Less is more: the 'slimmest local transport client' says it's still in the driving seat

Transport for Buckinghamshire was launched in April 2009. The Alliance brings together the public and private sector to deliver efficient, high quality transport services for the county. Transport for Buckinghamshire delivers all transportation services from highway maintenance, through to promotion of ‘sustainable’ travel, road safety and development control work. After a lengthy competitive tendering process, Ringway Jacobs were awarded the contract for delivering the entire service for at least the next eight years with a possibility of extending to 15 years.

Transport for Buckinghamshire was launched in April 2009. The Alliance brings together the public and private sector to deliver efficient, high quality transport services for the county. Transport for Buckinghamshire delivers all transportation services from highway maintenance, through to promotion of ‘sustainable’ travel, road safety and development control work. After a lengthy competitive tendering process, Ringway Jacobs were awarded the contract for delivering the entire service for at least the next eight years with a possibility of extending to 15 years.

Valerie Letheren, cabinet member for transport

Valerie Letheren, cabinet member for transport

Jim Stevens, Buckinghamshires head of transport

Jim Stevens, Buckinghamshires head of transport

Buckinghamshire County Council claims it has gone further than any other council in slimming down the client for local transport services: retaining just five in-house transport staff.

Jim Stevens, Buckinghamshire’s head of transport, says the county has gone “as far as possible on this agenda whilst still keeping a strategic client”. This has been achieved with a contract with a Ringway-Jacobs joint venture for local transport services that started last April.

Furthermore, in 2008, the county let a managing agent contract with Amey for client transport services including home-to-school transport and social care transport, an outsourcing that “has not happened anywhere else,” says Stevens.

Other clients have reduced duplication by trusting private sector contractors and consultants in partnerships to deliver strategic outcomes, rather than employing large teams to micro-manage what they are doing.

However, Stevens says that Buckinghamshire, by outsourcing everything from the production of the county’s third local transport plan and promoting sustainable travel through to planning and delivering school transport and managing public transport contracts, has “completely removed duplication of effort”.

The result, he says, has been that the authority has more than doubled the efficiency savings it has achieved over the last year, compared to the average for the previous six years.

From 2003/04 to 2008/09, Buckinghamshire made savings by recycling road materials, retendering subsidised bus contracts and reducing the number of managers. On average, it achieved £0.8m in savings per year. “We felt that there was little more we could do to achieve significant savings without changing our delivery model,” says Stevens.

This prompted the decision by Buckinghamshire’s cabinet, including Cllr Valerie Letheren, who has been the authority’s cabinet member for transport for the past five years, to move to a new type of contract.

Stevens comments: “We have in the first year of the new, bespoke deal based on the NEC (New Engineering Contract) made over 7.5% or £2m in savings, £1.3m from staffing and other overheads, and we are asking them to deliver a further 3% savings each year over eight years.”

To date, savings have been made through smarter purchasing and a better-integrated supply chain – talking to the suppliers before deciding what materials and other items to specify in order to bring costs down.

The bulk of these savings, however, have been achieved by streamlining the management structures for the service. Buckinghamshire merged three separate management teams that it had previously into a single team: one had been managing the contractor; a second was managing the consultant; and a third oversaw the in-house transportation service.

“Previously, we had a transport policy manager within the alliance and a transport policy manager within the strategic client. There was a huge amount of duplication in developing transport policy. By only having one, we saved £75,000 at a stroke,” says Stevens.

He stresses that the new contract was established without any compulsory redundancies. Staff were either transferred under TUPE regulations to Ringway-Jacobs or else seconded from the council. There was also ‘natural wastage’ because in the months during the run-up to the new contract, posts that were vacated were not filled.

Ringway-Jacobs carries out the function with “minimal interference from Buckinghamshire,” says Stevens. “We have a hand in directing the transport policy to be written, but they do the detailed work.”

The authority retains strategic control, Cllr Letheren tells LTT. “Many local authorities fear that they’d be losing control by outsourcing things like transport policy. But the big decisions are still very much up to us,” she says.

“We insisted that performance on highway maintenance should be an overarching objective within the third local transport plan, as opposed to something underpinning the transport strategy, as proposed by Ringway-Jacobs,” says Letheren.

The partners are co-located, and the head of transport and regeneration – Tim Bellamy – acts as a bridge between the two organisations. Bellamy is retained within the client, but reports to Stevens on policy matters and the Ringway-Jacobs alliance service leader Mark Rowe on operational delivery. This co-location and integration makes it possible to sustain what Letheren describes as “a very frank and honest relationship” between the client and the contractor/consultant.

She says that a balance has to be struck and that the alliance, whilst not a traditional micro-management, is not hands-off: she herself is “always here” at Transport for Buckinghamshire’s offices, based at County Hall in Aylesbury.

“You have to give the alliance room, but you can’t just leave them to it,” she says. “You have to be sitting down and working together.” Stevens says that the quality of the work is assessed “very much on a self-regulatory basis”. This means that the contractor monitors the quality of its own road repairs, for example, with only a sample audited by the client. Financial auditing is carried out every month, and on an open-book basis.

Mark Rowe adds: “This way of working is unique, and brings together the best of the public and private sectors”.

Rowe, who is also Ringway-Jacobs’ contract director, says the alliance is working towards delivering further savings in future years of the contract – which runs for at least eight years and up to 15 years with renewals – through better ways of working. Stevens acknowledges that the task of delivering continuing savings, is “a challenge that will become harder and harder, but necessary.”

He shares the Association of Directors of Environment, Planning & Transport’s (ADEPT’s) assessment that local transport budgets could be cut by 30% – and thinks Ringway-Jacobs can deliver them.

Meanwhile, Amey, which won the outsourced client transport services contract that commenced in April 2008, has been given a 10% savings target to meet within two years, by this April, or £1.6m in total. Client transport services were facing rising costs, such as from greater demand from social services, at a time of diminishing resources.

Stevens says that the in-house team managing transport operations, taxi companies and council transport fleets was “good, but not to the level needed to bring costs down. That’s why we sought outside logistics expertise.”

He says that Amey, which plans, procures and manages transportation for 17,000 Buckinghamshire residents on a daily basis, is on track to meet its target, having secured some better commercial deals with suppliers, and rationalised routes in order to reduce overall distances travelled. “Optimising the routes travelled by home-to-school transport services has also reduced carbon emissions,” says Stevens.

Steve Helliwell, managing director of Amey’s logistics division, says: “Through the introduction of state-of-the-art route optimisation software, we have managed to rationalise the number of routes undertaken on a daily basis and therefore increase utilisation of vehicles.

“We are working closely with our local supply chain partners to provide more surety to them. This has allowed them to invest in their own fleets so that the vehicles are now more modern, safer and greener – customer satisfaction has improved and, on average, carbon emissions of the taxi fleet have reduced by 19%.”

Stevens says that the prize of slimming down the client to five staff has been that the authority is now in a position to deliver more for less money.

“Going forward with this very uncertain financial situation ahead of us, we are planning for a 30% reduction. We’ll get started on our budget planning for beyond 2010/11 in May or June.”

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