Council announces reorganisation plans

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The City of Edinburgh Council has released plans on how it will reorganise in order to cut costs and improve services.

The proposal was discussed towards the end of last year, although the details were only released last week and can be found here. This includes the Council’s Better Outcomes through Leaner Delivery (BOLD) programme. The Council must reorganise to meet the budget gap of £67 million over the next three years.

A central pillar of the new way the council departments are organised is that the city will be divided into four localities.

The plans will mean that many of the routine services, such as making complaints, switch to an online system and that more powers are devolved to local organisations. The council hopes the changes will make it more efficient and customer focused as well as significantly reducing costs on each interaction with a customer.

The Council has an agreed stance of no compulsory redundancies and it is envisaged that some reduction in roles will be addressed through natural turnover of staff.

Finance Convener, Councillor Alasdair Rankin, said:

“The Council needs to take significant steps to tackle the financial challenges it faces as demand for our services continues to increase. At the same time, we want to make services for residents more efficient and effective.

“We set the direction of travel last month when Council agreed proposals for a new organisational structure, enabling more effective decision making at neighbourhood level and improved partnership working with third sector organisations. We are now considering detailed proposals around this and how we plan to improve the way we interact with residents.

“We believe these priority areas for change will enable us to achieve service improvements as well as cost savings. Of course change on this scale brings challenges but we need to take decisive action now to meet our targets and create a stronger, leaner, more agile Council to better serve the people of Edinburgh.”

The latest proposals will be considered by the Finance and Resources Committee on Thursday 15 January. Further detail on proposals around Council property and workforce controls will be provided in the Spring.

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