COMPUTING systems at Slough Council are set to see a £4.6m massive overhaul after it was judged to be not ‘fit for purpose’.

Senior councillors gave the go-ahead for officers to update and improve the council headquarters Observatory House’s computing and phone system.

Last October, Jim Taylor, who conducted a damning review of the local authority’s governance, found the WIFI and phone systems at the building at 25 Windsor Road were not working properly, resulting in “children’s social workers [being] unable to work from the new building for many months.”

IT was originally outsourced but was then brought back in-house. Not everything was transferred back, and it left a number of vacancies and a large number of interim staff.

The plan is to be delivered in two phases – with phase one to be completed by 2023/24 and is expected to cost £4.6m. Some of the funds will be from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities.

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This will involve spending £822,000 to replace 240 out of its 400 servers needing ‘urgent replacement, upgrade, or move to a cloud solution’ as some of these 18-year-old servers were unreliable.

The council’s ‘fragmented’ and ‘old-fashioned’ contact centre and internal corporate phone system is set to get a massive overhaul to the tune of £1.4m.

All the costs have been included in the capitalisation direction, which means the council will be covering £4.6m using capital funds from the sale of its assets.

Speaking at the cabinet meeting on Tuesday, March 29, chief finance officer Steven Mair said they will be looking at in the short-term that the council is safe, stable, and secure.

The council is also developing a strategy and restructuring programme to implement a new permanent staffing regime, which would include adding permanent staff in IT.

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Cllr Sabia Akram (Lab: Elliman), lead member for leisure, culture, and communities, said this is “fundamental” to the organisation’s success and enables the staff to do what they need to do.

Council leader James Swindlehurst (Lab: Cippenham Green) said: “The depressing thing is in terms of the external report, which two years ago said all the things wrong with IT and they are all still wrong now, which is the depressing thing about how the lumbering way in which we haven’t moved forward.

“I remember being frustrated with planners and engineers looking at the map loading software because it took about five minutes to try and get one of the maps to load up back at our IT in St Martin’s Place and here we are a decade later exactly the same issues hampering people.

“The sooner we can get into a place to move that forward, the better.”