Public Sector Roundup: Letting users do the work

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Avon and Somerset Police share services with councils

The Avon and Somerset Police Authority has joined Southwest One, a shared services company with IBM and two local authorities, Somerset County Council and Tauton Deane Borough Council.

The £185 million, 10-year deal will help cut costs while expanding services across finance, IT and other areas, the police authority said.

Colin Port, chief constable of Avon and Somerset Police, said: "This is a great opportunity for us to change, improve and transform policing... Without the support of our police staff, police officers would simply be unable to perform the duties they do."

Croydon saves time with self-service setup

The London Borough of Croydon has set up an online accounts system, which lets users such as customers and businesses answer their own questions about council tax, business rates and benefits, as well as check payments history and balances.

The council expects that if just 10 per cent of its citizens register for the programme, and 60 per cent of those answer just one question, it will save 752 hours a month in staffing.

"The online accounts we are providing will give customers instant access to their information 24 hours per day, seven days a week and add significant capacity during peak periods," said Graham Cadle, the council's Divisional Director, Financial Customer Services. "Interactions with customers take on average eight minutes by telephone and twenty minutes by post which is an extremely time consuming and costly method of communicating with customers. If we can switch just a small proportion of this communication online we will make considerable time savings freeing-up staff to focus on other more complex queries."

The Gandlake Citizen's Account system was installed with help from outsourcing partner Northgate Information Systems.

East Midlands links up education

The East Midlands Metropolitan Area Network (EMMAN) has been upgraded by NTL Telewest Business, allowing 50 educational institutions to connect to the latest version of the Joint Academic Network (JANET).

The upgrade will let thousands of East Midlands' students and staff access e-learning via multimedia streaming, video conferencing and other online tools.

"By providing our member institutions with a high speed, flexible and scalable network at competitive prices, NTL Telewest Business has ensured that 600,000 students, staff and researchers can utilise IT on a daily basis," said Ian Griffiths, executive director of EMMAN. "I wholly believe that education establishments could not exist without the network and, with the ability to transport 40GBs of traffic, JANET is one of the leading education networks in the world."

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