The Commissioning Joint Committee has completed a detailed and searching guide to these closely related subjects.

It accepts that great economies have already been made, that more are available, and that advances in technology are increasing the scope for them further still. But it also believes that the debates about both service sharing and big contracts often give scant attention to the many organisational, legal and accounting considerations that local service providers need to take into account before committing themselves to major changes. In its guide, the CJC spells out some of the wicked issues, including:

• the difference between delegating services, and delegating their procurement. Service sharing needs one or the other, but which? Both have their own distinctive strengths and weaknesses, and there is no way of sharing services which gives authorities all the strengths, and none of the weaknesses;
• the many risks which authorities are entitled to expect their delegation agreements to protect them against;
• the client sides that need to be set up when delegating services;
• which types of contract work with which methods of aggregation;
• the trade off between procurement costs and contract prices;
• whether current received wisdom about risk transfer to contractors is well founded; and
• when the advantages of small contracts and small contractors outweigh economies of scale.

The guide also quotes extensively from a number of influential publications – both those that make the most powerful cases for service sharing, and those that most forcefully point out some of the pitfalls.

View the contents: Word (33KB) | PDF (24KB)

View Part 1: Word (43KB) | PDF (36KB)