Agenda item

To consider the report of the head of HR, IT and Technical Services (attached).

South Oxfordshire District Councillor Ian White stood down from the committee for this item.

The Cabinet members, Lynn Lloyd (South) and Robert Sharp (Vale) were in attendance, together with Andrew Down, head of HR, IT and technical services. They introduced the report on the Five Councils partnership update and answered questions from the committee. The committee were invited to note the contents of the report.

The committee discussed this item.

Concern was raised about the recommendation that the committee “note” the contents of this report. Members felt that more specific questions should be asked of the report. However, the joint scrutiny committee does not have any role in the formal governance of the contract: this is the remit of the Five Councils Partnership Scrutiny Committee.

The services of the councils were still in the transition phase and many services were still running as they were previously. HR and IT were the most advanced in the transformation process.

Following the first six months of operation, the Interim Chief Operating Officer is working on reviewing the effectiveness of the five council’s partnership governance and confirming boundaries of responsibility between retained services, joint client team and contractors.

Final reports back from the contractors were due by the end of January on three specific performance issues:

·           Delay in payment of councillors expenses in December: more detail was needed regarding what measures had been put into place to prevent a recurrence.

·           Agresso reporting issues: further information was required from Capita.

·           IT network failure: a detailed interim report had been received, but more work needed to be done.

“What we expect from our suppliers and what our suppliers expect from us” is a dynamic which is still being developed and the Cabinet members are confident that this is going in a positive direction.

The Cabinet members reported that officers were undertaking a lot of hard work to ensure the effectiveness of the relationships with the contractors and the success of the contract.

Work undertaken by officers of the council, on matters which are the contractors’ responsibility, is recharged to the contractor at full cost as appropriate.

There are some transition and snagging issues which are being addressed.

Where new IT systems are being implemented, such as the successor to Agresso; Windows 10 and other systems, rigorous user acceptance testing will be taking place. These systems are also being used elsewhere.

Capita had issued two profit warnings in 2016. Scrutiny members wanted to know if there was a back up plan if Capita were to fail. The Cabinet members would investigate and respond to the joint Scrutiny committee.

There are robust governance arrangements in place to manage the contracts. A senior management board of the chief executive officers from the partnership councils haw regular formal and informal meetings. There are quarterly meetings of the Five Councils’ Partnership Joint Committee and there will also be meetings at least once a year of a Five Council’s Partnership Joint Scrutiny Committee.

The committee asked what the benefits were of being the first councils in the contract to “go live”, where we have the role of smoothing out the path for the other partners. There were no specific benefits of going first other than the savings benefit of a longer partnership.

Most changes to IT and phones are a case of transferring existing systems across to a new network and servers. If there are any risks with changing the accounting system, these will be flagged and implementation will be delayed if the councils are not satisfied that the new systems are demonstrably ready to go live.

Some councillors were unclear on the boundaries of responsibility and asked for clear guidance. All members were asked to use the formal escalation process through the customer services client team for all of the different types of services which are being provided. If the escalation process is not used, then the matter may well not get logged and patterns will be missed.

What is the feedback from the retained staff on how they feel about the effect of the contract?

Frustration over the quality of the HR service and the IT network. There is currently no systematic method of measurement of impact on retained staff.

Why were the issues, raised in paragraph 9 of page 12, of boundaries not resolved in the Heads of Terms agreement? There are different understandings of the agreements; it is also the case that things are sometimes different in operation to how they were envisaged.

The Councils have retained responsibility for setting fees and charges, including car parking charges.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Issues for the Five Councils’ Joint Committee or Five Council’s Joint Scrutiny

These to be addressed in the report to the 5CP scrutiny

·                Review of the implementation progress against plan

·                KPI tracking and monitoring, what’s the development process for these… do they give us the information that we need? How do we develop these

·                Financial savings against plan

·                Lots 1 and 2, how they could deliver savings in the future.

·                Clarification of the details of the boundaries of responsibility between the contractors, the client team acting for all five councils and retained services within each of the partners.

·                Address the frequency of meetings of Scrutiny 5CP and determine what is appropriate.

·                Scrutiny training for members of the 5CP.

Cabinets

·           How is the impact on retained staff of the Five Councils Partnership being monitored?

·           What is the plan if one of the contractors was to fail as company?