Essex councils plan shared outsourcing deal

Braintree district council has advertised for an outsourcing company to provide it, three other councils and a housing service with a wide range of ICT equipment and services. The contract, with a value of between £14m and £34m over up to seven years, is being set up by Braintree along with Castle Point, Rochford and Colchester councils, which currently have separate deals with three companies. The services will also be used by Colchester Borough Homes, a company set up by Colchester to run its housing services. A tender notice in the Official Journal of the European Union says the deal will include information systems and servers, PCs, telecoms, networks and audio-visual equipment. Consulting, software development, internet and support, plus business and management consultancy and related services will also form part of the contract. When the contract is in place, the four councils are planning to set up a framework agreement which could also be used by neighbouring Brentwood, Harlow, Maldon and Tendring councils. The tender notice, published on 17 March, says: "If the provider succeeds in winning contracts with more than one council, these opportunities for service improvement might include rationalisation of the data centre facilities, rationalisation of applications and application support and sharing of resources between council areas." This article is published by Guardian Professional. For updates on public sector IT, join the Government Computing Network here.