Content

Salford City Council – Record of
Decision
 
I, Councillor Jack Youd, Lead
Member for Finance and Support Services and Chairman of the
Procurement Board, in exercise of the powers contained
within the Council Constitution do hereby approve:
 

·     
the award of the
Contract for CapitaOne system to be moved to a Hosted Cloud Solution
with Capita, as detailed in the table below:
 

Detail required

Answers

Title/Description of Contracted
Service/Supply/Project

CapitaOne
Move to Hosted Solution

Name of Successful
Contractor

Capita

Supplier Registration Number

(to be supplied by Corporate
Procurement)

15370298

Type of organisation

(to be supplied by Corporate
Procurement)

Private Limited Company

Status of Organisation

(to be supplied by Corporate
Procurement)

Non-SME

Contract Value (£)

£270,655.91 Per annum estimated
average

Contract Duration

36 months

Contract Start Date

02/04/2024

Contract End Date

31/03/2027

Optional Extension Period 1

months

Optional Extension Period 2

months

Who will approve each Extension
Period?

Procurement Board (extension >
£150k)

Contact Officer (Name &
number)

Lead Service Group

People Services

How the contract
was procured?

(to be supplied by
procurement)

Direct Award

Framework Details (where
applicable)

(procurement body, framework reference
& title, start/ end date

KCS Procurement Servies
Framework
Y20023
Managed Services for Business

Funding Source

Revenue Budget

Ethical Contractor (EC): Mayor’s
Employment Charter

 

EC: Committed to sign Charter

 

EC: Accredited Living Wage
Employer

 
Background
Capita ONE has been used by SCC
since 1998 and is a
core statutory and Safeguarding application used by Children's
Services, Community Health & Social Care and Corporate
Services. The system incorporates essential information on
children, supporting essential service delivery to a multitude of
Education services and National agencies. These include Helping
Families and Early Years reform work, SEN, School Placement and
planning and Pupil Premium.
 
Staff who have manged the
technical aspect of Capita have since retired so DDaT no longer have the knowledge or skills to
maintain the application creating a high risk to the services that
rely on this application to meet core strategy and safeguarding
obligations.
 
Benefits of moving to Capita
One SaaS (Software as a Solution):
·     
Capita One has now
transitioned more than 20 customers to our SaaS platform, some of
them being amongst the largest Local Authorities in
England.
·     
All the risk of providing a leading-edge, highly
resilient cloud platform with a secure, dedicated instance resides
with Capita.
·     
The traditional reliance on a highly skilled and
experienced in-house IT workforce is removed (or significantly
reduced) leaving them to focus on more strategic workstreams rather
than the day-to-day technical operation of Capita One.
·     
Supports SCC Digital Transformation ambitions by
providing agile working and higher quality access for users and
citizens who can access from anywhere using all standard
browsers.
·     
Capita offer high resilience availability –
24/7 x 365 days per year.
·     
Capita include SLAs with documented uptimes - at
least 99.5% (100% in 2024) during normal business hours - and
targeted Recovery Point Objective (RPO) / Recovery Time Objective
(RTO) times enshrined within customer contracts.
·     
Capita provide all the hardware, software and
licences required to run the application suite to future proof
against costly operating system and database upgrades (e.g. Oracle
licensing requirement is passed to Capita).
·     
Capita provide industry leading security around the
application and our data built on the UK based Microsoft Azure
platform to leverage all the benefits of this multi-accredited
provider with our own security processes and services wrapped
around NCSC Cloud Security Principles.
·     
Risk of regular hardware and software patching
shifts to Capita along with hardware maintenance and upgrades with
virtually no impact on the user.
·     
Salford will benefit from tried and tested Disaster
Recovery processes based in part on proven deployment processes,
further reducing the requirement on Council infrastructure and thus
saving money.
·     
All applications are retained within n-1 of current
releases with LIVE upgrades done out of core business hours to
minimise the effect to the user / citizen. This means the business
are always using an up-to-date and supportable version of Capita
One.
·     
All upgrades bring with them the latest security
patches and protections regardless of when they are installed
ensuring the platform attracts the highest levels of security and
protection.
·     
Our elastic infrastructure has the scalability you
require to reduce impact of peaks or troughs in your service
demand, which could otherwise impact on user experience or business
critical processes (For example during Admissions peak
times).
·     
Capita provides an industry leading support function
which is available 8am-6pm Mon-Fri backed with a customer support
portal available 24x7, all operating under ITIL standard processes
(See the attached Customer Service Charter).
 
As part of the DDaT business continuity, the Cyber Security
Strategy and the ongoing support of statutory and high risk
applications, DDaT are migrating
systems, where possible, to cloud solutions to limit the impact on
our services should Salford City Council ever be cyber
compromised.
 
In the recent Pen Test the
servers were highlighted as critical, as we do not have the Oracle
DBA skills in house to move the application to new servers this is
a high-risk issue.
 
Moving this application to a
hosted solution will allow DDaT to
decommission servers in our data centre which currently host
Capita. Removing these servers will not only reduce our costs it
will also reduce our carbon footprint The saving on decommissioning
servers in our data centre would be around
£450,250.00.
 
As we are migrating other
applications to the cloud, for SCC to continue to host the capita
solution would require DDaT to maintain
a costly Oracle site licence which is currently £100,000.00
per annum.
 
Options considered and rejected
were:
1         
Continue as it
Continue with the current
support and maintenance costs. The current annual cost is
£199,305.91. This will increase each year based on the CPI
rate which for 24/25 is 6.3%.
 
On top of the support and
maintenance costs to Capita we would also need to maintain our
Oracle site licence, our VM Ware licence, maintain servers in our
data centre and continue to fund data storage. All costs for these
are detailed in the table below.
 
As mentioned earlier in this
report due to retirement of staff, DDaT
no longer have an oracle database administrator, which is a risk to
the service and support of the application. To mitigate this risk,
we would need to recruit an Oracle DBA. An oracle DBA is graded at
4C, the salary plus on costs would be £65,824.00 per
annum.
 
The total cost per annum to
remain as is would be:
 

Capita Support &
Maintenance

£199,305.91

Oracle Site Licence

£100,000.00

VM Ware licence

£100,000.00
Estimate

Server & Data Centre
Costs

£150,000.00
Estimate

Data Storage

£200,000.00
Estimate

Oracle DBA

£65,824.00

Total

£815, 129.91

 
 
 
 
2         
Migrate the application to the SCC Cloud.
We would continue with the
current support and maintenance costs current year cost is
£199,305.91. This will increase each year based on the CPI
rate which for 24/25 is 6.3%.
 
To host the application on the
SCC cloud would require Oracle database administrator skills. As
mentioned earlier in this report due to retirement of staff,
DDaT no longer have an oracle database
administrator, which is a risk to the service and support of the
application. To mitigate this risk, we would need to recruit an
Oracle DBA. An oracle DBA is graded at 4C, the salary plus on costs
would be £65,824.00 per annum.
 
To
move to SCC’s cloud environment, we would need to rebuild all
servers which would be a one of cost of£12,000.00.
 
We
would also need to pay for ongoing cloud storage at
£14,254.56 per annum.
 
There would also be yearly charges for Oracle licence of
£14,578.56 per annum.
 

Capita Support &
Maintenance

£199,305.91

Oracle DBA

£65,824.00

Server Build (one of
cost)

£12,000.00

Cloud Costs

£14,254.56

Oracle Licences

£14,578.56

Total
with one off

£305,963.03

Total
Per annum

£293,963.03

 
3         
Migrate to Liquidlogic EYES
Module
The preferred option for the
business was to implement the Education module in Liquid Logic
(EYES). This was explored by both DDaT
and the business leads. A quotation was provided by liquid logic
and their implementation partner ICT Revolutions who SCC used for
the previous Liquid Logic Implementation.
 
Due to costs, it was agreed
that it wasn’t a feasible option at this time. The cost to
implement EYES would be £2,964,071.00, plus the cost to
maintain Capita for at least one more year.
 
Below is a breakdown of total
costs if we were to implement EYES:
 

SystemC Implementation Costs of
EYES

£1,200,000.00

Implementation Support Costs
(ICT Revs)

£1,352,100.00

Capita Support &
Maintenance

£199,305.91

Project Management
Costs

£111,971.00

Total
Cost

£2,863,376.91

 
Due to Project Genesis, SCC are
not in a position from both a financial and resources point of view
to procure and implement an application of this scale at this
time.
 
Assessment of Risk
Capita ONE is an essential
tool, heavily embedded in SCC Childrens Services. Moving the system
to a hosted cloud-based solution will protect the system and impact
on the service should Salford City Council ever be cyber
compromised.
 
Source of funding
DDaT People Budget (C1028)
DDaT
have actively investigated costs
savings across the whole DDaT function
to progress this work.
 
The contract with
Capita was recently renewed and as a result we have already paid
for the support & maintenance for 2024/25. Below is a breakdown
of the total costs for the whole term.
 
Costs
for 2024/25
 

Costs

Description

£199,105.91

Annual Support and Maintenance
of Capita Software – this has already been paid.

£70,000.00

One charge of implementation of
Capita Cloud Services

£35,775.00 pro
rata

SaaS (Software as a Service)
Annual licencing. This will be pro-rata for the first year (24/24)
to keep in line with our current contract terms it will be
£71,550.00 for following years

 
Total
Cost for 24/25

 
£340,655.91
 

 
Remaining balance to be paid for 24/25

 
£105,775.00
 

 
Yearly costs for 2025/26 and 2026/27
 

Costs

Description

£199,105.91

Annual Support and
Maintenance

£71,550.00

SaaS (Software as a Service)
Annual licencing.
 

 
Total
Cost

 
£270,655.91
 

 
Legal Advice obtained: Supplied by Tony
Hatton
 
Financial Advice
obtained: Supplied by
Joanne Garvin
 
Procurement Advice obtained:
Supplied by Emma Heyes
 
HR Advice obtained:
N/A
 
Climate Change Implications
obtained: Obtained by Michael Hemingway
 
Contact Officer: Jenny Mcilquham
Telephone number: 01615219389
 
The Lead Member has been
consulted and is supportive of the proposed contract.
 
 

Signed:     Cllr J
Youd         Dated:   24 July
2024.
           
    Lead Member
 

FOR DEMOCRATIC SERVICES USE
ONLY
 
*          
This decision was published on 24 July 2024
*          
This decision will come in force at 4.00 p.m. on 31 July 2024
unless it is called-in in accordance with the Decision Making Process Rules.