Local Government Productivity Plan
Introduction
We want Southampton to be a city that creates opportunities for all ages and backgrounds. We want residents to have strong foundations for life, pride in their city and a successful city council to depend on.
We are dedicated to working together to make Southampton a city of opportunity and diversity where all are welcome. Our two universities are leading the way with innovative research. As well as our proud history and thriving cultural scene, we have difficult challenges that we must face head-on. Our residents experience greater health inequality than some of our statistical neighbours and we score higher in the index of multiple deprivation than other areas in Hampshire, despite this we want to tap into the potential we have for economic growth, tackle health inequalities, and be part of making Southampton a city of opportunity for all.
Southampton City Council (SCC), like many local authorities, faces a broad range of challenges that have put a significant strain on our ability to serve the needs of our city. Nationally, growth has been low since 2008, the effects of Brexit, a global pandemic, and war, have all created shocks to economic and social stability, and put huge pressure on public services.
Local Government funding has also been reducing over this period, with SCC’s core spending power reducing by over 20% since 2010. Significant inequalities remain within our city, residents still earn less per week than workers from outside the city, our skills & qualifications are below the national average, and the quality, quantity, and range of housing is inadequate to meet our ambitions for the city.
We also recognise that as a council we have a backlog of reform to our key services, alongside a significant structural budget deficit.
Despite this, the city also has huge potential. Creating inclusive growth, which in turn creates better jobs and community regeneration, underpinned by a regional devolution deal and a reformed city council, is key to unlocking this potential.
The future operating model underpins our transformation activity, recognising the importance of links between the city and the wider region to drive growth. We are focusing our operational approach on standardisation and digital interventions wherever appropriate, to allow us to focus resource on value add activities, in particular prevention, working with our strategic partnership groups across the system and the voluntary sector.
Operating model
Recent and future transformation and improvement activity
Over the past few years, Southampton City Council (SCC) has implemented several initiatives to improve services, outcomes, productivity and efficiency, with initiatives ranging from fairly specific to whole service redesign. Some examples are provided below:
- Redesigning Children’s services resulting in improved productivity, retention, lower levels of agency staff and an improved Ofsted rating to ‘Good’ with Outstanding Leadership.
- Improved the digitisation and automation of customer contact areas, providing simpler access and form structures for residents to complete online.
- Improvements and use of AI in our Finance and HR systems.
- Supported by funding through the Local Digital Fund, working with partner local authorities to implement digitisation and automation for our starters, movers and leavers to simply the process and save manager time. This project recently won the SOCITIM Service Delivery Project of the Year.
To address the range of challenges that Southampton City Council (SCC) faces, including a significant structural budget deficit, we have recently started delivering change across the organisation through a single Transformation Programme. That Programme is addressing what we do, how we do it, and what technology, process and structural changes are needed to enable us to reshape the Council to deliver for our residents in the challenging context we face.
To be successful and sustainable we will work with our partners to deliver growth and prosperity for the region and our city, and we will forge new relationships with our residents for efficient service delivery, coupled with deeper engagement where that is necessary for them to thrive.
Our aim is to set a balanced budget for 2025/26, but beyond that to continue our Transformation Programme over a three-year period to deliver our ambitions in line with our new City Plan.
We are calling our Transformation Programme: adapt | grow | thrive to reflect the specific challenges and opportunities of Southampton.
adapt… to achieve a sustainable financial position and succeed within a volatile world we will create a more effective and agile organisation focussed on outcomes for our residents.
grow… for longer-term success, we will work with our partners to achieve growth and prosperity for our region and our city.
thrive… the work that we are doing with our partners will enable our residents and the city to thrive.
Delivering transformation through our adapt | grow | thrive programme is about rethinking what we do, it’s not just about doing things differently, it’s about doing different things. It is about making fundamental changes to the way we operate and how we offer better value for money in how we deliver services to our residents. It is how we will empower people, how we will harness technology, improve processes, and make better use of our physical infrastructure to deliver our priorities and be financially sustainable in the future. It is how we will change the Council’s culture and behaviours to discover better ways of working, based on our vision and our values.
Portfolio structure
The programme is organised across seven service-focussed Portfolios, each led by an Executive Director. These portfolios are as follows:
| Portfolio Name | Expected Saving |
|---|---|
| Adult Social Care & Health | £14.65m |
| Children's Services | £7.9m |
| Customer & Community | £1.0m |
| Enabling Excellence | £.4.0m |
| Growth & Prosperity | £2.0m |
| Resident Services | £11.3m |
| Schools & SEND | £1.8m |
| Total | £42.64m |
*The Resident Services and Schools & SEND Portfolios also include activity that aims to positively contribute to the council’s financial position in relation to the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) and Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) respectively.
These portfolios of activities will be supported by cross-cutting supporting workstreams, around areas such as HR & people, procurement, and data & digital support.
The content and delivery of the programme has been initially defined through 28 programmes of activities that will deliver the savings required to address the structural budget deficit, whilst implementing reform of key services to improve outcomes for our city.
The activity currently within the scope of the programme can broadly be described as fitting into one or more of the following thematic categories:
- Efficiencies & productivity – Initiatives aimed at improving how we deliver existing services, improving customer experience, and reducing cost by taking out avoidable and duplicate effort, streamlining processes, rationalising or replacing existing systems, and exploiting opportunities to automate activities through new digital technologies, including AI.
- Prevention & demand reduction – Changing what we do and how we do it to prevent and reduce the need for the services we provide, whilst promoting independence and focusing on improving opportunities for all of our residents. This involves looking beyond just the scope of services that we offer, working in a different way with our communities and partners to ensure that the right support is available in the right place, and at the right time.
- Growth and income – Aimed at growing our city, building greater economic resilience, and developing and promoting our income-generating services to enable us to invest in the delivery of our priorities.
- Service delivery models – Fundamentally changing how we deliver whole service areas. This could include looking at alternative delivery models such as shared services with other local authorities, arms-length Local Authority trading companies, trusts, joint-ventures with partners, and externalisation.
Design principles
We have developed a set of design principles to underpin our transformation journey. We will carry these principles throughout our thinking when delivering our transformation – in how we design services, where we invest our resources, in how we make key decisions, and what we value and what we expect from each other.
Prevention: Data, deep engagement, equality, demand management
Prosperity: Skills, labour market, pay
City Council Leadership: Sub region, city, partners, residents
Economic growth: Investment, infrastructure, housing, business
Efficient: Digital, resident, business focused 
Reform: Transformation, delivery model options, promoting independence
Reducing carbon emission: Towards net zero
One Council: Budget balanced, confident, ambitious, engagedTransformation outcomes
Alongside ensuring financial stability, our transformation outcomes are focused on building resilience across the council and the city, and providing effective support to our most vulnerable residents.
A focus on prevention led by a public health approach
Residents have support, where necessary, to live independent lives
Budget set for 2025/26 without additional Exceptional Financial Support (EFS)
Ten-year Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) agreed based on growth and devolution
Investment portfolio for the region and city to increase growth and productivity
An engaged council at the heart of city partnerships
A more resilient community with improved housing, labour market participation and pay
Children and young people are safe and valued
Taking advantage of technology and making better use of data to improve decision making, service design and use of resources.
A core foundation of the transformation programme is a data and digital programme. This programme will deliver the implementation of our digital and data strategies, and support the digital needs across other elements of the transformation programme.
The programme is structured to address the core pillars of both strategies which cover:
- People and skills
- Organisation and process
- Systems and technology
- Data and reporting
Our vision is to empower our communities to access digitally inclusive services, designed to meet their needs and support the delivery of our corporate objectives.
Delivering our digital strategy will mean people will be given the skills, data and technology needed to deliver the best possible services for our communities and organisation.
We will ensure that every local person, employee, partner organisation, visitor and stakeholder benefits from the opportunities presented by the digital era, and to lead Southampton as a digitally enabled city.
Through the programme we will ensure that we build a technical architecture and roadmap, while rationalising systems, maximising the return on investment and shifting the balance to transformation from business as usual.
The data strategy is ambitious and centred around the vision that data is accurate, understood, and valued. The right data, intelligence and insight will be made available to the right people at the right time to drive effective, evidence-based and informed decision making, performance management and future planning.
This is enhanced by the SCC Health Determinates Research Collaboration (HDRC) which is working in an integrated way with our core teams and with key partners including the universities, the voluntary sector and our communities to really embed research skills and understand wider health determinates.
We will ensure that we address the key foundations of data and digital success – ensuring that our people are at the heart of understanding and executing this change. We are assessing and redesigning our processes to eliminate waste, building on our existing capabilities and reviewing emerging technologies which will in turn allow us to effectively forecast, plan, and make informed decisions. We will then be in a position to comprehensively assess and forecast different scenarios, track the impact of interventions and adjust our service design and provision to ensure successful outcomes.
Plans to reduce wasteful spend within the organisation and systems.
Last year we introduced a cost control panel to tightly monitor spend in the organisation. Through our budget monitoring processes we are careful about making sure each area operates within its budget on a monthly basis.
We set up a budget review panel who discuss and agree financial recovery plans for any areas of concern or projected overspending.
We are measuring the effects of the transformation programme through our rigorous governance structure which includes the production of business cases, baselining and monitoring of financial and non-financial benefits. Through service redesign we are conducting a comprehensive review of all services to identify opportunities for streamlining and automation, implementing a ‘design out’ followed by “digital-first” approach for all services and processes.
We have robust procurement processes to ensure we deliver value for money in our third-party contracts. We are actively exploring alternative sourcing options for our major contracts including the use of frameworks, to streamline how we procure goods and services.
Through and alongside the transformation programme we are exploring opportunities to progress work with strategic partners, share functions with neighbouring councils to reduce overhead costs, and working with local businesses and community organisations to deliver services more efficiently.
Barriers and Government support
Government could help address some of the barriers to progress with the following:
- Reviewing the funding system to create sustainable funding, allocated fairly with consideration of need.
- Implementing the proposed multi-year funding settlement, maximise un-ringfenced funding, and minimise expensive and time-consuming bidding processes for funds.
- Delivering on reform to address some of the key challenges in local government.
- Reviewing and updating the local taxation system so that areas with a lower council tax are not adversely impacted by default.
- Provision of opportunities for funding or other support for technology innovation and upgrades, particularly in areas like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data analytics.