Boston's £1 million gamble on shared services

Tonight is make or break night for the plan to merge the back office operations of Boston, South Holland and East Lindsey.
The first two councils are voting on the issue at their regular meetings, whilst East Lindsey is holding an extraordinary meeting to discuss the plan.
Timing is crucial, and if if any council fails to decide tonight it will be taken to mean that it doesn't want to move on to the next phase.
The report recognises that the risks are "significant" and if the project goes forward, they would need to be incorporated in the council’s corporate risk strategy.
The main risk is that the assumptions made by the consultants, Tribal, are wrong, and affect the council's financial position.
But if Tribal is right, there are significant potential benefits to be had in terms of profit for Boston.
The borough's population of 58,300 represents 20.6% of the proposed merged area and it would eventually save £5,486,000 on an investment of £1,082,000 - gaining a 51% return producing average annual savings of £548,000 over ten years.Unlike the two other councils, which will fund the project from revenue costs, the proposal is for Boston to fund its share of the overall set up costs using capital only, as it doesn't have the revenue reserves to afford an investment of £814,000 so the proposal is for the borough to finance the project by borrowing for capital purposes. This funding cannot be made available until 2010/11 as the 2009/10 programme is fully committed, and the decision may affect the affordability of its plans for 2010/11. The financing costs will be deducted from the savings.
The report runs to 90 pages, which makes it far too long to cover in detail - but you can read it in full by clicking here
In a nutshell, members are being asked to make three strategic key decisions:
- To agree a merger of five back office, high volume transactional services between Boston, East Lindsey and South Holland. The departments concerned are: customer services, finance, human resources, information technology and revenues and benefits.
- To agree a preferred delivery mechanism through an in-house stand alone organisation, jointly owned by the three authorities
- To delegate to the Chief Executives, in consultation with the of the Council, signing a legal agreement between the three authorities to continue this joint working.
Among the benefits are said to be greater staffing resilience achieved through the creation of larger shared service teams; increased skills, and greater efficiency and focus.
The timetable from decision to implementation will be 12 – 18 months.
The report quotes from the Boston Borough Council Branch of their union, Unison, which gave comments towards the end of August.
It said there had been little feedback from staff, and the general consensus of opinion is 'what will be will be.'
Morale was at an all time low, with most staff convinced that their jobs were at risk. Not all staff were given the chance to attend the service review board workshops, and felt that their comments were not always taken on board. Various suggestions made were ignored and decisions were made prior to the workshop so they saw attending as a pointless exercise. Some staff felt that staging the workshops during the holiday period meant that their opinions could not be heard as they were unable to attend at short notice.
Sadly we won't be at tonight's meeting, but if anyone wants to share what went on with us, we'd be glad to hear from them.

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