West Berkshire Council Productivity Plan 2024-25

The Government, through the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), has requested that all Councils produce a Productivity Plan for 2024-25. This should be read in conjunction with the previously-published efficiency plan and Council budget papers which refers to the Council's intended flexible use of capital receipts.

Assessment against the four themes - using questions (in italics) provided by DLUHC.
 

Transformation of services to make better use of resources

How has the organisation changed in recent years to become more productive? How do you measure productivity in your organisation? What changes have you made to improve services, and what effects have those had?

In recent years, the Council has undertaken redesign of a number of its services. This has included enhancing the availability of services online, installing new systems, restructuring teams to ensure appropriate strategic alignment and enhancing community engagement in order to enable co-design of services with local residents and stakeholders. These are linked closely to the objectives and delivery of the Council Strategy 2023-27.

In the case of key performance indicators and service performance, these are input and monitored day-to-day at service level before being scrutinised through monthly portfolio holder briefings before proceeding to the Council's Executive Committee on a quarterly basis. The Council's performance team also use a variety of local and national data to measure and benchmark the effectiveness of its services. The Council performs well overall, as referenced in the recent Corporate Peer Review and OfLOG data.
 

What are your current plans for transformation over the next two years and how will you measure the effects of those changes?

West Berkshire Council agreed a pan-organisational transformation programme comprising six key projects in September 2023. These are:

• Business Support Review - consolidation and automation of manual and administrative functions into a central business support unit
• Strategic Asset and Locality Service Delivery Model Review - rationalisation of corporate buildings and co-location of Council Services
• Place Service Improvement Plan - implementation of a Service Improvement Plan
• Corporate Review of Recruitment - improve our recruitment processes whilst reducing agency costs
• Review of Care Home Provision - development of in-depth business case for the future role of the Council in local residential care provision
• Review of Home to School Transport - review of the service delivery model

This activity is being undertaken in addition to the Council's previously agreed roster of corporate projects which include (but are not limited to):

• review of the Council's commercial property portfolio to realise capital receipts
• participating in the Government-funded Delivering Better Value programme
• participating in the Government-funded Open Digital Planning programme
• installation of new, more efficient systems including telephony and HR/Payroll
• converting council-owned buildings to temporary accommodation under the LAHF scheme

Looking ahead, which service has the greatest potential for savings if further productivity gains can be found? What do you estimate these savings to be? What role could capital spending play in transforming services or unlocking new opportunities?

In common with all upper tier authorities, the costliest services to deliver are social care and education services. Through participation in the Delivering Better Value programme, it is anticipated that the Council will realise savings and service efficiency. The DfE has provided £1 million for the Council to reduce the deficit on the High Needs Block. Through the transfer of care home services to an alternative provider, the Council expects to save in the region of £1 to 2 million per annum compared to existing costs.

Capital spending could expand the Council's capacity to undertake transformational activity by providing opportunities to fund salaries of officers undertaking transformation projects through flexible use of capital receipts, funding feasibility studies and capital schemes related to the Council's Accommodation Review and by funding organisational development and process redesign, facilitated by IT and Digital systems and infrastructure which will lead to enhanced digitisation, automation and better use of data.
 

Are there wider locally led reforms that could help deliver high quality public services and improve the sustainability and resilience of your authority?

The Council has invested in the production of a framework which will enable greater use of service co-design with local communities. Greater use of opportunities linked to this could improve service sustainability.

Opportunities to take advantage of advances in technology and make better use of data to inform decision-making and service design

What are your existing plans to improve the quality of the data you collect: how do you use it and how do you make it available to residents? Are there particular barriers from legacy systems? How often do you share data with other organisations and do you find this useful?

The Council has an online dashboard of information and seeking to improve how this can be shared further with residents. Alongside many other Councils, the Council is moving more of its services online and creating a digital service standard to ensure an improved customer experience and use data to improve the customer experience. Timely implementation of IT systems has long been a challenge for the Council, along with (in some cases) limited choice in the market. The Council, as part of its Digital and IT strategies is reducing the number of systems and making use of shared system offered through government initiatives it has to ensure better use of systems. There are data sharing arrangements in place with various government departments to deliver services; this is helpful, though there are barriers in place for how this data can be used and re-used. The Council has also published open planning data as requirements of Open Digital Planning.
 

Are there opportunities to use new technology to improve workflows and systems, such as predictive analytics and AI?

Three of the projects listed above - the Business Support Review, the Place Service Improvement Plan and the review of Home-to-School Transport - will include components which will make use of technology and data optimisation to realise stated benefits.

Other projects which will make use of either technology or data include (but are not limited to):

• assistive care in social care - this will reduce double-handling in social care but also play an important role in prevention of falls and more intensive care packages
• potholes - the council is piloting the use of AI in pothole detection and prevention
• machine translation of young asylum seeker documentation
• job advertising and content generation for different age groups - the Council is making use of ChatGPT to produce draft job advertisements and re-writing content for different reading ages, which has realised a time saving among recruiting managers across the organisation and those publishing content
• the implementation of PlanX as part of Open Digital Planning
• Council officers are active participants in the LGA AI Network and CoPilot subgroup
   

Ways to reduce wasteful spend within systems, including specific consideration of expenditure on consultants and discredited staff equality, diversity and inclusion programmes

How do you approach identifying and reducing waste in the organisation? How do you monitor progress? Where have you followed invest to save and what was the result?

West Berkshire Council recently introduced a Financial Review Panel to monitor its spending. This has been particularly helpful in respect of this objective as it has highlighted and mitigated spend levels and frequency of use in terms of consultancy and agency staff. The panel will continue in some form for the foreseeable future as part of a range of measures to monitor and limit expenditure. To date, the Council reduced annual expenditure on agency spend by £2.5 million (2023-24 vs 2022-23).

The Council has used transformation funding on an invest to save basis on a number of occasions. Examples include recruitment of an officer for recruiting carers for our adult social care Shared Lives service, which reduces the need for costly residential or supported living care packages, and in children and family services, recruitment of an officer to recruit foster carers to offset more expensive independent fostering agencies and residential placements. The Council has invested in recruitment and retention packages for social workers in order to reduce the number of agency workers, providing both cost reductions and stability of workforce.
 

How much time and money do you spend on staff EDI training, networks, and other programmes? How many EDI champions of you have? How do you log and report the time and money spent on EDI activity? How do you assess the effectiveness of that training?

Corporate EDI training spend was £0.2k in 2023-24. The corporate equalities and diversity online course is a mandatory course for staff and compliance is measured quarterly.
 

What percentage of staff budget is spent on a) agency and b) consultants? How do you assess value for money and what are your plans to reduce costs? How many of those agency and consultants have been in place for over a year?

For 2023-24, £9.5 million was spend on agency costs. This represents 12.8% of the Council employee budgets. There were 169 agency workers as at 1.4.2024. There has been significant work undertaken during the year on reducing these costs which were £12 million for 2022-23; this has involved weekly review of all posts for recruitment, all agency requests and an upscaling of recruitment activity to reduce the Council's reliance on agency staff.
 

What governance structures do you use to ensure accountability of spend?

As we well as the panel alluded to above, we also use internal boards and senior management meetings to scrutinise performance and spend. This is mirrored within our external governance arrangements through quarterly monitoring and overview and scrutiny meetings.
 

Do you share office functions with other councils? What proportion of your paybill is spent on trade union facility time?

No, although we do have shared Emergency Planning and Public Protection services with a range of other Councils in Berkshire as well as a joint Legal Team covering children's social care across all of Berkshire. The informal agreement is that 0.4FTE a week is spent on trade union facilities time. This equates to approximately 0.02% of the paybill for the Council.

Barriers preventing activity that government can help to reduce or remove

There are a number of policy mechanisms the government could use to enhance the sustainability of local government. In West Berkshire Council's view, the following should be considered:

• business rate retention - levels of collected business rates would suggest that West Berkshire Council would benefit significantly from being able to retain a higher proportion of the business rates it collects, particularly given that the Council receives no Revenue Support Grant
• continuing healthcare costs - ensuring that there is equitable funding at a local level of health costs for adult and children's social care services
• multi-year settlements - this would provide certainty and improve our ability to produce a comprehensive medium term financial strategy
• flexible use of capital receipts - this was consulted upon recently. We would encourage the Government to listen to submissions made and increase the range of activity permissible
• social care policy mechanisms - we continue to encourage the Government to develop a sustainable, long-term model for delivering social care at national level
• support for consortium purchasing and market management - market scarcity, particularly in areas such as social care and home to school transport, as well as high profit margins have led to increasing costs to deliver statutory functions. The Government could look to address this through primary legislation, market regulation and other mechanisms in order to assist with the delivery of these services
   

Metrics

DLUHC have not set out specific metrics, but that there should be a way of highlighting progress through relevant metrics and Key Performance Indicators. In light of the above, and without creating a whole range of new indicators for work which is already progressing, the following indicators will be monitored. These are already included in the quarterly performance reporting that is presented to both the Scrutiny Commission and the Executive: