Friday 9 July 2010

We have a weekend of sport ahead of us which I'm really looking forward to with the boys - the British Grand Prix and the World Cup Final. Not sure I'll be going out much this weekend...

We held the monthly Procurement & Commissioning Board earlier this week. This Board is charged with managing all council spend that is associated with purchased goods and services. This amounts to a net spend of £237million in 2010-11 - more than 68% of our total net spend. Many people assume that we spend most of our money on employing people but this is not correct, it's around 30%. We buy or procure a huge range of supplies as well as contracting with other public sector bodies and the private and voluntary sectors to directly provide many of our services to the citizens and communities in Wiltshire.

We are setting ourselves some challenging cost reduction targets for this spend. Over the next four years we wish to deliver around £40 million of cost reduction from this area of the business and to redirect this to those front line services that our elected members prioritise. This will be quite some challenge, but our track record over the past 2-3 years in this area is good which makes me confident that we'll succeed.

Have a good weekend and thanks for reading. Talk again next week.

Carlton