An e-mail arrives consisting of a letter to the Evening Post in answer to the nonsense written by Jeff Baker and David Phillips in tonight's Evening Post.As we have no shame we have corrected one item in it and used it as the basis of this post:
In his letter, Chris Powell states that the Service @ Swansea project has cost council taxpayers up to £170 million for both phases to come to fruition. The actual value of the work to date is £98 million over ten years. Of this £37 million is new money. The rest is paid for out of existing budgets and savings.
As phase two has not commenced there is no additional expenditure on this part of the project. The whole point of deciding that we would not proceed with phase two with Capgemini was to ensure that the Council did not overstretch itself and commit to expenditure that it could not afford. That is a prudent action and it is the reason why we will not get the massive increase in Council Tax bills predicted by Mr. Powell.
In the light of these facts it is difficult to reconcile the charges of incompetence from Trade Union Boss, Jeff Baker, with the reality. The Administration has already made it clear that it is investigating alternative ways of implementing the contact centre in a way that is affordable and deliverable. The out-of-date IT systems are being introduced and are already making a massive difference to the way that the Council is administered, whilst the suggestion that jobs are at risk as a result of this decision is a fiction.
The comments by Councillor David Phillips make even less sense. He refers to £18 million as savings that should have been made from phase one to fund phase two and yet the budgetted savings for this part of the project is £8.5m. He also claims that that we cannot make it phase one break even but with the first year not yet complete we have already identified half of the ten year savings.
We have not implemented phase two precisely because we did not believe that the figures stacked up. That decision has saved the Council millions. We will only implement phase two when we believe that it will deliver what is expected of it and that it is affordable. Phase two and the contact centre have not been cancelled. We are trying to find more affordable ways of delivering it.
When the present Administration came to power it found a legacy of neglect: the Leisure Centre had closed because of the failure to maintain it, the Guildhall had a £30 million maintenance backlog, money needed to be spent on schools, roads, car parks, lamp posts and many other assets just to keep them running. The same is true of the Council’s internal systems. If the Administration had not invested in ICT then millions of pounds would continue to have been poured down the drain from inefficient practices, duplication and poor information. To be fair Labour recognised that too, which is why they started the e-government programme. It is a shame they cannot continue to support that modernisation.
