A group of 10 local authorities has unveiled plans to spend £200,000 on a shared intelligence hub to identify and reduce fraud.

Leicester City Council has released a prior information notice for an off-the-shelf solution, which would enable data collaboration and matching between its partners.

The group of authorities was awarded £310,173 in November from the government’s £16m Counter Fraud Fund.

The notice said: “Data would need to be extracted from the various systems regularly, by either an automated process, or manual, from all participating authorities, and loaded into the Intelligence hub.

“Automated data matching should then take place any data anomalies would need to be reported out of the system.”

There are 10 councils across Leicestershire and Rutland involved in the partnership.

The participating authorities would require read-only access to the Intelligence Hub only, with Leicester City Council maintaining ownership.

Due to time constraints, it would not consider bespoke solutions, according to the notice.

The initial term of any contract would be two years, to match the funding announced by the Department of Communities and Local Government.

However, the partnership would have the right to extend the agreement for up to another three years.

The government says that fraud is costing councils £2bn a year in total.

Announcing the funding last year, communities secretary Eric Pickles said: “This challenge fund will be allocated to the most innovative local authorities who plan to generate the most-effective savings.”