NILGA, Solace and the NI Audit Office have acknowledged that without urgent change, NI councils could face significant risks to reputations, services, and their workforces.
PwC and NILGA have been working together to identify key transformation opportunities and the challenges holding councils back. We have interviewed council executives, looked at the approaches currently being taken and identified potential solutions that could be implemented at scale – with councils collaborating to drive change together.
Opportunities
There are multiple opportunities for NI councils to progress transformation from their current positions. We have highlighted the key opportunities below:
1) Digital including Voice Automation
We live in an increasingly digital world, so it should come as no surprise that there is a shift in the way councils interact with residents and local businesses. Councils must prioritise access to digital services that take customer needs into account:
Contact / Channel Strategy: To increase digital interaction and reduce operational costs, a clear mandate needs to be in place that will describe: how customers will access services, the channels required, and how this will drive the desired channel shift.
Digital Self Service Delivery: Accelerating the adoption of digital self–service will create significant capacity. A strategic plan and low cost digital platform are required to establish how this will be adopted and what capacity will be created.
Contact Automation: Calls are still preferred by many residents, but these do not always require a person on the other end of the line. Contact automation helps to triage demand towards automated voice and chat channels. As well as automated voice technology operating at 5% of the cost of live phone calls, there are accessibility improvements, as the transactions can be completed 24/7.
What would good look like in NI? Councils offer many similar services and deal with similar customer contact – could customer journeys be designed together and implemented on common technology platforms to progress quickly and at scale?
2) Improving Staff Productivity
Staff are councils’ greatest asset and cost – how can their morale, purpose and productivity be maximised? Councils are facing increasing demands for services, with a drive to “do more with less” resource, resulting in challenges in team connectivity, culture and morale, leadership change capacity, and consistency in outcomes for customers. These challenges repeatedly come up in our conversations with council leadership, but without clear interventions to overcome them.
These challenges can be addressed – over the last 10 years we have been working with council teams to improve productivity, working with team leaders to be clear on key performance indicators, enabling working together and problem solving and driving productivity gains of 15–25% alongside improved morale.
What would good look like in NI? A similar systematic approach that made the most of the workforce’s talents and reduced the reliance on agency staff to fill posts that councils are struggling to recruit to.
3) Future Operating Model
The current council landscape was created in the reforms of 2014/5, reducing 26 councils to the 11 authorities in place today. At the time the change was expedited – bolting the councils together rather than redesigning the new councils for the future. As a result many councils still have a dispersed property portfolio, processes and systems that are a legacy of their predecessors and staffing models that reflect the legacy organisations.
Addressing this is a challenge and an opportunity. Few councils would design the way they are set up today and many activities could be shared or delivered using common approaches.
What could good look like in NI? Councils develop their Future Operating Models to reset how they deploy their constrained resources to maximise their impact and outcomes for local residents. Further areas for collaboration are identified where resources, systems of processes can be shared to maximise local value for money and impact.
4) Collaborative Commissioning and Procurement
Collaborative commissioning and procurement are a case in point where better coordination could lead to better outcomes at lower cost. We recently reviewed spend across 10 of the 11 councils and found only 13% of spend being directed through collaborative commissioning contracts. As a result, there is a large, dispersed supply base which is difficult to manage, and drives significant time and effort to manage and process procurements and invoices.
Procurement resources in individual councils are strained by the demands of managing the volume of support requests and activity, struggle to recruit and retain talent, and rely on managers throughout their organisation to be on top of contract management.
What could good look like in NI? A collective reset on what could be procured by multiple councils with common needs, framework contracts that enable scale economies with locally tailored delivery and shared procurement resources that enable specialist skills to be developed and shared.
Closing Remarks
The momentum is building to deliver change, and that is why NILGA and PwC have been working together with the 11 councils to identify solutions for the similar challenges they face. Rather than councils working in isolation, solutions could be delivered at scale by multiple councils working together, then tailored to meet local needs. By working collaboratively, councils can transform and ensure that they can continue to provide the critical services that their residents depend on.
Mike Wallace is a Director at PwC focused on local government transformation. Prior to joining PwC in 2009, Mike was a transformation director in a large county council. Mike has been working with councils in NI and NILGA since 2022.
