Name

Minute No. and Subject

Reason

Interest

Councillor Thompson

Revenues and Benefits Update

Director of Plymouth Community Homes

Personal

(a)

as part of the budget approved by Council to reduce council spend by £30M a £1M saving was identified as needing to be achieved in 2011/2012 through a service restructure covering four separate departments which were Revenues and Benefits, Customer Services, Cashiers and Incomes and Creditors;

(b)

across the departments there was a significant imbalance of staff grades, with the majority of staff employed on a Grade E, and staff working hours, with approximately 40 of the 280 staff being term time only workers;

(c)

the staff structure within the departments had too many tiers spanning 10 grades, which did not present good opportunities for career progress;

(d)

the restructure would involve a reduction of 30 posts, which would provide a significant challenge in driving improvement to the service areas whilst delivering the agreed savings;

(e)

a holistic approach had been adopted to all service areas which aimed to –

·         

improve the quality of front line services;

·         

provide easy and equal access to all services;

·         

improve the resolution of issues at the first point of contact;

·         

improve levels of performance and customer satisfaction;

·         

provide an improved career structure and a greater variety of workload for staff;

(f)

in order to achieve these aims and deliver the service area improvements staff had been consulted in workshops that focused on four key areas, which were:

·         

the organisation – focused on the working environment;

·         

the customer – focused on improving the experience of customers and equal access to services;

·         

the structure – focused on reducing the tiers of staff to enable increase career progression opportunities;

·         

the role – focused on ensuring role profiles are fair and reflect the work undertaken;

(g)

the workshops enabled staff to make formal responses about the proposal, staff had also been invited to submit responses following the workshops with over 80 being received. The views and opinions from staff consulted would help form the next stage of the service restructure which will be to present the proposals to trade unions at the end of March 2011.

(h)

trade union negotiations would determine the outcome of the restructure, although it was anticipated that approximately twenty of the thirty job losses would be through redundancies with the majority of redundancies being from above Grade E;

(i)

the restructure which would undergo an Equalities Impact Assessment, was hoped to be completed by the end of July 2011;

(j)

benchmarking in the departments was undertaken against a number of other authorities where Plymouth was either on a par or better than the comparable authorities.

(k)

the level of staff engagement was both welcomed and impressive;

(l)

the imbalance of  ...  view the full minutes text for item 66.

(a)

the ICT Strategy had three key strands which were –

·         

the Digital Plymouth project, which aimed to provide a city wide modern communication system to improve connection within Plymouth;

·         

the Corporate Accommodation Strategy, which aimed to join up processes and change the way the council worked to improve efficiencies;

·         

Corporate Applications, which looked into standardising ICT systems with the use of Microsoft products;

(b)

the main objectives of the ICT Strategy were to –

·         

deliver value for money;

·         

join up Plymouth City Council and its partners;

·         

ensure assets were reused and shared;

·         

fully exploit all information;

·         

drive compliance and reduce risk;

(c)

the ICT Strategy aimed to reduce the number of IT systems in operation across the council into one easy to use system as presently there were over 90 data bases operating across the council.

(d)

Plymouth City Council was obliged to share data with its partners and good progress was being made with improving data sharing with processes on how to share data being agreed with partners;

(e)

a new telephone communication system called ‘Lync’ was to be piloted in May 2011;

(f)

work on developing a new data centre was being undertaken and had recently been released for tender.

(g)

invest to save project suggestions for ICT software and products had been submitted to the Corporate Management Team;

(h)

a Microsoft Enterprise system was being proposed to improve data collection and data sharing;

(i)

the ICT Strategy was a three year programme and was key to delivering both the Accommodation Strategy and the People’s Strategy.

(j)

the Accommodation Strategy aimed to –

·         

create a cultural change in the way staff work through hot-desking and a reduction of corporate buildings to improve working environments for staff and customers;

·         

incorporate a more modernised IT infrastructure;

·         

achieve revenue savings of £1.5M per annum;

(k)

in order to achieve financial savings and a reduction in carbon emissions the council had withdrawn from or planned to withdraw from the following buildings –

·         

Dean Hill on 30 September 2010 which would achieve savings of £30K for 2010/11 and £60K for 2011/12;

·         

Fairburn House on 24 March 2011 which would achieve a saving of £42K for 2011/12;

·         

Chaucer House on 15 April 2011 which would achieve a saving of £65K for 2011/12;

·         

FormerSouthway Community College in July  ...  view the full minutes text for item 67.

(a)

in 2009 a review was undertaken looking at the procurement processes across the council, which identified a non-contracted spend of £75M;

(b)

it was realised that by gaining control of non-contracted spend and achieving a 5 per cent saving on this spend could save the council £3.75M a year;

(c)

in order to achieve the £3.75M and other savings the council identified the following proposals as being integral to the Procure to Pay (P2P) Lean Strategy and to assisting the council to achieve its efficiencies targets;

·         

buyer roll-out – implement 8 buyers who would take on the role of purchasing currently carried out by 323 staff across the organisation who were authorised to raise purchase orders, to monitor and control the spend within departments;

·         

vendor management - to ensure that all suppliers have relevant accreditation eg  insurance and reduce duplication of suppliers;

·         

review Contract Standing Orders to fall in line with procurement legislation;

·         

review of current procurement documentation eg ts & cs, tender docs etc

(d)

in April 2010 a web portal was launched called ‘Sell2Plymouth’ which aimed to gain control over the council’s suppliers for low value procurement (under £75K) and promote small local businesses;

(e)

there were 14,000 suppliers in 2009 with an average of 103 new suppliers being added to the procurement system per month, this had now been reduced to 40 suppliers being added per month;

(f)

Contract Standing Orders has now been reviewed and will be submitted to City Council with the updated constitution in June 2011;

(g)

invoicing was centralised in November 2010 which led to more control of non-contract spend and a reduction in sundry payments, this has realised an efficiency saving of £28.5K to date;

(h)

two buyers were recruited in October 2010, to control spend within Corporate Support, with a further four buyers expected to be recruited at the end of March 2011 following an internal transfer of staff.  The buyers now sourcing and ordering all goods within Corporate Support and have to date achieved efficiency savings of £60K;

(i)

the P2P target savings are revenue and not capital and are expected to deliver £0.85M in 2011-12, £1.5M in 2012-13 and £4.0M in 2013-14;

(j)

staff with access to purchasing cards will also be reduced considerably as there is a concern that they will be used to avoid the new process.  Currently there are 396 staff who can purchase goods using a card, unless it is critical to business their cards will be removed and the buyers will be issued cards. 

(k)

purchasing cards would remain with staff who have a critical need to spend without notice being given;

(l)

Plymouth City Council partakes in collaborative procurements as part of the Devon Procurement Partnership,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 69.

(a)

the council as a whole was not getting value for money but there were plans in place which focused towards achieving the city and council priority of getting value for communities;

(b)

improvements to communication was a key aspect of improving value for money corporately and this was hoped to be addressed by a procurement exercise to gain control and monitor what the council spends;

(c)

there was a mechanism in place that would review and monitor both financial and non-financial benefits that were offered to and existed within local communities. This was being collated by the council and third sector organisations with the aim of quantifying the data to determine whether services could be improved to deliver better value for money and more sustainable communities.

(a)

it was the responsibility of each scrutiny panel to monitor the high risk spend areas within their remit;

(b)

the council had some cash reserves to address any financial problems that may arise which were being generated by procurement exercises;

(c)

the council’s website would be modernised and improved to enable customers to make on-line transactions;

(d)

the sickness level’s within Corporate Support were a real concern and were attributed to a cultural problem. This had been identified by senior managers and was being addressed on an individual basis.