Hammersmith & Fulham Bridge Partnership

Bringing together public and private sector expertise to create a centre of excellence

The Challenge
In 2004, the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F) was an ‘excellent’ CPA-rated Council. However, the Council recognised that despite this rating, there were opportunities to improve further, in particular through the provision of more ‘joined-up’ services.

H&F looked for a partner who could grow with them over time, and help them to minimise risk, maximise the commercial leverage, and create the platform for transformed service delivery – and with it the means to design, implement, manage, and continuously improve.

After a thorough and collaborative bid process, Agilisys was selected as the Council’s Strategic Partner, under an incremental partnership.

Agilisys and the Council rapidly established a true collaborative partnership – in fact, one that has been held up as an example of best practice. However, the initial consultancy nature of the partnership, while beneficial on a project basis, had some limitations. In particular, the Council faced the challenge of finding a way to fund the strategic investment necessary to continue to improve its service provision to customers in a cost neutral way – any investment would need to come from savings (or earnings) generated. In fact, H&F was at the same time looking to lower the Council Tax paid by its citizens, so any programme would need to have a level of efficiency savings built in as well.

The Solution
Working with Agilisys, the Council evaluated a number of options for the ICT Service, from complete outsourcing to a management buy-out.

Based on this analysis, the Council opted for the creation of a Joint Venture Company (JVC) -- called Hammersmith & Fulham Bridge Partnership (HFBP) -- as the vehicle to deliver transformational change. The JVC built on the existing innovative Council-Agilisys strategic partnership to combine the Council’s high customer satisfaction rating for its IT service, history of facilities management, and leading support for other local authorities, with Agilisys’ strong commercial and marketing skills.

Agilisys holds an 80% shareholding in HFBP, with the Council holding the remainder, with a profit share on new business and cost savings. There is a robust performance management framework in place, with a commitment to maintaining and improving service levels.

The Benefits
Although the establishment of a shared service JVC was perhaps more complex than originally anticipated, by setting up a joint team from the start, complete with appropriate legal and financial expertise, we were able to have the JVC up and running on time. The JVC now delivers IT services to the Council with improved career prospects for staff and higher customer service levels – including extended hours support.

One of the first projects completed by the JVC was the implementation of the award-winning customer access strategy developed by Agilisys working with the Council. The customer access strategy improves and extends not only customer service but also business efficiency, through re-engineered processes, and a radical reshaping of the council’s former departmental structure. This also builds on one of the earlier successes of the initial partnership, the introduction of an improved Customer Contact Centre.

More recently, HFBP worked with the Council’s Electoral Services Team to design and manage a two-stage RFP process for a new system. HFBP was responsible for the end to end delivery, which included vendor management and system deployment, delivering benefits such as easier reporting and an improved user interface in only three months.

All of the projects are supported by a strong Programme Management Office and project management toolkit. In addition, Agilisys helped to create an internal Business Transformation Team, transferring and embedding skills within the Council

The H&F Bridge Partnership continues to deliver transformational projects and is on track to realise £27m in savings over the next 10 years – and is one of the many ways Agilisys has helped the Council lower council tax to its citizens, now for four years running. In addition, resident satisfaction is up 20%, and the Council was recently awarded a 4-star rating by the CPA, and is still ‘improving strongly’.

Finally, having established the JVC model works, we are now working with the Council to take the shared service offering to the wider market, aiming to deliver professional services to other London public sector organisations.

Read more about how we worked with Hammersmith & Fulham to transform the Housing Benefits service.

Click here to download a PDF timeline of the partnership.