Agenda item

ANNUAL CORPORATE PERFORMANCE REPORT 2015/16

Report and appendices attached.

Minutes:

The report before Members provided an overview of the Council’s performance for each of the strategic goals (Clean, Safe and Proud).  The report highlighted areas of strong performance and potential areas for improvement.

 

Also attached to the report (as Appendix 2) was a Demand Pressure Dashboard that illustrated the growing demands on Council services and the context that the performance levels set out in the report have been achieved within.

 

Whilst the PIs currently included in the Corporate Performance report provided both Members and officers with vital performance information that could be used to improve services, there were few PIs that focused on customer satisfaction. There are various options to address this, from undertaking small surveys on a quarterly basis, to larger surveys on an annual basis, consulting focus groups to setting up consultation panels, as well as many other options in between. So that the Council may fully understand the options available and what the benefits and resource implications of each option may be, the Communications Service was currently seeking views from an external consultant to gain expert advice on how the Council could gauge residents’ satisfaction in the most meaningful way.

 

In response to a question relating to the financial cost of employing a consultant, officers advised that a consultant had yet to be engaged.

 

Members also commented that there could be better engagement with the relevant  Overview & Scrutiny Sub-Committees, an example of which had been the sheltered housing review which had taken place without any scrutiny.

 

During consideration of the report Members highlighted several areas of concern which included:

 

·         Consideration of more relevant areas of work by the individual Overview & Scrutiny Sub-Committees.

·         The possibility of developing a more robust new model of scrutiny.

·         Collection of more data regarding how businesses felt about the Council.

·         The need for information contained within the performance report to be shared by officers to the Sub-Committees and their topic groups.

·         The need for previously agreed performance indicators to be included in the performance report e.g levels of corporate debt.

·         Performance indicators that did not fall within the remit of the Sub-Committees to be reported to the Board and officers to attend meetings of the Board to discuss those indicators e.g collection of Council Tax and Business Rates, processing of benefit claims, payment of suppliers within 30 days, completion of complaints and Member enquiries within target timescale, and percentage of customers satisfied with the contact centre and online transactions.

 

Members also suggested that in future the report show the RAG ratings in three separate sections so that all the Red indicators were grouped together with the same applying to the amber and green.

 

It was noted that  the graph  depicting customer contact by channel, illustrated that the Council was failing in its policy of channel shift and Members questioned what steps were being taken to address the issue and what the budgetary impacts of such actions were.

 

Members reported that there had been positive feedback for the recent presentation on the new corporate performance management system.

 

1.    It was RESOLVED that Cabinet reviewed the levels of performance set out in Appendix 1 and the corrective action that was being taken, and

 

2.    Noted the content of the Demand Pressures Dashboard attached as Appendix 2.

 

 

Supporting documents: