Agenda item

The Council’s Commissioning Director delivered a report arising from recommendation 3 of the Ambition 2020 Scrutiny Review. This recommendation sought assurance that there were systems, principles and strategies in place to ensure that the Council received best value from the companies that it commissioned to deliver services. In delivering the report, the Commissioning Director set out the Council’s obligations in regards to best value and how this was applied across a range of different activities and functions, as well as the services provided by each commissioned company and their governance frameworks.

In response to several questions, the Deputy Leader of the Council and Cabinet Member for Finance, Performance & Core Services stated that:

• Be First had inherited a Capital Works monitoring team that contained many challenges. Whilst Be First had naturally had teething issues with improving this team, the situation was now improving.
• HRA rents had dropped 4% over the last four years, year on year. This meant that it was not problematic to take additional money out of the HRA rents. Be First, as well as other companies such as BDMS and BDTP, were also charging more due to external factors such as inflation. The biggest issue with companies moving forward (particularly with catering and cleaning) was that the Council pressed them to continue to match any national increases and the terms and conditions provided by the Council. This made the companies much less competitive than private markets in those particular fields. The companies also continued to manage wage conditions and sickness, and align themselves with the Council.
• Jobs had plummeted during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the companies only attending to emergencies. Whilst there was a huge backlog, the Council wanted to ensure the safety of its workforce, which could only be achieved through the undertaking of emergency repairs and less interaction with residents. It was noted that the job comparison figures in the report were from 2016/17 to year end in 2019/20 before the lockdown had taken effect, but that there had been a very marked improvement. Figures had increased from 345 jobs per operative to 616, which had not reduced quality as complaints were decreasing and good news feedback was improving. The Council had also gone from spending just over £18 million per year in responsive repairs to spending £13 million, signalling greater efficiency. The Council companies had shown robustness during the Covid-19 pandemic and dividends and profits had been made. 

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

• Beam Energy was not a company that had been set up and as such, did not have a business case in the same way that the other companies did. The Council had both entered into a partnership and embarked on a procurement process which at that point, had identified Robin Hood Energy as the best provider in the market in terms of its capability to deliver sustainable energy and lower energy tariffs for residents.
• The 53 new BDTP jobs created were not all for the lower section of the workforce, as evidenced through the analysis of BDTP information from the last quarter. Whilst most of the turnover in companies such as BDTP was experienced in the lower section, this was not the case for Be First. Turnover and jobs creation were also not exclusively the same.
• The report set out protections that residents had in relation to their energy. B&D Energy had capped its electricity prices to the average of the best deals offered by the Big Six energy providers, which had provided a level of assurance that the company was not increasing its charges outside of increases in charges that might naturally be applied to any energy provider when the cost of energy changed.
• The Council received wider value from the companies. Where projects and capital projects were commissioned on a scheme-by-scheme basis, discussions would be had between the relevant commissioner and their counterpart at the company as to an appropriate fee level. Whilst companies had to cover their costs and were also tasked with delivering other objectives, all activities undertaken went through some form of commissioning scrutiny in relation to appropriate fee levels, depending on benchmarks and were not simply accepted when proposed.