My Report to Council

Posted By: Liz Thirsk
Date Posted: 15/01/2010

Thank you Mr Mayor for the opportunity to report to the Council the latest developments on various matters relating to the Townships and Corporate Management Portfolio.

PERFORMANCE AND DEVELOPMENT SERVICE

Performance and Development is starting work with colleagues in the Council and partner agencies, to develop a new Community Strategy Pride of Place and a new corporate plan Aiming High for 2011 onwards. The team is aiming to use the process to better align the key strategies in the borough.

A new customer insight project will help council services and our partners better understand our customers. We have already helped the Benefits Service identify key groups and areas of the borough for targeting in their benefits uptake work.

The Information Team has successfully implemented the new Adult Care Case Management System. The data was migrated from the old system and the service went live on the 1st December. The new system has incorporated new functionality and joined up the finance system to automate more processes.

The Contact Point Project continues to work with partners to give access to Contact Point with real progress being made with GP’s and schools. All the CAFs are now recorded on Contact Point and a system in place to maintain this, a real local benefit for practitioners.

New Statutory Schools Workforce Census has been successfully completed for all schools and we have received positive feedback from DCSF.

The Information Team organised for 410 children and families drawn from the Children with Disabilities Register to attend the pantomime funded by the Aiming High for disabled children fund.

Information Team have been heavily involved in producing the Children Joint Strategic needs assessment available at the end of January.

Townships
Township Management is currently working with services and partner agencies to develop action plans to deliver Township Plan priorities in 2010/11. The action plans will be integrated with the Council’s service planning and budget setting processes for 2010/2011.

Townships continue to work with partner agencies; third sector and local people to address local issues and improve service delivery. All 4 Townships are involved in the ‘Shop Local’ campaign and worked with retailers as part of the recent shop window competition Three multi activity games areas for young people are now completed and in use in Middleton as part of a joint approach with Fair Shares. Local residents and groups continue to work with the Council and partner agencies through the forums in Rochdale Township to agree projects to tackle local priorities. Township Management had 4 nominations in the Councils Customer Service awards. Heywood Township team won an award and is nominated for 2 further national awards for community engagement in the Phoenix Centre development

Joint Health Unit

The Joint Health Unit continue to provide a range of support to the council and other partners in relation to health and in particular promoting best practice in delivery of services to tackle health inequalities. In the last few months the Unit has completed research concerning Diversionary activities for young people away from alcohol consumption in urban areas, personalisation of services for learning disabilities and a research project with people in the Borough who have HIV, focusing on their specific housing needs and how they access other services. The unit are also leading on the development of an evaluation framework that is being rolled out across the Borough. This will provide a framework against which all services will be able to be evaluated against, identifying how effective our services are at meeting the needs of the Borough’s residents. The unit has also continued to co-ordinate the work of the Health & Well-being partnership who recently held a successful partnership away day that looked at how arts and culture are being used across the borough to help people improve their own health and mental well-being.

TRANSFORMATION PROGRAMME

Cross Cutting Reviews

The Cross Cutting Reviews are key to achieving the £100m we need to save as part of the Efficiency Programme. It’s part of Stepping Up and will shape the future of the entire council. These reviews will take a detailed analysis of every service in the council to work out:

 What’s working
 What needs improving
 If our services match the needs of our customers

Good progress is being made with the initial stages of the reviews and the team are busy collecting data and meeting with senior managers, partners and elected members. Staff workshops have been arranged for January so all staff can engage and contribute to the reviews.

New Municipal Offices

We are currently working up the concept design of the new building and will be submitting an outline planning permission in January. We have recently shortlisted six main Contractors. Over the next few months we will be selecting the best one and asking Members in April to approve the selection. Consultation with citizens, customers and staff will continue throughout next year and we are still on programme to deliver the new building by the end of 2012.

CUSTOMERS AND COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE
REVENUES & BENEFITS

Service Improvements from 1 April 2009

Benefits Performance

The economic downturn has resulted in a significant increase in our caseload from 24037 in February 2008, to 26341 in April 2009 and to 27491 in November 2009.

In spite of the subsequent increase in our levels of work our performance has improved across all areas:

We are now processing 90.9% of new claims within 14 days compared to 87.3% during 2008/09. The average time to process new claims has also reduced from 21.75 days to 17.24 days.

Changes in circumstances are also being dealt with more quickly, during 2008/09 it took us an average of 9.67 days to process a change, we are currently dealing with these changes in 7.26 days.

Our performance in our two National Indicators has also improved. Our annual target for National Indicator 180 (the number of changes that affect customers entitlement to Housing and/or Council Tax benefit) was 1400, at the end of November we had exceeded the annual target with 1670 changes. Our target for National Indicator 181 (the time taken to process new claims and changes in circumstances) is 11.89 days and we are currently achieving this at 9.41 days.

Our accuracy figures have also improved from 96.8% to 98.8%. and we continue to have a low level of customer complaints.

We have completed a number of projects that have contributed to these improvements:

• Implemented a policy of contacting our customers by telephone which has allowed for claims and changes in circumstances to be processed more quickly (39% of claims where we are able to use the telephone are now processed on the same day).

• Implemented BECS (our on line benefit claim form) which gives our customers the opportunity to access our service via the Web. Claims made through BECS are on average processed within 2.27 days.

• Expanded the Fast Track project to include changes in circumstances and allow front line staff to process some changes. Changes of circumstances reported via Fast Track are processed on average within 1.98 days.

• Worked with a large local Housing Association to train their staff to verify claims for Housing and Council Tax benefit on our behalf, this has improved customer service for both them and their tenants.

• We have also worked closely with our colleagues in the Contact Centre to review and implement new procedures to improve the service we provide to all our customers. This work has resulted in a reduction of 25% in work generated by the Contact Centre to be processed by the ‘back office’ and has also seen a reduction in waiting times and number of unanswered calls by staff within Revenues & Benefits taking 'overspill' calls. The Contact Centre have reciprocated by making pro-active calls on our behalf which have resulted in increased numbers of direct debit payers and improved collection rates.

Council Tax Collection

Despite the economic climate we have increased the amount of Council Tax we are collecting and are meeting our targets for collection of both current year’s Council Tax and also of arrears. At the end of November our collection rate for in year Council Tax was 94.15% (compared with 93.49% at the same date last year) and we had collected £1.88M in arrears.

We have also increased the number of payment options for our customers who are now able to pay weekly, fortnightly and four weekly by Direct Debit.

Business Rates

We have successfully publicised the Small Business Rate Relief scheme and have received a number of positive comments from local businesses the scheme has helped.

Benefit Take Up
We worked jointly with Advice Services on a successful disability benefit project that resulted in 45 Attendance Allowance claims, 12 Disability Living Allowance awards and 25 new or increased HB/CTB awards. The total weekly award of these benefits is £3,337 with estimated entitlement to March 2010 of just over £111,000.

Our Pension Service take up campaign matches customers on Pension Credit but not on HB/CTB. Using this information we were able to make 77 awards of HB/CTB, with £21,000 in backdated awards, £1,800 weekly awards and £88,300 estimated entitlement to March 2010. In addition we made 30 second adult rebate awards.

We carried out a full demographic analysis of our caseload to help us understand who our customers are and what their needs may be. We are now using this information to target our take up activity.

We carried out a consultation exercise to help us understand the barriers to claiming. We were able to identify those households with potential high eligibility but low take up, and contacted them all to ask why they are currently not claiming. The findings showed that many people are just unsure whether or not they are entitled to claim and we can now target these households to provide further information.

Summary

All of these achievements have been carried out with 21 less staff than we had this time last year. So overall we are doing more, with less, and doing it better!

BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS

 Client Services has had a positive report from the Audit Commission’s Partnership Review. This focused on Impact Partnership and Link4Life. The report’s conclusions were under the headings of improving outcomes for local people, improving efficiency, meeting Council objectives, managing performance and good governance. The report concludes that examples of good practice were found in all areas with only a few areas of improvement, which have been responded to in an Action Plan. These include rolling out an assessment of all the Council’s Partners and ensuring monitoring and reporting arrangements clearly show how initiatives contribute to corporate and shared priorities.

 In relation to Impact Partnership and Link4Life, the commissioners found that through the strength of arrangements in place the Council is now seeing improvements in outcomes.

 Corporate Procurement continues to identify savings to achieve its £1.4m target this year. Projects have been identified to meet this target and are being implemented.

 An Interim Strategic Sourcing Strategy has been prepared which aims to deliver customer focused outcomes and VFM through Commissioning and Procurement. Emphasis is placed on engaging local suppliers and working collaboratively with Partners and AGMA, to obtain optimum efficiencies and improve the economic, environmental and social opportunities for the Borough.

 Facilities Management is working to introduce a number of efficiency measures, including increased productivity in building cleaning, review of service level agreements in relation to school meal provision and increased income from commercial catering.

 Following the Service’s promotion in schools of National School Meals Week, the uptake of school meals increased by 11% which, with meals being fully compliant with required nutritional standards, is good news.

 FM are working on a number of joint initiatives with Oldham Council. The Head of FM is based at Oldham for 2½ days per week during a pilot project until the end of March 2010, which Oldham is funding alongside consultancy advice on nutritional standards and building cleaning efficiency. The Service is also piloting providing a commercial catering service to Oldham which, if successful, will be until 2011. This will bring income into the Service.

PEOPLE MANAGEMENT SERVICE TRANSFORMATION PROGRAMME

Successfully piloted Employee and Manager Self Service in 2 service areas Finance and People Management and propose to roll out to all service areas from April 2010, with enhanced functionality for users. Provided visual demonstration of Trent and its benefits to 65 Senior Managers. Positive feedback, managers feel engaged and very enthusiastic.

Joint venture with AGMA Councils procured an e-recruitment system which will provide a hosted and fully managed e-recruitment solution that will deliver the ability to access all vacancies within the AGMA consortia. The ability to search, register and apply online, consistent branding across all Councils. It is a solution which is embedded into the Council’s existing website and interfaces with the HR system. It will allow both on-line and off-line job applications. It will provide comprehensive management information reports for Rochdale and across AGMA.

Target to start to implement in Rochdale first during January 2010 with completion 31 March 2010.

LEGAL AND DEMOCRATIC SERVICES

Legal and Democratic Services continue to provide high quality support services to all areas of the Council. The Services current achievements and challenges are as follows:

Case Management System

Legal Services are due to move to a new Case Management system on the 1st February 2010. We are currently in the process of building the infrastructure to support the system and have carried out a dummy conversion from the current system, which was very successful.

The benefits of the new system, which is supplied by Civica the suppliers of the Councils Financial system, is that it will allow the Service to be far more efficient with regards to document production and storage, with information only required to be input once for all correspondence associated with each case, and will be used each time a document is produced. Currently information has to be added to documents manually at time of production. It will also hold all the electronic documentation association with a case in one place, and help reduced the long term storage issues within Legal Services.

Procurement

The Service continues to offer support and advice in relation to all the major initiatives including:

• the New Municipal Offices.
• Rochdale Town Centre Redevelopment.
• Street Lighting PFI.
• the BSF Projects.
• HMR.
• Town Centre Redevelopment.

Legal Property Team

The Team continues to support the Council’s various projects by working on a variety of land and property transactions:-

• Regeneration (Housing Market renewal) – presently Rochdale Town Centre, Kirkholt, Langley in Middleton and Heywood. Our role is to purchase all land/dwellinghouses and commercial interests in order that the Council can redevelop these areas.
• Supporting the BSF project with regard to land issues in connection with many different schools.
• Supporting the town centre redevelopment including the site of the new municipal offices by acquiring various land interests in order to obtain a clear site and also getting involved in the general procurement process to find a developer
• The Middleton Arena Site and various matters arising out of the Tesco acquisition of the Council’s land in Middleton Town Centre
• The proposed sports village at Heywood and proposals for Entwisle Road Leisure Centre and the water activity centre at Hollingworth Lake
• The Lease in respect of the café at the Phoenix Centre Heywood
• Continuing support on the property transactions involving the Authority relating to Right to Buys and all RMBC Land portfolio and mortgages

The Litigation Team

The Team provides advice, representation and support to most of the Services within the Council. We undertake licensing, planning, employment, traffic, footpath, compulsory purchase and other statutory orders, prosecutions (e.g. litter, fly tipping, benefit fraud, food safety, noise nuisance, education welfare and trading standards), RIPA, travellers, debt recovery, contracts and generally any other civil and criminal law matters.

The Team have continued to manage the Council’s use of surveillance under RIPA. In October 2009 the Council received a positive inspection report of its use of RIPA.

We recently concluded the Council’s first application under the Proceeds of Crime Legislation resulting in persons convicted of counterfeit goods offences having to pay substantial sums of money to the Council.

We have concluded many prosecutions for a variety of offences. Recently substantial fines have been imposed in an illegal advertising prosecution. We also concluded the Council’s first prosecution for blue badge fraud.

The Team has played a key role advising the Licensing Committee, including a hearing in resulting in the suspension of the Kandy Klub Licence.

We have published, in conjunction with the Schools Safety Team, a Guidance document for Schools to help them tackle anti-social behaviour from parents and other School visitors.

The Team has been involved in a variety training initiatives for Officers and Member, including Licensing and Planning.

We are continuing to work on new procedures for RIPA and travellers. We are working closely with Education Welfare to help improve School attendance levels through enforcement action and we have our first smoking prosecution. We continue to work closely with Environmental Management to progress as much enforcement action as possible regarding littering and fly tipping.

Child & Adult Care Team

The Team provides advice, representation and support to the Authority’s Child and Adult Care Services within a sensitive, wide ranging, challenging and ever changing social/legal framework. In its safeguarding work for both Child and Adult Care Services, the Team supports the Aiming High priorities of the Borough in improving the health and well being of our people; and in protecting our most vulnerable residents.

The Team ensures that Social Care Workers have immediate access to legal advice via a Duty Lawyer Scheme in working hours and also at weekends, evenings and holiday periods.

The last year has seen very significant increases in the work load of the Team, particularly in the field of child protection care proceedings, where children are placed in the care of the Authority by the Courts; and in pre-proceedings advice and support, where families are experiencing difficulties and children are on the cusp of being placed in public care. Despite this increase in the need for legal support, the Team continues to maintain a high quality Service which is very valued by its Clients. This is made possible by the team structure which enables a good quality, efficient service to be delivered. In spite of ever increasing demands on the Service, the Team has maintained its commitment to in-house advocacy which provides value for money to the Authority and is welcomed by Client Services.

The last year has seen training being delivered by the Team within the Authority and on a multi-agency basis with our partners; furthering the valuable work of the Rochdale Safeguarding Children’s Board.

The Team aims to be pro-active and where necessary act as a ‘critical friend’ to Client Services, ensuring that together they improve service delivery as a whole.

Legal support to the Fostering and Adoption Panels has been valued in the preceding year and the enhancement in the support provided to Adult Care Services on complex mental capacity issues and at decision making forums is of real value. The Senior Adult Care Solicitor has led on a significant piece of collaborative working between several Greater Manchester Authorities and plays an active role in the regional Law Society Adult Care Special Interest Group. A challenge for the coming year is to enhance the awareness of the safeguarding vulnerable adult’s legal framework.

Democratic Services

The Service continues to provide effective support to the democratic process including:

• Continuing to provide efficient and effective support to the Mayor.
• Successful organisation of major civic events – Remembrance Sunday, Civic Carol Service, assisted with organising the Homecoming Parade for Royal Regiment of Fusiliers.
• Continuing to provide efficient and effective support to the Leader, Deputy Leader and all other Members of Council.
• Introduced a webpage for all Corporate Governance information and a webpage for the Standards Committee.
• Conducted training sessions for Members on Standards and the Code of Conduct.
• Continued development of the Modern Gov Committee administration package, with the completion of each Members ‘homepage’.
• Undertook consultation on revised Governance Arrangements as required by LG&PIH Act 2007 in respect of Governance arrangements where the Council decided on the Leader and Cabinet Executive model.

The Service has the following challenges for 2009/10

• Revising Governance Arrangements to take effect from May 2010.
• Co-ordination of the Review of Members of Allowances.
• Implementation of Modern Gov Committee Administration package.
• Responding to possible snap General Election.
• Preparation for General/Local Election in May 2010.
• Undertaking 2009 Annual Canvass.
• Assisting with organisation Holocaust Memorial Ceremony.
• Preparing for incoming Members as result of 2010 Local Elections.
PORTFOLIO HOLDER’S FINAL WORD
I am sorry I cannot be here to present my report in person. As some of you might know I reached a landmark Birthday in December and my husband and family have arranged a wonderful holiday for me.
There have been a lot of things going on under my portfolio so please accept my apologies for giving you such a long report.
If you have any questions please let me have them when I return to duties after January 17th 10.

Thank you Mr Mayor, I will be pleased to answer any questions from Members of the Council about these or any other matter relating to the Townships and Corporate Management Portfolio