16 January 2009
By Tash Shifrin
Essex County Council has shortlisted five bidders to run ‘any or all’ of its services in its huge £5.4bn outsourcing programme.
The council issued a tender notice in November for what could be the biggest local government outsourcing scheme. It said the successful bidder could potentially run all of its services during an eight-year contract, including ‘but not limited to, corporate and back-office functions, environmental services, social care and school-related services’.
Essex has now shortlisted four consortiums, led by Capita, IBM, Mouchel and T-Systems. The fifth bid is from Tata Consultancy Services, the India-based global outsourcing giant, which will go it alone.
Nick Bell, Essex’s deputy chief executive and executive director of finance, said the council had asked all five bidders to ‘give us ideas in terms of an outline business case’ by February. The five-strong short list would then be reduced, probably to two.
The outsourcing plan, which is opposed by the Essex Unison branch, has not yet been put to the council’s Cabinet or any committee, nor has its scope been defined.
Instead the council is seeking proposals from the bidders, Bell said. ‘We’re very much asking them for their ideas.’ Proposals for a preferred supplier would be put to a Cabinet meeting on March 31, he added.
Bell said decisions about what services would be outsourced to the selected private sector partner would be taken later. ‘All we’re doing at this stage is looking for who might provide us with a solution rather than what that solution will be,’ he said. ‘There will be no outsourcing at the point of contract signing.’
As a first stage, the council was looking for bidders to suggest areas for ‘working with us’, he said. ‘The initial stages don’t involve any transfer of staff or of property.’
Outsourcing of services in different areas would proceed on the basis of individual business cases, he added.
But Bell confirmed that the five bids would ‘contain suggestions about what they might like to do in future’, adding: ‘We will look at their ability and capacity to do that.’
Essex Unison is organising protest rallies across the county this month and has commissioned its own expert study of the proposals.
The union condemned what it dubbed the ‘Essex closing down sale’, adding: ‘This is all being done with unseemly haste and is likely to lead to disaster for ECC staff and residents.’
PFjan2009
