Agenda item

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 Covid pandemic due to increased applications for the Council Tax reduction scheme.

·         There had been technical issues with the ‘my account’ registrations on the Councils website and a solution was currently being tested,  When this was complete, “my account” would be made live and would be  promoted in a campaign prior to annual Council Tax billing.

·         The Discretionary Housing Payments scheme that was reduced due to an underspend was the Hardship scheme, which was for council tax top up payments. The Discretionary Housing Payment scheme is funded by central government not SSDC (unless we are overspent). The current predicted spend was an estimate based on trends. If the scheme was overspent at the end of the financial year, this would be met from reserve funds in the benefits budget.

·         Generally the responses from SCC departments (highways, ecology & lead local flood authority) were slow.Highway officers were required to co-ordinate responses on larger schemes from a number of internal colleagues and were therefore reliant upon further input from separate teams to provide a response.  The phosphates issues had affected the response time of ecologists and the Local Lead Flood Authority appeared to be currently under staffed.

·         Staff turnover was covered in PCS 18. It had increased by 1.44% on the previous quarter but this was in part due to staff moving within SSDC.

The Chairman of the Scrutiny Committee thanked officers for their detailed responses to the questions.

During discussion, the following points were made:-

·         Officers were congratulated on the quality of the report particularly relating to land development and economy.

·         Overall the trends were good and we should not always focus on the red reports. 

·         Information regarding the rough sleeper referral service should be publicised through the media.

·         The measurement of spending with local companies only recorded those which SSDC directly contracted and it could be higher than 60% if sub-contracted workers were included.

·         Many members of the public reported long waiting times to have their phone call answered by SSDC.

·         Would it be possible for Town and Parish Clerks to have a dedicated telephone number for SSDC?

At the conclusion of the debate, the Chairman thanked the officers for their report and for answering Members questions.  Members were content to note Corporate Performance Report 2021-22: 2nd Quarter.