Agenda item

Hannah Thorpe, Director of Communications led the discussion with a slides presentation and made the following comments:

• The Corporate Performance report was due to be refreshed in 2020-21 to link in with the council’s new Corporate Statement. Due to significant pressures on the team to support the council’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, a new approach to corporate performance and new indicators would now be implemented from 1 April 2021;
• As a result, the council’s corporate performance for 2020-21 is to be measured in line with the former Corporate Plan (using the existing indicators and targets);
• There is evidence of council performance being impacted as a result of the pandemic and having to redirect resources - green measures have fallen by two and red measures have risen by 2. In the current context however this is not as significant as it potentially could have been and is testament to the hard work of the council in very challenging times;
• Within the covering report, a commentary has been provided for each indicator which is below target (red), as these are the areas which require focus;
• Ms Thorpe provided a summary of the results by each priority area; a clean and welcoming environment, supporting neighbourhoods, promoting inward investment and job creation and statistical information;
• Ms Thorpe apologised for an error in the statistical information section regarding the number of starters and leavers, confirming the figures should state there had been 50 starters and 31 leavers, which would mean a net increase of 19 staff;
• Ms Thorpe drew the panel’s attention to the improved performance of the council regarding its response time to FOIs which has moved from significantly below target to within reach of the target and also to the homelessness indicators which have continued to be met despite significant pressure on the team.

Members made comments and asked questions as follows:

• Missed bin collections showing as red – under current circumstances (with covid) a missed collection rate of 0.34% would be unfair to record it as red. It was actually quite good performance;
• Incidents of dumped rubbish on council land had gone up from 134 to 234. Was that due to KCC charging the type of waste being dumped?
• Action to improve living conditions was low. What were the prospects for that figure being improved in the future?
• The time taken to reduce homelessness was impressive;
• On the target regarding the number of people in employment – When was that measured and how soon would the Panel get the next figures for that indicator, would help the Panel understand the full impact of covid?
• Who sets the target for recycling? Was it the government or TDC? Given the current worries particularly about plastic recycling, could the target be raised?
• How many respondents would be in the residents’ survey and how were they selected?
• Had the response rate increased in the lockdown and what were the main areas of concern registered by residents?

In response, Ms Thorpe, Mr Bob Porter, Director of Housing & Planning and Mike Humber, Director of responded as follows:

• The target set for waste collection is ambitious and deliberately so. Officers were looking to coming up with a more effective way of setting those targets in the new performance monitoring approach;
• This year has been particularly hard on the waste collection teams, especially considering that agency staff had to be contracted as some permanent staff had to shield or self isolating due to the pandemic;
• As many more people were working from home, the vehicles have experienced significant issues passing through certain areas where cars were parked on either side of the roads;
• Despite all those challenges, senior management was proud of the achievements of the waste collection teams;
• In order to ease the number of crew in the waste collection vehicle cabs, food waste was collected separately. This had created more work for the crews;
• With regards to dumped rubbish, a more comprehensive response would be given to Members after the meeting, after consultation with the enforcement team;
• The amount of residual waste was significantly higher this year. This was largely due to the number of people being at home most of the time due to the national lockdowns;
• With regards to the improving living conditions target – Officers anticipated this indicator to go down slightly. This was because the government funding for the Rogue Landlords Project had finished and as the current Selective licensing scheme ends in April this year, so there was projected to be less activity. The teams have also been affected by the lockdown restrictions. However the licence was valid for 5 years which means the council would still be able to enforce the conditions of the previous scheme;
• Officers had been looking at what the new selective licensing designation could look like. The Housing CAG was looking into this and the council had held early discussions with MHCLG and they had been supportive and were open to hearing what the proposals looked like. It was therefore reasonable to be optimistic about the options for the council to designate a new area of selective licensing and use that as a tool for improving living conditions in private rented housing;
• Employment data was provided quarterly by NOMIS;
• Recycle targets were set by TDC and was benchmarked against other local authorities;
• The Residents’ survey will be issued at the end of January. It will be a random selection of 6,000 Thanet residents. The survey is profiled by postcode to ensure a balanced representation of Thanet areas. It will be conducted online and will be open for three weeks. Paper copies would normally be sent to those unable to access the online platform. The response rate was usually 10-12%. Questions and responses from the survey would be shared with Members;
• Information on the response rate and areas of concern raised by residents during the survey would be shared with Members.

Members noted the report.