Agenda item

O&S.08/21

The Executive Lead Member for Customer Satisfaction and Improvements introduced a report which provided the Committee with an update on the performance across the Council.  The Member outlined that overall performance had been very good considering the impact of the Pandemic and applauded officers for this achievement.  The one area which had under-performed was the Contact Centre who had experienced increased levels of contact due to the pandemic and had received around 200 extra calls per day over the last two months in response to the waste situation.  Therefore, the performance of the Contact Centre was deemed to be acceptable under the circumstances.  The Lead Member confirmed that the level of waste calls being received by the Contact Centre had fallen significantly in recent days.

The queue buster technology had begun to be rolled out which provided callers with the option to select a call back whilst maintaining their position in the queue.   The Lead Member concluded her remarks with a request for these Key Performance Indicators to be reviewed as a regular item on the Committee’s Work Programme.  The officer confirmed that live dashboard reviews would soon be possible for Members to see real time performance information.

Following a question from the Chairman, the officer confirmed that the project would be completed by the end of this year.  The officer explained that ‘less time dependent work’ referred to in point 2.2 of the attendant report related to processes such as debt management, discount applications, and data cleansing.

A Member welcomed the ability for Members to get easy access to the figures and it was confirmed that the dashboards would be accessible from the desktop of Members’ laptops.

Following discussion around the planning enforcement figures, the Chairman proposed two additional recommendations were added.  These were voted on and agreed.  The Leader outlined that the number of outstanding cases was reducing and that staffing issues were being resolved.  The Leader then asked for Members to contact the enforcement case manager to review cases in their area that could be defined as ‘neighbour disputes’ and therefore not planning enforcement cases:  these could then be removed from the outstanding list.  The Leader felt that the data being presented as a graph was not particularly helpful and that a traffic light system based on definitive performance indicators with a short summary for those defined as amber and/or red.  The Chairman hoped that this could form part of the report as outlined in recommendation 4 below.

It was then:

RESOLVED

That the Overview and Scrutiny Committee:

1.    requests a report, to come to the Committee’s 4November 2021 meeting, on progress being made in improving the Contact Centre performance and on the changeover as set out in paragraphs 1.5 and 1.6 of the attendant report;

2.   notes the performance figures shown in the Pentana report attached at Appendix A of the attendant report;

3.   has reviewed the information provided in the dashboards and provided feedback to the portfolio holder on any additional measures required to scrutinise performance; and

4.    in respect of planning enforcement, requests a report be presented to the Committee at its 30 September meeting following the previous recommendations arising out of the Committee meeting on 1 April 2021 (minute O&S.49/20 a) refers.