Decision details

101 Out of Hours Insourcing Project

Decision status: Recommendations Approved

Purpose:

To approve arrangements to insource the current Council only related telephone enquiries out of hours service for adults, children’s, homeless and antisocial behaviour (currently delivered by South Yorkshire Police).

 

Decision:

 

(i) Delegate authority to Director of Finance and Commercial Services in consultation with the Director of Legal and Governance to terminate any existing Shared Service Partnership Agreement in respect of the Out Of Hours Telephone Service with South Yorkshire Police;

 

(ii) delegate authority to Director of Finance and Commercial Services in consultation with the Director of Legal and Governance to insource the current Council only related telephone enquiries out of hours service for adults, children’s, homeless and antisocial behaviour (currently delivered by South Yorkshire Police); and

 

(iii) delegate authority to Director of Commercial Services in consultation with the Director of Legal and Governance to take all other necessary steps not covered by existing delegations to achieve the outcomes outlined in this report.

 

Reasons for the decision:

Assuming that all of the existing shared services (excluding the Police non-emergency calls) can be consolidated creating economies of scale, then it is anticipated that the overall net effect of the financial case will be positive in terms of realising financial cashable savings to the sum of £49,670.

 

There are also a number of non-financial benefits and opportunities that may be realised following insourcing as follows:

•      To improve call the customer experience for these customers

•      To reduce risk to vulnerable customers by improving call performance and call handling quality

•      To deepen and improve relationships between in-house council teams

•      To provide signposting to council wide range of 3rd party services, hence providing a more holistic service delivery for these customers

•      To use established referral process for emergency calls to SYP

•      To maintain synergies with SYP via back office (Neighbourhoods Intervention and Tenant Support team

•      To enable SYP to deal with their core offer (immediate life/death ASB calls) rather than being bogged down with non-core work

•      To review processes and ensure improvements are made to improve service delivery to customers

•      Co-location of children’s social worker with OOHs insourced team at Manor Lane

Alternative options considered:

SYP have also more recently advised that they do not consider the Partnership viable unless they maintain a charging model for funding their 11 FTE at £252,000. This negates any option to negotiate year on year reductions in costs whilst seeking to improve the customer experience. Despite this assertion, SYP have been unable to consistently achieve the service delivery target of answering 90% of calls within 30 seconds.

 

A soft market tender was also undertaken in the earliest stages to see the appetite for procurement for OOHs service delivery by an external third party. The results were few and those received were extremely expensive and hence not considered as a viable option.

As is clearly documented, insourcing is the current financially viable option.

Publication date: 06/11/2017

Date of decision: 31/10/2017

Effective from: 11/11/2017

Accompanying Documents: