Cuts push local authorities to share services

Efficiency drive across government means shared services are attractive to councils

Councils are adopting shared services

Forty per cent of local authorities believe that shared services initiatives can help cut costs, despite recent high-profile problems with some such schemes.

Nearly one third (30 per cent) of the 100 respondents surveyed by supplier Civica thought that the government will further cut funding and support in 2009.

Some 33 per cent of the authorities said that they were using, or planned to use, shared services over the next three years.

And more than half (53 per cent) believed that introducing standardised systems and processes across the organisation was important.

Last year the Public Accounts Committee slammed the Department for Transport for "stupendous incompetence" in the implementation of a shared services scheme that could cost the taxpayer £81m.

But an efficiency drive across the public sector has forced councils to look at their spending more carefully.

"In 2009 the challenges facing local authorities and housing organisations are being compounded by the economic climate as executives will be forced to do more with even fewer resources," said Val Earle, head of consulting for enterprise service transformation at Civica.