A back office shared services initiative run by three London councils is to create a “finance academy” to improve budget management and financial control.
The move is being made as part of a major improvement plan agreed in July last year for the OneSource partnership, which covers ICT, asset management, human resources and finance across the London Boroughs of Havering, Bexley and Newham.
A report to the council said the new academy would move the organisation to a model of continued professional development for all staff and improve finance support to council departments and members.
A report to a joint committee overseeing OneSource said the new academy would provide external training for aspiring finance leaders, targeted at senior officers who have recently qualified.
In addition, it will provide dedicated courses to support areas such as commercial investment and regeneration plus technical skills.
The report said: “Training resources will be aligned to the priorities of the service with a number of trainees being assigned posts in the systems, reconciliations and closing teams to prepare and support the auditing of the statement of accounts for 2019/20.”
Additional resources will be introduced, “aimed at producing the statement of accounts earlier than previously to mitigate against delays in the audit programme that compromised the completion of the 2018/19 accounts”.
However, the report warned that this was an “extremely ambitious piece of work”, which will rely on support from external auditors, senior leaders within the council, and an understanding of the need to prioritise the closing of accounts in all service areas.
Performance indicators area also under development, to monitor the finance service and hold it to account, the report said.
In July, OneSource published figures showing that it had delivered around £13m of savings for its partner authorities since it was created in 2014/15.
It also announced planned savings of around £1m a year between 2020 and 2022, which have been built into the council’s medium term financial strategies.
However, in a Room 151 blog this week, Newham’s director of resources, Conrad Hall, explained his council’s decision, taken last week, to take some of its financial advisory services back in house from the venture.
He said: “OneSource has delivered savings over the years and parts of it, like transactional services, work really well. But it’s much harder to share advice.
“The theoretical benefits of shared expertise can all too easily get lost because of the distance it places between support services and operational managers.
“On top of that, there’s no easy way around the obvious problem of peaks and troughs, as all of the partner boroughs tend to need the same sort of expertise at the same time.”
In June last year, a Local Government Association report claimed that councils have saved £1.34bn through shared service arrangements with other councils.
