Peterborough spends £3m in efficiency drive

Peterborough City Council is spending £3m on an IT upgrade in a bid to hit efficiency targets set by the government.

The three-year facelift is set to support the council's core systems in more than a dozen projects, including disaster recovery, helpdesks, intranet and telecoms.

The project is aimed at increasing productivity by giving council staff and the public faster access to information and more transparent reporting.

Councillor Stephen Goldspink, Peterborough's cabinet member for efficiency and business improvement, said: "We need to make sure our system is capable of running modern applications for e-purchasing and e-procurement.

"There's a lot of pressure from central government and I fear that they are likely to cut funding. These savings have to be robust and reliable and we're not going to be able to do that without having the technology available."

The investment follows an internal audit of the council's IT after Sir Peter Gershon's Spending Review was published last year.

Gershon has said local governments must save £6.45bn through improved efficiency by 2008. Councils have also been told that services must not suffer from savings and that a maximum of 50 per cent can be achieved through squeezing existing resources.