Richmond Council has set out key cost-cutting plans as it faces losing more than half of its core funding by 2029. The council will redesign services across six major areas, including care and housing, in a bid to eventually save £39 million a year.
The south London council faces annual cuts of £29 million by 2029 under a new government funding formula, which aims to shift more cash towards areas with higher deprivation. This amounts to 58 per cent of its central funding.
Transformation programme
While Richmond is challenging the cuts alongside Wandsworth, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea councils, it has put forward a major transformation programme to save £39 million by 2029. It has published business cases to overhaul six major departments, in a bid to save cash while improving services, which will continue to be developed over the coming months.
The authority plans to introduce a single “front door” where residents and businesses can raise service requests and find information, provide staff with a “single view” of residents to join up support, increase automation and drive up self-service rates. It will also develop tools to better predict demand for services and identify people most likely to need more support in the future to help them earlier.
Key plans by department
Adult social care and public health
- Focus on preventing, reducing and delaying the need for care
- Overhaul staffing models
- Improve early help and occupational therapy services to maximise independence
- Deliver innovative care technology models
- Provide a self-service platform using AI to reduce demand
- Review policies
- Increase digital automation and digitise processes
- Improve effectiveness of reablement services
- Redesign service acquisition for more affordable deals
- Improve commissioning models
Children’s services
- Reduce the average cost of placements by improving commissioning, maximising regional collaboration and reducing reliance on expensive arrangements
- Improve referrals, triage processes and reviews
- Increase the use of family group decision-making to make sure all options are considered before a child enters care
- Improve offer to permanent carers
- Begin reunification earlier in the child’s journey
Housing
- Identify and support residents at risk of homelessness before crisis point
- Increase proportion of initial assessments resulting in prevention duty, while reducing those that escalate to relief duty and main duty
- Reduce the average time cases remain in relief duty beyond the 56-day deadline
- Cut average time households spend in temporary accommodation
- Slash the average nightly cost of temporary accommodation
Corporate functions
- Introduce a hub-and-spoke operating model to better support frontline services
- Reduce duplication and improve efficiency
- Make money by selling and leasing assets
- Reduce running costs across assets through upgrades and decarbonisation
- Consolidate contracts and renegotiate existing contracts
- Improve internal customer experience and responsiveness
- Improve governance, decision-making and professional standards
Environment
- Improve traffic enforcement
- Consider changing the pricing of related services and running markets and events in parks
- Redesign waste and street cleaning, libraries and sports contracts
Growth and place
- Increase charges for related services
Approval and investment
The council’s finance committee approved the scope of the transformation programme on September 24. It also green-lit a further investment of £18 million, on top of the £1.5 million already set aside, to carry it out.
Lib Dem councillor Jim Millard said the authority needed to carry out the transformation “rapidly and effectively in time because we’re facing a very severe pinch point”.
Councillor Millard said: “Many of the proposals are about prevention, early intervention, which not only improves outcomes, improves lives but saves money at the same time. It’s about better use of technology, improving streamlining processes, better use of our assets and taking all those sorts of opportunities for helping residents to have greater independence.”
James Wills-Fleming, director of transformation, added that alongside the financial benefits, the programme “is also about protecting the services that matter most to our residents and ensuring the services that we provide to those residents promote independence and ensure that we maintain the high outcomes that we already deliver”.
