Havering and Newham councils worked in partnership to create a new shared back office support service, called oneSource. The councils brought together 22 separate services, with a total budget of around £58million, and 1,350 staff to create a single shared support service. This will save the two authorities an estimated £40million by 2018/19 with the savings being used to protect frontline services. Ongoing savings of £10.6m a year will be achieved by 2018/19.

The vision for the shared support services between Newham and Havering is to provide: ‘an efficient and fully integrated support services model that promotes resilience and achieves savings’.

Alongside being able to do more with less and enabling the sharing of expertise the shared service will:

• Improve the customer experience by building an outstanding service, with focussed experts, best practice business services, the latest Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and a strong customer management focus.
• Reduce the cost of support services by sharing assets (IT, buildings, resources, management) and reducing process cost through economies of scale.
• Improve services by freeing the departments to focus on their core objectives, taking the best from each other to capitalise on our strengths and reduce our weaknesses.
• Increase operational efficiency through improved delivery, better systems and management information.
• Create new opportunities by using our own talent to redesign our business, creating an excellent service which others will want to use and learn from.
• Give resilience and flexibility by using standard systems where a pool of resources is able to cover unexpected resource shortages. Working together also means we are at the forefront of the changing world of local government and ready to help others work differently.