Shared services and similar collaborations are hard to get right.
For every success story, we read about partnerships and collaborations being unwound.
Politics changes, and financial assumptions become invalid.
How many times have you heard officers explain that their council’s requirement specifications for a service can’t possibly be changed…
…or that their contract renewal cycle has to stay the same – so unfortunately, the potential for shared procurement has to be ignored?
But just as we are at an unavoidable point of reckoning with respect to social care and health, local government is going to have to face the fact that scaling up needs to be part of the future.
Risk pooling is obviously more efficient than 300+ councils separately paying for commercial insurance (only to pay almost all of their claims themselves in any event). The risk protection arrangement scheme for schools has saved millions of pounds that goes into education instead of overseas commercial balance sheets.
It’s only a matter of time before this is accepted for cyber risks in particular – watch this space!
But the broader imperative to become capable of designing, introducing, managing, varying and exiting large-scale collaborations is also going to have to be faced.
Councils can’t realistically aim to protect hundreds of small discrete budgets and spending exercises for essentially homogenous service packages when the country’s sustained economic decline means that local government grant is simply not going to recover to where it was 15 years ago.
Don’t we need to shape this development ourselves rather than wait for it to be imposed from above?