London Borough of Enfield
Passenger Transport – Review and 3 year delivery partnership
Following a 6 week in depth review of opportunities in early 2016 Edge has been engaged on a three year programme to drive £1.5million of efficiencies and improvements across passenger transport. This assignment included the provision of an interim Head of Service to lead the operation through some significant changes including operational improvements, culture change and re-launch of the service to meet the needs of its customers. The Enfield transport team provides daily transport to 66 special schools for 700 SEN children and transport to 8 main day centres for around 300 adults. Delivery is through a team of 145 internal drivers and passenger assistants who are either employed directly or through agencies and a series of external providers. This team utilises a combination of internally owned fleet, leased fleet and a number of contracted transport providers,
After only 1 year we have delivered and signed off savings of £860,000 which has been realised from a number of initiatives. Edge provided the leadership and most importantly the skills and capacity to deliver as well as stabilising and running the service, improving credibility with internal service customers and users. We were successful in delivering a number of key initiatives;
Adult social Care transport routes have been reduced from 25 to 16 with an annualised saving of nearly £500,000. We achieved this by working to find alternative travel options for clients (regular client numbers reduced from 325 to 265) as well as utilising innovative software to re-route journeys.
In SEN transport, the situation was one of rapidly rising demand. We have worked with services and other partners to manage this demand through more robust challenge of entitlement and driving independent travel opportunities.
With £4million of annual spend, the contracted transport with private hire, minibus and taxi companies had become outdated by the rapidly changing transport landscape that was unfolding and this problem was accentuated by a small number of providers and providers having geographical “rights” to work arising in specified locations. In short there was a lack of flexibility and capacity to cope with demand. Edge worked to develop and renew these contracts and ignite the contractor market to ensure there was significant competition. As a result of this re procurement, 120 transport routes were retendered via electronic reverse auction and as a result of these activities the number of available contract firms has increased from 5 to 11, service quality has improved, and annualised costs are £850,000 lower. This efficiency, together with the adult social care efficiencies have allowed us to reinvest in further training and a new transport routing IT System to drive further efficiencies and sustainability going forwards.
Plans are now in place to deliver around £2million of annual efficiencies by the end of the partnership, which exceeds the original target.
Project Achievements
- Year 1 savings of £860,000
- Drive to deliver £2m of efficiencies
