Network News - July 2016

Welcome to the July edition of Network News. The recent British success in the sports world has got us excited for the rest of Summer 2016 and the continued sporting calendar ahead. Over the next few weeks we can still look forward to the culmination of the Tour de France, the British Open at Royal Troon and of course the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. It’s got us thinking, is your service ‘Going for Gold’ in Year 18?

The Year 18 data templates are now finalised and available to access on the members web portal. The deadlines for the first set of reports and to qualify for award entry are during September / October 2016. As usual we are offering all our members the opportunity to attend a data completion training session held in a number of locations.

If you would like to book onto a FREE training session please contact a member of the performance network steam by emailing performance.networks@apse.org.uk and we can arrange some training for you.

Highways Maintenance Capital Funding and Performance Networks – How can we help you secure funding?

In December 2014, the Secretary of State for Transport announced that £6 billion will be made available between 2015/16 and 2020/21 for local highways maintenance capital funding and in November 2015 a further £250 million was announced for a dedicated Pothole Action Fund. From this funding, £578 million has been set aside for an Incentive Fund scheme, to reward councils who demonstrate they are delivering value for money in carrying out cost effective improvements. Each year, local highway authorities in England will need to complete a self-assessment questionnaire, in order to establish their share of the Incentive fund. Your answers to the questions determine the % share of the fund you receive. By 2017- 18, you could lose up to 40% of the incentive fund by not meeting the criteria and by 2020-21, you could lose it all.

In this questionnaire, authorities will be asked, “Does your local authority undertake benchmarking to drive improvement in its highway maintenance service?”. And, “Does your local authority have a process in place to measure the ongoing cashable and non-cashable efficiencies that are being delivered in the highways maintenance service?”

As a performance networks member you can say YES and qualify for 3 points.

Please contact the performance networks team if you would like to learn more about how we can help.

Summer Event

PN Seminar - 16th June, London

We recently held our ‘Measure for Change’ seminar at the Thistle Hotel in London, with over 50 delegates in attendance. The seminar examined how performance management can help you meet the financial challenges for environmental services.

We discussed how performance management can help local authorities to identify achievable cost savings and innovative approaches to service delivery. It focused in on environmental services with case study examples on streetscene and public realm services; parks and green spaces; and waste and recycling. Key messages included:

o Local authorities have responded well to the financial challenges

o Knowledge is power

o Performance management has a vital role to tell you where you are, where you need to be and how to get there.

Land Audit Management System (LAMS)

The new LAMS report is now available and contains the following:

1. Grounds maintenance quality indicators: the number of inspections and QI score for each month and a cumulative score for the year.
2. Street cleansing cleanliness indicators: covering litter, detritus, fly-tipping, graffiti and cleanliness score, plus a cumulative score for the year.

The new data input sheet and inspection form for this year is available to download from the web portal now. These have been slightly revised following on from the recent LAMS review meeting. The main changes to this are:

 • A new column for drug paraphernalia (this is optional and can be deleted if you choose not to monitor this)

 • Deleted the Y/N column for hard surface weeds and inclusion of a ‘Not applicable’ option in the grading column for hard surface weeds. There are also a number of changes to the reports which will include more analysis for this coming year.

Changes to Year 18 templates

This year has seen some changes to the templates and here are the highlights.

Transport operations and vehicle maintenance

A number of new columns have been added to the optional Profile tab this year to assist with the production of a "Process Benchmarking" database. These fields will provide additional contextual information to the database but the information is required vehicle by vehicle

Sports and leisure facility management

A number of new questions have been added regarding memberships, these include membership attrition, yield and average length of stay. Guidance has been included to assist with answering these new questions.

Refuse collection

With effect this year we are now asking for the number of refuse vehicles and the total number of hours per annum these are deployed. This will allow us to calculate the productivity. Collections data - the number of rounds now contains all the various collection options and has been split into ‘year-round’ and ‘part-year’.

Education catering

Nurseries - you now include the number of integrated nurseries meals served within your service. Special schools - We are including special academies within the data collection for the first time this year. Universal Infant Free School Meals (UIFSM) - The introduction of Universal Infant Free School Meals in Scotland and England requires a more detailed breakdown. This information is also desirable for Wales to assist with UK wide comparison of meal uptakes for Key Stage 2 pupils. Academies and other schools - Academy schools which are within your local authority boundary will be included with LEA controlled schools for the purposes of data collection and reporting.

Other (civic and commercial) catering

The 'Other catering services (civic and commercial)' data collection template and performance indicator suite for 2015/16 has been simplified to reduce the data collection process and focus on key perfrmance indicators. Please review the data collection requirements this year before proceeding with data input.

Parks, open spaces and horticultural services

As a result of the key and secondary drivers being reviewed this year, the 'Drivers' tab has been removed from this template as it is necessary for all participants to have their family group reviewed / recalculated.

Road asset management

A CSS Wales Results page has been added to the template this year so that Welsh members can see their provisional performance indicator outputs as they complete the data input tabs. This only covers the PI's and stats that are used in the annual CSS Wales Report and not the full suite of APSE PIs.

Second batch best performers

Congratulations to the following authorities who have been identified as best performers after the second batch data returns.  These supplement our current list of best performers announced at Blackpool 2015.

Building cleaning

St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council

Building maintenance

Bradford Metropolitan District Council

South Ayrshire Council

Cemeteries and crematorium

Manchester City Council

South Lanarkshire Council

Sports and Leisure

The Hydro - Harrogate Borough Council

Parks and open spaces

Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council

Street cleansing

Gedling Borough Council

Gateshead Metropolitan Borough Council

Nottingham City Council

Roads 

Oxfordshire County Council

Transport

Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council Durham County Council

New service areas

The environmental health model was rolled out on a UK-wide basis last year and substantial work has been carried out by the working group this year to develop the model further for this next data collection round; in particular to include relevant legislation and guidance for England, Northern Ireland and Wales. APSE performance networks member authorities who are subscribed to all services will be able to participate in this model for 2016 free of charge.

During 2016, a pilot will be carried out on Trading Standards. If you would like to get involved in this pilot, please contact us.

New types of case studies

With the current climate that local government is operating in, it is more important than ever to provide you with intelligence on how other authorities are meeting the challenges and the impact that their interventions and changes are having on their performance.  We have therefore extended our series of case study reports to include:

•  Improving productivity whilst improving quality

•  Improving performance with reduced costs

• Best and most improved performer award winners 2015

Deadlines

29 July 2016

Return deadline for roads/highways/lighting

5 August 2016

Return deadline for all other service areas 

5 August 2016 

Return deadline for service profile tables (SPT)

September

Circulation of draft/exclusion reports

August/September

Data Validation Working Group meetings

October

Final deadline for amendments or additional data

November

Circulation of Performance Reports

1/2 December 2016

Performance networks annual seminar / PN Awards

February 2017

Deadline for late data returns (Second batch)