APPENDIX A

Corporate Improvement Plan 2013-16 2014-17

Maidstone Borough Council has been recognised under previous inspection regimes as providing good quality value for money services.  However, we want to be even better, offering the services that people want for a cost they think is good value.  In 2010 the Government announced its plans to reduce public spending by 25% and reduce the national deficit.  The Council has to save around £xxxm over the next three years, which is a substantial reduction in the budget we have to spend on providing services for local people, at the same time that the number of potentially vulnerable people requiring some of those services, like housing advice and Housing and Council Tax Benefit, is increasing has increased.

The Strategic Plan details the priorities and priority outcomes for Maidstone until 2015 and how these will be delivered.  The Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) sets out what the Council will spend and when and where savings will be made.  In order to deliver the Strategic Plan and MTFS the Council is undertaking various pieces of work and projects to improve value for money and quality of customer service, and this must be aligned with the Council’s strategic objectives and Medium Term Financial Plan.  This improvement work makes up the building blocks that will make Maidstone a better council. 

This plan explains the key workstreams for the Council’s improvement journey, the drivers for improvement as well as priority services and projects for improvement.  It will allow work to be planned, sufficiently supported and monitored to ensure savings needs and the improvements required for the Council to meet its priority outcomes are delivered.

Objectives

It is important that the Council delivers services that are value for money and that residents are satisfied with.  We must make savings and maximise income where we can but also be flexible enough to take opportunities as they arise, including those that come from external influences like changes in legislation.  Therefore, the objectives of the Corporate Improvement Plan are:

1.   A reduction in net cost, through making savings or increased income

2.   Improving or maintaining quality: ensuring we deliver excellent services, which means delivering what is promised to agreed standards

3.   Identifying and responding to opportunities aligned with the Strategic Plan

Improvement workstreams

The Council’s Improvement Plan is corporate and involves a number of different workstreams, which are owned by different officers in the organisation.  Those workstreams identified as most important are:

1. Efficiency and effectiveness (Head of Finance and Resources) – looking at our services to make sure we are doing the right things to deliver our organisational priorities and working with our customers to make sure that the way we do them is as customer friendly and efficient as possible.
2. Income generation (Head of Commercial and Economic Development) – maximising the value from the income streams we already have in place, exploring other options for income generation and launching any viable initiatives that will bring in sustainable income to the Council.
3. Asset management (Head of Finance and Resources) – making the best use of the building and land we already own or lease, exploring opportunities to add to our property portfolio to support delivery of organisational priorities and bring in income, as well as transferring assets to the community or selling assets that are no longer viable for us to keep.
4. Empowerment and self-sufficiency (Head of Housing and Communities) – empowering borough residents to do more for themselves through building financial and digital access and skills and supporting communities to deliver services where they could do this better or take on assets of community value that we can no longer properly support.

1. Incremental improvement (Head of Change and Scrutiny) – making good use of performance and financial information and good business planning, including responding to recent recommendations from an Internal Audit review of performance management, to enable service managers to make small changes to enable continuous improvement in the services their teams provide.
2. Asset management (Asst Director of Environmental & Regulatory Services) – making the best use of what we have in terms of buildings and land and management of our use of water, gas, electricity and petrol/diesel.  It is important we know what assets we keep and what we want to sell or transfer to others, and that we actually dispose of those assets we no longer require.  This is essential in terms of providing capital income and ensuring services are delivered to residents in the best way. This may mean that we transfer assets to others, including community groups, to enable them to deliver more services in the future.  It may also mean that we look to make savings by sharing accommodation with other organisations. 
3. Transformation (Head of Business Improvement) – larger changes to ensure key outcomes are delivered effectively and efficiently.  Making good use of unit cost information and benchmarking to consider different ways of delivering services, for example using shared services to gain economies of scale and increase resilience, and using business improvement techniques to improve processes.  This includes working with other organisations and residents to deliver shared goals as well as different teams within the Council working together better.  We may also work with public service providers and local people to redesign services and pool budgets through Community Budgets.  More internal and/or external support to make these improvements may be required. 
4. External challenge (Head of Change & Scrutiny) – using information and challenge from residents and critical friends to improve services.  This includes complaints information, feedback from local people, peer reviews, nationally driven change like the welfare reform changes and Overview & Scrutiny reviews.

These workstreams and the whole Improvement Plan are underpinned by the following enablers:

• Organisational culture (Head of HR) – ensuring that staff and members can contribute to and understand their role in delivering organisational priorities.  Creating Embedding an organisational culture where staff are empowered to do their jobs through appropriate training and managerial support, where there is permission to experiment and time to learn, including looking at best practice in other organisations, and where all officers and members are engaged and are able to give their feedback and ideas.  Improving collaboration between different parts of the organisation, ensuring that change is well managed and there is the capacity and capability to deliver the required outcomes.  This will all contribute to our aim of achieving Investors in People (IiP) Gold by 2015.
• Good information and knowledge management (Head of Policy and Communications) – modernising our information governance and systems architecture to ensure we make more efficient, secure and smart use of information we gather about our customers.  In addition, making use of other customer insight, like Mosaic Public Sector, to create and deliver messages that people hear and understand and which cause them to make positive changes in behaviour.
• Councillor assurance – leadership and involvement of elected members in shaping, implementing and monitoring the progress and outcomes of policies and projects.
• Commissioning and procurement (Head of Finance and Resources) – looking at all the options for delivering a service and picking the right one.  Where we have to purchase goods or services, going through the right process to ensure legal compliance and value for money. 
• Effective use of technology (Head of ICT) – utilising technology better to engage with customers, deliver better and more efficient services and save money.

Other important tools for improvement are:

• Procurement
• Use of technology

Priority services and projects for improvement

In order to ensure we can deliver our priority outcomes in the Strategic Plan and savings in the MTFS it is important to make changes in the following service areas.  The list of service areas below is in order of priority for improvement, from highest priority to lowest.  These improvements may be to deliver savings, improve the quality of a service or respond to an opportunity that may arise. 

1.   Waste & Recycling – implementing a new waste contract with other Kent authorities, working to achieve the target of 50% recycling by 2015 and launching making a profit from our commercial waste service

2.   ICT – sharing our ICT service with local authority partners

3.   Hazlitt Arts Centre – implementing the chosen option for delivery to ensure value for money

2.   Economic Development – ensuring we have clear deliverable priorities for achieving growth through economic development and regeneration by working with partners to develop adopting a Regeneration and Economic Development Plan and putting in place collaboratively ensure there are the resources and skills required to deliver this

3.   Housing – ensuring we can respond to the increased need for homelessness services, preventing homelessness wherever possible, enabling the provision of more housing and ensuring that there is a supply of decent, affordable and  accessible housing, including in the private rented sector Reducing the number of people and days spent in temporary accommodation and improving the amount and the diversity of housing supply, including in the private rented sector

4.   Maidstone Culture and Leisure – using our cultural and leisure assets like the Museum and Mote Park better to bring in a sustainable income

5.   Customer Services – redefining and achieving our customer service standards and moving to our ‘digital first’ customer service model by moving more contacts to our website and away from face to face visits and the telephone

6.   Revenues and Benefits – preparing and planning for the effects of national welfare reforms, analysing the impact of the localised Council Tax and business rate schemes, maximising the collection of business rates and exploring different ways of delivering the service for the future e.g. joint Fraud initiative

7.   Planning – sharing the Planning Support function with local authority partners exploring opportunities to make the Development Management Service more efficient and improve the value for money of specialist advice

8.      Environmental Services – making the Street Cleansing and Grounds Maintenance services more efficient, including improving work practices and feedback to customers through use of technology

9.   Bereavement Services – exploring options for delivery, introducing more efficient working practices and expanding the offer at the Crematorium

10.  Finance – building an efficient service that supports the Council make informed strategic financial management decisions, manage and control budgets and commit and measure resources and investigating how this service could be delivered in the future

11.  Building Control – re-designing the service, diversifying work to undertake more trading rather than statutory work and looking to both public and private sector partners to investigate investigating options for delivery of the service, in particular the viability of a public sector partnership, and developing a model for delivery for the future

12.  Corporate Support – investigating whether our Print services could be a viable commercial service and/or whether our Corporate Support services could be shared with local authority partners

As well as work in particular service areas there are a number of other important projects that need to be undertaken in each of the improvement workstreams:

• Customer services delivery   becoming more customer-centred, engaging better with our residents and designing, adopting and delivering our new sustainable model of customer services delivery for the long term
• Integrated Transport Strategy – adopting our Integrated Transport  Strategy and delivering this to ensure the infrastructure is in place to support the development proposed by the Core Strategy and to address some existing traffic congestion issues

• Cross organisational collaboration – exploring and establishing new ways of commissioning and delivering services with other agencies and organisations to improve outcomes, increase efficiencies and reduce cost. To review and revise existing governance and funding arrangements including pooled budgets to maximise the use of resources in service delivery
• Future Use of the Town Hall – looking at the future use of the Town Hall, including the former Tourist Information Centre facility at the front of the building, with a view to maximising the income potential from the building. Exploring potential uses including both commercial and community use to achieve the best rate of return and usage whilst not competing with local businesses
• Major assets review - reviewing the Council’s major assets as part of the Asset Management Plan to make savings and/or maximise income potential. and expanding our commercial property portfolio to support the delivery of the Council’s 3 key priorities. This includes considering long term options for Council accommodation in the town centre, looking at the future use of the Town Hall, exploring options for the King Street, Medway Street and Brunswick Street car park sites, as well as improving and maximising income from the Park Wood industrial estate.  King Street car park, Medway Street car park and Park Wood industrial estate are key assets.  King Street car park will be demolished and a surface level car park constructed, whilst we seek opportunities for redevelopment of the site.  Medway Street is a major revenue provider and any development will need to reflect this. The current market will not provide the returns necessary but this will continue to be reviewed.  We will work with the tenants of Park Wood industrial estate to invest in and improve the estate, which generates considerable income for the Council, mostly through ground rents
• Right to bid and community asset transfer – investigating which assets and services might be appropriate to be delivered by the community through the ‘Right to Bid’ and establishing an effective mechanism and approach for supporting the transfer of community assets where this is appropriate, demonstrating value for money and maximising their use
• Corporate peer review - a peer challenge involves officers and members from other authorities acting as critical friends, making recommendations on where we could do things better. We are going to use this method to look at our corporate governance and take advice on any improvements we can make
• More proactive use of the performance management system (PMS) – embedding the use of Covalent, our PMS software so that managers and key officers in the organisation use it to effectively monitor performance, service delivery and risk
• Other Shared services and Mid Kent Improvement Partnership (MKIP) work Mid Kent Improvement Partnership (MKIP) shared services and operational model – working with partners, in particular our MKIP local authority partners, to establish closer working arrangements and partnerships in more services, as well looking at all the services we share and deciding on and delivering the best operational model for the future
• Information and knowledge management – implementing the recommendations of our external Information Management review to ensure we make more efficient, secure and smart use of information we gather and store.  This includes improving our information governance arrangements, agreeing relevant policies, improving our systems architecture and finding ways to turn information into knowledge
• Commercial property investment – increasing our property portfolio by identifying and purchasing secondary property market options and converting the Chillington Street building for residential use
• Digital inclusion – working with partners to identify the geographical areas and communities that are most likely to be digitally excluded and work with them to identify solutions.  This could mean increasing or signposting publically accessible computers, running training courses or accessing cheap computer schemes
• Financial inclusion – Working with partners to improve financial awareness and identify solutions to reduce the impact of financial exclusion. Financial inclusion is the ability of an individual, household or group to access appropriate financial services or products. There are a number of barriers to financial inclusion including debt problems, fuel poverty poor financial knowledge, no affordable credit and low income. Those most likely to be financially excluded include people over 60, young adults, single parents, people with disabilities and people on low and insecure incomes.

This is how the priority services and projects for improvement fit in with the 4 improvement workstreams:  

More detail on the work to be undertaken on the priority service areas in the Transformation and External challenge workstreams is shown in Appendix 1.

Appendix 2 shows when we plan to carry out this work over the next three years.

Governance and Monitoring

The Cabinet own the Council’s improvement journey and the Chief Executive is ultimately accountable for delivery of the Corporate Improvement Plan.  Political leadership is provided by the Leader and the Cabinet.  A head of service is responsible for each of the workstreams and enablers that make up the improvement journey detailed above.  The Leader, Chief Executive, Director of Environment and Shared Services  and the appropriate heads of service make up a group that will monitor progress against plan to ensure that any as yet unknown opportunities that would provide greater benefit than the work already planned are not missed and that the services and projects for improvement are re-prioritised as necessary as a result.

This plan will be updated annually to the same corporate planning timetable as the Strategic Plan and MTFS.  A progress report will be compiled and sent to Cabinet 6 months after the adoption of the Improvement Plan.

APPENDIX 1

Future plans for priority service areas