Peterborough City Council has approved plans to review its ICT provision, with a view to outsourcing functions currently run in-house.

As part of its budget proposals, the council said that it would consider moving all ICT services under the remit of a contract it has with Serco, under which some functions are already run.

In a separate move, the council is planning to save more than £2 million by moving its computer services to an external provider.

A report to officers said: “When we outsourced our main ICT function, a number of systems remained in-house and continue to be managed by council staff.

“The first proposal is to review all of these arrangements with a view to bringing all ICT applications and projects under the main contract.”

It said that the council would also reduce the amount it spends on ICT equipment by reducing the number of people who have laptops and desktop computers, and for more staff to have “mini desktop boxes” linked to servers, meaning they can be updated remotely.

The council said that it would need to make a one-off capital investment of £1.3 million to move from in-house servers to  a Cloud-based service.

It added that the move would also require an annual revenue cost of £250,000 but would save money on maintenance and staffing costs.

The officers report added: “In the long-term this would save the council money because the alternative would be to make major capital investments in future years to renew the servers as they reach the end of their life.”

A separate proposal to reduce broadband costs and encouraging other organsiations to use the council’s network could save £1.9 million to 2019, according to the council.