Agenda and minutes

Councillor Cereste had requested that the meeting be adjourned for thirty minutes to enable him to be in attendance.

This was unanimously agreed by the Committee and the meeting was adjourned for thirty minutes and reconvened at 3.30pm. 

Apologies for absence were received from Councillor Walsh, Councillor Khan and Councillor Sandford.

Councillor Cereste was in attendance as substitute and Councillor Jamil was in attendance as a nominated substitute. 

There were no declarations of interest.

The minutes of the meeting held on 13 June 2013 were approved as a true and accurate record.

The Chief Executive presented a report to the Committee which detailed the outcomes of the consultation held in respect of proposals for a new senior management structure. The report further advised of the action that the Chief Executive intended to take as a result of that consultation.

Members were advised that the Chief Executive had the delegation to determine such changes, subject to the Employment Committee considering and recommending actions where necessary in response to such proposals, under its terms of reference.

An overview was provided of what the proposals sought to achieve, in summary these being:

·      Bringing together the commissioning activity, which took place in four council departments, into one structure;

·      Bringing together all the functions to deliver the growth, regeneration and economic development for the city into one place, led by a senior manager in the Council and creating a new wholly-owned company of the council to deliver major schemes;

·      Bringing together other functions which sat separately in service departments, namely finance, performance management and asset management; and

·      Bringing together all functions which supported good governance and decision making into one directorate.

The consultation document had been sent to all directors, heads of service and assistant directors, as well as other managers who were affected by the proposals, and prior to the publication of the consultation document, the Chief Executive had met personally with all those senior managers affected by the proposals.  The review had been conducted in line with council policies and consultation had been for a period of 30 days with the Trade Unions being formally notified. 

A number of consultation responses had been received, as well as other comments made during the individual discussions held with senior managers. As a result of these consultation responses, the Chief Executive had decided to put forward the following proposals:

·      There had been considerable support for the proposals for Place and People Directorates, those proposals were therefore to remain unchanged from the original set of proposals which had been consulted upon;

·      There had also been considerable support for the proposal for a Governance Directorate, so this proposal remained unchanged too;

·      As there had been unanimous support to bring the asset management function together into one directorate, it was proposed to create a new role in the Resources directorate of Head of Corporate Property and Children’s Resources which would unite all the asset management functions under this role.  In addition, during the consultation, the unification of finance functions into the Resources directorate had been suggested and so it was further proposed to transfer the Children’s Services Resources functions to this new role. The residual functions left in Children’s Services (school improvement, special educational needs and the pupil referral unit) had not been part of the proposals but were being worked on separately by the Executive Director: Children’s Services; and

·      A role of Director of Public Health (part-time) was also proposed in the event that when the council recruited to the role of Executive Director: Adult Social Care, Health and Wellbeing,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.