New Shropshire Council computer system to cost £10 million

The authority's leader, Malcolm Pate, says the new council-wide system will require a "substantial capital investment", but "is intended to make us a lot more efficient".

It will be discussed by Shropshire Council at a meeting next week.

A team of consultants has been reviewing the council's current system, and has been asked to produce a report on options for the replacement. The cost of the consultancy team is more than £600,000.

Councillor Pate has said that the options will include moving the authority's operations to the cloud or maintaining their own servers.

He said the investment is unavoidable, adding: "The one we are operating at the moment is not sustainable in the long term, it is quite old stuff some of it. We have got consultants in looking to advise us with the future strategy whether it is with the cloud or our own servers."

Councillor Pate suggested that some systems and services could be shared with other councils.

He said: "We are talking to other councils about working together more closely and maybe sharing some back office services. What happens with that could affect our IT strategy.

"That is why we are giving it such a lot of consideration, it is important we get it right to take us into the next 20 to 30 years."

The issue will be discussed at the next meeting of the council's cabinet on May 11.

It comes after the cabinet agreed to spend more than £6 million on replacing the computer system used for children's and adult social care at the authority – separate to the cost of the council-wide overhaul.

Earlier this year Councillor David Turner, portfolio holder for resources, finance and support and IT, said the review would come up with suggestions which would save money.

He said: "This should present us with some 'invest to save proposals' which hopefully will prove that by buying or leasing new systems, equipment and training our staff, we will overall, save money and improve performance.

"The functionality and user experience of our ICT should be improved as well as offering new digital capability to our customers and service users who increasingly access the council through the internet.

"New systems will also likely be in a 'hosted environment' or in other words we will no longer need to maintain our own servers and our systems will then be accessible via the internet from anywhere where an internet connection is obtainable. The cost of this short term team of staff to accelerate the work is estimated to be £0.6 million for three months."