Renfrewshire Council will not pursue a shared service proposal with Inverclyde and West Dunbartonshire councils after it was deemed it would not offer “value for money” at this stage.
Finance chiefs had held talks about ways of working together to address concerns relating to the “resilience” of their respective internal audit and counter fraud teams.
However, it has become clear – while the exercise was “useful” – it is not a viable option because of a variety of obstacles that would prove too difficult to overcome.
Among them, according to a report to last week’s finance, resources and customer services policy board, were the complexity of servicing multiple public bodies under a single structure and inconsistency in resources within each local authority.
The paper, authored by Alastair MacArthur, director of finance and resources, concluded the idea “would not represent value for money” but added exploring it was “useful in reaching a shared understanding of the challenges we each face”.
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Councillor Alison Ann-Dowling, Labour group finance spokesperson, said at the meeting on Thursday: “Obviously we’re disappointed that on this occasion it wasn’t felt that it was good value for money to go ahead with a shared service proposal, which was one of the drivers for doing that piece of work in the first place.
“Given the financial pressures that all councils face currently and probably going forward, it would’ve been great to see that being a more successful outcome in terms of efficiency savings.
“But with that being said, I do support the approach that’s now been adopted and hopefully we’ve got some good learning from it for other areas of work.”
Mr MacArthur responded: “This was a useful exercise to have undertaken and … we will, as a council, continue to explore any opportunity for making efficiencies in terms of the wider transformation seam that both as a council we have committed to but also in terms of the views of the Accounts Commission, for example, of councils and public bodies being more open to the potential for shared services in future.
“That’s something that we will continue to explore as opportunities arise but just unfortunately in this instance once we had worked through all the detail of what would be involved, it became apparent that it would not be a cost effective way forward for any of the three councils involved.”
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