Agenda item

A report of the Cabinet Member Corporate Services supported by the Director People, Organisational Development and Change (20 mins)

The Cabinet Member Corporate Services introduced the report which provided an update on the GO shared services programme. The programme’s aim was to develop a shared service for Finance, Procurement, Human Resources and Payroll, based on the creation of a shared IT platform – ABW (Agresso Business World), in order to deliver savings for partner councils, improved resilience and improvements in service delivery. He highlighted a recent decision by the programme board to defer the implementation at West Oxfordshire District Council from April to August 2012. Cheltenham Borough Council (and Cheltenham Borough Homes and the local authority company) and Cotswold District Council were still on target for implementation in April 2012.  The reason for this decision was that technical problems at the Forest of Dean had delayed the implementation in December and a number of staff had been required to work on the problems. Although these were all fixed and the system had now been successfully implemented, there had been a knock-on effect on the programme timetable and use had been made of contingency funds to retain staff for a longer period. He hoped that the planned savings for Cheltenham Borough Council could still be made in the timescale set out in the business case.

A member referred to paragraph 3.5 of the report which talked about accommodation and location of staff.  In view of the under capacity at the Municipal Offices and the review of accommodation currently underway, did the council have a policy view on whether they would present the council offices as potential accommodation for GO staff.  The Director advised that the programme team would be carrying out a diagnostic of accommodation requirements for GO staff in preparation for a final decision in October.  The aim was to make the best use of accommodation across the partners whilst at the same time taking account of the optimum location for the service and implications for employees. She advised that any recharge arrangements would be via the section 101 agreement between the partners.

A member was concerned that the reference in paragraph 2.2 appeared to provide a get out clause if the savings fail to be achieved. He referred to his previous question in the debate on the budget that only staff savings of 5 FTE were listed in the savings for the next financial year.  In response the Director People, OD and Change confirmed that savings for Cheltenham would not start being realised until 2013/14 and that was why they did not feature in the 2012/13 list of savings. Referring to paragraph 2.2, she felt this only served to emphasise the importance that was being given to getting the implementation right first-time and partnership working and a lot had already been achieved already in this regard.

The Cabinet Member Corporate Services highlighted the ongoing work to drive further savings from the programme. The board had already been approached by another council who may be interested in joining the partnership. Consideration would also be given in the future to putting additional services into the partnership such as ICT.

The committee congratulated everyone involved for the successful programme management of GO and the ongoing re-evaluation of the business case.

Resolved that overview and scrutiny should get a further update on the GO programme in six months time.