HE isn’t a councillor or a public servant, but for hundreds of staff at Bournemouth Town Hall, he’s the boss nonetheless.

Grant Rumbles was recently appointed chief executive of Mouchel, the company which has taken over the work of four Bournemouth council departments and is set to take on two more.

The council transferred 350 full-time equivalent jobs to Mouchel under the first phase of the agreement, which involved ICT, facilities management, revenues and benefits.

Another two departments with 100 staff – human resources and finance – are set to follow in the new year, subject to a risk assessment.

In the national press, the name Mouchel has frequently been preceded by the word “troubled”, thanks to a succession of financial problems. It recently revealed an annual pre-tax loss of almost £65million. Its shares, valued at £2.94 each in a rejected takeover bid in 2009, stood at 12.25 pence at the end of November.

In Bournemouth, the company’s difficulties have added fuel to the debate over whether it was right to outsource large parts of the Town Hall’s operations to a private concern. In October, the council’s chief accountant, Stephen Parker, was suspended after writing an email voicing his concerns about the deal.

Making his first visit to Bournemouth since his appointment, Mr Rumbles says the council has been unfairly lambasted – not least in the Daily Echo – for a deal which will save the public millions with no decline in standard of service.

“The range of services we’re providing here over a 10-year period needs to be either as good or better than the council did before and over a 10-year period reduce the costs by 40 per cent.”

The deal with Bournemouth – worth £148million over 10 years – was the company’s biggest new contract in the last year, and its fourth largest partnership with a local authority.

Mr Rumbles, who was brought in to put Mouchel back on a sound footing, says he understands why people were alarmed by the company’s difficulties.

“I think people had good reason to be concerned. The share price fell dramatically. On the back of that, the market capitalisation of the company has reduced significantly. It’s a reasonable question people might ask and were asking: ‘Is Mouchel going to go into administration?’ “I’ve been here for the last seven weeks now. I spoke to our lenders before I started. They were very supportive then and they have been very supportive since I began. Mouchel frankly is here to stay.”

With massive cutbacks in the local government spending that provides much of Mouchel’s businesses, there will have to be changes.

He says Mouchel will have to streamline its own structure in the same way it streamlines those of other organisations.

He has already announced plans to cut the £19m a year the group has been spending on corporate property and the £5m on accounting software normally used by global manufacturers.

“My approach is to take a very negative view of what growth is going to be like, cut our business to the appropriate size and move forward,” he says.

It’s not easy for a chief executive to tell his company it needs to get smaller, but that he believes that has to be done.

“A lot of business people get out of their beds in the morning to grow.

“It’s probably very difficult actually to accept. I think Mouchel can grow and I can tell you Mouchel will grow but we will look at adjacent markets to grow it.”