A NEW computer system is saving Oxford City Council £150,000 per year.

The local authority had to move more than 20 million files, 150 servers 57 systems to a new provider, a report to the audit and governance committee said.

This was because its previous provider, Oxfordshire County Council, had proposed charging it more money.

During the changeover the city council said there were some "significant issues", with outages hitting services used by residents such as the planning and consultation websites.

The report said: "The city responded swiftly with messages advising customers of the issues with on line services on the website, extension to consultation deadlines were put in place where required and regular communications were maintained with affected customers and senior stakeholders, with general updates going to the whole organisation."

The county council also suffered two outages that lasted 48 hours during the period, the city council said.

Once the new system was introduced, some councillors also experienced problems with email.

The city council said "lessons have been learned", but noted the new arrangement reduced the cost of IT from £1.13m per year to £940,000.

It has also saved £68,500 on software charges and £220,000 in reduced software licensing costs.

A one-off cost of about £900,000 was budgeted for to pay for the change.