Accountability is at the heart of North Yorkshire Council’s performance - Carl Les
Last week was the first quarterly performance meeting of the new council municipal year. I’ve mentioned these before, meetings where Executive Members and their Directors come together to discuss performance and budget management issues in public, with 200+ pages of supporting data as befits an organisation of the size and scale of the Council.
Of course, again as I have repeated often, these are not the only performance management meetings we hold, indeed most performance is managed on a daily basis by hundreds of managers working with thousands of staff delivering hundreds of thousands of transactions.
This meeting is in public however, and we invite the chairs of our six scrutiny committees and of the Audit Committee, our financial and probity oversight, to not only attend as observers but also participate. Other Members can join in-person or online, and the meeting itself is streamed online for public viewing.
It is the most transparent way we can expose how we are working and importantly deliver services, although the acid test of delivery will always be the individual transaction with the resident concerned. Although some members object, I like to refer to residents as the customer, recognising that they have wants and needs that we should satisfy, expectations that we should meet and wherever possible exceed.
It is important that we collate the millions of transactions into data that we can verify, and show to our council taxpayers as openly as possible what we are doing with their hard-earned money, as well as to the government with their grants. Some colleagues say that the real test of performance comes every four years at an election, with the ballot box deciding, but that is too simplistic. Our organisation is much more complex now, and four years is a long time to wait if errors are being made, and within those four years we want to see continuous improvement as well. Today’s excellent performance should be tomorrow`s standard.
So following sessions held with our directors within the directorates my colleagues are responsible for, we faced a number of questions from our overview and scrutiny colleagues ranging across matters that are important to most households like waste collection and recycling rates and to most residents like highways customer requests and the reporting of road defects. Then more singular interests like the speed of handling of planning applications through to the very personalised ones like the number of child protection plans that are open and the number of Looked After Children in our care in placements both within and outside the county.
With the growing elderly population we have in North Yorkshire we spent some time looking at residential and nursing home placements, and care home admissions whilst also assessing the effectiveness of our reablement programmes designed to reduce the reliance on residential care, allowing more people to live at home for longer.
Why for instance were there 72 cases in Harrogate, but only six in the former Craven district? Was this simply a factor of population numbers? Some time ago each quarter we focused on a particular theme from our council plan – thriving places with empowered communities; sustainable and connected places; safe, healthy and living well; maximising potential; a strong and innovative council.
However, I decided some time ago that as the council was a complex deliverer it was better to take an overall view each time, allowing our questioners to go wherever they wanted in the data. Some Members believe that the chairs of scrutiny should not be from the majority party. I don’t believe there is a right or wrong approach, councils across the land operate differing models, the important thing being robust but reasonable challenge. My Executive companions and I feel well challenged by colleagues from whatever party without any need for political point-scoring.
Financial performance is a key concern too, and it is alarming to see overspends at this stage of the financial year. This gives us an early opportunity to start corrective action, although largely driven by increasing demand for our services in children's and adult care.
Accountability also features in ‘Rewiring the State’ with a stronger role for audit, both national and local. This will be important if there is to be increased public monies for initiatives, especially those led by individuals. Four years may be too long to wait if plans are going awry. The essential focus has to be on economic growth as the driver for all else. The Prime Minister has said this will come largely from Number 10 North, but the Treasury will still monitor public expenditure, and the Chancellor is comfortable with this approach. Immediately there is a tension there, but it may be constructive.
The court of public opinion will have its say on Mayoral performance.
Coun Carl Les is the Leader of North Yorkshire Council.