Vale of Glamorgan Council Cabinet agreed to establish a Local Authority Trading Company (LATC) for Catering Services. C.Co was engaged to provide a ‘checkpoint’ or ‘Gateway’ review of progress to date with a specific remit of assessing the requirements to get to a ‘Go’ position, assessing the overall governance of the project and the currency of the financial business case assumptions.
Our approach
Although Catering Services, and its readiness to be a trading company, was the principal service under review it was also necessary to understand the Council’s readiness to ‘spin out’ one of its services and to gauge its ability to support commercial activity of this nature. Support services’ contribution to the project was considered in the following areas:
- Finance
- Legal
- Human Resources
- ICT
- Communication
- Project Governance, Management & Support
The project was delivered using a commercial assessment model and involved a mixture of desktop review, on-site face to face interview and a meeting with the Project Team.
C.Co recognised that ‘pace’ was critical to the reinvigoration of this project and was able to submit an interim findings document at the end of the on-site week, in advance of the final report, that was well received and enabled the Council to begin to address some of the accepted project issues immediately.
The outcome
C.Co identified a number of opportunities for the Council to improve its delivery of this project and tabled a number of recommendations covering:
- Project and general governance
- Commercial readiness
- The Financial Business Case
- Legal readiness
- Human Resource implications
- ICT impact
Although the focus of this review was the Catering Services LATC, C.Co was also able to identify a number of wider, added value considerations for the Council that will inform its future project and commercial activity.
The report has been well received and is actively being used to support the project moving forward.
