FINANCE

Council incurs £3.7m overspend on IT system

Vale of Glamorgan Council took more than a year longer than planned to install a new IT system, leading to a £3.7m overspend.

Vale of Glamorgan Council took more than a year longer than planned to install a new IT system, leading to a £3.7m overspend.

In 2020, a business case outlined a £1.5m cost for the Welsh authority to replace its Oracle EBS system with cloud-based Oracle Fusion, which would manage its financial ledger, procurement, HR and payroll.

The system was scheduled to go live in January 2022 but was not in place until April 2023 – at a final cost of £5.2m.

A report to the council's corporate performance scrutiny committee laid out a series of delays, which included replacing the project manager and the Covid-19 pandemic.

The council was forced to backfill its finance and HR teams, which it said came at a high cost because specialist staff were in short supply.

FINANCE

A happy ending to the retrofit challenge in Oxfordshire

By Gayle Pilkington | 17 September 2024

Gayle Pilkington discusses the challenges her Oxfordshire CC team is facing in finding households to benefit from energy efficiency work – and how they are o...

FINANCE

Reviving councils' dormant powers

By David Williams | 12 September 2024

David Williams looks at how councils’ positive Victorian legacy has been curbed and sets out a manifesto to give new energy to local government

FINANCE

Lessons from Michael Caine and councils

By Sir Bob Neill | 28 August 2024

Both Labour and the Conservatives must look to local government for solutions to the challenges they face, writes Sir Bob Neill

FINANCE

Unfair variations in energy costs hit councils by £700m

By Ann McGauran | 07 August 2024

Councils could have saved more than £700m in 2023/24 if they had paid the same rate for energy as government departments, a survey has claimed.

Popular articles by Ellie Ames