Police officials have been warned to learn the lessons from the city council’s controversial deal with Service Birmingham when drawing up a £25 million contract with a consultancy.
David Bailey, Professor at Aston University said that he was concerned that public organisations like West Midlands Police simply don’t have enough expertise to do deals with the private sector.
The force has announced it is entering into a five-year partnership with Accenture to help restructuring and the introduction of new technology.
West Midlands Police says that it hopes that the deal will help maintain crime-fighting while chopping £120 million off the budget.
But Prof Bailey, who has been deeply critical of the city council’s contract with Service Birmingham - which is a direct outsourcing deal, whereas this is a consulting arrangement - said there were great risks in entering such contracts.
He said: “If the police deal with Accenture helps unlock genuine savings and better ways of working then that's great. I have no issue with using the best of the private sector to help the public sector and vice-versa.
“Let’s hope some of the lessons from recent experience are being learned across the public sector though. In particular, contracts shouldn’t be so large that public sector expertise gets hollowed out to the point that it becomes dependent on the private firm.
“Secondly contract termination fees need to be kept to a minimum and the contract needs to be regularly market tested. Thirdly, real key performance indicators need to be in place that hold the private firm to account properly, with effective scrutiny, transparency and accountability. I also hope that the Accenture deal can bring benefits to local, small firms.
“More broadly, all too often the public sector simply doesn’t have the expertise to design, monitor and enforce the contracts that govern the relationship with the private firm. Let’s hope it’s different this time.”
The Service Birmingham contract which cost the council almost £1 billion between 2006 and 2012, has been condemned for offering taxpayers poor value for money.
West Midlands Police said that over the next six months Accenture will help design a new target operating model for the force, a blueprint for how it will work in 2020.
Over the course of the Accenture deal, the force says it expects to spend £100 million on new technology, to find new ways of sharing information, and also help how the public interacts with officers.
Early discussions have included work on developing systems where people will be able to report crimes online and track the progress of cases electronically. The force and Accenture are also considering introducing new mobile devices to help officers spend more time on the street.
Chief Constable Chris Sims said: “At the core of this project is a desire to sustain and improve the quality of policing across the West Midlands.
“Never before have we taken on a project of this scale or magnitude. This ground breaking piece of work will look at the delivery of a more information led policing model.
“The delivery of policing services will remain very clearly with the elected Police and Crime Commissioner, exercised through myself as an operationally independent Chief Constable.
“This partnership with Accenture heralds a new model of public and private sector engagement that exists nowhere else in the policing world, capable of supporting our aim to be the best police force in the country and a leader of wider public sector change.”
The contract with Accenture is for an initial five-year period with a breakpoint at the end of the first phase of work and an option to extend for a further three years.
