Agenda item

Report of the Assistant Chief Executive.

The Committee considered a report of the Assistant Chief Executive which presented progress against the council’s corporate basket of performance indicators (PIs), Council Plan and service plan actions. It further reported other performance issues for the 2015/16 financial year (for copy see file of minutes).

The Corporate Scrutiny and Performance Manager presented the report highlighting key performance achievements and key performance improvement issues for the quarter.

Councillor Wilkes in referencing the performance of FOIs, suggested that a recommendation should be made to Cabinet to review staffing so that services were adequately staffed in order to meet demands in light of the high number of requests now being received.

He further made reference to page 41 of the report and indicator 185 (proportion of households in fuel poverty) commenting that there was a significant time lag on this indicator. The latest data relates to 2013 and a lot of changes had taken place since this time and therefore suggested that the indicator was no longer accurate or appropriate. He also mentioned indicator 184 (percentage of children in poverty) where there was a similar issue with data relating to 2013. In response the Corporate Scrutiny and Performance Manager advised that these were national indicators which are published by the Office for National Statistics. The time lag related to the time the ONS take to collect the data and carry out data cleansing processes on it and the council had have no control over the time taken for ONS to publish this data.   However, the council developed a local proxy indicator number 183 for child poverty which gave a close approximation to the nationally published data and was based on more recent data (August 2015). The Corporate Scrutiny and Performance Manager said that he would work with officers dealing with fuel poverty issues to see whether a similar proxy measure for the national indicator can be developed. 

Resolved:

That the content of the report be noted.