The report recommendations focused on four major opportunity areas: revenues; HR services; adults’ services; and children’s services.
In reviewing the recommendations of the report, the risks and potential rewards of shared solutions in each of the service areas were considered.
In particular, the scale of expenditure on adults and children’s services was noted as was the range of activity taking place within each of these services which needed greater understanding.
It was acknowledged that the opportunities in these two areas covered the spectrum of shared solutions from collaborative procurement through to shared service provision.
It was also considered that the data used in the review was high level and based on information supplied by the boroughs and before progressing further, it needed to be more robust and detailed with the assurance that the data was directly comparable between boroughs.
It was also recognised that for any individual service it was not necessary for all seven boroughs to participate in developing shared solutions at the same time and some activities might involve fewer boroughs with others possibly joining at a later stage.
The Leaders and Chief Executives concluded that the opportunities for HR should be taken to an outline business case and that more work was required on adults’ and children’s services. The case for pursuing shared solutions on revenues was not as strong, although this would benefit from further benchmarking of performance. The boroughs have therefore concluded that:
- It is important to take the work on shared solutions forward;
- further work is required on the quality and reliability of the financial and performance data to underpin this programme and the Finance Directors have set up a technical group to do this;
- the PWC work should be taken forward by the development of an outline business case efficiencies through shared solutions in the provision of HR Services;
- further work should be undertaken on children’s services and on adult services to identify the main opportunities for realising efficiencies through shared solutions prior to developing outline business cases or projects and the results and recommendations for further activity should be reported to Leaders;
- The WLA secretariat and the Finance Directors should improve the quality of data on revenues and report to the Leaders with benchmark data and any consequent recommendations
New structure established
Following these decisions a new programme management structure has been established with strategic leadership provided by the Leaders’ and Chief Executives’ meetings, programme management by the West London Chief Executives and three workstream project boards – children’s services, adults’ services and HR services.
Each work Group comprises the relevant service directors from each borough, a Finance Director nominated by the Finance Directors Group, a sponsor Chief Executive and the WLA Director.
Further funding has been agreed by the LCE to support the HR workstream in producing the outline business case and work is to commence shortly on this. The Children’ workstream has commenced with an initiative on joint commissioning for children’s placements and is planning a further baseline data and benchmarking exercise to be completed this summer.
A business plan for developing the adult’s workstream is being prepared currently. Benchmarking of the revenue service performance has commenced (drawing where possibly on other national and regional benchmarking).
