Joined-up thinking leads to major phone parking award

The joint agreement covers 48 car parks with a total of over 6,000 car parking spaces, operated by three Tees Valley Councils:

• Middlesbrough Council
• Stockton Borough Council, and
• Hartlepool Borough Council

"The Tees Valley Councils regularly collaborate on procurement decisions when it's in the interests of our citizens" says Middlesbrough Council's Executive Member for Transport, Councillor Ron Lowes, whose team led the consortium.  "Services, like phone parking, operate best when offered across a wide area, rather than piecemeal with different suppliers.  So, joint procurement was the natural route."

Councillor Peter Jackson, Hartlepool Council's Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods and Communities, gave more background: "In choosing a provider, our main focus was on value for money, quality of service and security, rather than just price - and that was reflected in our choice of RingGo."
"We chose RingGo because it's a well thought-through service which has a clear focus on customers' requirements and recognises the need to fit seamlessly into the day-to-day running of a parking operation."

There were three aspects of the RingGo solution, which the officers particularly liked were that:

• it uses advanced speech recognition technology to keep calls short;
• motorists call a local number to use the service, and
• the company holds data security as a high priority as evidenced by its PCI tier 1 accreditation.

With joint procurements of this kind, carrying out research and due diligence into the solutions is obviously paramount.  Councillor Bob Cook, Stockton Borough Council's Cabinet Member for Transport and Regeneration comments.  "We admit to being impressed with the feedback from other Local Authority customers who currently use RingGo.  They clearly value the service and have won benefits from it.  All those to whom we spoke are seeking to increase RingGo usage because of the proven advantages it brings both to them and their citizens."

Councillor Lowes concludes.  "With this agreement, we are demonstrating the synergy and benefits which joint local authority procurement can provide.  Our three Councils openly co-operated to decide on the most suitable pay by phone solution for their area.  With unanimous agreement, that service was RingGo and we look forward to seeing our citizens enjoying the fruits of this latest example of our working together."