London Tri-Borough
Leadership of passenger transport
The London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham (LBHF), The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea (RBKC) and Westminster City Council (WCC) developed a number of shared working proposals in the interests of efficiency and improved customer service, and these were badged as Tri-Borough (TB) initiatives and include shared senior appointments, integrated social care and TB passenger transport (PT). We have acted as a subject matter expert to the TB and then in particular developed the strategy of a combined approach to PT and provided the resources to manage the implementation of the new service.
In 2011 we were commissioned by WCC to undertake a strategic options appraisal for the procurement of their outsourced PT service. WCC were convinced that the service should cost them less but were unclear how to deliver a new significantly more efficient service. TB initiatives were just starting at this point and alongside proposing a new innovative procurement method for WCC, we proposed that a significantly more efficient opportunity would be to re-procure all of the services together in order to drive cross border sharing and benefit from economies of scale including the development of a more efficient customer focussed central management team.
In 2012 the TB accepted this strategic direction and we developed a programme of readiness to align procurement dates and aim for a full re-procurement of passenger transport in September 2013.
This project experienced the significant challenges of gaining agreements and managing the different project expectations from 3 different boroughs and shows how our team needed to be adept at working with political processes in a shared environment.
Following successful retender we were retained to guide the TB through the very difficult task of ensuring that all the new operators were compliant with all TB policies and had the correct vehicles, TUPE arrangements, licences and infrastructure in place for a smooth go live. In addition we were commissioned to set up from scratch the Transport Commissioning Team which had the responsibility of oversight and compliance of all of the new contractors.
Working closely with the new contractors to ensure the integration of an 80% TUPE staff transfer derived from a combination of in-house council employees in addition to transferred private sector staff has enabled Edge to set up standards and performance levels that are actively improving service levels and supporting a sustainable cultural change across all contractors.
The services across all three boroughs successfully went live at Easter 2014 providing services to 750 Special Needs Children and 450 Adult Social Services clients and realising savings of £2.1m per annum and with a much stronger customer focus.
As a trusted partner on this very successful shared service initiative we have managed the Transport Commissioning Team on a day to day operational basis throughout the process and were retained to manage the team through to December 2015.
Project Achievements
- Realising savings of £2.1m per annum
- Stronger customer focus.
