Issue - decisions

The Strategic Director Corporate Resources introduced this report, and responded to Members questions in the following terms:

• Kivells leased from Exeter City Council, so the money was appropriately coming from the council;
• the refund had not been accounted for in the budget;
• he could not confirm at this stage when the MRF project would be completed but he would speak to the Head of Service and update Members;
• the debt write off process was dependent on the amount of the debt;
• Exeter City Council could only use bailiffs for council tax, but could use debt recovery agents for other forms of debt;
• the Council had recently strengthened the income collection and the legal teams; and
• car parks would be included in the model going forward.

During the debate, Councillor Fullam asked the Leader the following:

“On 8.4, is there expected to be any improvement on recruitment and retention across the range of services with vacancies?

Is there limited expectation of resolving recruitment issues before the timescale of LGR, are there interim plans by department for reduced service delivery to avoid undue stress on remaining staff and excessive agency costs?

If so, can Members be made aware of the specific services being reduced?”

The Leader responded in the following terms:

“Within our Human Resources Improvement Plan we have a focus on reviewing and modernising our approach to recruitment with a particular emphasis on those areas that are harder to recruit to. We have had notable success is filling vacancies and areas traditional regarded as “difficult to recruit to” with permanent staff e.g. in planning, environmental health and digital and data. Within the Operations Directorate there are long standing issues with recruiting and retaining permanent staff working on frontline waste services in particular largely due to the relatively high employment rate in Exeter. However, our HR and operational reviews (Rapid Impact Project) have highlighted a number of opportunities to modernise our approach to recruitment and work is underway to design and pilot new approaches tailored to the target employment market in these frontline roles.

Whilst there are no guarantees, we have high expectations that we will resolve these recruitment issues in the medium term. In the meantime, we have already instigate a number of actions which are standardising the rates we pay agency staff, reducing overall spend on agency staff, limiting the length of temporary agency contracts and raising the quality of employment terms and conditions for agency workers. We are doing this by using an agency recruitment framework (Comensura) across all parts of the council. Spend and use of agency staff is monitored monthly by the Senior Management Board and authority to recruit temporary staff requires Strategic Director approval.

The Strategic Director for Operations was working with Heads of Services on a continual basis to introduce productivity and efficiency gains within the service area following the independent research conducted as part of the Rapid Impact project work SMB have been undertaking since last year. Should there be a need to reduce operations due to staffing on anything other than an ad hoc or marginal basis i.e. a substantive change to service delivery, we would be obliged to undertake a statutory consultation with those customers affected by any such temporary change likely to be required over the medium or longer-term. A this point in time we are not anticipating any substantive change to service delivery.”

The Leader moved, and Councillor Wright seconded the recommendations of the report, which following a vote were CARRIED.