(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 staff grades and the inconsistencies in role profiles did not reflect well on the job evaluation process;

(m)

the council had a duty of care to its staff and this was a major concern given this major restructure was proposed so soon after the job evaluation process;

(n)

in order to improve service delivery and achieve the required financial savings the services needed to have quality IT systems in place and that the Accommodation, People’s and ICT Strategies were key to ensuring this restructure was completed successfully.

(1)

an update on the service restructure be provided at a future meeting of the panel;

(2)

the Democratic Support Officer would disseminate copies of all the presentations from this meeting to all members of the Panel.