| Workstreams | Environmental Services |
| Funding Detail | SWCoE 0014 |
| Funding detail | £120k, SWCoE Funding, £108 in kind contribution from partner investment of project team members and £32k from Partner cash investment |
| CEx Champion | Andrew Pate (Cex West Wiltshire DC) |
| Team Leader | John Rogers (Wiltshire Partnership Programme) |
| Project Manager | Kevin Gibbs (West Wiltshire) |
Project Objectives and Scope
Street and open space management (abbreviated to street scene management from here) are among the most visible areas of public sector delivery to citizens and have a significant impact on community amenity and safety. They also contribute disproportionately to the public’s perception of public sector organisations as efficient and effective.
Grounds maintenance and litter collection (abbreviated to grounds maintenance from here) are services within street scene management which are inherently straightforward but have been made complicated by the different responsibilities and service standards of the different bodies which care for urban public land, whether by mandate or as a result of contractual agreement. For example, adjacent pieces of grassed area including the roadside verge can be cut by different people employed by different organisations on different days in the same week; alternatively they may be cut 2-3 weeks apart, so they are not uniformly groomed.
This project will:
- Improve the quality and efficiency of the service by improving and rationalising urban and urban fringe grounds maintenance which is done by:
- the participating authorities
- their key suppliers/partners (eg housing associations)
- co-located authorities (eg town councils)
- [this work will be done in the preparatory stage (stage 1) of the project]
- Deliver cashable efficiency gains by procuring grounds maintenance services, based on a new service specification (output from stage 1)
- [this work will be done in the procurement stage (stage 2) of the project]
- Embed partnership working behaviours among participating delivery and procurement teams
- Further strengthen skills across the partnership (both depth and numbers) in business process re-engineering and project management
The grant from the SWCoE covers the cost of a procurement professional as a project manager.
Anticipated gains from the project
In addition to the increase in delivery performance there will efficiency savings of between £250k and £1m from 2007/08.
See document “0016 PID Wiltshire Grounds Maintenance v0.1.xls” for further details about costs and benefits, including assumptions and calculations (available from SWCoE).
Wider implications and anticipated gains if it were successfully rolled out
This project can be rolled out as an exemplar across the SW region. Estimated benefits from rolling this project into other sub-regions in the SW could be about £1.4m (SWCoE estimated figure, not validated by the project team).
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