YOUR Civic Catering Service

In 2014 Cityserve underwent a redesign to become a One stop shop, Senior Managers within the council were appointed and supported by Capita to undertake a service review that included questioning all aspects of the design, delivery and output of the service. The outcome of the review was to recruit a management team from the private sector to put the business into the best financial position for the council to explore selling the business

Senior Managers, including Client Managers were recruited in September 2014 to be multi skilled and manage an estate of both catering and cleaning services at educational establishments.

By 2017 Cityserve had emerged as successful, award winning market leading force in the provision of school catering, with an annual surplus of £2.6m.

Despite this success in the catering business, the cleaning service continued to struggle, each year the service failed to meet its budgeted target for the business. 

Increasing the charges to the schools for the cleaning element of the service had hit a glass ceiling of cost, the labour cost was high due to the impact of the Birmingham living wage and pension scheme liability and payroll was 98% of the charges to schools. The service was unattractive to existing customers in comparison to charges from private sector companies, and by applying an increase to ensure that cleaning was not subsidised by the now successful catering service to existing clients, Cityserve had to consider a commercial strategy.

At the same time that Cityserve was considering a Commercial approach to its business, the politicians in Birmingham were also exploring a commercial strategy for outsourcing services and by the end of 2017 Birmingham City Council had created a Commercialism Strategy. Over the last decade Birmingham City Council has had to reduce its budgets by hundreds of millions of pounds and politicians and members were beginning to recognise the importance of innovative approaches in the drive from Government for local authorities to be self-sustaining by 2020.

The senior leadership team at Cityserve used their commercial skills and decided that the one stop shop no longer fitted the business or the environment and that the elements of the business had to be separated. This would empower the school to become more flexible operationally. Cityserve had around 850 cleaning employees and 150 cleaning SLAs with educational establishments.

The thinking was that by migrating the cleaning service and staff, Cityserve would be moving staff to be managed directly by schools who have delegated budgets, the choice would be in house or an external contractor both of which would drive efficiencies for the school.