(a)

the VFM team comprised of two members of staff; Paul Chapman, Head of VFM and Efficiencies and Laura Harris, VFM Programme Manager;

(b)

achieving VFM was a key priority for Plymouth City Council and was monitored by internal delivery plans to achieve financial savings and deliver improved or the same standard of services;

(c)

each departmental budget remains the individual Director’s responsibility with an overview being provided by the Corporate Management Team(CMT);

(d)

there were currently no central government external monitoring arrangements or central data reporting mechanisms although this was being reviewed by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). The Council were still required to demonstrate delivery of VFM to other external auditors through the delivery plans and external auditor reports on specific projects such as the Procur 2 Pay project;

(e)

the 2010-2011 budget outturn was just £105k over on the budget of £201,930M;

(f)

in 2010-2011 the council realised savings of £9.185M which was the reason for coming in so close to the challenging outturn budget;

(g)

two of the major projects that assisted the council in achieving high levels of savings were the Procure 2 Pay project and a project in Children’ Social Care – Residential Care;

(h)

savings of £13.3M  needed to be achieved in 2011-2012 to meet this years outturn budget;

(i)

to achieve this challenging target cross-cutting delivery plans had been created; these would be monitored by CMT and through quarterly performance and finance reports;

(j)

VFM undertook analysis which included benchmarking through The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), using a performance team to review performance against finance and utilising scorecards to report on VFM performance against key performance indicators;

(k)

benchmarking would be proactively used in future to monitor against similar authorities and to enable a full picture to be developed for budget setting in 2012-2013;

(l)

going forward, the Council aimed to continue to develop the approach of driving VFM from capital investment by ensuring that invest to save projects were carefully considered and evaluated to ensure that they provide a maximum return on investment. Current projects included the Accommodation Strategy, the Care First system and the launch of a new transaction website.

(n)

the biggest financial impact in 2011-2012 was proposed to be in the Procurement department as there were a number of cross-cutting implications for the whole authority, in order to achieve the greatest savings possible the Council have enlisted the assistance of an external company to deliver the highest level of efficiencies corporately;

(o)

the tangible savings of £60K in the ordering of non-catalogue items was across the whole department and was £10K above the proposed target set at the start of 2012-2011;

(p)

the council’s expenditure of purchasing goods and services was approximately £228M, in order to reduce this figure there was a commitment to develop a supply chain with more locally based companies.