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Thursday 4th August 2011
4 August 2011
Cambridgeshire County Council is targeting £3.6m of savings through a move of its facilities and IT functions to a shared service with Northamptonshire.
Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire set up their shared service function LGSS in October to handle human resources, legal services, internal audit and finance.
To date, the shared service has banked £11m in savings for the two authorities, according to a Cambridgeshire statement.
“This latest move builds on the strengths of LGSS, which already provides Northamptonshire County Council with the lowest cost IT services per user of any UK county council,” says the statement.
LGSS will make the £3.6m savings over four years through “a combination of standardising processes, sharing systems and technologies, merging and rationalising the teams from both authorities, reducing management overheads and improving productivity”.
It has no separate offices from the two councils and there has been no permanent migration of staff from one council to the other, a spokeswoman for Cambridgeshire County Council told FM World.
A similar set-up for IT and FM is envisaged whereby staff will spend some time at the other council’s offices depending on projects and processes, the spokeswoman said.
There were some job loses when LGSS was set up, “but very few”, she said.
The leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, Councillor Nick Clarke, said the case for sharing services has been proven.
“We have shown how successful sharing services can be with our other back office services and the transfer of IT and facilities management to LGSS was the next logical step,” said Clarke. “By making further savings from our business support services, we can ensure that the vast majority of our money goes directly to the front line.”
He said the council is “now looking for other public sector organisations that we can work with to reduce the cost of these services even further”.
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