Wednesday 23 November, 2011

Just over a year on after the launch of Local Government Shared Services (LGSS) in two local authorities, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, this LGSS initiative is now an 83m business providing a number of operations for each council focussing on services for customers.

Paul Blantern, managing director of the partnership and chief executive of Northamptonshire, aims to share LGSS in the next 12 months with another upper tier authority and after this timescale to include up-to five more authorities. If the number grows to five authorities the executive board could expand to 15 members from three.

The three members of the executive board from each county manage an operation to deliver a larger number of their core support functions. These include a finance team which supports 850 budget managers and a HR team that support 30,000 staff liasing with Public Sector unions, and a property and asset management team managing with over 1,000 buildings and a procurement team dealing with £750m contract negotiations. Read more...