Gloucester City Council and Civica has launched an innovative partnership to outsource the delivery of revenues, benefits and welfare rights services for the authority and deliver annual savings of £220,000.

The seven-year agreement between the council and Civica will see the partnership maintain and improve service delivery to local citizens while achieving financial savings. It is the first step in the creation of a centre of excellence in the city for local government revenues and benefits administration that will sustain local employment and bring new business to Gloucester through the provision of outsourced business process services to other local authorities around the UK.

The agreement is part of the wider process underway at Gloucester City Council to transform the authority’s approach to providing back office, transactional and corporate support services and to systematically deliver vital budget savings across all these operations.

Civica, which is a supplier to more than 90% of the UK’s local authorities, provides IT systems and business process expertise to 175 local government revenues and benefits departments. As a strong and stable partner, the company is able to build a specialist and highly flexible service model that provides an alternative to both large scale ‘one size fits all’ outsourcing and local authority shared service models. Both these existing models can lack the flexibility and scalability to respond to the rapid and significant changes faced by councils or to accommodate additional work.

Councillor Debbie Llewellyn, Cabinet Member for Performance and Resources at Gloucester City Council, said: “This ground-breaking agreement provides the council with a means to improve, rather than cut, our services to citizens. The model harnesses our employees’ knowledge and experience with Civica’s service improvement know-how to meet local outcomes while achieving annual cost savings of £220,000. It’s very pleasing to be setting up a service centre with the potential to increase its contribution to the local economy and local jobs as time goes on.”