Meeting documents

            Meeting: Economy Scrutiny Sub-Committee (County Hall, Durham - Committee Room 1b - 10/03/2008 10:00:00 AM)

                  Item: A6 Building a Strong Economy Quarter 3 Performance Report

         

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Report of the Head of Economic Development and Regeneration

1 The purpose of this report is to provide a performance update for Quarter 3, 2007/08 for the Authority’s corporate priorities and other performance indicators relevant to our Corporate Aim, Building a Strong Economy.
2 As members will be aware, there are no statutory performance measures for economic development. It is therefore difficult to attribute quantitative measures in economic development at the local authority level due to the necessity for a multi-agency approach to delivery. 3 The draft County Durham Economic Strategy (2008-2013) sets new targets for performance, alongside this, a new Local Area Agreement is being developed with new targets to be agreed for final sign-off in June 2008. This means that the performance report presented to this committee will show new targets and indicators from June of this year.

4 Members have had the opportunity to provide input during the consultation period for the draft County Durham Economic Strategy which ended on 7th March 2008. An action plan is being developed to deliver the strategy and establish annual targets.

5 Whilst the new LAA will replace the current one, the existing stretch targets covering Incapacity Benefit claimants, VAT Registrations and NVQ2s will continue to be monitored for another year. 6 Following the loss of benefit claimant data from HMRC (the two CDs missing in the post), DWP is withholding all updates to benefit claimant data until they have completed a review of data security. There has therefore not been an update for this since last quarter. A number of other indicators have also not been updated during Quarter 3.



1. An overview of performance and comments relating to indicators relevant to the Corporate Aim, Building a Strong Economy are as follows;

Direction of Travel since year-end 2006/07	Number of measures	% of total
	Improved	741
	Maintained	00
	Deteriorated	16
Data is unavailable (N/a) during Quarter 3	9	53
Total	17	Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding

Comparison to target	Number of measures	% of total
	Worse than	16
	Better than by <10%	529
	Better than by 10% or more	212
Data is unavailable (N/a) during Quarter 3	9	53
Total	17	Totals may not equal 100 due to rounding

2. 18 indicators aligned to Building a Strong Economy are included in the authority’s priorities for improvement. Of these indicators 8 were updated during Quarter 3. The following table summarises the performance of these indicators.

	Achieved Q3 target	Did not achieve Q3 target
Improved from year-end	· % working age population claiming Job Seekers allowance · Employment rate · % of 16-18 yr olds classed as ‘NEET’* · New VAT Registrations · % VAT Deregistrations · Number of Businesses	· County GVA
Remained static
Deteriorated from year-end	· Self Employment

N.B. NRF= Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, NEET= Not in Education, Employment or Training
*This indicator is produced by CYPS but included in the economy block owing to it’s connection to the state of the labour market.

6. Areas of concern/ Deteriorated performance
(Indicators not achieving Quarter 3 target with deteriorating performance since 06/07 year-end)

There are no indicators in this report which have not achieved the Quarter 3 target and have deteriorated from the 06/07 year end. This is in part a reflection of some statistics (especially those which were in this position last quarter) not being available for update.


7. It is recommended that Economy Scrutiny Sub-Committee Members;

(i) note the contents of this report

Contact: Graham Tebbutt Tel: 0191 383 5727

Attachments

 Economy Scrutiny Q3--0708.pdf