Agenda item

(Service Director – Communities & Partnerships) To consider the attached report.

The Service Director for Community & Partnerships presented the Corporate Plan Action Plan Year 2 Performance Report.

The Service Director reminded the Committee that the Action Plan was a mechanism for reporting to Members on the Council’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and key programmes of work, which highlighted the Council’s overall performance against the agreed objectives in the Corporate Plan. The Performance Measures for Year 2 of the Corporate Plan had been streamlined to enable improved focus on how the Corporate Objectives were being met. Some suggestions for improvements to the report had been made at the meeting of the Stronger Council Select Committee, held on 9 July 2019, and quarterly milestones were intended to be added for all the listed key programmes.

The Service Director provided some updates to the report, following its publication on the agenda:

-        For the ‘Increased Customer Satisfaction’ KPI, the overall target was listed as 67% but the Council had already achieved 73.4% in Quarter 1; this target had now been revised upwards to 75%.

-        For the ‘Improved Customer First Contact’ KPI, quarterly figures and targets would be implemented, not quarterly updates.

-        For the ‘Increase new Leisure Centre Attendees year on year’ KPI, the target for the first quarter was 65,0007 but 200,086 had been achieved. This figure was not new Leisure Centre Members as stated in the description but total attendances at the Council’s Leisure Centres. New KPIs would be set up for this area to give Members an idea of the number of new Leisure Centre members, users of the gymnasiums, users of the swimming pools etc, which would give a better indication of any trends in Leisure Centre usage.

-        Corporate Objective 7, ‘Keeping the District Safe’, was showing a status of Red but all the self-generated actions had been completed; it was only the joint actions with Essex Police which were still outstanding which subsequently adversely impacted this Objective.

-        For the ‘Partnership Working Programme’, it had been suggested by the Stronger Council Select Committee that this programme should be removed from the report as it could mean any number of different things and was difficult to measure.

Councillor Murray felt that an initial target of 67% for customer satisfaction was quite low and the Council should be aiming for 80% at least. The Leader of Council stated that the Council’s customer satisfaction rating was actually quite high but reiterated that the indicator would be reviewed. Councillor Philip felt that a more complicated score should be considered for this indicator rather than the simple customer satisfaction rating. The Service Director undertook to feed these views back to the Service Director for Customer Service. Councillor Wixley commented that the revised target of 75% was based on the number of people who had actually answered the survey, and enquired how many people did not answer the survey? The Service Director responded that she would have to liaise with the relevant Officer to obtain that figure and report back to Members.

Councillor Neville asked about the ‘Delivery of the Epping Forest Health & Wellbeing Strategy’ programme, as there was no information other than all its targets had been met to date. The Service Director assured the Committee that milestone measures would be implemented for every programme in the Corporate Plan and there would be figures for this for the Committee to examine at the next meeting.

Resolved:

(1)        That the performance for Quarter 1 in relation to the Key Performance Indicators and Work Programmes within the Year 2 Action Plan of the Corporate Plan be noted.