Those grappling with the mechanics of setting up shared services may sometimes feel as though they need the co-ordination and contortion skills of an escapologist in a sack simultaneously spinning plates and pedalling a bicycle while picking up passengers. As ambitious regional models have punctured, is the task beyond the humble local authority?
Evidence from a recent survey for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) suggests that fewer than a third of councils have shared ‘back-office’ arrangements with other authorities, little more than a third are considering possibilities and almost a third are not doing so, with overall progress considered weak in this area.
The shared services concept for the UK’s massed ranks of assorted local authorities, facing a tightening public purse, expanding service demands and ever-higher standards, would seem “a cert” on the face of it, whether for back-office administration or a multibillion waste management scheme. There are gains to be had simply by sharing and by cutting duplication.
In reality, councils are confronted by a complex array of priorities as part of the financial and proposed devolutionary packages. The allure of shared services can seem a distant prospect.
Ian Watmore, architect of the Transformational Government Strategy, had a vision of shared services supporting three major transformations: empowered citizens (personalised services); policies driven by outcomes, including efficiencies; and loops of positive feedback, where joined-up services lead to efficiencies and more satisfied citizens.
Efficiencies and the design of services bespoke to individual users, different user-groups and specific neighbourhoods are not so easily reconciled away from Whitehall. “It’s not surprising that some authorities are reluctant to go down the shared services route until they have sorted out how exactly they want to respond to the neighbourhood agendas, for example, through neighbourhood charters,” says Tony Bovaird, Professor of Public Management and Policy at Birmingham University’s Institute of Local Government Studies. “They can allow communities to choose higher standards for some services and pay for them through accepting lower standards for other services – subject to some minimum standard in the council. “We have to be careful here – this could be used by the many authorities that are not genuinely exploring imaginative neighbourhood working and it would be wrong to accept that kind of excuse.
“I suspect the real breakthroughs will come when neighbourhood management services have cracked the basic issue of how to offer different qualities of services to different neighbourhoods, and devised a local consultation process to seek agreement on which standards are wanted in each place – a basic step towards ‘participative budgeting’ at local level.”
Fresh demand
The concept of shared services delivered across the public sector is far from new. Her Majesty’s Stationery Office supplied government bodies as a kind of shared service for around 200 years from the late 18th century. So it should not be a shock to the system when there is fresh demand to exploit the sharing potential to release £4.9bn in local government efficiency gains by 2011 and for genuinely integrated services that put customer needs up front.
In the view of PricewaterhouseCoopers in its shared services working paper for DCLG, the range of collaborative scenarios is extremely broad, at one end, alliances between local authorities and NHS bodies to commission integrated care; at the other end, aggregated service delivery for support services where staff from several authorities are transferred into a single structure with a single budget and management team. Operations vary from in-house centralisation, simple outsourcing, informal collaboration and joint venture to public sector consortia, contractual partnership, lead client, prime contractor and trading companies.
