There is increased pressure on local authorities to deliver
value for money services against a backdrop of increased service
demand and reduced revenues.
The October 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review
stated that funding to councils will be reduced by approximately 7%
annum for the next four years.
Central government has indicated that greater
responsibility for spending and service procurement is to be
transferred from central to local government departments allowing
them to play a greater role in shaping services and making public
services more efficient and effective. This will give local
authorities greater autonomy and freedom to manage their budgets
and explore new service delivery models that can be tailored to
their specific needs.
Capita Symonds is one of the UK’s leading providers of
professional property and engineering services to the local
government sector, including local councils and transport
authorities, schools and local community groups.
Whether an organisation needs to improve services, become more
commercially focused, or drive change, our breadth of experience
enables us to deliver business objectives, achieve savings and
enhance customer satisfaction for our clients.
We have a highly skilled work force of over
4,000 property and engineering professionals working from a network
of more than 50 offices across the whole of the UK, ensuring
projects and services are delivered successfully with demonstrable
benefits for our clients and the citizens they serve,
including:
- Reduced cost of delivery and increased
income;
- Improved service quality;
- Improved customer service, responsiveness of
local service delivery and accountability;
- Greater and easier input for local people to
the way services are designed and delivered;
- Job creation and inward investment in the
local economy;
- Improvements to the local
environment.
Since 2001 we have been transforming and
improving the delivery of public sector services across the UK
through strategic partnerships with local authorities. We are
currently involved in eight partnerships - including
Blackburn, Salford, Gwent, Glamorgan and Southampton - many of them
offering a full range of multidisciplinary and technical
professional services to the partnering councils as well as the
broader private sector market and even other local authorities.
Read more about our current
local authority strategic partnerships.
Of course, there is no 'one size fits all'
solution. We develop and implement bespoke partnerships that
establish a solid foundation through trust, commitment, openness,
honesty, clear governance structures and realistic planning.
We are able to combine this experience with
our vast private sector property expertise to develop a flexible
suite of solutions that not only supports more collaborative
delivery of public services, but also estate rationalisation,
workspace planning and co-location. We do this in a number of
ways:
- Bringing together our understanding of the
delivery of public services with our private sector property
expertise from our commercial activities as a top three real estate
manager in the UK to develop a flexible suite of estate
rationalisation solutions covering every need from basic moves to
workspace planning and co-location;
- Through our specialist health estates
consultancy business we are uniquely placed to help local
authorities and local health trusts to coordinate their property
and service delivery;
- We have a unique capability to support, and
are actively engaged with, the government relocation agenda,
working with both the OGC and central government to engage with
local authorities to ‘make the case’ for relocating civil service
functions to their areas in order to enable rationalisation of the
broader public sector estate as well as to maximise the benefits
from investment and regeneration:
- Our unique ‘end to end’ support capability
including outplacement for staff whose jobs relocate; project
managing the move; land assembly and designing and managing the
construction of new, modern flexible shared working environments;
ICT, HR and business process reengineering to realise savings and
efficiencies; and managing support services as a shared service if
required.
