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Issue - meetings
Performance Monitoring Quarterly Report for 2019/20 - Quarter 1
Meeting: 05/09/2019 - Overview and Scrutiny Committee (Item 22)
22 Performance Monitoring Quarterly Report for 2019/20 - Quarter 1 PDF 269 KB
Minutes:
With the agreement of the chair this item was moved down the agenda to item 5
Councillors asked questions of the present officers about the report
Question: The improvement of street cleanliness is 4% compared to its 5% target what exactly does this mean
Answer: It is a percentage of tests failed so a lower percentage is less tests failed and therefore better.
Question: The length of time to process housing benefit applications is too long at 17 days, the private rented sector won’t hold a property for two weeks how can we improve this?
Answer: The council would like to process these faster. The council is in the upper quartile of the country for average days to process an application. It is a complicated process that requires co-operation of many different people. The council has aspirations to get this faster, but it should be noted that very few councils have it lower than 10 days.
Councillors passed on their appreciation of the planning team at achieving 100% on targets on major applications and exceeding targets of minor applications. The Director of Operational Services commented that whilst he would pass on the comments it should be noted that the planning team continue to be hit with sickness and absence so the performance may not continue into the future. It was also commented that note 7 of the report mentions the possible future performance loss.
Councillors commented that there is a lot of strain on staff at the moment causing sickness, this causes more strain on the remaining staff and this causes a vicious cycle. The also commented that the first focus should be protecting staff in their jobs.
Question: Is Hastings Borough Council’s sickness in line with other authorities?
Answer: Need to look at sickness stats across the organisation. There has been significant amount of work looking at trends but there is a difficult winter ahead. In the crudest terms £1.5m is 50 staff posts and a number of posts are externally funded. This will cause stress and worry on staff and affect their work and personal lives. It is expected that the sickness and absence figures will get worse in the next two quarters.
Councillor Rogers commented that she meets with the Director of Corporate Services and Governance on a regular basis as well as the Executive Manager of People, Customer and Business Support. They are looking at where the sickness is, which departments and are doing lots of work with occupational health and mental health. It has to have an effect on staff, but proud of the support and help that is there and available.
Question: Is the low number of homelessness cases prevented due to staffing issues?
Answer: Now that there are some additional staff in the role Hastings Borough Council expects the numbers to increase in the next three quarters
Question: Has the council collected more council tax? Can we improve on the number of days to process?
Answer: Universal Credits (UC) has affected the time ... view the full minutes text for item 22
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