The Prison Service will be the first national government agency to establish organisation-wide shared administrative functions when the Phoenix system goes live this spring.

Under the £180m scheme to centralise finance and procurement, prisons will move to the system at a rate of eight institutions per week, HM Prisons head of shared services Steve Hodgson told a conference in London.

The scheme has been delivered under the agency’s 12-year Quantum framework deal with supplier EDS. If all goes according to plan the 130 prisons in England and Wales will all be using the service centre in Newport in Wales by September.

The next stage of the scheme will be to extend it to include human resources, said Hodgson.

Shared services is a key component of the Transformational Government strategy published by the Cabinet Office eGovernment Unit in November.

It is also part of plans to improve efficiency under the public sector-wide Gershon review.

The model is already in use in the NHS. Centres in Leeds, Bristol and Hampshire provide finance services to 79 organisations, rising to 101 by April. The service is a joint venture between NHS Shared Business Services and supplier Xansa.

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