Edinburgh Council reckons to have saved £10m this year
by using a new system to cut its procurement bill and by
standardising systems to enable it to renegotiate an outsourcing
contract.
The council said its savings showed that, for large councils,
internal efficiencies can be great enough to meet the demands of
the government's Gershon efficiency review, without the need to
share services with neighbouring authorities or other outside
agencies.
Andrew Unsworth, head of e-government at Edinburgh Council, said
the savings equated to 2.4% of the council's total budget this year
- just shy of the 2.5% target set by the government's Gershon
efficiency review to be achieved by 2008.
"The opportunities from internal projects are certainly large
enough to deliver substantial parts of the Gershon agenda," said
Unsworth.
This year Edinburgh Council renegotiated a long-standing
outsourcing deal with BT, cutting its annual bill to £22m from
£26m. Unsworth said the saving was made possible by the council
moving towards standardising its 18,000 desktops on a single build
of Windows XP, as well as starting to consolidate its
applications.
The desktop programme, being carried out by BT subcontractor
Civica, started in July and is due to be completed by June
2007.
Alongside this saving, Edinburgh said it has cut £6m from its
procurement bill by using a procurement module on an Oracle
enterprise resource planning system installed in April 2005.
"Some of the large authorities, such as Edinburgh, can meet the
Gershon efficiency savings using their own capacity," said Eric
Woods, government practice director at analyst firm Ovum.
In last week's pre-Budget report, the chancellor Gordon Brown
announced that councils have to make further savings of 3%
year-on-year from 2008 to 2011.
Woods said, "The challenge for Edinburgh will be working with
front-line services, such as social care, to meet the next round of
efficiency targets.
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Vista waiting game
Edinburgh Council decided against standardising on Windows Vista
for its desktop refresh because it wants to wait until other users
have implemented the new Microsoft operating system.
Head of e-government Andrew Unsworth said, "We did not want to
be in the first wave of Vista. It is early in Vista's lifecycle and
we are planning with BT to look at the new operating system next
time around."