THE government is to unveil further funding for local authorities that transform the way they deliver services.

The bidding prospectus for the Transformation Challenge Award 2014-16 is expected to be published imminently.

Some £135m is due to be made available over two years – an estimated £15m in 2014-15 and a further £120m in 2015-16.

The Rural Services Network will publish full details of the funding when they are released by the government.

In the meantime, the network has prepared its own briefing document explaining the Transformation Challenge.

The money will support the upfront costs of local authorities working in partnership to re-engineer their business practices and redesign service delivery.

In addition, the government has already announced a further £200m of capital flexibility, allowing local authorities to use receipts from asset sales for revenue purposes.

Last year's Transformation Challenge Award received 145 bids for the £6.9m funding pot.

There were 18 successful bidders with 44 local authorities and five fire authorities benefiting from government funding.

Projects ranged from integrated health and social care to transforming electoral services to improving children's services.

Successful bids from last year's Transformation Challenge Award are available here.

The Transformation Challenge Award 2014-16 aims to build upon the successes of last year's awards and help councils take transformation even further forward.

Local authorities face challenges in delivering high quality services from a combination of demographic pressures, increasing user expectations, and fiscal consolidation.

To meet these challenges, the government believes local authorities need to re-engineer their business and redesign their services to make them sustainable over the long term.

Key to achieving this is the coming together of different authorities and parts of the public sector to share staff and other resources, it says.

But these kinds of radical change can require upfront funding.

The Transformation Challenge Award is available to provide this kind of funding, targeted at the best proposals, which the government says are likely to make the biggest difference.