"Residents and businesses get better quality services, and staff get better pay and conditions.” Cllr Andy Hull, Executive Member for Finance, Performance and Community Safety
Cllr Andy Hull, Executive Member for Finance, Performance and Community Safety

Due to a 70 per cent cut in central government funding since 2010, as well as increasing demand and cost pressures, ensuring value for money for residents has been a crucial element of Islington Labour’s leadership of Islington Council. That is one reason why it has been a council priority to bring services in-house – providing better services for the borough, ensuring funds are spent efficiently and improving pay and conditions for staff.

Over the last eight years, approximately £400 million worth of council contracts have been ‘insourced’, delivering savings of £14 million. Services that have been brought back in-house after previous council administrations outsourced them include housing management, cleaning services and refuse and recycling collection.

As well as the savings that have been generated, Islington’s insourcing programme has so far secured better pay and conditions for more than 1,400 frontline staff. Services have improved too: earlier this year, Islington’s streets, which were cleaned by a private operator until the service was brought back in-house in 2013, were independently assessed as being cleaner now than they had been for at least a decade.

Building on this track record of success, the Council’s Executive has agreed to consult on a policy that looks to deliver services in-house by default whenever possible in future. If, following consultation, the policy is adopted, the Council’s go-to position will be that services will be delivered in-house, unless it can be demonstrated that outsourcing them would be better for residents in terms of service quality and cost.

Cllr Andy Hull, Executive Member for Finance, Performance and Community Safety, said:

“The council has a responsibility to provide high-quality, efficient public services that are run for the benefit of residents”.

 

“With the Tory Government cutting our core funding by 70 per cent since 2010, every penny counts, and, in the majority of cases, bringing services back in-house represents best value. Residents and businesses get better quality services, and staff get better pay and conditions.”

Cllr Asima Shaikh, Executive Member for Inclusive Economy and Jobs, added:

“Providing services in-house also means we can ensure good quality jobs are available for residents of our borough”.

 

“Recruiting locally means creating more jobs and apprenticeships for local people to start a career in their local area. In turn, this supports our community wealth building agenda, and greatly advances our ambition to create a fairer, more inclusive local economy.”

The full report from the meeting of the Council’s Executive can be found here.

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