Officer outsourcing could save a small fortune

Steve Bishop is Strategic Director for South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse District Councils

Who can honestly say they work flat out all year round? I know I can’t. If we as officers are being completely honest there are times in the year when we all have a bit of spare capacity and an opportunity to do something else, for someone else.

That, in a nutshell, is the idea that underpinned a project I was involved with, going back a few years, and one that I’d love to see rekindled. The spending review has come back round to bite us where it hurts most and, although it’s fair to say we saw it coming, we’re all having to think again about initiatives, collaborations and schemes to keep costs down and steer our authorities through the choppy waters of austerity.

While I was working with the Society of District Council Treasurers (SDCT) we teamed up with the Center for Public Sector Partnerships (CPSP) to see how we could make better use of key personnel resources within councils. Most councils, we figured, had highly skilled and highly experienced staff who have peaks and troughs in their workload across the year. So we sought to establish a simple marketplace where officers with spare capacity could flag up their availability and councils who needed an extra pair of hands could buy in staff on a project by project basis from within the sector.

For the CPSP this was seen as a fairly informal, flexible arrangement that would encourage more collaboration across the public sector (starting with local government) and for the SDCT it was seen as an opportunity to draw on other councils’ resources instead of going out to the private sector, typically the big accounting firms, who do an excellent job but cost a small fortune.

The SDCT was a good place to kick-start this kind of initiative – we’re a pretty cost conscious bunch by nature – but we actually saw it being applied across all sorts of senior officer posts and not just in finance departments. With a critical mass of finance officers signed up initially we saw an opportunity to go before chief execs, with the CPSP as a partner and say if we can do this for accountants and treasurers, you can do it for all your senior officers.

We built up a decent list of officers with spare capacity in their diaries and the plan was to build the marketplace from there.

You’ve probably guessed by now that we didn’t get much further with it first time round but as I rustle through my old file of discarded cost saving initiatives that didn’t quite get off the ground this one leaps out at me as something that could benefit us all.

The success of any project or collaboration, no matter how good the ideas behind it, ultimately hinges on having the right people talking to each other. With this project it was me that took the lead on it for the SDCT and John Tizard who led for the CPSP. When we moved on, there wasn’t really the momentum there to carry it through and while we had both been evangelical about it we didn’t manage to pass that enthusiasm for the idea on to the individuals who took over from us.

Maybe now is the time to give it another go?

Local government finances have never looked so shaky and as I’ve said on Room151 before there are a growing number of councils each year that are facing a financial cliff edge. All of them have got to do something about it no matter how reluctant their politicians are. And what that requires is further scrutiny of the back office because nobody wants to cut front line services.

If you’re one of the councils who hasn’t yet embraced shared services, which can save millions of pounds, it’s a big learning curve and there’s a lot of work involved, especially if you’re doing it for the first time. If you haven’t got the skill set or level of resource that you need in-house, then this would be an ideal way to cost-effectively tap into experience from within the sector. A lot of councils really struggle to persuade their politicians that shared services are a good idea but when they finally do, they then realise they haven’t got the officer capacity to make it happen.

There’s a big need for those councils to buy in reliable skill where you’re not being sold by a private sector profit-driven consultant a business case that takes six months to write. If I had to guess, I would think councils could get this kind of project done using other councils’ experienced resources at much less than half the cost of using the private sector. That really is just a guess but the private sector is learning on the job too when it comes to shared services and there aren’t many out there who have as much experience as some of us have within the public sector.

If we tried to start this on an ad-hoc, council to council basis, it would probably take ten years to get a decent sized operation off the ground and we’d all lose interest. And, frankly, some local authorities don’t have ten years; they needs solutions today. To make it happen we’d need to find a ready market; a network that already exists to help us launch this to the widest possible number of councils signed up to it. Ideally we’d get the message out to all of local government in a matter of weeks or months but definitely not years.

Using an existing forum or body that represents all of local government or at least large sectors of it seems like the ideal place to start. With their help we could save money, work more effectively, share our experiences and keep resources and capital within the sector. Hopefully the treasurer societies, the LGA and other groups across the country are reading this and feel the same way.