Richmond and Wandsworth Councils appoint Capita in shared financial services deal

Councils claim that they will save £6.8m by migrating to Capita's Integra finance system

Richmond and Wandsworth Councils have finalised their appointment of Capita Local Government, to provide it with a new joint finance system and a range of transactional services.

The deal, which the councils claim will save local taxpayers around £6.8m, was initially announced in February when Capita was named as the preferred bidder but it has taken several months to complete.

The agreement will mean that Capita will migrate Richmond and Wandsworth on to its Integra finance system, to support their accounts payable and accounts receivable functions.

The system aims to deliver time savings by speeding up invoice processing and other tasks, while also offering a range of business intelligence tools that will help it to better manage suppliers.

The contract is for an initial six years, with the option of another four. It is one of the first jointly procured contracts, with the councils claiming that they combined their buying power to secure a better deal.

The councils will also work together on a new framework to promote and sell the managed service to other local authorities.

It forms part of a wider strategy from the two London authorities in forming a shared workforce to serve both boroughs.

This will mean that council officers are jointly employed by both authorities and they will report into a single chief executive who will manage the joint authorities. The councils claim that this will deliver savings of around £10m a year for each council.

The councils emphasised that they will however continue to be separate sovereign bodies with their own elected councillors, cabinets and leaders.

According to TechMarketView's John O'Brien, jointly procured shared services ventures by different local authorities are few and far between, because of their complexity.

"The Tri-borough managed service programme between the local boroughs of Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea, and Hammersmith & Fulham, which uses Unit 4's Agresso platform, is arguably the only other one today. This however has proved a complex programme with significant implementation challenges," he said.

"Capita has the potential to turn this to its advantage, so long as it delivers on the execution," he added.

Islington and Camden Council may disagree with O'Brien, as they have a shared services ICT deal, but other shared services deals such as Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire's CRM agreement haven't worked out.