With a current membership of all the Councils in North Yorkshire (nine in total) plus the Police, the Connect Partnership is a powerful collaboration of public service providers.

The initial phase is to get the Councils and Police to work together on a common agenda for access to services. The second phase is to expand this work to all other community service providers, for example the Health Trust, Voluntary Sector, Charities, etc.

Costs and resources

There is some ‘Regional Improvement and Efficiency’ funding to help kick-start elements of the programme. However, as the objectives of the Partnership are in line with the goals of individual partners there will be a requirement for each to provide resources to achieve these common goals.

Aims and objectives

The vision of the Partnership is for customers to have completely seamless community service delivery, regardless of the provider or the preferred access channel and all made possible by new ways of working and electronic access to key information.

In order to achieve this vision its objects are to:

• Improve web access and on-line services
• Web-enabling of back office information systems to allow improved mediated and on-line access to services
• Establish multi-provider walk-in community service centres
• Maintain and improve all types of access channel, i.e. face-to-face, phones, web, texting, etc.
• Promote the use of hand held technology for accessing and delivery of services.

Description

To achieve the vision a strategy board has been established that reports to the Association of North Yorkshire Councils (made up of the Chief Executives and Leaders from each Council).

The Connect Partnership Strategy Group is led by the Chief Executive of Scarborough Borough Council (Jim Dillon, who represents all the District Council Chief Executives) and has executive membership from North Yorkshire County Council and City of York Council. Achievement of the aims and objectives has been delegated to three key ‘expert groups’:- the North Yorkshire IT, Web and Customer Services Managers.

Results

To date the Customer Services Managers have developing common standards, PI’s (including benchmarking), training regimes, mystery shopping, connected call centres via a secure VPN and providing community rather than organisational walk-in centres.

The Web Managers are looking to develop web access to achieve the seamless community service vision and the IT Managers are tasked with developing the information sharing systems that will be essential for shared access to services.

Good practice and lessons learnt

The key elements that have helped to make this work are a will to improve service provision by removing the confusion over who does what; commitment from the very top (Chief Executives and Leaders); realisation that the programme is not about harmonisation of IT systems but getting them linked; and finally not imposing solutions on unwilling partners, (pilots by groups of partners that have an interest in that specific element of the overall work programme, to which others can join later).

References and links to policy implications

The vision links to the Governments transformational agenda of providing customer centric service delivery that are seamless as far as the customer is concerned.

For further information contact:

Paul Hill
Manager - Connect Partnership
Scarborough Borough Council
Town Hall
St Nicholas Street
Scarborough
North Yorkshire
YO11 2 HG
Tel: 01723 232304
Mob: 07967 465232
Email: paul.hill@scarborough.gov.uk