Report of Councillor Mark Robinson, Executive Member for Customer, Digital and Performance.

Councillor Mark Robinson, Executive Member for Customer, Digital and Performance presented the report that asked Members to agree the proposed changes to the performance indicators for the upcoming performance cycle.

Members of the Overview and Scrutiny Commission had discussed the report on 16^th December 2021 and recommended to Cabinet that minor changes to some indicators should be made.

It was noted that whilst there was a long list of Key Performance Indicators, the detailed data would be available should it be required.

Councillor Birt said that the recommendation highlighted within the report was the same for the Overview and Scrutiny Commission and felt that the Commission had made significant modifications, but they had not been recognised within the report to Cabinet.

Councillor Jermy suggested that an updated list of the Key Performance Indicators be circulated to all Members.

The Innovation and Change Business Partner apologised for the recommendation and confirmed that the changes had been made and would be circulated to Members.

The Executive Member also confirmed that Cabinet had taken into account what had been presented by the Overview and Scrutiny Commission and it would be with those changes that the Cabinet would be voting on.

Options

1)    To recommend the adoption of the revised Indicator suite.

2)    Do Nothing

Reasons for Recommendation

The revised suite of indicators allows for performance reporting in line with the new corporate plan in terms of organisational goals and aims.

RESOLVED that the proposed indicators be adopted.

Report of Councillor Mark Robinson, Executive Member for Customer, Digital and Performance.

On behalf of Councillor Robinson, the Executive Member for Customer, Digital & Performance, Councillor Sarah Suggitt, the Executive Member for Planning, Leisure & Contracts introduced this item.

Members were informed that the proposed indicator list had been assembled in line with the Council’s new Corporate Plan and would provide updates on the way that the Council was performing against what it had set out to do.  The changes had been made based on the feedback received from the Overview & Scrutiny Commission as well as working alongside the Corporate Management Team to revise this list.  Approval was sought to agree the revised Key Performance Indicator (KPI) list and recommend to Cabinet for approval in the New Year.  

Claire Burton, the Organisational Development & Performance Manager presented the report and was pleased to announce that the number of KPIs had been reduced to 25.  The main changes made since presented to the Commission previously were the Climate indicators that had been reduced in line with the agreement to report annually on the Climate Strategy.  The community’s indicators had been removed due to the numbers but would still be reported publicly in some form moving forward.  Finally, the satisfaction indicators had been removed as further work was required and this would be reported once this work had been completed.

In view of the current situation, in respect of the lack of staff and the problems with enforcement, Councillor Wickerson asked if it was possible, under the planning heading, to have a KPI for the responses to requests received by the Enforcement Team as he was aware of examples, certainly in Swaffham, of communications with the Team back in June 2021, that had still not had any response.  He felt that it was important to have some measure for this particular activity.

Councillor Birt had several queries and comments to make.  He asked for confirmation on the first three items including the jobs supported and was aware that there was some available data but asked for clarification on what the description under these items actually meant.

In response, Rob Walker, the Deputy Chief Executive explained that those listed were the ones that the Council had direct influence on and could be quantified on an outcome. 

Under Customer Contact, and the number of days customer contact dropped below 90%, Councillor Birt felt that this was an arbitrary 90% of an arbitrary target and wondered how this would be calculated, and what it meant, as he felt that by just having one single number was unhelpful.  He had noticed that there were quite a few indicators that just had a percentage against them, and he felt that it would be useful, in almost all of these indicators, to know the magnitude; for example, under the percentage of automated customer webchat, how many were successful out of how many calls rather than just having a percentage calculation.

Also, under the Chatbot indicator webchat interactions, he wondered how this was going to be measured, unless there was a message at the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 105

To receive a report from Mark Robinson, Executive Member for Customer, Digital & Performance and Ryan Pack, Innovation & Change Business Partner.

Councillor Robinson, the Executive Member for Customer, Digital & Performance presented the report that recommended proposed changes to Key Performance Indicators for the upcoming 2021/22 performance cycle which if agreed, would be submitted to Cabinet for approval.

The Innovation and Change Business Partner, Ryan Pack said that there was a list of approximately 60 indicators which the team were seeking feedback on to reduce and that some of the satisfaction measures were not yet set in place so would not be included in the Q3 report.

Councillor Wickerson suggested that planning enforcement should also be included and added to the planning heading.

Councillor Birt agreed with the comments on page 19, para 1.5 where it stated that focusing on the wrong metrics or too many metrics could be detrimental, but also felt that a lack of focus or too few metrics could be detrimental too. He mentioned the climate emergency declaration made by Breckland Council and the fact that it had agreed to try to reach net zero by 2035 but felt that this required some form of carbon measuring to be put in place to be able to reach that target but could not see sight of any metrics on this. He had concerns that the right metrics were not in the right place to get to the core of the issue and to measure how this could be achieved.

Councillor Clarke felt that the Complaints KPI needed to be broken down further to show the types of complaints received. He also felt that measuring how KPIs related to risk was important.

Councillor Morton felt that Breckland Council should go back to the climate change report from earlier in the year and look at the recommendations to see what progress the Council was actually making, as this highlighted the large carbon emission buildings and as a minimum felt that this should be measured.

Councillor Jermy asked for reassurance that under the section relating to jobs supported, it was important that the field was not too narrow and that the range and type of jobs created was important and not just the number of jobs created.

The Chairman had some suggestions and amendments to the KPIs and felt that some could only be reported by exception which were:

·         page 23, Health and Safety Property Compliance, to be reported as an exception if there was a breach

·         Page 24 & 25, Silktide – Overall external score, and Overall internal score – this was an Executive Member role to ensure that the website was doing everything it should do

·         a combined figure should be seen on the amount of carbon reductions to ensure it was going down, rather than separate reports on the amount of carbon saved by staff, the emissions reduced from trees and the number of additional electric vehicle charging points delivered.

·         Facebook engagement and twitter engagement were not necessary to be included in the report

·         the number of staff who felt well supported by the Council could be included in an  ...  view the full minutes text for item 92