Nottingham City Council has approved spending of more than £400,000 to develop 'robotic automation' which it says will 'free up staff time'. The authority will spend the money over the next two years, with automation expected to deliver the capacity of 40 full-time-equivalent members of staff.
The council says the workforce will not be reduced by this amount, with staff instead having more time to focus on "activities that make a difference to our residents." Overall, the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) process is expected to save the council £600,000 a year, though this will have risen to a projected saving of more than £5 million by 2026.
In documents approving the decision, the council says: "RPA is one of the tools the council can use to free up staff time from repetitive rules based activities and enable colleagues to focus activities that make a difference to our residents... We could chose not to implement RPA across the council and automate high volume, repetitive rules based tasks, however this would mean the council would have to continue to resource these manually activities at a significant cost."
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Pilots have already been developed in areas of the council including adult social care, commercial waste and leisure services. The council says there are now "significant opportunities" to utilise automation across the wider authority.
Although the council says it will not be cutting the 40 roles which RPA will be able to match, the authority does add: "It should be noted that any resulting proposals that would place employees potentially at risk would be subject to a formal consultation process following [the council's] restructuring principles." The £424,019 of spending, approved on June 23, will fund two new RPA developer roles.
These roles will be appointed on a two-year fixed term basis. The council adds: "Given the specialised nature of the role the service should carefully consider where to source applicants for these roles to maximise the potential pool of applicants."
