Doncaster Council spend £18,000 on consultants for plan to merge property services

A sum of £18,000 has been paid to ARK Consultancy to see if merging the council’s public buildings maintenance team with St Leger Homes of Doncaster’s housing repairs and maintenance teams is beneficial.

The review also looked at how best the council and St Leger Homes could ‘modernise’ how they use their building operations and storage facilities.

A range of people were consulted including mayor Ros Jones, senior Doncaster Council officers and trade unions.

The decision was signed off by two council directors and chief executive Jo Miller.

Dave Wilkinson, assistant director of trading and property services, said “We have looked at a number of options including transferring public buildings maintenance service to St Leger Homes of Doncaster and vice-versa and also looked at opportunities of how we could modernise our building operations and stores functions based on best practice across the industry.

“ARK who carried out the review have significant experience of doing this across the UK. The review provided both us and St Leger Homes with a detailed report which generally said both organisations were well run but outlined some areas for potential improvement and we will be implementing a number of actions to improve our service to customers.”