North-East councils sign shared services deal

The councils hope to make major savings

Northumberland County Council has signed a deal for Durham County Council to use its back-office IT system to save money.

Durham wants to use the software to streamline its procurement and financial management processes, and put more resources into frontline services.

As neighbouring councils, Durham had been aware of Northumberland’s modernisation strategy for some time, says council leader Albert Nugent.

'Following a review of our own business support and financial management systems, we discussed the possibility of sharing expertise between our support functions,' he said.

'As a result, we have embarked on our own three-year programme of change, using the Oracle e-business system to improve our internal business support services with the ultimate goal of improving they way we deliver our services.'

Durham says it hopes to save some £900,000 a year once the project is live, as well as avoiding the capital costs of buying Oracle's software. Northumberland will host the application, having achieved £1m annual savings itself since installing the system in 2004.

The key aim for Northumberland as a council is to modernise and improve its services and organisation, and to keep council tax increases as low as possible, says council leader Bill Brooks.

'We are using this system to make savings behind the scenes, which contributes directly to helping us achieve our aims,' he said.

'It has not only given us savings that have exceeded our expectations but it has also helped give us a better understanding and more effective use of our management systems.'

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Further Reading:

• Downtime blights council sites
• Haringey Council signs IT outsourcing deal
• Broken sites hit grand vision