Company Background
Southwest One is a joint venture company set up between Somerset
County Council,
Taunton Deane Borough Council,
Avon and Somerset Constabulary,
and the global IT and business management provider, IBM.
This unique partnership has come about due to a shared belief in delivering
excellent services to local communities as cost-effectively as possible.
For
several years now, the amount of money needed to maintain public services
has risen faster than the funding available to do this. So, in 2005 a radical
solution was proposed in the South West to deal with this problem.
That
solution was to set up a new company - a joint venture between the councils,
the police and a partner in the private sector. The new
company would be based in Taunton and would manage a range of everyday
activities on behalf of the councils and police - activities like Finance,
Information Technology, and Property Upkeep. This would create significant
cost savings.
The other priority of the joint venture company would be to
find new and better ways for customers to access a wide range of public
services provided by the councils and the police.
Two years later, we created that joint venture company: Southwest One
The work of the new company is open to expansion during the early years
of the contract to provide similar services to other authorities in the
South West region of the UK. This is the first partnership of its kind
to establish such a framework agreement. Public sector organisations
across the region were invited to sign the framework agreement which
enables them to purchase services from Southwest One. Over 30 public
sector organisations signed the agreement in December
2005.
< Back to the About Us page
