Report of the Strategic Director (Neighbourhood Services)

The report sets out a service overview and key priorities including an update on the Climate Action Plan, along with the latest draft budgets for the services within the remit of this scrutiny committee.

The Committee considered the report of the Strategic Director (Neighbourhood Services) that set out a service overview and key priorities including an update on the Climate Action Plan, along with the latest draft budgets for the services within the remit of this scrutiny committee.

Key points and themes in the report included:

·         Noting that as part of the 2023/24 budget process, savings were identified over a three-year period and it was intended that the 2024/25 budget would be light touch and no further savings would be required;

·         In light of the current financial year’s pressures and ongoing high inflation rates it had been necessary to revisit the initial assumptions and identify further savings options for consideration;.

·         As part of identifying further savings options the initial priority had been to protect service delivery wherever possible, and this had included looking to increase income generation opportunities where possible; and

·         The proposed savings from services within the remit of this scrutiny committee were summarised and set out in more detail in Appendix 1.

Some of the key points that arose from the Committee’s discussions were:

·         With regard to staff retention, what was being done to retain technical knowledge amongst staff;

·         Expressing caution at introducing a charge for replacement bins, commenting that this could result in increased incidents of flytipping and decreased propensity to recycle that would be undesirable and would result in increased costs

·         Any proposals for charges for replacement bins needed to be subject to a full Equality Impact Assessment;

·         More information was sought on proposals for income generation from parks and green spaces; and

·         What data informed the reported Growth and Pressures 2024-27 at section 3.8 of the report.

The Strategic Director (Neighbourhood Services) advised the Committee that the Council maintained a register of all contracts, and these were RAG rated and monitored. He stated that within this list there were ‘Gold’ contracts that warranted additional monitoring, and this included the Biffa waste contract. The report described that a new Contract Management System was expected to go live during the current financial year. Once operational, this would provide Directorates with consistent contract performance information to support contract managers to ensure that contracts delivered against expectations and opportunities for improvement could be identified and realised more easily.

In regard to staff retention, the Strategic Director (Neighbourhood Services) commented that this had always been an issue, and to address this the Council had striven to be an attractive employer by offering good terms and conditions, training and development opportunities for staff and providing career progression.

The Strategic Director (Neighbourhood Services) stated that the issue of charges for replacement bins had been debated at length in the previous round of budget setting discussions and that additional resources had been specifically allocated to address flytipping. He further explained the rationale regarding the statement provided in the report at section 6.1, however he was mindful of the comments raised by the Committee regarding Equality Impact Assessments and said that if these proposals were to be considered in the February round of budget discussions, following the Financial Settlement, further consideration would be given to the Equality Impact Assessment.

The Strategic Director (Neighbourhood Services) said that the Growth and Pressures analysis as described in the report was based upon a range of data sets available to the Council, including projected population growth data and footfall data in the city centre.

In regard to parks and income generation, the Strategic Director (Neighbourhood Services) said that there had been significant investment in parks to reduce ongoing costs and to generate commercial returns.

The Executive Member for Environment and Transport stated that the funding cuts and nature of the budget allocations made it very difficult to plan long term and deliver the ambitions the Council had for the city. She stated that she endorsed the ask of the Leader in her recent letter to the Chancellor of the Exchequer ahead of the Autumn Statement.

The Chair noted that compliance and enforcement budget information had been omitted from this report and requested that this be included in the report submitted to the February meeting.

Decision

The Committee recommend that if the proposal to charge for replacement bins were to be considered in the February round of budget proposals following the provisional financial settlement, expected late in December 2023, that a full analysis of the impact of this should be undertaken.