Consultants called in to streamline council’s services

A COUNCIL in Yorkshire has paid a consultancy firm a five-figure sum to find out the benefits of merging two property maintenance services.

A sum of £18,000 has been paid to ARK Consultancy to see if merging Doncaster Council’s public buildings maintenance team with St Leger Homes’ housing repairs and maintenance teams would be beneficial.

The review also looked at how the council and St Leger Homes could “modernise” the use of their building operations and storage facilities.

A range of people were consulted including Mayor Ros Jones, senior Doncaster Council officers and trade unions.

Dave Wilkinson, the council’s assistant director of trading and property services, said: “We have looked options including transferring public buildings maintenance service to St Leger Homes of Doncaster and vice-versa and also looked at opportunities of how we could modernise our operations based on best practice across the industry.

“ARK who carried out the review have significant experience of doing this across the UK.

“The review provided both us and St Leger Homes with a detailed report which generally said both organisations were well run but outlined some areas for potential improvement and we will be implementing a number of actions to improve our service to customers.”