North Northamptonshire Council sets out framework for new transformation programme despite concerns that existing projects could be 'culled'

Under the watch of the council’s recently-appointed director of transformation and strategy, Libby Caulfield, NNC has announced a new ‘T20’ approach to deliver change in the organisation’s most critical priorities and ensure value for money.

A report, which went to a corporate scrutiny meeting last week (June 29), identified a number of systemic issues with the council’s existing portfolio of transformation projects, which was in excess of 70 different work streams at once. Several had drifted over time, missed delivery deadlines or did not have clearly defined outcomes, it said.

Under the new T20 framework, NNC’s transformation team will reduce this to managing just 20 priority projects at any one time, ensuring that resources are focused on where change is deliverable and will have the greatest impact. The council said that, as a result, projects will only proceed where there is confidence in the outcomes.

This follows continued budgetary pressures for councils, especially in demand-led areas such as social care, which saw North Northants report a £13m overspend at the end of 2025/26.

Speaking at the scrutiny meeting, Ms Caulfield told the council chamber that ‘wherever we see budget pressures, we should see transformation’.

She said: “The way that we were deploying our transformation resource previously is no longer fit for the way that we need to deploy it, now that we’ve had the budget pressures that we face."

Officers told members that the new framework would be more focused on covering the whole life cycle of a project. This includes setting a baseline at the start, assessing the deliverability of proposals at an early stage and clearly defining what will be achieved to ensure senior leaders have ‘an absolute granular grip’ on each piece of work.

It was revealed in the meeting that the first project being taken forward within the T20 programme is on home-to-school transport services, which overspent by £3m last financial year.

The council’s transformation director said that the focus on a smaller number of projects would ‘up the ante’ for performance because of the limited space to prioritise things.

However, concerns were raised by Cllr David Howes (Conservative) that the process of taking the current transformation portfolio – which is made up of 70 ongoing projects and up to 50 in development – down to just 20 was ‘going to take some culling’ and could lead to some good ideas being lost.

Ms Caulfield explained that many of the priorities the transformation team were engaged in had moved out of scope and were more in the area of service improvement than transformation.

She added: “I wouldn’t suggest that we’ve culled them. With the challenges we face with the budget, everyone is now on board with prioritising those new activities that are going to improve outcomes and save money.

“It doesn’t mean that they’re lost, it might mean that they’re deprioritised for a while, or it might mean that services are delivering them with the support of transformation.

“The work that we need to do improve outcomes whilst closing the budget gap that we can foresee going into the future must take priority and as soon as we’ve done that that’s when we can start to do those other projects again.”

A transformation board, chaired by the chief executive, will meet monthly to scrutinise the delivery of the T20 projects, each of which will have its own senior responsible officer who is held accountable for its design and delivery.

A draft portfolio of the final 20 key transformation projects NNC will progress will come back in September for further scrutiny. The service director said she hoped to begin reporting on savings coming in from T20 from March next year.