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The ‘English Riviera' unitary council of Torbay is next month launching a new joint venture which will boost its recycling rates and reduce costs, report Gary Mills and Clare Tanner Local authorities across the UK are facing up to the unenviable task of maintaining service levels against a backdrop of major spending cuts, as the new coalition government looks to pay down the UK's £850bn national debt. Finding ways to address this challenge is a major focus, and initiatives such as Total Place are being keenly watched by local authorities looking for new ways to cost-effectively enhance services. Torbay Council is the latest local authority to announce a new structure for providing services within its area, working with infrastructure specialist, May Gurney, to cut around 8% from its £130m budget over the next 10 years, while delivering improved services for residents, and creating a leading resource and materials-recovery solution which will exceed national targets. What differentiates the Torbay scheme is that it is based on a landmark public-private partnership, which sees a range of bundled services delivered via a joint venture company – Tor2 – which is 80% owned by May Gurney and 20% owned by Torbay Council. This approach provides a platform to take best practice from both the public and private sectors, and develop a new way for managing service provision. May Gurney works with around 40 local authorities in the UK, and has been able to draw on the lessons learned and experience gleaned from all its other contracts to develop service solutions for Torbay Council. Through the Tor2 joint venture, May Gurney will run recycling and refuse collections, highways maintenance, park, grounds and buildings maintenance services, street and beach cleansing and an out-of-hours call centre for Torbay Council. Although Torbay is not a pilot area for the Total Place initiative, Torbay Council was keen to take a ‘whole area' approach to the delivery of services, and look for ways to reduce service overlaps and duplication. The joint venture structure allows this to happen more easily by making one delivery organisation responsible for implementing and managing a large portfolio of service lines. This has enabled May Gurney to identify significant cost savings through streamlining planning and supply chain management, and using the purchasing power of the Torbay Council more effectively to gain greater economies of scale. It has also involved examining each service line in detail, to find new ways of working, with one of the biggest cost savings expected to be achieved through streamlining refuse collection and recycling. When the new services go live in July, May Gurney will, via Tor2, implement a new kerbside refuse-collection and recycling scheme which will see householders segregating glass, plastic, paper, cans and general household waste which will be collected from separate bins in specially-designed trucks which keep the different types of recyclable materials apart. This allows Torbay Council to significantly boost the income it gains from the waste stream by ensuring that the different commodities – ie, glass, plastics, metal, etc – are separated and graded, and are uncontaminated by other waste materials, allowing them to be resold to materials reprocessors with minimum cost and intervention from the local authority. This system allows Torbay Council to significantly reduce the cost of landfill and disposal of waste while providing a ‘greener' refuse collection service for residents. Household waste collections can also be timed more efficiently, with glass, plastics, paper and metals collected on a weekly basis, and general refuse collected every two weeks. The enhanced service and the active ‘mining' of the resource stream to capture and sell on materials which can be recycled also has another beneficial knock-on effect for Torbay Council, creating new jobs in recycling and refuse collection. Tor2 is committed to employing apprentices and more experienced staff to scale-up service provision as it wins new business and, by this summer, around 100 extra jobs are expected to be created. While reflecting the whole area approach of Total Place, the Tor2 joint venture has focused on generating cost savings through streamlining individual service lines and adopting new ways of working to reduce the cost of services, drive economies of scale, and also, by looking at ways to generate revenue through Torbay Council's activities. This means the initial 8% saving identified over 10 years could be greater. As the new government looks to drive further cost efficiencies while maintaining frontline services, joint venture partnerships between authorities and private sector specialists to deliver bundled services are likely to provide a blueprint for the future. While Torbay Council has the benefit, as a unitary authority, of being able to derive savings across a broad portfolio of services, district councils and authorities with a less comprehensive range of services can also benefit from this model. The bundling of services and central planning and economies of scale which have provided the basis for driving cost savings at Torbay can be applied by other authorities to a wide range of service lines, from roads to streetlighting and street cleaning to facilities management. The key is to embrace new ways of working, and planning the provision and purchase of services and materials, and to explore ways to maximise additional revenue from local authority services, where this is achievable. By doing so, the seemingly-impossible task of cuttings costs and maintaining service levels can be accomplished. Gary Mills is chief executive of the Tor2 joint venture at May Gurney, and Clare Tanner is director Tor2 and operational support commissioner, at Torbay Council

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WHITEHALL

Riviera rendezvous

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