Agenda item

Year-end Performance Reporting together with Outcome Agreements and Improvement Plan.

Context:

To undertake scrutiny of service delivery and performance across Public Protection in 2015/16. The Public Protection division comprises of Environmental Health, Trading Standards and Licensing. The recommendations are that the Committee consider and comment on the contents of the report ‘Public Protection Performance report for the year 2015/16.

          Key Issues:

The Outcome Agreement and the Improvement Objectives have a different focus:

Improvement Objectives

Improvement Objectives are set annually by the Council to deliver on priorities. Despite objectives being focused on the long term the specific activities that support them are particularly focussed for the year ahead.

Activity that contributes to the delivery of some objectives cross cuts Select Committee remits and these have also been reported to the other relevant committee(s). Therefore it is suggested members particularly focus their scrutiny on the activity relevant to the committee with consideration of its contribution to the objective as a whole.

Improvement Objectives are scored based on the Council’s Self-evaluation framework, as set in the Improvement Plan 2015/17, Table 1, and performance against them is reported in the Stage 2 Improvement Plan published in October each year.

Outcome Agreement

The Outcome Agreement is an agreement with the Welsh Government for a three year period, where the council needs to deliver on performance activity and associated targets that contribute to the Programme for Government. The agreement covered the period from 2013 to 2016.

In the summer of 2015 the Welsh Government announced the final year of funding for performance in 2015-16 would no longer be attached to performance in the Outcome Agreement and would be rolled directly into the Revenue Support Grant for 2016-17. This means that payment for performance against the targets in the agreement for 2015-16, is assured, the council was also awarded full payment in the previous two years. However given the importance placed on the agreement as part of the council’s performance framework an evaluation of performance achieved over the three years of the agreement has been undertaken. The evaluation highlights progress made against the actions and performance indicators set in the Outcome Agreement.

Key National Indicators

Appendix 3 sets out further Key Performance Indicators that are in the National

Performance indicator set used by Welsh Government and are under the committee’s remit. The primary purpose is to highlight the performance achieved in 2015/16. In some cases this may result in duplication of indicators already included in other sections of the report. Where indicators relate to the performance of services that are under the remit of more than one committee these will also be reported to the other relevant committees.

Member Scrutiny:

During discussion Members asked about increased sickness levels and raised concerns regarding staff wellbeing.

It was asked why the percentage of appraisals had fallen, year on year. We were told there had been reporting issues with the ‘Check in, Check out’ function which were being addressed.

It was asked why the take up of the concessionary bus pass was only 76% and we were told that every person who had applied for it had received it.