Our recent work with South Gloucestershire involved two reviews with the aim of identifying ways of increasing net revenue to support the budget as well as developing internal commercial skills and culture.  The two reviews were a Commercial Sprint Review and a Fees and Charges Review. 

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Commercial Sprint Review

 

This review looked across all service areas to identify ways performance in existing commercial initiatives could improve as well as council held assets and capabilities that were under-utilised and had the potential to generate new commercial opportunities both through income generation and savings.

 

The review identified 80 commercial opportunities with an estimated net revenue potential of £3.7m when fully matured.  These opportunities were then assessed using portfolio management tools, rated against the priorities in the corporate plan and assessed for risk, ease and cost of implementation and timescales to produce a suggested shortlist for the council that is manageable and will create the largest impact both financially in the delivery of the corporate plan and culturally.

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Fees and Charges Review

 

We worked collaboratively with service areas to assess fees and charges in five different ways:

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• Benchmarking against neighbouring councils and CIPFA statistical neighbours

• Market assessment to understand the sensitivity to price increases for particular fees and charges

• Policy and legislative context for the fees / charges

• The cost of delivery and what is the full cost recovery

• Is everything being charged for and is it is, is it done in the best way

 

Through this work we developed proposals for changes where we could see a compelling case for the fee / charge to be changed.  These proposals were staged over time as some rises could see a short term decrease in usage or others it may take a while to build up.

 

The result of the work was an additional £1.6m for the following years budgets rising to an additional £3.5m once some of the new fees reached maturity.

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We also develop a bespoke toolkit and trained managers to use it to enable greater ownership and understanding of fees, charges and costs across the council.  Finally we reviewed the approach to setting the corporate overhead and made suggestions on ways it could be developed to create greater transparency.

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