Productivity Plan Ways to reduce wasteful spend within organisation and systems

How do you approach identifying and reducing waste in the organisation? How do you monitor progress?

Identifying efficiencies

Last year the council carried out an in-depth review of all services to identify all non-statutory elements and areas that require efficiencies. A benchmarking exercise was also carried out to provide additional evidence of services that the council spends proportionally more on than its statistical neighbours. This process led to £8.5million of savings to the revenue budget.

Performance monitoring

The council has recently reviewed and updated the approach it takes to monitoring performance across all services. Continuous improvement is a running theme within performance management and further areas for development have been identified. This will be achieved through working with staff at all levels to map where improvements can be made.

The key objective of this approach will be to deliver and range of benefits, including: 

  • greater automation of the collection of data, which largely relies on manual processes, which will support improved trend analysis
  • clearer alignment of performance information and budget monitoring, so that we can better understand the impact of changes in service demands on our finances and, where these demands are detrimental to the ccouncil’s financial position, explore mitigations
  • clearer identification of the performance measures which are most significant, to help us focus on those issues which are most important

Progress against performance management targets is monitored on a quarterly basis with reports being submitted to CLT and the Executive for review.

How much time and money do you spend on staff EDI training, networks and other programmes?

The council has reduced service provision for all non-statutory services. As a result, the E&D function has been closed down.

The council continues to ensure compliance with the public sector equality duty to consider how our policies and decisions affect people who are protected under the Equality Act, publish our equality objectives, and publish information demonstrating compliance with the duty and gender pay gap data.

All training is provided online via the council’s e-learning platform, for which an annual subscription is paid for a suite of learning and development resources.

The council is a member of the South-East Employers network and participates in networking events held by them.

What governance structures do you use to ensure accountability of spend?

The council introduced the Financial Control Panel (FCP) in early 2023 to ensure that all spend over £500 is reviewed. The panel meets twice weekly and is chaired by the Strategic Director for Place. Monthly budget monitoring is in place for all service budgets to be reviewed with finance business partners.

Do you share office functions with other councils? How useful is this?

Our procurement service is provided by Orbis which is a partnership between Surrey County Council, East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove City Council, providing back office services to local authorities. This enables the Council to access policies, procedures and advice that a small council could not resource itself.

Our waste collection service is currently being delivered through a joint waste contract (Serco) with other district and borough councils.

As part of the Council’s drive to provide the minimum statutory provision and work with partners to ensure valuable services are still provided to our communities, certain community services have been transferred to partners. This includes the Social Prescribing and Borough Discharge services which were transferred to Spelthorne Borough Council, and Integrated Health Projects which were also transferred to partners to deliver. 

What proportion of your pay bill is spent on trade union facility time?

This is currently zero.