Productivity plan - Wakefield Council

About our place

Wakefield District has a population of 357,729 – an increase of +9.8% since 2011, higher than the overall change for England and Wales. In the last 20 years, the District has become a more ethnically diverse place, and English is not the main language spoken for over 18,900 residents.

Wakefield is the 54th most deprived district in England (out of 317 districts) and average earnings are lower than regional and national rates.

Wakefield is well connected, sitting on the intersection of the M1 and M62, and has rail links on the East Coast mainline plus TransPennine services via Leeds. As a result, the District has high levels of employment and growth in the logistics sector.

About our council

Wakefield Council’s Corporate Plan details its strategic priorities for 2024 – 2026, based on resident feedback and intelligence data. The Plan also identifies the long- term challenges and opportunities for our district. One of the key priorities of the plan is fulfilling our Change and Improvement Programme – ‘Our Future Council’.

At the heart of this programme is the Council’s response to the challenging funding environment in local government, and a commitment to making sure that decisions made are responsible, sustainable and fair. This means planning for the future and delivering plans and services as efficiently as possible. Every part of the Council will be involved in driving planned improvement in order to achieve our vision.

Council-wide, Wakefield has sought to achieve improvement savings and increased income generation of £21.4m in the 2024/25 financial year.

As a key member of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, Wakefield works with our four neighbouring local authorities and the Combined Authority to deliver the five joint missions within the West Yorkshire Plan and work towards further devolution.

Transforming the way services are designed and delivered

Our Corporate Plan shows how we are continuously driving improvement and targeting efficiency savings. A key driver of this is the ‘Our Future Council’ programme, which ensures accountability and delivery in our efforts to transform services, improve outcomes, and achieve our financial targets in the Medium-Term Financial Strategy. The programme drives efficiency savings, reduces revenue spending, generates capital receipts and will increase income for the Council.

Wakefield Council has worked hard over many years to find sustainable, innovative solutions to the financial challenges that we have faced. Our funding from central government has reduced dramatically (in real-terms) whilst at the same time the demands on our high cost, statutory services have increased.

Many early transformation projects are in the delivery stage, and new systems and contracts for services are already resulting in reduced costs and greater efficiencies, or are on track to do so.

Some examples include:

· £4.79m through staffing restructures and deletion of vacant posts

· £0.28m from a review of cover budgets and agency support in Street Scene

· £0.2m from an efficiency review of commissioning in Public Health

The recent transformation of our Children and Young People’s Service has enabled us to implement industry leading changes to service delivery and outcomes. Two significant examples of this are within our children’s homes – where well directed investment has enabled the development of a more effective 2-bedded model of in- house mainstream children’s homes – and our early help offer – where a network of family and youth hubs has been established, bringing together a team of professionals from early help, education, and health to identify the best way to support families at the earliest stage.

Discovery work is underway on new projects such as modernising our street scene, reviewing our homelessness strategy, and home to school transport provision.

As well as the focus on transformation, new governance arrangements to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our capital programme are now in place.

Taking advantage of technology and making better use of data to improve decision making, service design and use of resources

As part of the ‘Our Future Council’ programme, the Council is committed to using technology to make services and information more accessible, improving service user and wider residents’ satisfaction. Information, digital services and communications will be available in a format which is easily understood and available to service users and residents. New technology will enable greater multidisciplinary and multifunction working approaches, and enhanced collaboration between partners across Wakefield District and wider, leading to more and better joined up services for residents and businesses.

Workforce efficiency

The Council has implemented a Modern Workplace Programme to ensure that the workforce has access to robust, fit-for-purpose technology, supporting our staff and partners to work efficiently, effectively and collaboratively to meet the needs of customers, now and into the future. Continuous user training and awareness raising is delivered to improve the digital skills across the Council workforce to make best use of this technology transformation.

Managing our organisational performance through data

The Council has a robust performance management framework which sets out the key strategic themes, plans, indicators, targets, and standards that it is held accountable for. It helps the Council set benchmarks, understand and measure its performance, enabling better adaptation to future challenges and demands.

Our ‘Vital Signs’ dataset is monitored monthly by senior officers and Members, and acts as an early warning system, flagging critical issues and demands and helping understand causes and solutions for these. The dataset is a critical part of the assurance process, and enables the Council to use its resources effectively and efficiently as part of the wider performance framework.

Power BI reporting in our Children and Young People (CYP) Service

There have been significant improvements in operational performance reporting for our CYP Service over the last 2 years with the introduction of daily Power BI reports. The reports enable Managers to see where there is drift and delay and where performance is below target, enabling corrective action to be taken. The reporting model is now being rolled out to the Education and Inclusion team.

Evidence led decision making and policy formulation

Our Public Health team uses data and intelligence to inform commissioning, ensuring the services provided meet the needs of residents and communities.

Wakefield was one of 11 partnerships awarded funding to establish a Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC). The HDRC is a five-year evidence- based research programme to improve health and tackle inequalities, using research to shape the way local health services are delivered, enabling the Council and its partners to deliver the right health services to the right people in a cost-effective way.

The Council is also an active participant in the Yorkshire and Humber Policy Engagement and Research Network (Y-PERN), which brings together researchers and policy makers to support evidence-led, collaborative, place-based policy making.

Building district wide digital infrastructure for all

We have made significant progress in building the digital infrastructure of the District and improving the take-up of our Digital Services. By leveraging our investment in the Council’s network we have attracted significant additional investment from telecommunication companies to deliver the fastest possible broadband connections across most of the District to help people to get online. We are also supporting those residents that are digitally excluded to ensure they are able to take advantage of the opportunities that being online provides.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)

The Council recognises the important role that our workforce plays and that EDI is everyone’s responsibility. We have reviewed our People Strategy setting out our approach to recruitment to ensure our workforce reflects the communities it serves and continue to support self-organised groups reflecting particular protected characteristics.

Within our Resources directorate we have two members of staff who, alongside wider responsibilities, are focused on developing and coordinating relevant policy and supporting workforce development, ensuring the Council fulfils its statutory legal requirements with regard to equality. They also ensure that adverse impacts are identified and mitigated against through any proposed transformation activity or cuts.

Collecting EDI data helps us understand the needs of the population we serve, enabling service provision to be targeted cost effectively, reducing inefficiencies and relieving pressures on other service providers such as our partners within the NHS.

Wider initiatives

A new education case management system was implemented in October 2023, with new processes and functionality to drive efficiency. Portals for parents and partners will transform how teams provide services and improve accessibility to service users.

We continued to make improvements to enhance the customer experience of the Council website, focusing on the customer journey and ensuring information is easy to understand and accessible to everyone. We have also used data led analytics and customer feedback to information these adaption and enhancements.

Improvements made to the council’s online self-service portal, MyAccount, brings it in line with our new design standards and provides a more joined up experience. We continue to develop our online presence to make more Council services available digitally, meaning our customers can access Council services at a time and location that is convenient to them.

Balancing Our Budget

A Wakefield Council Internal Audit report from April 2024 on Achievement of Budget Savings 2023/24 concluded that Wakefield Council has ‘Good Assurance’ in its control environment and compliance assurance.

Our Medium-Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) sets out the challenges that the Council faces beyond March 2024. There remains considerable uncertainty which creates further risks, alongside the general impact from rising costs and increasing demands for services, in particular adults and children’s social care.

In response to this, the Council has undertaken the following mitigating actions:

· An identification of further efficiency / savings proposals

· Identifying budget opportunities via budget clinics

· Further work on the profiling of the capital programme

· Innovation and transformation proposals to reduce future demand and costs

· Other work around asset reviews, fees and charges, general cross cutting efficiency targets, review of growth / pressure proposals

· To update the Corporate Plan for 2024-26

Underpinning these actions, and as a base point for identifying future strategic savings, the MTFS focuses on the following themes:

· Organisational efficiency

· Procurement

· Charging for services

· Maximising external funding opportunities

· Exploiting technology and performance data

· Alternative service delivery models

· Prioritisation

Wakefield Council is on track to deliver £20.4m in budget savings over 2024/25. Latest performance against identified savings, which includes rollout of LED street lighting, implementing a rehab and recovery model to reduce number of external placements in Adult Social Care, and efficiencies achieved through shared mayoral/council elections, can be found here: Appendix 3 - savings tracker.xlsx (wakefield.gov.uk).

The Council have tightened approval limits for internal purchasing, leading to greater control of spend, and work is ongoing to reduce reliance on agency staff.

Barriers that Government can help reduce or remove

Longer term planning and funding

Programmes work better where they can be developed with long-term sustainability in mind, and can be hampered where further confirmed funding for programmes comes late, especially where this affects employment of staff. Funding and finance settlements should be announced and confirmed earlier to help financial planning.

The introduction of multi-year, needs-led, flexible funding settlements, with an end to competitive bidding and “cliff edge” funding (where services become ‘at risk’ as continuation of funding is left unconfirmed) is essential.

Public sector reform

We would welcome a commitment to public sector reform, and to play a part in developing government thinking around this.

There is strong appetite amongst public, private and third sector partners in Wakefield to develop an outcome focused district plan, bringing combined resources together at place level. Government support is needed to enable an integrated strategic partnership model that can target support to achieve better outcomes.

Social care

Delays in adult social care reforms and implementing recommendations from the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care is blocking progress across the social care system.

Government reporting

The extensive monitoring required for some areas of funding could be reconsidered, which can be a huge barrier, and the collection of monitoring information should be rationalised, using less different systems and templates.

Regionalised relationships

It has been noted that often those areas of business where there are regionalised relationships with Government or arms length bodies work better, and that, where these have been pared back, the relationship can suffer.

Central government’s understanding of challenges in local areas could also be strengthened, including the identification of opportunities to support local authorities with problems that they can’t solve at a local level.

Net zero

There is a need to align Net Zero policy and funding opportunities into a coherent programme and funding strategy.

How we will publish data and update on progress

Through mechanisms already in place at Wakefield, performance and progress will continue to be reported against the objectives in our Corporate Plan every six months to Cabinet and to the Overview and Scrutiny Management Board.

The Council will also report any new initiatives or actions taken forward in response to changing issues or opportunities nationally, regionally or within our district.

Relevant regular monitoring information will also be published via the following mechanisms:

· Future Council activity reporting.

· Budget monitoring information.

· EDI annual report.

· Annual publication of State of the District report.

· Audit and governance reporting.

Through the Office for Local Government, an online Data Explorer tool will provide the public with information in one place on how their local authority is performing and delivering. While the measures monitored via this tool will not completely align with the Corporate Plan, it will be a complimentary tool for those who live, work and do business in the Wakefield district which will demonstrate how money is being spent and how this impacts outcomes and delivery of key services.

Wakefield Council’s Corporate Plan will be reviewed and updated again by Autumn 2026, in collaboration with residents and partners.

Conclusion

Wakefield Council is a progressive and forward-thinking council, with a balanced budget, and a great track record in regeneration and continuous improvement. Our Future Council programme demonstrates our ongoing commitment to transform and deliver services in an efficient and effective way, making better use of resources to achieve better outcomes for our residents, communities and businesses.

We have established and developing partnerships that allow us to achieve more than we could on our own, and our appetite to do more in this space is clear. We are a problem seeking and problem-solving Council, acting as a convenor of our places, with a keen desire to work with Government to pilot innovative approaches and remove barriers that exist in the current system – for the benefit of all.