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."
