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Lewes District and Eastbourne Borough Council sharing services

Lewes District and Eastbourne Borough Council have joined together to create two more flexible, customer-focussed and cost-effective organisations. They have achieved this by integrating their staff and by modernising their culture, structures and technology.

This does not affect the political sovereignty of either council, which continues to be completely independent of one another. They are however served by a single workforce.

Both councils need to make significant savings over the coming years and therefore they need to find new ways to deliver public services, for less money. By taking these steps now they will stand the best chance of making the savings required while avoiding reductions to services.

This has been an exciting couple of years for Eastbourne Borough and Lewes District Councils. This process of joint transformation sees the two councils share a single officer team. This process helps to protect services in a time of reducing budgets while ensuring a modern, high quality and resilient professional team. At the same time, the strategic profile of both organisations within the region is set to grow.

Eastbourne and Lewes offer a diverse mix of environments; including the larger urban area of Eastbourne, the historic county town of Lewes, small towns and villages in and around the National Park and a large area of coastal strip.

Under the Joint Transformation Programme, both councils retain their own identity and powers, meaning that there are two separate sets of elected councillors setting the priorities for their areas, but there will be full integration of management, services and ICT (information and communications technology).

This initiative builds on collaborative arrangements between the two councils that have been working together to share resources and expertise since 2012, with legal, printing and HR services being shared since 2015.

As part of the integration strategy, Robert Cottrill was appointed shared Chief Executive for both councils in a newly created role.

There is a national trend towards councils increasingly working together with more than 400 shared service arrangements already in place across the country.