Thinking big: a global firm with local connections forges unique partnership

Consultancy Scott Wilson has joined forces with three East Midlands counties to make savings and foster smarter joint working. LTT 's Lee Baker finds out how three clients can become one and a consultancy can be a catalyst for sharing ideas across boundaries.

Scott Wilson Group plc offers strategic consultancy and integrated design and engineering solutions in the railways, buildings & infrastructure, environment & natural resources and roads sectors. With 30 offices in the UK and employing 6,000 staff globally, the firm provides a full range of consultancy and support services to central government, regional agencies and to local authorities.

Scott Wilson Group plc offers strategic consultancy and integrated design and engineering solutions in the railways, buildings & infrastructure, environment & natural resources and roads sectors. With 30 offices in the UK and employing 6,000 staff globally, the firm provides a full range of consultancy and support services to central government, regional agencies and to local authorities.

Kevin Smith, local public sector service leader, transport consultancy; Anna Moore, 3 Counties Alliance Partnership framework manager; and Adrian Withill, ITS director

Kevin Smith, local public sector service leader, transport consultancy; Anna Moore, 3 Counties Alliance Partnership framework manager; and Adrian Withill, ITS director

Over the last month, LTT has explored how local authorities responsible for highways and transportation can do more for less by outsourcing work and slimming the client in new partnerships. But some local authorities have gone further still.

Authorities such as Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire have closely integrated the client, contractor and consultant in order to avoid management duplication. Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire county councils, meanwhile, have gone further. They, too, have set up a partnership with a consultancy; but by entering into this partnership together, the three councils have effectively become a single client for one consultancy framework contract. This avoids duplication of consultancy work, leading to further savings.

Under the 3 Counties Alliance Partnership (3CAP) formed in 2007, Scott Wilson undertakes work for the three authorities that they jointly commission. The arrangement reduces overheads, and has the further benefit that the councils can better share resources and ideas with each other.

Anna Moore, the framework manager at Scott Wilson, says: “We act as a catalyst and facilitator, highlighting opportunities for Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire to work together on projects.” This unique partnership has both enabled more effective communication between the local authority partners, and between different departments within individual authorities.

“Having a partnership that involves active and continuing dialogue with different members of staff within several authorities allows you to find opportunities to make savings,” she says. “It’s very easy to overlook things when you’re busy with your day job.”

When Scott Wilson was carrying out telephone surveys in order to collect data on trips for 3CAP, for example, the consultant identified that the same survey could be carried out for economic studies it had also been commissioned to carry out, for minimal additional cost. “Our ‘upside down framework’ – three authorities working with one consultant instead of one authority commissioning work from three or four providers – gives more scope for finding efficiencies,” says Moore.

There are similar pieces of work that all local highway authorities need carrying out, such as responding to national changes in guidance. And even when a piece of work is done in-house, the existence of the partnership means that often any one partner does not have to start from scratch on a particular piece of work.

Over the first two years of the four-year contract, 3CAP has allocated £8.5m of work to Scott Wilson and accrued estimated efficiency savings of £1m in the process. The savings on individual pieces of work are significant: the counties estimate they made a collective saving of £210,000 on the development of a highway design guide, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire having benefited from earlier work done by Leicestershire.

But while there are savings to be had from doing similar work for more than one authority, is the management of the contract streamlined? Moore says it is: she is the framework manager for Scott Wilson, while Steve Smith, the alliance manager, who is also a Nottinghamshire County Council employee, co-ordinates management of the contract for ‘the’ client: the three counties.

“Steve is my first point of contact, so I don’t need to have three conversations about our programme of work,” says Wilson. The result is a reduction of overheads under the contract: only a third of the number of meetings between the client and the consultant need to be held.

Smith heads the operational board that sets the annual works programme. For day-to-day discussions on ongoing projects, Moore speaks to the delivery managers, three Scott Wilson employees co-located at the three client offices on a part-time basis. These managers develop “one-to-one relationships with client officers and are the first point of contact for each authority’s queries,” she says. The partnership arrangement means that the client does not simply just ask the consultant for work, as under traditional contracts.

“We always discuss planned work, and Scott Wilson can suggest discrete projects. This year, we suggested to the client a focus on sustainability, and they’ve agreed,” says Moore.

Last year, Scott Wilson studied the impact of climate change on highways policies and standards at the request of Nottinghamshire County Council, but the consultant suggested that the study was widened to include the other two authorities, generating savings in the region of £21,000. For 2010/11, Scott Wilson proposed that a follow-up study was carried out. Moore says: “A study on its own doesn’t achieve anything. We suggested investigating to what extent that work is following through into practice.” Scott Wilson sees its role as being a “critical friend” to its three county council partners: asking them if they are aware of newly emerging initiatives, and challenging their ideas.

There is a facility within the contract for scoping work, allowing the county councils to “test ideas and chew things over with a critical friend,” says Kevin Smith, Scott Wilson’s local public sector service leader (transport consultancy). “They have a small budget for this, so we can help them progress their ideas, without their needing to go through procurement. Sometimes things will come back as full commissions, sometimes they won’t.”

Scott Wilson has three offices within the county areas, and its staff have between them chalked up decades of experience of being employed by the three counties: the three that LTT speaks to – Smith, Moore and Adrian Withill, director of ITS –  alone have 40 years between them.

Smith says: “We have local knowledge and presence, and the relatively long-term contract provides the continuity and team-working that a top-up contract cannot provide. Developing a partnership is better than being a consultant who just comes in for the odd piece of work. You get to know what the client wants.” Scott Wilson’s consultants are “not technical tourists,” adds Withill.

However, because Scott Wilson is a global design and engineering consultancy with specialist skills in various UK offices, it can provide the three counties with expertise in specialist areas, alongside the local knowledge. Withill says this is sometimes necessary, as with an ITS project the consultancy carried out for Nottinghamshire.

“Nottinghamshire was an early adopter of a particular passenger transport information system – on their own admission, a bit too early,” he says. “The surrounding areas subsequently got new systems that the Nottinghamshire one is incompatible with. The county council didn’t want to have to put four different transponders inside all its buses, nor could it simply buy the same system as the others, for competition reasons.

“The authority had to find a way of making its system communicate with those in the neighbouring council areas.” Scott Wilson recommended a solution by augmenting the core skills within 3CAP with an expert in wireless communication based in Scott Wilson’s Swansea office.

Withill says: “We can provide the client with specialist consultancy, whilst also knowing how many bus stops there are in Worksop.” This piece of work also highlights the further advantage of having a partnership with a consultant covering more than one county: the fact that transport crosses local authority boundaries. Under the 3CAP contract, Scott Wilson developed a business case for a bid to the Transport Innovation Fund for the three counties and their three city council counterparts.

Smith says: “There’s a lot of cross-boundary working. It’s not only efficient to deliver consultancy in a collaborative contract, it makes sense in transport planning terms.” When the counties face similar transport issues, Scott Wilson can use a methodology devised in one area in another.

Both Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire wanted to investigate the potential offered by rail lines to carry further passengers in order to help meet the transport demand created by regional developments. “We applied the same systematic review using the analytical processes developed during the first study to the appraisal of the second project with only minimal new data collection, reducing the time taken to complete the work, and therefore minimising expenditure,” says Smith.

The collaborative nature of the contract also helps to drive costs down in other ways. The Midlands Highway Alliance, which oversees a regional framework contract for building medium-sized schemes costing up to £8m such as park-and-ride sites, relief roads and pedestrianisation schemes, wanted highways standards to be harmonised across the region first.

Contractors working across local highway authority boundaries have to interpret each council’s different, bespoke standards and specifications, adding to costs. Moore says: “The beauty of having a standard document is that the contractors can buy in bulk and so give you a much better price. Scott Wilson was available at very short notice to do this work, so it could be incorporated into the tender documents for the medium schemes framework contract.”

The work was carried out during July to September of last year, in order to be included in the tender documents for the contract issued in October. Scott Wilson says that reducing needless local variations in what councils ask for “could release significant savings”.

However, the move does not preclude individual authorities using bespoke items in certain areas, stresses Moore. On bollards, for instance, “there is a standard, concrete design that will be provided across the authorities in the Midlands Highways Alliance. However, if it is a scheme within a civic amenity site, the clients stipulate that different items can be used. We’ve struck a balance, allowing standardisation everywhere this is desirable.” Harmonising standards and specifications will better allow costs to be benchmarked across the Midlands, because the authorities within the regional partnership will henceforth be comparing like with like.

Performance benchmarking

The partners within the 3CAP contract are benchmarking the costs of design and delivery between them too, whether it is carried out in-house or by Scott Wilson. On some projects, the skills of different partners are used: for example, there was design input from both designers at Scott Wilson and Leicestershire’s in-house designers on one major project.

On the project to improve transport links in Loughborough as a catalyst for new homes and jobs close to the town’s train station, Leicestershire County Council provided the traffic signals and structures skills, while Scott Wilson contributed project management, highway design, street lighting skills. “All the partners have skills to bring that we can bring together on individual projects,” says Moore.

As well as benchmarking between the partners, from time-to-time, the three county councils test the market by putting out tenders. “Our arrangement saves the three counties the cost of procuring work over and over again,” says Moore. “But it’s not an exclusive contract. They can and do test the market, and that’s fine.”

A situation where issuing tenders is the exception rather than the norm makes the 3CAP contract very different from other collaborative framework deals that Scott Wilson holds. These other collaborative contracts – including one with the metropolitan boroughs of Bolton, Manchester, Stockport and Trafford metropolitan boroughs for top-up engineering consultancy – involve mini-bids, so do not cut out the cost of procuring individual pieces of work altogether.

Comments Moore: “The 3CAP contract is unique in having one private sector partner and a number of public sector partners. This has not only allowed significant savings to be made, it has enabled us to invest over four years in building a relationship with the clients; it has also facilitated greater collaboration between the three clients.”

So what of the future? Can the 3CAP model be replicated elsewhere? The consultants say yes, as long as other contracts give a contractor a sufficient quantum of work. She says: “It has to be a contract of some viable magnitude, not just a top-up service for special, one-off projects. If we are to put special management teams in place, we need an indication of the amount of work that will be available.”

While there have been suggestions that outsourcing work is necessary to make savings, there will be far less capital money available to spend in future, reducing the pool of potential work. So will there be enough work?

Smith emphasises that the looming budget cuts require transport consultancy advice if services are to be carefully re-designed and not just indiscriminately withdrawn. A rural accessibility study for Derbyshire identified where there was an unnecessary duplication of subsidised transport services such as dial-a-ride and primary care trust visiting services.

Thought will have to be given to the appropriate size for collaborative contracts, striking a balance between local knowledge and teams on the one hand, and economies of scale on the other. Scott Wilson has offices throughout the UK, but, as Withill puts it, “a consultancy contract covering the whole of the UK would not be a good idea... you wouldn’t have any competition”.

Above all, however, Moore says that collaborative contracts can succeed “only if other local authorities and consultants are prepared to commit themselves to making such partnerships work”.