Swansea IT strike escalates into bitter political row

Thousands of Swansea council staff are to be balloted on industrial action in support of IT staff who are currently into the fourth week of an indefinite strike over a controversial £100m outsourcing project.

Over 100 IT staff are currently on strike over the proposed outsourcing of the council's IT and call centres to a private sector supplier as part of a project called 'service@swansea'.

With both sides deadlocked trades union Unison will now ballot all 5,000 of its members who work across Swansea council on strike action. A recent meeting attended by 700 members revealed unanimous support for an escalation of strike action, according to Unison regional officer Jeff Baker.

"All 700 voted in favour of industrial action because of the way the IT staff have been treated and the possible implications of service@swansea on their own jobs," he said.

He told silicon.com that the ballot has been given formal approval and that voting papers will go out Swansea council staff in the next two weeks.

Around 200 Swansea council staff are set to stage a march through the city's streets later this week in support of the striking IT staff.

The bitter dispute centres on a 10-year outsourcing project called 'service@swansea', which is intended to provide a one-stop website and call centre infrastructure for the city's citizens to access public services. Capgemini and ITNet are currently in the running for the £100m deal.

The strike has now escalated into a fierce political row over the cost of service@swansea. Although silicon.com has always understood the cost of the project to be in the region of £100m, opposition Labour leader David Phillips claims the cost has risen from £35m when the project was first proposed under the Labour administration - the Liberal Democrats recently won control of the council.

Swansea has dismissed Phillips' claims, saying the cost of service@swansea is the same as when it was first proposed by Labour. Most of the £100m figure consists of existing IT and call centre budgets that will be transferred to the project, with new investment of around £4m a year over 10 years accounting for the rest of the cost.

A spokesman for Swansea Council told silicon.com: "The estimated £100m cost of the service@swansea programme has not changed significantly during the course of the year."

In the early days of the strike the Council also accused IT staff of blocking access to vital systems by withholding passwords, while striking workers retaliated by claiming they had merely left IT systems running with the level of security mandated by the government and that council had hired 'blackleg' contractors to hack into systems.

Initially ITNet, one of the bidders for the deal, provided some staff to help keep the council's systems up and running but Swansea is now using contractors from a recruitment agency while talks between Unison and council leaders continue.