Southwest One – A Taxpayers Guide
Southwest One was recently set up as a Joint Venture Company between Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council, Avon and Somerset Police Authority and IBM, the global IT and business management providers.
For the first time in the country, two public authorities and the Police have teamed up with a private sector company to transform a range of support services. It will deliver services such as information technology, finance, human resources, property, procurement and customer contact centres.
A combination of streamlined procurement and negotiating more efficient contracts is expected to save in the region of £200 million over ten years for Somerset County Council and Taunton Deane Borough Council. This comes at a time when all local authorities are contending with increasing pressure on their finances. These savings will be available to the benefit of our residents.
The public procurement process was robust and challenging. Since April 2005, Somerset County Council’s proposal to create a joint venture with Taunton Deane Borough Council, the private sector, and more latterly the Avon and Somerset Police, has been to Scrutiny on six separate occasions, Executive Board on five occasions and to Full Council on one occasion, which resulted in unanimous approval to proceed.
In addition to this, a Joint Member Advisory panel met monthly throughout the process and then weekly during the last six months of negotiations with IBM.
A review carried out by our external auditors in November 2007 examined the process in setting up Southwest One, the joint venture between Somerset County Council, Taunton Deane Borough Council and IBM, the global IT and business management providers. The review gave Somerset County Council, as the lead authority, a clean bill of health saying the arrangements were robust. The review acknowledged a previous independent review of our procurement process which described it as ‘exemplary’.
Throughout the whole process we have been independently scrutinised by a range of external bodies including 4P’s, MAANA (who are 4P’s accredited), KPMG, Grant Thornton and the Audit Commission.
The Southwest One Board of Directors comprises three people from IBM, three from the authorities, and one independent Chair (to be appointed).
IBM were chosen as our preferred bidder after the most rigorous of evaluation processes involving over 100 senior staff and independent advisers against a predetermined set of criteria that all bidders were aware of. In fact, our evaluation process has been described as ‘exemplary’ by our external assessors.
The addition of the Police to the Joint Venture has allowed all the Authorities involved to benefit from obvious economies of scale and reduced infrastructure costs generated through sharing IT and other systems.
This Joint Venture is a good deal for the Somerset and Avon region. Councillor Jill Shortland, Leader of Somerset County Council and Councillor Ross Henley, Leader of Taunton Deane Borough Council said: “Southwest One has been set up with the express purpose of transforming and improving the delivery of services, making them more accessible and driving down costs. It’s through collaborative working like this that we can deliver excellent customer-focussed services, cost-effectively.”
Further details about Southwest One can be found on: www.southwestone.org.uk
Further details about Improving Services in Somerset (ISiS), the project that started the process of creating a Joint Venture Company, can be found on: www.somerset.gov.uk/isis
Councillor Jill Shortland and Councillor Ross Henley
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