The London Borough of Tower Hamlets aims to save £1m a year as part of council-wide HR transformation project.
The council is centralising all its HR transactional services, including recruitment, payroll and pensions, as it looks increase efficiency and cut costs.
Deb Clarke, joint director of HR at the council and NHS trust, told Personnel Today that the council already ran good services, but felt there was more to squeeze out of HR in terms of efficiency and service improvement. This would free up HR’s time to focus on more strategic issues, she added.
“We’ve got quite good partnership arrangements with our senior HR advisers and management teams but want to develop that further into more of a business partner model,” she said.
She added that the project would result in at least £1m a year in savings after the first two years.
Three new senior HR roles are to be created, but Clarke ruled out any forced job losses among her team.
“I am not anticipating any compulsory redundancies but there will be reductions in staffing; we will work out the detail for each post going forward but some staff will change jobs, some vacancies will be deleted and some staff might be redeployed,” she said.
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