Agenda, decisions and minutes

To approve as a correct record the minutes of the District Executive meeting held on Thursday 7^th October 2021.

The minutes of the previous meeting held on 7^th October 2021 were approved as a correct record and would be signed by the Chairman.

An apology for absence was received from Councillor Peter Gubbins.

In accordance with the Council's current Code of Conduct (as amended 26 February 2015), which includes all the provisions relating to Disclosable Pecuniary Interests (DPI), personal and prejudicial interests, Members are asked to declare any DPI and also any personal interests (and whether or not such personal interests are also "prejudicial") in relation to any matter on the Agenda for this meeting.

Members are reminded that they need to declare the fact that they are also a member of a County, Town or Parish Council as a Personal Interest. Where you are also a member of Somerset County Council and/or a Town or Parish Council within South Somerset you must declare a prejudicial interest in any business on the agenda where there is a financial benefit or gain or advantage to Somerset County Council and/or a Town or Parish Council which would be at the cost or to the financial disadvantage of South Somerset District Council. 

There were no declarations of interest made by Members.

There were no questions from members of the public.

The Chairman advised that the draft Structural Change Order for the Unitary Authority had been received the previous evening and it had been circulated to all Members that morning.  The first meeting of the Somerset Local Government Reorganisation Joint Committee would be held the following day (5^th November) at Mendip District Council offices in Shepton Mallet.

The Chairman introduced the report and advised that a number of questions had been raised by email by members of the Scrutiny Committee and some may require a written answer.

The Performance Specialist thanked her fellow officers for providing the data for the report which she said was an honest and robust picture of the Council’s current performance. All areas which had red or amber outcomes were working very hard to improve their statistics. 

In response to questions from Scrutiny Members, the Performance Specialist, the Lead Specialist and the Director for Service Delivery advised:-

·         Planning enforcement data would be included in the Quarter 3 report.

·         Removing duplicate planning applications on the same site and only looking at major applications, there were currently 3,966 dwellings and 224 bedrooms of care home accommodation delayed by the phosphate issue.

·         Homeless enforcement action referred to action such as civil injunctions and community protection warnings/notices where individuals staying on the streets had other options but refused to engage.  The enforcement was to encourage engagement with services to help individuals off the streets.

·         PCS11 & PCS12 (percentage of planning applications determined within 8 weeks) were rated as green because both were above their Annual and Quarterly Targets.

·         There was an extensive training & development service for staff together with a dedicated Learning & Development Officer who sourced internal and external training as required.  There was also an extensive on-line learning management system available. 

·         There had been extensive leadership and management training at the beginning of the year and a number of management team officers were undertaking professional qualifications and personal development.

·         Spending on local companies was measured by postcodes and also on a 30 mile radius and was currently running at 45% due to the Chard Regeneration scheme but it was usually around 60%.

·         There had been an increase in the number of rough sleepers and additional funding for outreach work to help them look for long term housing solutions had been made available.  The Housing First project should also help to reduce their numbers.

·         Public data on FOI’s was not currently produced but improvements including robotics and artificial intelligence to support the FOI process would allow more meaningful statistics to be produced in the future. 

·         Statistics on the time taken to answer telephone calls to the Council was not currently measured as the move to on-line services was intended to free up the telephone calls for those customers who required more assistance and these calls were generally longer.

·         The length of telephone calls to the Council were recorded and the number resolved at first point of contact which was to the benefit of the customer, but they were not part of the corporate KPI’s.

·         The public were encouraged to use the SSDC on-line services where possible.

·         The Housing Benefit Specialists had written a recovery plan to return to a good level of service and there had been very productive meetings with DWP.  There had not been a high turn-over of staff but their workload had increased during the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 91.

The Chairman noted that there were a large number of reports due at the December District Executive meeting.

Members noted that the next scheduled meeting of the District Executive would take place on Thursday 2^nd December 2021 as a virtual meeting using Zoom meeting software commencing at 9.30 a.m.

The Chief Executive provided members with a brief verbal update on the Local Government Reorganisation in Somerset.