Caerphilly’s £13.5m savings mark one year on from Perago-backed transformation programme

A year ago, our two-year partnership with Caerphilly County Borough Council came to a close. In the last few weeks, the council’s own year-end figures show the change held: £13.5m saved in 2025/26 alone, first-point-of-contact resolution nearly doubling from 38.8% to 76.1%, and the equivalent of more than 12,000 working days recovered through lower sickness absence.

We know these numbers well. Contact Management was one of the twelve workstreams we built into Caerphilly’s £65m efficiency portfolio, alongside areas like Financial Management, Housing, Parks and Third Party Spend. Within the first two years of the partnership, £20m of savings had already been banked — and, on this recent evidence, the council’s own teams have kept the momentum going well beyond the point where our team walked out of the building.

How the momentum grew
Real transformation doesn’t end when the consultants leave. It compounds, if the groundwork is right. At Caerphilly, that meant a single view of change that leadership could actually use instead of 370 separate live projects competing for attention; a leaner governance model that kept pace with delivery instead of slowing it down; and a weekly, open stand-up that started around a handful of Post-it notes and grew to around 150 people in the room and 170 more online — popular enough that Welsh Government, the Centre for Digital Public Services, Audit Wales and representatives from various Welsh local authorities came to see it for themselves.

It also meant treating communication as part of the delivery, not an afterthought: a shared change narrative agreed with political and officer leadership, and campaigns like “Your Council. Explained” that helped residents understand decisions rather than have them announced.

The real measure of a transformation partner
“What I’m proudest of isn’t the number itself,” says Victoria Ford, Perago’s Managing Director. “It’s that the council’s own people delivered it, a full year after our team walked away. That’s the test I’d want anyone judging this work to apply — not did we deliver a good project, but did we leave something that kept getting better once we’d gone.”

That’s the measure we’d encourage any organisation to apply when choosing a transformation partner: not what changes while the consultants are in the room, but what’s still working a year after they’ve left it.

Read the full Caerphilly case study or get in touch if your organisation is facing the same pressures.