A northern council is drawing up detailed plans aimed at saving £19m by overhauling its ICT systems to enable more services to be moved online.

An initial exercise for Kingston upon Hull City Council, carried out by consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers, says that the cost of procuring the software, engineering and consultancy would cost around £5.25m up front with ongoing revenue costs of £442,000.

The council will now publish a tender allowing for the procurement of consultants to prepare a detailed business case for implementing online services.

A report published by the council said that the approach was preferable to continuing with its current customer relationship management system.

It said that “a high level of administration and paper dependent processes and the continual need to apply the available IT resource to maintaining the current complex linkages between systems rather than developing more efficient processes prevents progress.”

The council says that it will continue to deliver a “quality service” to residents.

In addition, it claimed that moving more services online would “help customers to become more digitally ‘savvy’, enhancing opportunities for social inclusion for those currently isolated, providing more access to value for money via online deals and advice and building skills that are transferable into employment.”

Savings will come in part from staffing reductions, although the full scale of redundancies has not been assessed.

The detailed business case is likely to take around four months to complete – expected by July 2015, with implementation occurring during August 2015.