Agenda item

The committee has invited the Support Services Portfolio Holder to present his priorities and areas of focus over the next year and to answer questions on progress towards achieving the aims and targets of the Council’s Corporate Plan priorities.

The Cabinet Member for Business Improvement Services, Mr P Wilding, gave a presentation to the committee on progress towards achieving the aims and targets of the Corporate Plan priorities and his areas of focus in the future.

The committee made the following comments and received answers to questions as follows:

·       Queried the future use of East Pallant House and emphasised the need to be adaptive to loss of space without losing business – We are currently working with consultants and looking at market information to consider our options. If there was a large capital receipt to be made then this would need to be balanced against the suitability of an alternative office accessible to the public. Discussions are taking place with WSCC regarding a possible building in the city centre and with the local court to establish the possibility of establishing a pop-up court a couple of times a month which would bring in revenue. It was possible that we could contract our existing footprint in the building and rent out more space to bring in revenue to reduce our operating costs. Cabinet would be asked to consider future options with costings, following which a PID would be developed.

·       Queried whether the committee would be given the option to review the ICT Strategy – It was possible that the committee could consider this before it went to Cabinet in March 2018. Members questioned the demise of the IT Panel and were concerned that IT matters did not have adequate member involvement before being considered by Cabinet.

·       Queried whether the council used innovative ways of communicating with the local community – A number of online forms had been provided online to avoid the need for our customers to come into the office; direct debit use had increased; green waste was renewable online annually; current projects being developed to enable Council Tax payers to manage their accounts online and to enable a housing benefit risk based verification process. We were continuously looking for new ways to assist our residents and businesses however were always mindful of those without IT capability.

·       Queried involving others in testing web and form functionality - The Web Team invites services to review new forms and functions for usability. Residents were invited to provide feedback on usability of web pages and any difficulties were fed back to the service area for review.

·       Queried whether customers who had given up on using the council’s website and can’t travel to the council offices were tracked in order to understand the volume. Customers were asked questions on how they accessed the service and how they travelled in to the offices. On commercial sites such as Careline and green waste we monitored a reduction in customers.

·       Queried members’ responsibilities under GDPR.

·       Queried Public Relations resourcing – Two members of staff on PR and two on advertising and sponsorship. PR had a regular schedule to provide information on social media and staff had access to social media. The Local Plan and the Southern Gateway would be a major area of work for PR.

·       Queried the savings achieved and staff reductions as a result of channel shift - We track the shift in communications channels and have targets to move more information online or from the back office to the contact centre. As more customers self-serve capacity is created in the back office and customer service centre and associated savings are made.

·         Queried the number of staff in the various teams – ICT 21, Customer Service 15, Public Relations 5, Building Services including Facilities 9 and Human Resources 7. Mrs Dodsworth undertook to clarify staffing numbers for this year and the previous year along with IT and staffing costs. [Post meeting note: Total staff = 62.07 FTE, Head of Service/Admin = 1.4 FTE, Building Services = 5 FTE, Facilities = 4.54 FTE, Customer Services = 16.55 FTE, IT = 21.11 FTE, HR = 6.83 FTE, PR = 4.14 FTE, Corporate Improvement = 2.5 FTE. ICT Direct costs = Total £1,270,009 (£824,000 staff, £181,600 infrastructure, £264,009 support and maintenance agreements)]

RECOMMENDED TO THE CABINET MEMBER FOR BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT SERVICES

1)          That an ICT Panel be re-established to regularly review the council’s ICT programmes, workload and investments. 

2)          That a report is brought back to this committee on customers lost who cannot engage online or access ICT along with a policy or programme on how to deal with this.