Hackney's transformation programme aims for savings

Hackney Council's transformation programme is on track to deliver significant savings, aiming to bridge a substantial budget gap while improving services across key areas.

The Hackney Council's Scrutiny Panel met on Thursday, October 8, 2026, to review the progress of the Corporate Transformation Programme. This initiative is designed to modernise council operations and ensure long-term financial sustainability, projecting to contribute approximately £35.9 million in savings to the council's Medium Term Financial Plan (MTFP) target of £57 million over three years.

Kieran Read, Director for Corporate Strategy and Transformation, presented an update on the programme, highlighting its aims to balance service improvements for residents and staff with financial savings. The transformation programme, which has been in development for around three years, is grouped into corporate and people in place portfolios, with 11 live programmes, eight of which have associated savings.

Key Service Improvements and Savings:

The Corporate Transformation Programme is enhancing services across several departments:

• Children's Social Care: The Finding My Future programme focuses on early intervention and prevention. It aims to improve the description and understanding of children's needs, ensure evidence-based decision-making, and reduce care escalations. This includes using tools like Valuing Care and Carecube to inform commissioning and home-finding approaches. Beyond a projected cost reduction of £608,000 for 2026-27, the programme seeks to establish a consistent way to describe and understand children's needs, ensure ethical decisions are made, and achieve fewer care escalations due to unplanned endings. It has also delivered social value through paid internships for care leavers and donated laptops.
• Agency Staff Recruitment: The creation of Connect to Hackney, a joint venture with another council, aims to reduce reliance on private recruitment agencies. This initiative is projected to save approximately £300,000 by eliminating a master vendor premium and has contributed to a £6 million reduction in overall agency spend in the previous year. The joint venture offers greater control over the recruitment process and potential for greater local recruitment.
• Council Tax Service: A new portal for council tax services allows residents to check balances and set up direct debits online, resulting in a 30% reduction in call volumes to the contact centre for council tax queries.
• Repurposing Vacant Caretaker Properties: These properties are being transformed into care homes for vulnerable children and young people, with a projected saving of £400,000. This initiative also provides better quality regulated care within the borough.
• SEND Transformation: This workstream aims to improve outcomes for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), reduce reliance on Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), and target resources effectively. It includes piloting training for speech and language difficulties in primary schools, improving early years support, and implementing a new digital assessment tool (VSEND) for the EHCP process.
• Fostering Futures: This initiative focuses on enhancing the in-house foster care model to keep children in stable homes closer to their communities and reduce reliance on external agencies. It involves improving recruitment, matching, housing solutions, and carer support and retention.
• Strategic Enabling Services: Reviews are being conducted on identified functions to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

Performance and Challenges:

Despite the progress, all transformation programmes are currently rated as amber due to their complexity and scale. The key factors contributing to this rating include assumptions in early business cases that required changes after validation, potentially over-optimistic initial timelines, and the complexity and volume of changes. Furthermore, change readiness across the organisation has required more effort than initially estimated, leading to feedback about potential change fatigue.

To manage these challenges, officers are implementing strategies such as launching a comprehensive set of resources and training to help staff manage change, improving proactive communications, and developing a change heat map to identify areas needing additional support or resequencing of changes. The effectiveness of these strategies is monitored through the heat map which identifies areas requiring further intervention.

Councillors raised questions regarding the alignment of performance indicators with strategic objectives, data quality, and the escalation of underperformance. Officers assured the panel that mechanisms are in place to address these concerns, including monthly performance boards and issue management systems. The success of the transformation programmes is measured against financial targets, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and broader strategic objectives such as Putting residents first and Securing Hackney's future. Each programme has a Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) responsible for tracking progress, with programmes RAG-rated (Red, Amber, Green) based on performance against savings, milestones, resources, and non-financial benefits.

The programme also incorporates equalities impact assessments for each workstream, with examples provided of how the resident experience programme addresses accessibility requirements and develops mitigations for groups who may find digital transactions challenging. The council's commitment to being an anti-racist organisation and its broader social justice framework were also highlighted.

The meeting concluded with an acknowledgement of the ongoing nature of transformation within the council and the commitment to delivering better outcomes for residents. Further details on the meeting can be found in the Public reports pack.