Each of the facilities has undergone an energy audit and a variety of energy efficiency upgrades will be completed by an energy service company (ESCO).
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the first step businesses and households should take when trying to improve energy efficiency is performing an audit to identify where energy is being wasted.
Councils' compliance with the best- value rule would also be checked using a beefed-up version of the Audit Commission's annual comparisons of their costs and efficiency.
According to the National Audit Office only a quarter of the claimed savings were fairly represented while the second efficiency programme launched just last year is "cutting services to claim efficiencies" - and has "acute" measurement problems.