Executive Summary

Today, local authorities are in the midst of a significant period of change and have a new role and purpose as community leaders. This includes dramatically increasing the level of outsourcing and working with partnerships to deliver on promised outcomes. Indeed, Government policy has moved from encouraging partnerships towards mandating them.

We have, sadly, a very wide range indeed of disasters and embarrassments caused by supplier and
partner failure that encourages us to place these risks as topical, potentially catastrophic and urgent. These third parties are very likely to have different agendas, ambitions, stakeholder pressures to satisfy, governance standards, attitudes to risk acceptance, levels of resources to apply to risk management, sensitivities, and often very different business and human resource management cultures. Once these relationships are created, stepping back from them is not easy, especially urgently and when in a crisis.

This paper makes the fundamental point that outsourcing or partnering, whether it is towards back office or front office outcomes, is so much more than subcontracting or logistics management. Never before has outsourcing and its risks, myths and opportunities been such a topical and urgent challenge for public service executive leadership and its managers. This paper sets out to support them in understanding and addressing these issues.

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