Issue - meetings

[Report of the Director of Environment and Neighbourhoods. To be introduced by the Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods.]

This report seeks Cabinet approval for an extension to the Parking IT managed service contract with the incumbent provider for two years and for the award of a contract for provision of a replacement system to the preferred contractor for a contract period of 10 years, with an option to extend for a further 5 years.

The Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods introduced the report which sought approval to the extension to the Parking IT managed service contract with the incumbent provider, Civica UK Ltd, for two years and also sought agreement for the award of a contract for provision of a replacement system to a preferred contractor, Supplier D, for a contract period of 10 years pursuant to CSO 9.07.1(d), with an option to extend for a further 5 years. These proposed decisions would provide a cost effective updated parking system, moving away from a paper based system of issuing permits, to a modernised electronic system, significantly reducing delays and allowing for a better customer experience.

The Cabinet Member emphasised the need to have cost effective parking systems which took advantage of new technologies to give residents the service they expected, entering this new contract would facilitate this. It was noted that remaining with the current provider would cost an additional £300k per annum and would not enable the Council to meet £348k of savings allocated to the FOBO [Front Office and Back Office] savings programme. The report set out the reasons for recommending, concurrently operating the existing Civica system with the new provider’s system for a period of 2 years and the Cabinet Member highlighted that the Council would need a backup system as cover until April 2020 and also as a safety measure in case of delays with the start date of the new contract. This decision would protect the customer offer and maximise the PCN recovery process with £4.6m of income to be collected this finacial year.

In response to questions from Councillor Morris, the following was noted:

• With regards to the length of the contract extension, two years was the minimum extension required and started from November 19 before the new system starts in April 2020. The Cabinet  Member explained that a  warrant on a PCN fine lasted 18 months and given the  Council would be issuing fines on the  Civica system  until 31^st of March, it would  needs to remain in place to  capture  the warrant process and allow  fines to be collected. Therefore, two years was acceptable in this context.

• Civica was holding fines on IT software but the Council maintained the responsibility to enforce these fines locally.

• Migration of the system had been explored, prior to the tendering exercise being taken forward. This was through a comprehensive soft market exercise. The Council had listened to key market suppliers on the plans for this data migration exercise. Taking account the significance of the data transfer, it was felt that there would be risks connected to PCN migration and more detailed permit holder migration. Some suppliers felt they could manage this risk easily but others described this as  a high risk , particularly in permit migration given the condition of existing data in terms of duplication and cleanliness of data. There was also a high risk that customer accounts would not have been as clean as possible and residents taking  ...  view the full minutes text for item 17