Two London boroughs, and savings that were still there in year two.

Both councils had a savings target they had to meet and a portfolio of change initiatives that was not, collectively, going to meet it. That is the ordinary position rather than a failing one. The individual projects are usually sound; what is missing is a view of the whole, and the authority to make the trade-offs between them.

Local government savings programmes fail in a particular way. The savings are declared, the structures change, and eighteen months later the cost base has not moved, because the operating model underneath it never did. The number goes into the medium-term financial plan and comes back out again a year later.

The Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames ran a council-wide savings portfolio, reporting to the Chief Executive. We led the programme team: bringing the initiatives into one governed programme, redesigning the operating model where the savings actually sat, and standing up shared services across functions that no longer needed to be duplicated.

The mechanics were a hybrid governance structure and the programme office built to run it — one place where the trade-offs between initiatives were made, rather than each project defending its own line. We facilitated the Cabinet and executive strategy sessions where those decisions were taken, working directly with the Chief Executive.

£22m was realised in the first year.

At the London Borough of Haringey the same pattern ran across more than thirty projects in HR, finance, ICT and procurement, spanning the council’s SAP finance and HR platform. Two stalled finance projects were recovered. A shared services centre for more than 300 staff was created, and a new corporate operating model embedded around it.

£8m a year came out of the cost base.

Neither programme was a restructure with a savings number attached to it. In both cases the work was on how the work was done: which functions stayed duplicated, which decisions moved and to whom, and what the operating model actually looked like once the structure chart stopped being the answer.

It is the slower answer, and the reason both programmes needed governance with enough authority to make trade-offs rather than accommodate everyone.