On Tuesday (9 March 2009), WalesOnline carried an article by Martin Shipton reporting on the collapse of a plan to develop a shared service of HR, payroll and training between local authorities in South East Wales.

In my view, the main reason the project collapsed was because of a drive from certain quarters amongst the council officers involved to deliver one huge, exemplar project between all ten local authorities in South East Wales, even though the finances didn’t particularly stack up.

We should simply have never have tried to get one shared service up and running between nearly half the councils in Wales.

My alternative suggestion of developing two or three collaborative projects based on smaller clusters of local authorities working together within the South East Wales region was not pursued. Ultimately, this has turned out to be a huge mistake because had we followed that approach we might just have got something up and running.

From Cardiff Council’s own perspective the maths were quite clear. If we had taken part in the South East Wales Shared Service Project, we could have looked to save £618,000 a year but only after the service had been up and running for seven years. By making our own internal efficiencies in these services, we calculated that we could save £1.03 million a year after just a three-year period. For us it really was a no-brainer. Collaboration is supposed to be about making savings. There is no point in doing it just for it’s own sake if you can make greater savings by not collaborating.

In my view there may be more to be gained by collaborative projects between different providers of public services in the same geographical area. For instance, Cardiff Council has established a shared occupational health service with the South Wales Fire & Rescue Service. We are also in discussion with the Cardiff & the Vale University Local Health Board about taking forward joint working projects with them.

The problem with trying to get savings out of services like HR and payroll is that we don’t spend that much on them in the first place in comparison to more public-facing services like schools or social services. In relative terms you can’t make that much of a saving from something you don’t spend all that much on at all to begin with as a percentage of your overall spend.

There is also lots going on elsewhere in the sphere of collaboration between local councils. The Welsh Purchasing Consortium now covers the majority of councils in Wales, for instance, enabling us to work together on getting maximum value for money from procurement. This is already delivering huge savings. And there are also a plethora of collaborative projects that are taking forward various waste solutions the length and breadth of Wales. Cardiff Council, for instance, is involved with four other local authorities through ‘Prosiect Gwyrdd’ which is seeking to procure one regional residual waste treatment solution to serve all five authorities.

It is wrong to get hung up on one project – that was probably doomed to failure from the start – as indicating that collaboration isn’t happening.

And while I’m on the subject, I wonder if many people know that early in the life of the Assembly they looked into the idea of Cardiff Council running their payroll for them as a shared service. In the end, however, the Welsh Assembly Government decided not to bother!

Councillor Rodney Berman is the Leader of Cardiff Council