northlincs.gov.uk

10 (10) JOINT PROCUREMENT OF HUMAN RESOURCES, PAYROLL AND FINANCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS – The Directors: Business Development and Governance and Partnerships submitted a joint report seeking approval to jointly reprocure the council’s HR, Payroll and Finance systems.

The council currently operated a number of systems for HR and Finance purposes:

• The HR Professional Personnel System
• The iTrent system for payroll, through East Riding of Yorkshire Council
• E-Financials for financial management

Its shared service partner North East Lincolnshire Council (NELC) also used iTrent and E-Financials. These contacts were due to expire.

The proposal in this paper was to procure the next generation of Finance and HR systems jointly with NELC. Combining procurement of human resources, payroll and finance management systems would help achieve efficiencies and economies of scale. It also provided the opportunity to explore the potential benefits of fully integrated Finance and HR systems.

Shared systems were central to the delivery of the shared services business plans for HR and Finance, enabling the next phase of planned efficiency savings.

They would also contribute to the council’s digital transformation, enabling the council to implement new agile and responsive ways of doing business.

Reprocurement would also allow HR and Finance to develop their commercial offers for accountancy and payroll services, which were prohibited under current contracts.

The intention was to implement the new systems from April 2019. Procuring the systems now allowed the councils sufficient time to develop and test the systems and ensured users were suitably trained.

Resolved – (a) That the joint procurement of HR and Finance Systems be approved, and (b) that a report detailing the outcome of the joint procurement following the award of the contact be submitted.

11 (11) REPORTING A CONCERN (WHISTLEBLOWING) POLICY – The Director: Business Development submitted a report outlining and seeking approval for a ‘reporting a concern (whistleblowing) policy’.

The council currently had a Whistleblowing Charter. This charter was an appendix to the council’s Counter Fraud Strategy, which was under the remit of the council’s internal audit service. The charter detailed the processes for both employees and members of the public to report concerns, primarily regarding fraud and corruption, and was only accessible through the council’s website.

In line with the council’s commitment to accountability and transparency, it was proposed that the Whistleblowing Charter was relaunched as a standalone ‘Reporting a concern (whistleblowing) policy’ and moved into the Human Resources (HR) manual.

This policy outlined the process for employees to report a concern and broadened the range of issues that was included.

The process for members of the public to report a concern was also reinforced and a new page on the council’s website was launched for this purpose.

Resolved – That the policy be incorporated into the Human Resources manual and be approved.

Note: Reports are in Portable Document Format (PDF) and therefore require a suitable reader to view them. A reader can be downloaded free from the Adobe website (full instructions for downloading the reader are provided on the site).