Agenda item

The Council’s Commercial Director and Commissioning Director delivered an update on the progress made regarding Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) 1-3 of the A2020 Scrutiny Review. The Action Plan, which detailed the 24 recommendations that arose from the review, had previously been agreed by the Committee at their 7 October 2020 meeting (minute 19 refers).

In response to several questions, the Commercial Director stated that:

• A Business Forum Newsletter was sent out to local businesses and Councillors by the Cabinet Member for Employment, Skills and Aspiration, and this now included a focus in some areas on the social value element. Lots of work had been undertaken within the Revenues and Benefits and Inclusive Growth departments during the pandemic to identify local businesses in the Borough and a list of local businesses had now been compiled.
• All Council-owned companies had agreed to produce summary business plans, which would not contain sensitive commercial or financial information, but would provide information for residents that would identify their strategic objectives and how they planned to meet these as part of their business planning process. These documents would be made publicly available from 1 April 2021 and the Commercial Director agreed to share links to these once they were in circulation.
• The Council was committed to getting as many local suppliers to bid for its work as possible. It was in the early stages of planning how to develop social value and the local business element of this; the development of the Social Value Policy had been agreed at the Council’s Cabinet on 19 May 2020 (minute 4 refers).
• The Commercial team had initially been working to identify which commitments had already been made in regards to local employment and work with local businesses. The team had also been working with commissioners to identify which commitments needed to go into contracts that were going to be let over the course of the next 12 months, to ensure a more established baseline with which to work.
• The team were still at the start of their journey. There would also always be a delay between the procurement of a contract and the completion of an outcome. Some of the work completed would not lead to outcomes in the short-term, and there was a longer plan that had been developed that would provide local businesses with more information about how they could bid for work.
• The Council were constrained to a degree by the amount of work that it commissioned and a lot of the work that it commissioned was already in contract. As such, the Council was trying to establish the arrangements for contracts that were going out to procurement.
• There had been a delay in establishing these arrangements, as the Commercial team had tried to encourage Commissioners and Council Companies to secure work through local businesses where there was the opportunity to do so.

The Deputy Leader of the Council and Cabinet Member for Finance, Performance & Core Services stated that:

·  The Council needed to look into how it divided its frameworks into more bitesize, achievable outcomes for local businesses, as the commissioning work and services undertaken by the Council were vast and some of the smaller businesses were not in a position to deliver these.

·  The Council had been working to ensure that it was on the front foot with its social value work and in working with local businesses; however, the Council was restricted by when its contracts ended and new procurement cycles

·   could begin.

·  The Council needed to ensure that procurement was robust, no matter the size of the contract procured. It now had an extensive list of local businesses with which to engage and work, following on from the Covid-19 business grants allocation.

Following on from the Commissioning Director’s update on recommendation 5 in relation to how demand for services was affected by the movement of people in, out and around the Borough, the Council’s Director of Policy and Participation (DPP) emphasised that:

• The Resident’s Matrix 2019/20, which was on track to be completed by March 2021, had already been used in some pilot areas and would provide data on all wards and areas by March.
• The Demand dashboards in OneView (infrastructure management software) were now also live for commissioners and operational staff to utilise. The development of these tools was the first stage in the process and as with any data tool, more information would emerge as officers started to use this and the real impact could be determined. As such, this was an area that the Committee may wish to revisit in the future, when more information about the impact of the tool could be collated.
• The Dashboards held sensitive service user data, which help frontline practitioners to make more informed decisions, but the Committee could be provided with some mock dashboards to better understand their structure.The Committee was also due to receive an update on the OneView software in March 2021.

In response to a question, the Cabinet Member for Social Care and Health Integration provided some additional detail around recommendation 6 in relation to challenging local authorities who placed families in the Borough without informing the Council:

• The Council had a system to challenge Local Authorities who were making placements into the Borough and not informing the Council.

• The Council’s biggest issue in regards to increased demand and families with complex needs, was families who came and rented privately, who were not necessarily coming through the Local Authority route.
• There was still a lot of people who came to the Borough as housing was relatively cheap in comparison to the rest of London, and the Council would not find out about these families and their needs until they presented to Council Social Care services.
• The Cabinet Member agreed to look into the financial issues surrounding temporary accommodation, private-rented housing and placement families, stating that there was also an ongoing discussion at the London Leaders level into the unfairness of the present system in terms of the burden on some local authorities in comparison to others. Future updates on this would be brought back to the Committee.