Local authority transport and highways departments have generally only made annual savings of two or three per cent of their budgets in recent years. Asked why they have not moved more swiftly to make their organisations leaner, directors have responded that they've delivered all the savings asked of them.
There was simply no incentive. Why fundamentally transform the way services are delivered, if you are then asked to deliver even more savings a few years down the line, with much less scope to find savings? Now, the rules of the game have changed. Councils are being asked to cope with a 7% a year cut in revenue, and with hardly any time to prepare - there are only 153 days until the first cut will kick in.
It's against this context that three London boroughs - Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham - have announced that they will progress plans to merge services, where it makes economic sense to do so. This would be the first time that highways and transportation departments go further than merging backoffice functions, and merge frontline delivery too.
Two of the three boroughs' highways departments have already been sharing a director for over three years now. Graeme Swinburne, who is both director of highways and transportation at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the director of neighbouring Hammersmith & Fulham's highways and engineering department, told LTT 42 months ago that he would consider the case for joint working between the two departments. There were a range of options, he said, up to, and including merging the two boroughs' highway departments.
The prize for taking this forward now could be great in terms of protecting frontline budgets for highways maintenance and local transport schemes. However, the councils emphasised in a statement that there had to be "a democratic case" for change. At a time that senior council officials are saying that national highways service standards need to be reviewed, there will be questions over the scope for political divergence over the priorities for a smaller pot of funding.
It'll be very interesting to see the conclusions of the three boroughs' deliberations in February.
The Efficiency Network is the next step in Local Transport Today's campaign to bring our extensive network of professionals the essential business intelligence required to deliver more with less.
