Letter: Shropshire Council leader answers critics of council's commercial company ip&e

"Ip&e is the company created by Shropshire Council to deliver public profit and improved outcomes to Shropshire.

The company is not political and is there simply to do a great job of delivering some council services in better ways, and also doing this for other organisations in the public sector.

Over the past few weeks, you may have seen or heard news of ip&e, fuelled by ridiculous rumours of it not being a very open organisation.

But let me tell you, this is far from the case.

Ip&e is a relatively new business, made up of incredibly talented people who work hard every single day, carrying out all sorts of amazing services across Shropshire and beyond.

The breadth is huge and they carry out important work such as doing vital health and wellbeing checks in our communities by working with GPs and other healthcare organisations, and helping schools to educate our children in the best way we can through our school improvement service - as well as redesigning council services so we can keep doing the really important and necessary parts of public service for Shropshire residents in the most efficient way.

There is a fine balance between ip&e wanting to be open and transparent with information and yet not giving away sensitive, commercial information that would undermine its ability to trade. This would compromise the goal of making a public profit that gets reinvested back into Shropshire.

It wouldn't be in the interest of Shropshire residents to give this information away and would allow competitors to know what the company is doing and planning, clearly give them an advantage. Obviously competitor organisations do not publish their business plans and do not share this kind of information with their competitors.

Ip&e is open and transparent in everything it can be.

But it is important to protect the interests of Shropshire's residents, so information is shared where it is confident that it doesn't compromise the company's ability to trade.

All the information publicly available is already on the Shropshire Council website, with ip&e's own site recently launched and developing as you read this – and all our key documents and policies have been shared with the Council's various committees in the public arena.

Our company's accounts will also be available once they are finalised in July and I'm looking forward to reporting a small, but not insignificant profit for the last trading year.

This is great news, and in addition to this, the contracts that we have with the council reduce over the lifetime of the contract, and by 2017 ip&e will have also saved the council in the region of three quarters of a million pounds.

This is simply by doing things differently within the company in the context of it being a limited company (although wholly owned by Shropshire Council), and being able to reduce process and operational costs.

They have also created new jobs and this is set to continue as the company grows. It's a win-win situation, the public get a better service for less cost!

If ip&e benefits, then the public of Shropshire benefit, which is why I was astounded when some councillors who claim to have taken office to help our county, happily defame ip&e without bothering to actually find out what it's really about and how it is significantly helping our county.

It is time for others to take the politics out of the company and let it have some credit for the contribution it is making, and thank the amazing staff for the work they are doing.

I look forward over the coming months to continuing to share the success of ip&e.

By delivering services in new, innovative ways, we can continue to improve the quality of life for everyone that lives in, works in, or visits our beautiful Shropshire."