It has become clear that our district human resources teams will have an increasing challenge to cope with the demands of people change management.

We are currently awaiting the details of the change from localised fraud investigations which is being transferred into the Single Fraud Investigation Service (SFIS).

More recently, we have become aware of the consultation in other services such as land charges, which could involve the transfer of staff. We also remain unclear about the impact upon our staff as the introduction of the Universal Credit system is determined.

This highlights the importance of ensuring that we continue to have specialised staff at our disposal to ensure we conform to our legal and employer responsibilities.

The continued march towards integrated and shared working presents a challenge to ensure we continue to act as good employers in determining the future capacity, skills requirements and development needs for the organisations we are establishing.

All this pressure has to be matched by the need to be responsive and imaginative in our thinking so that we can maintain the pace of change, protect our organisational interests and continue to meet the service demands required from us by our citizens.

Despite our concerns regarding any of the transactional issues that may have to be implemented, the move toward the SFIS could present another opportunity for district authorities to take the lead in developing new corporate fraud investigatory services.

Some upper-tier authorities have limited fraud investigatory capability and many still rely upon the role of the internal audit services to identify the risk areas.

District councils have built up a wealth of expertise, experience and capacity which, if utilised in a different way, could be organised to support all tiers of local government to investigate and root out corporate or systematic fraud.

The recent announcement by the DCLG to create a £16.6m fund to support future fraud capacity may not be completely effective if divided between the total number of authorities with existing fraud teams.

However, a good opportunity exists for it to be utilised to support the setting up of regionalised specialised fraud investigatory teams, thereby underpinning the emerging areas of risk created by revised ways of working and emerging simplicities of accessing services.

Allen Graham is chief executive of Rushcliffe BC