New North unitary council will share some services with its West counterpart

The blueprint for North Northamptonshire’s new unitary council has been set out, with the new authority being tied to its counterpart in the West for a number of services.

There will not be a clean break in April when the county council and the seven district and boroughs councils disband and form two new unitary authorities.

Instead the two new councils will remain joined for some time with a number of services shared.

The blueprint published and considered by the North Northants shadow executive last night (Aug 27) laid out how the new authorities will operate.

Both councils will run their own adult social services departments, which will operate out of new community hubs stationed across the area. They will also run the services which were formerly provided by the borough councils, such as housing, car parks, planning and electoral services.

But for some services the plan is for one council to be the lead authority and some services will also be temporarily hosted by one council before being settled into both councils.

The North will be the lead council for services that include adult learning, country parks, Chester Farm, the coroners’ service and the director of public health office. It will also host from April the safeguarding services, school admissions, waste disposal and apprenticeships.

The West council will be the lead authority for the archive service, the travellers units, pensions, payroll and HR and the Lord Lieutenants office. It will temporarily host the on-street parking service, transport planning, brokerage and commissioning and highways contract management.

All staff employed by the eight councils – apart from those in adult social services – will remain working out of their current offices, with all of the present headquarters and One Angel Square remaining in use.

The short timeframe the councils have had to prepare for the new unitaries, plus the covid pandemic, is the reason behind why the two new councils will not stand alone from April.

There are also some shared service agreements that NCC has with Cambridgeshire County Council and Milton Keynes Council which will remain.

At the meeting Cllr Jason Smithers questioned whether down the line the shared service could lead to problems.

He said: “Some of the points about shared hosted services and service level agreements – I would be interested in the commercials between any agreements we do with the west and north as a hosted service. How easy would that to be unpick moving forward? It’s like a divorce. Sometimes a divorce can be acrimonious but when you get married it’s very simple. I would like to understand that if the north decides to pull away from various sharing agreements as we move forward, as we expect, how easy will that be to do and will there be financial implications involved.”

Anna Earnshaw, the current director of adult services at Northamptonshire county council and the recent appointee to become chief executive of the new West council, said the biggest risk would be IT services.

She said: “Regardless of whether one of the other authority is the lead or a host, the actual budget to buy those services would sit with each of those councils. That is quite important in being in control of your own destiny and making sure you have the budget to either spend in those services there, or indeed look at alternative ways.”=

“The biggest risk area is the potentially IT area, as we are already in a shared relationship in terms of our infrastructure with Cambridgeshire county council and Milton Keynes here at NCC.

“It depends – while infrastructure may have a cost to separate – increasingly we find with systems – that moving off the shared platform systems and into clouds is much easier. That is something we are doing at no cost in adults in terms of separating out those systems into a North and a West.

“I think the key to it in terms of SLAS, is we are very clear on the process. If one authority wants to pull away in some way, what is the process to do that and how is it worked through and how is the budget permanently split like that?”

“We have tried to minimise those. We have tried to make sure most services are properly split and not a lead authority or a hosted model to try to avoid exactly that pitfall and make each authority has the capability to do everything if we can. The IT is a challenge but we need to make sure we have the right arrangement and the right contract so if the North decides to do that it can pull away at very low cost.”

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