Somerset Council review their council service in Heritage.

[BAJR]

The outline business case presents a vision for the Somerset
Heritage Service. This describes ensuring sustainable heritage
services in Somerset that protect, promote, celebrate, and make
accessible the heritage of Somerset. It presents a vision of
integrated heritage services that manage the interface with
heritage land assets better. It should promote effective
partnerships and create opportunities for income generation.

The service model options considered in the Outline Business
Case are:

1. To keep the service in-house.
2. To externalise the service to a local authority owned and
controlled company.
3. To create an alternative model for heritage services that can
achieve the vision for services.

Read all the reports. if you can... ...

http://www1.somerset.gov.uk/council/meet...p?item=901

Item 8

So is this an opportunity? or a disaster? Could they survive as an external body? Is privatisation of core services that really should not be subject to commercial business models. ( what value heritage? )

:face-confused:

Would appreciate some considered thought

[Unitof1]

Would appreciate some considered thought

unfunded pension grabbers..... VAT....., ownership of all the shiny things..., lottery money...grants..., service agrements are not anything..... oh we do everything for the education of children using things like museums which have had their day and thousands of voluennters would be jobless without us. and theres a brick and tile museum as well....

1) Historic environment service is not statutory and existing planning regulation can do their job which is basically nothing. Get rid of them inhouse. It is going to be a hell of a lot cheaper in the medium to long term and you will not notice anything in the archaeological world of somerset.

2)Trust off the museums and cut their funding so that they can find genuine customers and reject unwanted "archaeological" site artefacts and sell things and probably not pay VAT if they is a museum. Be innivotive call them a charity put them on something like ebay for trustees

3)Join the "Archive" with the librarys and look for a way to make it a trust and digitise everting untill its the size of memory stick. Anything that looks like an old book sell for anything that you can get.

4)Tell the lottery thay it has to pay compensation for any future liabilities that any of its schemes that its funding has inflicted on us, generate.

[moreno]

After scrolling through the report, it would appear that under Section 2 Options Considererd, no. 2.2, that the option of outsourcing services “for profit” organisation or externalising services to an arms length organisation are considered to be undesirable and unviable". So I would think this is a foremost consideration and the preferred option would be to keep the services in house and develop a local authority owned and controlled company with stakeholders as such. I'm sure there are pro's and con's but at the moment I don't see this as unviable and perhaps a better option than privatisation.

Admittedly it's a curious and interesting approach.

Although not exactly the same as above, it bears consideration:
http://planningblog.planningresource.co....%E2%80%99/