Decision details

The PCC and CCC Transport teams provide home to school transport for educational and social needs. A new system is proposed to allow improved levels of service, joint working and increased efficiencies. This decision is to proceed with the procurement of this new system, with CCC taking the lead.

CCC and PCC currently use different systems and processes to meet their statutory obligations to plan and provide transport for educational and social needs.  Both services cover the provision of school transport for those eligible, and CCC also provide adult social care transport.  However, both suffer from limitations of the systems currently in use, and some of the issues include:

·         Disconnect between online entry by clients and manual transcription by the transport team, which wastes time and can introduce errors

·         Because the current systems do not provide all the data required, it is often rekeyed into spreadsheets to allow for further tracking and analysis

·         In PCC, applications submitted for transport requests are sometimes not received, leaving the authority unable to meet its statutory obligation and wasting significant time resolving the application

·         Limited integration with Education, Social Care and finance systems

·         Limited ability to securely share client details with providers

·         Inability to automatically notify clients or providers of late changes or emergencies

·         No facility to track the current location of a provider or live status of a journey

·         No integration with the route planning software

Significant amount of time required to manage the in-house fleet of vehicles including vehicle inspection records and maintenance schedules as well as DBS status for drivers

Do nothing:  this would leave the Transport team using existing systems, with the limitations described above.  This option has been rejected because:

·         The opportunity to share routes would be missed, with the potential for lower costs and reduced carbon footprint

·         New systems can improve safeguarding with journey tracking

·         New systems will remove data duplication and reduce the risk of data protection incidents

The PCC system will be phased out by the supplier over the next few years and will no longer be supported

None.

None.