The government’s not-so-united stance on how public services should be delivered and the degree to which the private sector should be involved is a good catalyst to stimulate the debate on the advantages and disadvantages of shared services.
While the government may be scaling back its plans to privatise (in effect) many public-sector services out of a misplaced fear of being seen to allow private companies to profit from taxpayers, the ‘big society’ theme underpinning many government strategies should provide excellent opportunities for many housing providers to use their existing IT infrastructures and business operations to deliver services on behalf of councils, local authorities and other public-sector organisations.
Housing providers don’t need to be net consumers of services; as Gentoo Group has demonstrated (see page 16), they are more than capable of using the results of their own investments in IT to create products and services to compete in the private sector. So, while we’re not suggesting that RSLs and ALMOs should take over rubbish collections for local authorities, now is a good time for housing providers to consider the commercial possibilities on the open market of their existing skills and investments.
