Productivity Plan

1. How have you transformed the way you design and deliver services to make better use of Resources?

Questions to consider:

• How has the organisation changed in recent years to become more productive? You may wish to consider what you have done around staffing, structure, operating models etc:
• How do you measure productivity in your organisation?
• What changes have you made to improve services, and what effects have those had?
• What are your current plans for transformation over the next two years and how will you measure the effects of those changes?
• Looking ahead which service has 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 existing services or unlocking new opportunities? If you have already used capital spending to boost growth or improve services, we would be interested in learning more:
• What preventative approaches you have undertaken and can the value of these be quantified?
• Are there wider locally led reforms that could help deliver high quality public services and improve the sustainability and resilience of your authority?

The Recovery & Reset Programme concluded in March 23 and identified significant savings. The main achievements of the programme were:

Customer Service – Reception Facilities moved from the Council Office to the Assembly Rooms operating alongside an acceleration of digital platforms allowing citizen contact and 24hr electronic access. 

Supporting Vulnerable People – The programme included an initiative around Supporting Vulnerable People - The partnership work undertaken to deliver a Council-led, partnership-owned vulnerability agenda and Third Sector Charter; informed through a baseline assessment arising from the Covid Pandemic and tailored services in the community and in people’s homes.

TBC takes advantages of close links with the voluntary sector to help provide vital services to the community. Working with a wide range of partners that make up the Heart of Tamworth partnership which supports rough sleeping arrangements for vulnerable people. This contributed to a zero count of rough sleepers to be submitted to the government for the first time in 2024. 

In April 2024 a Home Hub has been opened by the Community Together CIC together with HomeStart and Citizens Advice Mid Mercia which offers support in various areas of life, such as skills development, financial advice, addiction and recovery, family support, mental health and lots more.   

Disabled Facilities Grants (DFG) – the Council have taken the poor performing DFG service back in house. Investment made in the necessary human resources to deliver this service has enabled redesign of the process to make it more efficient and cost effective.

Continued to deliver a front of house service making use of an alternative Council asset (Tamworth Assembly Rooms).

Workforce – hybrid homeworking together with a set of modern terms and conditions has been introduced which both improves work / life balance for staff whilst ensuring continued responsiveness and accountability to our citizens. New ways of working has supported retention and attracting talent from a much wider pool. This has enabled a large proportion of the Council’s office space at Marmion House to be decommissioned. The future of Marmion House is still under review and may lead to future relocation of services with a view to changing the use or disposing of the site.

Working closely with our Trade Unions we continue to benefit from exceptionally supporting cohesive working relationships. Making use of shared knowledge from other sectors and building on established trust and openness to work for the benefit of all.

Service Re-design – restructure of the Treasury Management and Revenues and Benefits teams where a shared head of service was introduced which produced annual savings of £80k.

A transition from Community Wardens to a Neighbourhood Impact service and introduction of a CCTV shared service which produced annual savings of £80k.

Review of car parking income - £157k additional income has been received from a review of car parking charges along with implementation of new parking meters which collect data to provide insight and information regarding usage.   

Productivity – Productivity within the organisation is measured in a number of ways.  Objectives within the current corporate plan drive service plans and individual work plans.  Performance is measured and reported to Corporate Scrutiny Committee - an example report which demonstrates how data is used to inform decision making.

Corporate Plan – a new corporate plan 2025-2030 is currently under development. The Council is undertaking stakeholder engagement and consultation including Members, voluntary and community sector, before being finalised in January 2025. The Plan is expected to cover locally led reform, concentrate on delivering high quality public services and, alongside the Financial Stability Plan set out below, improve the sustainability and resilience of the organisation.

Financial Stability Plan – the Council launched a Financial Stability Plan as part of a larger organisational improvement plan in June 24. This will include the following work streams

• Review of services statutory / non statutory
• Making non statutory services self sufficient 
• Identifying opportunities for service transformation through peer challenge
• Identifying opportunities for more commercialisation / delivery arms / partnership working
• Making better use of digitalisation to streamline services and free up resources to invest in front facing office customer service.

This plan will identify potential areas for savings. A target savings figure of £3m over the next 3 financial years has been set. This will be measured on and reported back to Members as part of the budget process.

The Plan includes an Invest to Save programme. £1m funding has been identified for this workstream. Whilst the programme of works is yet to be identified, it is likely to include Capital expenditure and ICT development.

The Council has a number of joint/shared services including:

Joint Waste Management Services, Health and Safety, Internal audit - all of which are shared with Lichfield District Council which provides the benefit of economies of scale and makes use of key skilled resources.

Legal Services – this service (hosted by South Staffs DC)  is shared with 3 x authorities (Lichfield, Tamworth and South Staffs) and continues to provide advice on governance and legal matters.

LGA Corporate Peer Challenge– the Council is embarking on a Peer Review in October 2024. It is hoped that this will help identify and support areas of improvement.

The current Organisational Development Plan will be updated to align to the new corporate plan and will set out our commitment and longer-term vision.

2. How you plan to take advantage of technology and make better use of data to improve decision making, service design and use of resources?

Questions to consider

• 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?

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

TBC's current three-year Corporate Plan included a specific target to ensure that more people can access council services digitally / digital enhancement with partners and within Council housing stock. As a consequence, digital form completion has increased from 1,102 to 3,460, with indications that this will increase again in 2024/25. Further digital contact opportunities have resulted in an 8.5 % reduction in call demand to the Customer Services Team and a reduction in email contact. Whilst legacy systems have limited significant improvements, steps have been made to enhance the digital offer with better workflows and an increased number of digital contact forms. Successes include an improved housing application process and taxi licencing.

The Council is committed to ongoing modernisation of its technology as a key foundation for improving the customer experience, service efficiency and effectiveness. 

The Council’s ICT Strategy runs to the end of 2025 and will be reviewed in line with the new Corporate Plan and feedback from the LGA Corporate Peer Challenge. This Strategy will form a key priority for review within the Council’s forthcoming Peer Challenge. The focus of the Strategy has been the journey towards digital transformation to support the Corporate Plan. The current Strategy has 5 themes, including:

Digital by Design

The focus of this theme is to deliver digital services enabling access for customers when and where they want whilst delivering efficiencies for the organisation. Customer portals have been delivered through a new website and have moved customer contact to digital channels freeing up staff time for more complex cases and customers who prefer face to face contact.

The new TBC website now provides information on all Council Services with a view to maximising digital contacts, thus reducing the need to contact the Council directly. The website is also accessibility compliant.

The consistent monitoring of enquiries and customer services data allow for a flexible approach to reception and face to face services. An intelligence led service offer based on changing citizen demand patterns resulted in continued reception at the Assembly Rooms for in-person visits. 

Our web chat service continues to develop with more customers year on year making use of its access.

Working Smarter

The implementation of home-based end user technology that is modern and reliable. This has supported hybrid homeworking.

Increased use of Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive has improved staff and partner collaboration.

Several new ‘low code’ apps have been developed to help internal services digitise manual processes. 

AI and robotic process automation including Microsoft Copilot use cases and the art of the possible with be looked at to unlock productivity and resource.

Better use of Intelligence, knowledge and Insight

Power BI has been used to produce a dashboard for Customer Services, continually reporting on customer interactions and telephony data to help inform demand resourcing. Expanded use for Power BI is currently being explored.

We have continued to achieve gold standard from Geo Place and earlier in the year were awarded Platinum as part of the 2023 Exemplar awards. Geo Place manage the central address data repository for the UK and accuracy of our data is essential both for our systems and our data quality and submission obligations.

Fit Future Technology

The focus for this theme is around maintaining modern, flexible and effective technology with a Cloud first approach. It includes modernising the telephony system. Our cloud first strategy has progressed with several lines of business applications moved to Software as a Service and our Azure cloud data centre prepared. Legacy systems are being phased out, an example with the move to NEC Assure from M3.

3. Your plans to reduce wasteful spend within your organisation and systems.

I know we will share the aim to reduce waste wherever we can and, while you have all made huge strides in recent years, no organisation is ever 100% efficient. You should set out your plans to reduce wasteful or ‘gold-plated’ spend.

Questions to consider:

• 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?
• How much time and money do you spend on staff EDI training (internal and external), networks, and other programmes? How many EDI Champions do you have as an organisation? How do you log and report the time and money spent on EDI related activity? How do you assess the effectiveness of that training?
• What percentage of total staff budget is spent on a) agency and b) consultants? How do you assess value for money on agency & consultancy spend and what are your plans to reduce use / costs? How many of these consultants or agency staff have been in place for over a year?
• What governance structures do you use to ensure accountability of spend?
• Do you share office functions with other councils and if so, how useful do you find this?
• If you share external training costs with neighbouring councils, how do you factor our duplications of service between your council and your upper-tier council (if you have one)?
• If you have one, what is your assessment and experience of working with an elected mayor, combined authority, or devolution deal?
• What proportion of your paybill is spend on trade union facility time?

Governance

The Council has a strong track record of financial management and strategic financial planning which has ensured its financial sustainability and resilience in the face of reductions in Government funding.

In 2022/23 the external Auditor’s Annual Report concluded that:

“Overall we are satisfied the Council has appropriate arrangements in place to secure economy, efficiency and effectiveness in its use of resources. We have not identified any significant weaknesses and have not raised any key recommendations.”

and:

“Overall we are satisfied the Council has appropriate arrangements in place to ensure it manages risks to its financial sustainability. We have not identified any significant weaknesses and have not raised any key recommendations”

The budgets of the Council go through a rigorous scrutiny programme before being approved by Council. This includes:

• Early identification of budget issues.
• Internal review of any new requests for funding.
• Members seminars to consider new requests for both revenue and capital funding.
• Members budget workshops.
• Corporate Scrutiny before approval of the budget by Council.

£1m of reserves has been set aside for invest to save projects with a view to saving at least £500k per annum. Further use of these reserves will be aligned to corporate priorities.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is an integral part of TBC’s culture. The council is working hard with its new Chief Executive to challenge current ways of working to ensure the ethos of the organisation is informed by EDI.  The EDI strategy is currently in the process of being reviewed with a fresh approach to service delivery.

Agency staff are normally used as short-term cover only and do not stay in excess of a year.  In total only 3% of staffing costs is spent on agency staff.

Consultants are appointed to some capital projects to provide the expert knowledge required. Examples of projects include our £21m Future High Street Fund projects and Tamworth Castle, which is an historic monument and requires specialist technical advice before undertaking any maintenance work.  Consultant charges to revenue account for 1.7% of total salary budgets.

We continue to make use of and invest in our shared services (as detailed above) which provides the authority with skills not currently employed ‘in house’.

Shared Office Functions – The Council shares Waste Collection services and Internal Audit function with Lichfield District Council. Other shared services include CCTV, Building Control and conservation advice. This provides cost effectiveness and added resilience. It also provides learning opportunities across the different organisations.

Create a stable financial planning environment for local government so it can plan for the medium term, including:

• Multi-year financial settlement to provide certainty and enable future planning
• Remove Council Tax referendum limits and more support for local decision making
• Ability to set our own planning fees
• Ending onerous and costly competitive bidding for both capital and revenue funding

Lack of join up between central government departments on issues including housing, homeless prevention and asylum dispersal.

Complicated and misaligned processes for submitting data returns to central government.

Increased awareness of policy change impacts on housing/landlord functions by ensuring sufficient new burdens funding is provided to support those changes.

Additional support and consideration of the local impact of asylum dispersal including community cohesion, impact on housing stock etc.

Simplify the Statement of Accounts to make them more understandable for users. This would include reducing reporting requirements on pensions and changing the valuation methodology for some classes of assets to reduce valuation and audit costs.