Environmental Transformation Programme Support for Southampton City Council

Supporting the development of a shared vision for transformation

Local Partnerships have supported a variety of councils, and transformation projects through the LGA’s Sector Support Improvement programme funded by the UK Government. These case studies explore the key activities and learnings from these projects and highlight both best practice and common challenges.

Case Study 3 – Environmental Transformation Programme Support

Southampton City Council (the Council) is undergoing a transformation of its environmental services. This includes waste, streetscene, environmental health and port health teams. The work has focused particularly on the waste and fleet teams. The function is under pressure to deliver savings, but as a very public facing service there are significant political concerns about the impact of any change in service standards. The picture is also complicated by the changes anticipated as a result of the Environment Act 2021, which introduced key legislative changes to the way in which waste is managed within the UK to increase reuse, quality and quantity of recycling collected and to help eliminate avoidable waste. 

The challenge

The Council’s challenge is to find a way to address the way in which it delivers environmental services.

The Council sought to:

• ensure that there is member and officer alignment regarding change principles, red lines and options
• understand how other organisations are reshaping the delivery of environment services and the strengths and challenges of these models
• agree principles to inform rapid service redesign activity
• ensure that the transformation programme is fit for purpose

The solution

The project entailed conducting interviews and workshops with officers and member Through workshops, stakeholder interviews and document analysis, we identified areas that could be improved.

Two workshops were held in which alternative delivery models available were discussed and an options appraisal carried out to score each aspect of the service against tailored criteria to suit the Council’s ethos and ambitions e.g. to ensure that staff feel more empowered to be commercial.

The result of the options exercise was that the main part of the service i.e. residual waste collection service should remain in-house, mainly because of time pressures in delivering savings which would have been delayed through setting up a company and a political preference to keep it in-house.

However, there were several other aspects of the service that the group considered could be delivered differently e.g. grounds maintenance and food waste collection had the potential to be commercialised as they had spare capacity and a large enough potential market, so could be operated through a company, while food waste treatment could be outsourced to an experienced provider to benefit from expertise and scale economies. This mixed model is expected to deliver benefits over the next five years.

The impact

The Council has said that the work and set of actions arising from it have helped it to take the work forward with a clear plan. Already they have begun to address some of the points raised.

The report has been used as part of a programme to guide transformation. It has been useful to have an independent, experienced third party to perform this review which holds weight.

How is the new approach being sustained?

The Council has recognised through this work that there is a lot to do in order to achieve the desired goals so have mobilised project resource to enable the recommended tasks to be completed e.g. route optimisation.

They have also commissioned APSE to review and advise on labour relations.

Lessons learned

The Council has learned that it is helpful to involve a broader range of individuals who bring different perspectives e.g. Elected members and those with more operational detail, rather than the managers of the service. On this project, this has enabled a more open and honest discussion about how the service is now and what it could be. It has also enabled all those involved to feel a sense of ownership.

Conducting an options appraisal with every option under consideration was useful and to have experts explain the implications of each so that the right decision could be made, knowing the facts. This enabled the medium to long term, as well as the short term, to be considered.

More transformation case studies

Can we help with transformation?

As part of the public sector we can be directly procured. Do you have a project you would like help with, or could we answer a question about our services?

Please message Sarah-Joy, use the ‘Can we help’ form on this page or use our contact us page, it would be great to hear from you.