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Sharing services has risen up the agendas of the UK's national and local governments in recent years, propelled by political and financial trends as well as by more concrete factors such as Sir Peter Gershon's 2004-5 Efficiency Review and Sir David Varney's report on transformational government. In an attempt to throw some light on recent developments and to examine where shared services may be headed in future, SSON convened a roundtable debate involving a group of practitioners and advisors at local and national level, chaired by SSON's online editor Jamie Liddell. The results were, indeed, illuminating…

Attending were:

Tony Isaacs Programme Manager Warwickshire Direct Partnership The Warwickshire Direct Partnership is an alliance comprising all six local authorities in the county of Warwickshire: North Warwickshire Borough Council; Nuneaton & Bedworth Borough Council; Rugby Borough Council; Stratford District Council; Warwick District Council; Warwickshire County Council; and three private-sector partners in Steria, MacFarlane Telesystems and Northgate Information Systems. The partnership includes a shared services programme relating to its CRM [citizen-relationship management] system.

Dominic Swift Head of Shared Services Browne Jacobson Browne Jacobson is one of the largest law firms in the Midlands with offices in Nottingham, Birmingham and London. The firm acts for over 100 local authorities, either directly or through their insurers. It recently published its Shared Services Survey '08, one of the most comprehensive surveys ever carried out into shared services in the UK.

Peter Telford Chief Executive Officer Research Councils UK Shared Services Centre Research Councils UK (RCUK) is a strategic partnership between the seven UK Research Councils. RCUK was established in 2002 to enable the Councils to work together more effectively to enhance the overall impact and effectiveness of their research, training and innovation activities, contributing to the delivery of the Government's objectives for science and innovation.

Ray Tomkinson Local Government Improvement Specialist and Shared Services Author Ray Tomkinson is the author of Shared Services in Local Government: Improving Service Delivery (Gower, 2007). Ray managed the Welland Partnership shared services project and currently operates as a consultant.

SSON: Peter, you're at the head of one of the more prominent national shared services centres [SSCs]. Can you explain a little about the drivers behind the move in your organization?

Peter Telford: Behind the Research Council's business case are benefits focusing on what are seen as financial gains which will be passed back to research and the research community, but probably more importantly in the early stages is the feeling that we can secure better effectiveness in business support to that research community by aggregating the seven Research Councils' services onto one common platform, and transforming them. The business case started with an outline about two years ago. There was a lot of work done on certain parts of the shared service model even before that, but the activity's really come together in the last two years. The full business case was accepted by the Research Councils in line with CSR07 [Comprehensive Spending Review 2007] in August last year, and the intention at the moment is that we will go live on the platform at the beginning of next year. We already have some services live in the IT and strategic sourcing areas.

SSON: Tony, your project's been going for rather longer than that. Would you say that the drivers behind the Warwickshire Direct Partnership are similar?

Tony Isaacs: I think ours were slightly different in that when we started off in 2002/3 the driver behind that was, basically, to capitalise on the money that was available from central government at the time. We made a bid as the Warwickshire Online Partnership, and set up that particular group specifically to bid for that money: a total of £2m. We identified a number of different projects that we would attempt to procure and implement with that money, not least of which was the joint procurement by all six authorities in Warwickshire of a CRM [citizen-relationship management] system and associated telephony systems. We got the full £2m and since then we have actually implemented it; we jointly went to procurement and we've ended up with the Northgate front office CRM system.

Now I don't think the goalposts have changed, but the drivers have. I think the drivers have changed in that there is no money available now; it's exactly the opposite insofar as before there was money splashing about, if you will, from central government, and now it's the opposite insofar as with CSR07, with all the efficiencies and demands that there are on local authorities to save, there is an overriding need to make things more effective and more efficient, and shared services is seen as being one key method of doing that - with the consequence that we are in a position now where our chief executives, our leaders, are very keen in looking at what can be done. And based upon that – or around all this – is the whole area of the two-tier structure within Warwickshire, and the drive that the government may want to push – and seems to be pushing – with regards to unitaries. But Warwickshire is very clear that it wants to retain its two-tier organisational structure and will do so by sharing services.