Disappointment At Collapse Of Project For Delivering Savings Across Bucks

Leader of South Bucks District Council Adrian Busby, today expressed his disappointment that the Council along with Buckinghamshire County Council, will be forced to abort a project which promised to save each Council a large amount of money on back office (support) services such as finance, information technology and human resources support.

This follows the decision of three of the other partners in the initiative – Aylesbury Vale DC, Wycombe DC and Bucks/MK Fire and Rescue Authority - to pull out of the project before completion of the tender process which had aimed to bring the private sector into an innovative joint venture to provide back office services for all the Councils and the Fire and Rescue Authority. This was part of the Bucks Pathfinder initiative.
Because of tendering rules the two remaining councils cannot continue without the other partners so are now likely to be forced to halt the project.

Councillor Busby commented,
“when we started this project the aim was to make savings and this will now be made much more challenging.
In South Bucks we feel that the main concerns of our residents in these harsh economic times are to keep the council tax as low as possible and to preserve vital public services.
We believe that all councils will have to make substantial savings in the future, if not straight away, because public sector spending limits will require it. We would rather try to achieve efficiencies in the back office than be forced to make cuts to front line services because we’ve failed to look for those efficiencies.
Whilst the likely cuts in public spending may mean that we have to make savings to front line services in the future, in the meantime we think that residents will want us to try as hard as we can to at least maintain and where possible improve them.

For that reason we will be looking at alternatives to this project to try to deliver the same level of savings from the back office – we owe it to our ratepayers to do this.”

ends.