Agenda item

(Chief Executive) To consider the attached report.

The Head of Transformation, Mr D Bailey, introduced the report on the Corporate Plan for 2018 – 2023. This new Corporate Plan would run from 2018 to 2023 and sought to lay out the journey the Council would take to transform the organisation to be ‘ready for the future’. This plan strived to link the key external drivers influencing Council services, with a set of corporate aims and objectives, grouped under three corporate ambitions.

The Corporate Plan was the Council’s highest level strategic document. It set the strategic direction of the organisation for the lifetime of the plan, and as such informed all other plans produced by the Council. The Corporate Plan did not cover everything that the organisation did in detail, but it provided a framework to demonstrate how the work of the Council at a strategic level fitted together. It also provided a focus to establish a set of corporate priorities, describing how the organisation would deliver positive change. The Corporate Plan did not contain specific information on the wide range of services that the Council provided, or how it delivered statutory duties or enforced legislation.

The new Corporate Plan aspired to be written in language and presented in a style that could be readily understood by the Council’s customers. It also strived to ‘put the customer at the heart of everything we do’. For the purposes of this Plan, ‘customers’ meant people that:

§  Live (residents);

§  Work or do business;

§  Learn (students);

§  Visit (tourist economy) and

§  Play (leisure activities) in the district.

The final Corporate Plan document will include many of the sections found in the organisation’s previous Corporate Plans, including an overview of the district, our vision, purpose, values, and a set of corporate aims and objectives. The most significant change to the plan was its focus on our customers and the measurement of success as the impact that the delivery of the plan had on them.

An annual Corporate Specification details how the Corporate Plan would be delivered through a set of operational objectives for that year. Corporate Specifications would continue to be set annually. Every year during the lifetime of the Corporate Plan, the Corporate Specification will be agreed by the Cabinet, with the scrutiny of the Select Committees. New operational objectives will reflect the progress already achieved against the Corporate Plan.

The benefits maps were broken into three themes, people, place and council and were to be, unusually, assessed from right to the left.  Best practice was to start from the right-hand side and work towards the left, i.e. start with the needs of our customers or the end in mind, and work back to the solutions on the left-hand side. When the organisation delivers services, it starts on the left-hand side and works over to the right, i.e. the delivery goes from left to right.

Next year the maps will carry traffic lights in the boxes in the plan, to indicate how they were performing.

Councillor S Kane was impressed with the new presentation given by the report. He asked if the intention was to use these measures to augment or replace the existing KPIs. Also, were these indicative measures to be expanded at a later time or have they been set. Mr Bailey said that the KPIs in the report were to replace the existing set as we have had them for some years. We wanted to measure things important to our organisation and our customers rather than what was easy to measure. This was an attempt to flesh out what to measure indicatively and upon consultation the measures would change and improve.

Councillor Bassett would like something on partner dependencies on page 47; and protecting people from abuse or neglect, if we do not have any control over this then we would be criticizing ourselves for not delivering.

Councillor Bedford asked if there should be a section on Highways and working in partnership with them and monitoring progress.

Councillor Surtees was looking at adults and children supported in time of need and protecting people from abuse or neglect and the safeguarding issues being the performance measure. There were a lot of other things that affected supporting people in times of need and there somehow needed something to draw these together to have a really effective measure of what we do to support people in our communities.

Councillor Wixley wondered if officers could elaborate on the ‘dis-benefits’ mentioned in paragraph 19 of the report. Mr Bailey said that there was only one dis-benefit that had been drawn out in this document, under the stronger council benefits map; item B3.3.5, on reduced staff morale from disruption. This was an example of a potential dis-benefit and we acknowledge that this would be something to manage in order to minimise that potential dis-benefit.

Councillor Wixley said he was thinking about the residents, something like the Local Plan may cause quality of life issues and have a negative effect and cause ‘dis-benefits’. Councillor Whitbread said they would look at the Local Plan in detail, but also remember there were young people who had dis-benefits by not being able to buy homes in the district and the missed out social housing in Loughton that have had planning applications turned down. All this is customer focused and we know there were a number of issues to be addressed.

Councillor Philip said that there would be bigger dis-benefits for not having a Local Plan; we needed a Local Plan otherwise any open space in the district would be fair game for developers. It may be that a small loss of open space would be less of a dis-benefit than the loss of a larger open space. Therefore it was a balance overall looking at this as a whole district.

Councillor Lion, looking at paragraph 5 of the report, asked if we had considered “growing old” in Epping Forest. Mr Macnab noted that under communities there was a strong thread about people increasing the quality of life for older people etc. so it had been picked up but could be looked at in more depth.

Councillor Patel noted that under ‘stronger council’ to implement new ways of working (3.4.2); new ways of working were only beneficial if they were to be efficient for the council, so the word ‘efficient’ needed to be in there.

Councillor Sartin noted that the committee had done all they could in providing comment on this corporate plan. It would be going to two other select committees for further comment. Mr Bailey confirmed that he would be taking into consideration all the comments made when next reviewing the Corporate Plan.

RESOLVED:

That the Committee considered and provided comment on the Council’s proposed new Corporate Plan for 2018-2023.