SWINDON Council is considering visiting the failing London Borough of Hackney to learn lessons about how to run a revenues and benefits service.

Members of the council's special committee last night met in private for one and a half hours to look at the future options for the failing service provided by private firm, Atkins.

Afterwards, councillors, officers and union leaders refused to reveal what had been decided.

But secret papers obtained by the Advertiser before the meeting revealed that the resolution being put forward was to defer the decision until a further meeting on August 20.

In the interim, members of the committee will visit Hackney, where the country's most notorious council has taken the same service back in house and witnessed significant improvements.

The service in Swindon has been run by Atkins since November 1999 on a £2 million a year contract, which represented a £300,000 saving on the cost of running it in-house.

But since the firm took over, huge backlogs of unprocessed benefits claims and uncollected council tax have built up and the company has struggled to bring the situation under control.

Late last year, the Advertiser has learned, the firm found it was losing £500,000 a year by employing extra staff to try to solve the problems.

In May, Atkins approached the council and asked to sever the contract early. It still has four and a half years to run.

At the same time, the firm that lost out to Atkins in 1999, CSL now known as Liberata approached the council in the knowledge that the service was struggling.

Liberata managers were invited to the council offices to gauge how much it would cost for them to take over and improve the service.

They have now given the council a quote understood to be around £800,000 higher than the current contract, which council finance director Ian Thompson believes to be roughly the same as the cost of taking it back in-house.

His recommendation to last night's meeting was to give the contract to Liberata immediately, despite the protests of union leaders.

Unison reps for Atkins' staff said they were "tired of being used as pawns in an ever-failing game of chess" and would object to being shunted off to another private firm.

They urged the council to take the service back in-house and warned that if Liberata was chosen, there was likely to be a "mass exodus" of staff.