New schemes to be added to the Capital Programme for 2024/25 to be Approved

New Capital Project Approval Request
Directorate:	City Services
Unit:	Transport
Project Title:	2024/25 Mendix IT Project – Online Parking Permits
Total Project Cost (All Years) £:	198,000
Purpose, Benefits & Risks:
This investment will build on the success of the project to build an Online Parking Permit System, undertaken in partnership with the council's internal Mendix developers in IT&D and completed in year 2024/25. It will contribute to productivity gain and support an increase in the extent of what Parking Services provides while enabling for some carefully managed reductions in headcount within the Parking Permits Team. It will also reduce the risk of needing to recruit temporary staff to cover delays in processing (as has happened in the past, including in the current financial year). In support of the council’s priority to be a responsive and well-run council, the future development and management of parking permits in the city, as outlined in a Transport & Sustainability Committee paper agreed by councillors on 6 February 2024, will follow the sequence below: - Increased automation of processes to achieve improved customer experience and a reduction in processing work in the Parking Permits Team. - Provision of virtual digital Resident Visitor Permits. - Provision of virtual digital Resident Permits. - All other permits to become digital. - A Monthly Subscription model for Resident Parking Permits. The main benefits of all this work can be summarised as: For our customers: - Instant activation of parking cover without having to wait for paper permits to arrive. - Easy to use digital solutions that ask for less evidence. - A way to spread permit cost over monthly payments and not having to remember to renew. For the organisation: - Supports the 'Tell us Once' whole council approach through links to Council Tax information. - Reduced carbon footprint by printing and distributing fewer paper permits. - Reduced risk of fraud. - Alignment with the wider Digital Customer and Digital Data Strategies. - The monthly subscription model will help to protect annual parking permit revenues.
Capital Expenditure Profile (£’000):
Funding Source (see guidance below)	2024/25	2025/26	2026/27	2027/28	2028/29	Total All Years
Service Borrowing	198					198
Total Estimated Costs & Fees	198					198
Financial Implications:
IT&D’s Mendix developers are 3 years into a project for Parking, undertaking work specifically for the service which is additional to planned activity and does not form part of the original plan for IT&D capital budgets. This requires the capital budget to be increased by £0.198m to cover the additional work, funded by the contribution from Parking. So far this project has been funded through a series of temporary funding sources; the first year being covered by a carry forward as a result of a revenue underspend delivered some years ago whilst in the second year the CMDB (Corporate Modernisation Delivery Board) committed some Modernisation Funds for parking to draw down on. This money was exhausted by the 3^rd year leading to a revenue pressure last year. For this year there is no other identified revenue funding option that can cover this cost and capital financing is therefore required, hence the requested capital scheme approval. Borrowing this amount over 7 years does however require repayments of £0.033m per year to be funded from revenue but this can be absorbed into the service’s existing financing costs budgets as repayments on older projects are due to drop out shortly.