Agenda and minutes

Apologies were received from Councillor Martin.

At this point Members must declare whether they have a disclosable pecuniary interest, or other interest, in any of the items on the agenda, unless it is already entered in the register of members’ interests or is a “pending notification “ that has been disclosed to the Solicitor to the Council.

Members must also declare if they are subject to their party group whip in relation to any items under consideration.

There were no declarations of interest or whipping declarations.

• 2 November 2012 – Joint Meeting of Sustainable Growth and Environment Capital Scrutiny Commission and Scrutiny Commission for Rural Communities

• 8 November 2012 – Sustainable Growth and Environment Capital Scrutiny Commission meeting

• 19 November 2012  - Call-in meeting

• 6 February 2012 – Joint Meeting of Scrutiny Committees and Commissions - Budget

·2 November 2012

·8 November 2012

·19 November 2012

·6 February 2013

The minutes of the meetings held on 2^nd, 8^th, and 19^th November were approved as an accurate record.  The minutes of the meeting held on 6^th February 2013 were also approved as an accurate record.

The decision notice for each decision will bear the date on which it is published and will specify that the decision may then be implemented on the expiry of 3 working days after the publication of the decision (not including the date of publication), unless a request for call-in of the decision is received from any two Members of a Scrutiny Committee or Scrutiny Commissions.  If a request for call-in of a decision is received, implementation of the decision remains suspended for consideration by the relevant Scrutiny Committee or Commission.

There were no requests for call-in to consider.

The report provided the Committee with an update on staffing and workforce matters since reporting to the Sustainable Growth Scrutiny Committee on 10 January 2012.  The report informed Members of turnover, absence, appraisals and training activity, employee relations cases and workforce diversity.  Highlights included:

·         Headcount and FTE had been fairly even since March 2012.

·         Significant changes had included the transfer of support services to Serco and the TUPE in of Adult Social Care staff from NHS.

·         Restructuring within services had continued in order to meet budget requirements and business needs.

·         Voluntary turnover was currently running at 7.6%, up slightly on the previous 12 months, which was below the average benchmark for large authorities.

·         The average number of days employees were off sick was 7.21 but there had been a step change in March 2012 to 10.53 when Adult Social Care transferred in. Improvement in rates has been achieved since the transfer.

·         New monitoring tools had been introduced to monitor absence.

·         In the 12 months to 30th November, 702 staff had no absence at all.

·         Emphasis has continued on embedding the Personal Development and Review process, and rates of completion during 12/13 are at 96%. This includes Adult Social Care, who have been newly incorporated into the scheme.

·         60% off staff had been rated as a 3 in their PDR.

·         Rates of Disciplinary and Grievance Cases had decreased, one reason being that transfers out of the organisation have included areas in which there tended to be a higher number of formal actions.

·         HR continued to monitor the equality impact of HR decisions, policies and procedures through Equality Impact Assessments when policies were reviewed \ revised, and through workforce monitoring. A proposal had been made for approval to expand monitoring to the other protected characteristics under the 2010 Equality Act in order to have expanded workforce data to inform future Impact Assessment.

Questions and observations were made around the following areas:

·         Members were concerned about the consistency of scoring within the PDR process.  Members were advised that HR monitored the scores across each Directorate and would note if a significant number of people were being scored significantly higher or lower than a three in a particular area of the organisation.  The Corporate Management Team also reviewed the scoring data and the training and development Manager also audited a selection of PDR’s to ensure consistency.

·         Members sought clarification on whether the scoring of the PDR’s would be reflected in performance related pay.  Members were informed that the PDR process had been focused on performance and was not currently linked to pay.

·         Members sought clarification on the budget proposal to not pay sick pay for the first three days of sickness.  Had this suggestion come from an HR issue or as a budget saving.  Members were advised that it had come from a need to save money.  The proposal had changed from applying to all absences to only those people who had high frequency casual absences.

·         Members wanted to know what other authorities had  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.

The report provided the Committee with a summary of formal corporate complaints monitored between 1 April 2011 and 31 March 2012 which came under the Corporate Complaints Policy.  The report also informed Members of a proposed change to the current Corporate Complaints process from three stages to two stages.  Members were advised that compliments about council services continued to exceed complaints and had shown an increase on the previous year.  The Annual Local Government Ombudsmen report had also been included in the report.

Questions and observations were made around the following areas:

·         Members sought clarification as to why there was a high number of Stage 1 complaints (108) logged for 2011/12 for shared transactional services under Strategic Resources and in particular for delayed/failed service (63). Members were informed that the shared transactional services department included the old revenue and benefits department, and the payments processing team including payroll.  The revenues and benefits department had always received a high number of complaints.  The delayed/failed service remained the most common category of complaint with 49% of the total number of stage 1 complaints.  It should be noted that the number of housing benefit cases being dealt with within the city were 1800 and it was therefore inevitable that there might be delays in receipt of benefit but 63 was still too high and was being worked on to reduce this number.

·         Members were pleased to see that compliments had now been included in the report.

·         Members complimented the Head of Customer Services for his professional and excellent service.

·         If a complaint is still not resolved at stage 3 does the complainant have any further course of action that can be taken?  Members were advised that if the complainant was still not happy with the outcome at stage 3 they would be informed of their right to go to the Local Government Ombudsman.

·         At a meeting of the Sustainable Growth Scrutiny Committee on 6 March 2012 Members had sought clarification as to what happened to complaints that had been made directly to Councillors.  Were they logged as a complaint in the normal way through the corporate complaints database?  There was a concern that they were not logged. It was therefore recommended that the Head of Customer Services pilot over a period of time with members of the Committee if the complaints they received had already been logged with the Central Complaints Department. Councillor Maqbool had volunteered to conduct the pilot for her ward but there had not been many complaints in her ward so this had not proved to be a successful pilot.  The Chair therefore agreed that another Councillor from the Committee should step forward to conduct the pilot.  The Chair asked for nominations to be sent to the Senior Governance Officer.

·         Members sought clarification around the proposed removal of the stage 3 process.  Members were informed that the rational behind reducing the stages to two was timescales and the necessity of a third stage.  The timescale for dealing with complaints was  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6.

Councillor Elsey, Cabinet Advisor introduced the report which provided the Committee with an update on progress of delivery of services on the Council’s behalf for the following areas of business:

-          refuse and recycling collection

-          street cleansing and grounds maintenance (“Street Care”)

-          facilities management

-          property design

-          building maintenance

-          hospitality and school catering

-          building cleaning

-          public and home to school transport

-          travellers’ site management

-          courier services

-          Council’s fleet maintenance;

-          Hackney carriage and private hire licence testing;

-          Interface management; and

-          parks, trees and open spaces.

Members were informed of the following:

·         Enterprise was measured against more than 100 Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) on a monthly basis and had performed better on the majority of KPI’s than their predecessor City Services.

·         Last summer had been the wettest and worst summer for some time which had caused a major challenge for grass cutting.  Enterprise responded with a new fleet of vehicles and increased their workforce by 25% at no cost to the Council.

·         Enterprise had turned a corner and was now tackling long standing issues.

·         The new food waste collection service had been successfully mobilised over a five week period and to date the service had collected in excess of 1,000 tonnes of food waste.

·         On the 21 February 2013 it was announced that Ferrovial Services, the parent company of UK public services provider Amey, had signed an agreement to acquire Enterprise plc.

·         A new communications manager had been put in place who would be tasked with promoting the good news stories.

·         The council had moved from a people based service to an intelligence led service and relied on good intelligence and good mapping data which was now available to monitor services more effectively.

The Enterprise Partnership Director gave Members an overview of the new cleaning regime that had been implemented across the city. The city had now been divided into high intensity, medium intensity and low intensity areas for cleansing.  High intensity areas would be cleaned daily and low intensity would be cleaned 3 times a week.  The city had been divided into five areas and each area had a work gang which was expected to clean to a Grade A specification.  Additional supervisors had been employed with Samsung smart phones with an app for quality checking.  Five checks would be completed per day and the data collected would be sent to the Enterprise Partnership Manager who would collate the data to see if objectives were being achieved.

Questions and observations were made around the following areas:

·         Will the tree survey programme be offered to all ward councillors?  Members were advised that a schedule of tree surveys had been produced for the next three years.  At the beginning of work in each ward area a notification would be sent out to ward councillors to advise them that a tree survey was about to be started.  Ward councillors would have the opportunity to meet with officers from Enterprise  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7.

            The Committee received the latest version of the Council’s Notice of Intention to take key Decisions, containing key decisions that the Leader of the Council anticipated the Cabinet or individual Cabinet Members would make during the course of the following month.  Members were invited to comment and, where appropriate, identify any relevant areas for inclusion in the Committee’s work programme.

ACTION AGREED

The Committee noted the latest version of the Council’s Notice of Intention to take key Decisions and requested further information on:

• Award of Contract for the 413 Bus Service – KEY/27DEC12/01
• Moy’s End Stand Demolition and Reconstruction – KEY/03APR/12

Wednesday - 20 March 2013