Cornwall Council: More Exciting Initiatives!

Cornwall Council is considering selling its sublime management skills to other public authorities. 

The idea is, the Council would run someone else’s payroll system, perhaps manage their personnel records, or mastermind repairs to Spaghetti Junction.

To do this, Cornwall would team with private industry and submit joint bids for work to councils across the country. The carrot for Cornwall is preservation of its own jobs and services, and for the industrial partners, profit.

But if Cornwall Council seeks work beyond its own border, Cornish people will experience a decline in public services even more severe than the current shambles.

You don’t identify business opportunities in five minutes and depending on the prospect’s complexity, forming bid teams and submitting proposals can take months. Once the bids have been lodged, usually in competition with other would-be suppliers, often the customer asks for clarifications; sometimes even rebids are required.

These activities are seriously costly for bidders and it can be hard to predict your financial exposure, especially without a track-record. Always there's the question too: what else could have been done with the money?

Cornwall Council might not win any work. Then again, customers' budgets could be slashed, in which case there'll be no work awarded. During troubled economic times slimmed purchasing requirements become ever likelier, particularly in the area of say er, local authorities.

All in all then, not a great idea. Cornwall Council must concentrate on trying to manage its own shaky affairs. The Council’s recent hurried and risky outsourcing of some of its own staff, made under a partnership with BT, ought to provide a suitable distraction.