Appendix One: Wyre Forest District Council Productivity Plan

How we have transformed the way we design and deliver services to make better use of resources

How we plan to take advantage of technology and make better use of data to improve decision making, service design and use of resources

Our plans to avoid wasteful spend within our organisation and systems

The barriers preventing progress that the Government can help to reduce or remove

This plan responds to the request from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) to publish a productivity plan by 18 July 2024.

How we have transformed the way we design and deliver services to make better use of resources

Since 2010, we have successfully implemented a wide range of changes that have reduced costs and increased income:

• A range of shared services with other councils in Worcestershire. For example, since 2010, the six district councils have discharged their licensing and most environmental health functions via Worcestershire Regulatory Services. This has saved about 50% of the expenditure compared to the previous service delivery model and provides much greater resilience;
• Rationalisation of our offices with the creation of Wyre Forest House in 2012. Further reductions in our footprint have generated significant rents and IT service charges (over £460,000/year, gross);
• Rationalisation of leisure centres, reducing from two main sites to one new building in 2016. The operator pays a significant management fee to Wyre Forest District Council (WFDC) (which meets the cost of borrowing for the new building) instead of the council having to pay the operator;
• We have an ambitious localism programme, including the creation of a town council for Kidderminster in 2015. Many local assets and services have been transferred to town and parish councils or other bodies, including Kidderminster town hall, Stourport civic centre and hall, town centre toilets in the three towns, a car park in one of our villages and four parks in Bewdley and Kidderminster. Further transfers are under consideration. Localism has ensured that valued local assets are put on a sustainable footing, often at zero ongoing cost to WFDC, instead of WFDC having to close them;
• A range of internal efficiencies. These are most prominent in but not limited to revenues, benefits and customer services, where annual savings of £174,000 were made in 2012 followed by additional recurrent savings of £214,000 in 2014 and £250,000 in 2022. The amount being collected in locally administered taxes has grown significantly across that period;
• Increased external income, including from commercial activities, from £5 million in 2017-18 to £8.1 million in 2022-23 in cash terms but has fallen to £7.4 million in 2023-24. While income in 2023-24 remains above that achieved in 2019-20 on a cash basis (ignoring the time value of money), it has fallen when inflation is factored in.

The growth of 491 dwellings between 2023-24 and the current financial year has not resulted in more staff dealing with waste collection, administering council tax or working in customer services, for example. Simply because of this, productivity will have improved in these services by just over 1%. (We would procure an additional vehicle and employ an additional crew only when housing growth is so significant that it cannot be serviced by adding to existing rounds and workloads.) Likewise, we have not taken on more facilities or ICT staff despite some recent significant additions to our property portfolio that will be leased out to tenants when refurbishment works are complete.

Our future plans are based on our corporate plan and medium term financial strategy, which were shaped by public consultation, and include:

• further cost savings through transferring assets/services to local bodies, starting with Bewdley Leisure Centre this year and expected to focus on transfer of more parks and other green spaces to town councils across the three years of the Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS);
• targets for growing net commercial and property income by £160,000 in 2024-25 rising to £300,000 in 2026-27;
• cost avoidance measures by collaborating with other councils, for example on service delivery and procurement of vehicles for food waste collection. A current example is the joint procurement of insurance services, with five other councils, which WFDC has led – this is the third time that we have procured insurance services jointly. The joint procurement exercise is estimated to have saved participating councils 5%-7.5% or about £100,000/year compared to making their own arrangements, as well as savings in administration from having a single procurement process.

Despite these steps, our current medium term financial strategic projects a funding gap of £2.1 million (15%) of net revenue expenditure in 2026-27.

How we plan to take advantage of technology and make better use of data to improve decision making, service design and use of resources

WFDC is exploring further use of technology and Artificial Intelligence to promote self-service and reduce demand for work that is done by staff but this often requires up front (capital) investment. Developments that might save costs cannot take priority against the over-riding need continually to invest in the council’s cyber security.

WFDC has spent considerable time looking at options for deploying Artificial Intelligence chatbot technology to provide a level of customer responsiveness 24 hours a day and to reduce demand on staff during working hours. The cost to implement a solution ranged from £10,000/year for the most basic option to a specialist bot for local government with a first-year cost of £115,000 and yearly licensing cost of £33,000 thereafter. The conclusion is that none of these options meets the Council’s needs in terms of functionality and cost at the present time.

While capital investment can be funded by prudential borrowing if the ongoing revenue savings justify it, this is an area where there is the opportunity for Government to procure development of IT packages and solutions that all councils could/must use, which would be more cost effective than councils each making their own arrangements, having to undertake their own procurement etc.

Organisations such as SOCITM have highlighted the need for simplifying, standardising and sharing IT systems; and we welcome initiatives taken by councils such as Swindon Borough Council which develops and shares for free applications that it has developed. Good practice examples in central government include the National Parking Platform and the portal for electoral registration which has been expanded to applying for postal and proxy votes and voter authority certificates. Perhaps the Government should procure common software that councils could/must use to support digitisation of the planning function (a DLUHC ambition), administration of elections or route optimisation (to support Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs' (DEFRA) waste reforms).

We also ask for a more cost effective approach to Government funding changes to ICT arising from Government initiatives. For example, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) works directly with software suppliers to establish the costs before providing the funding to councils and the software companies invoice councils with the agreed amount. However that involves unnecessary bureaucracy when the Government could make a single payment directly to each software company.

Our plans to avoid wasteful spend within our organisation and systems

WFDC does not indulge in wasteful spend.

We use consultants almost exclusively for delivering specialist support that the Council does not have among its staff. Smaller councils such as WFDC do not have teams of architects, urban designers, development appraisers, quantity surveyors, fund managers, barristers and the like on our books. In areas such as waste collection and grounds maintenance, we use agency staff to cope with fluctuations in staffing caused by sickness etc. or to respond to seasonal demand (for example in the peak growing season). We also use agency staff in a number of specialised areas where we have been unable to recruit/retain staff. Spend on agency staff in quarter 4 of 2023-24 was £128,000 or less than 5% of the pay bill and that expenditure was within the budget for pay.

We have a number of policies on equality, diversity and inclusion, as any responsible and reasonable employer would do that wishes to comply with equality legislation. We provide proportionate support and training for staff in implementing and complying with that legislation.  Expenditure on trade union facility time is minimal: £2,600 in 2022-23, representing 0.02% of the pay bill.

The barriers preventing progress that the Government can help to reduce or remove

Much wasteful spend is incurred as a result of Government and legislative requirements. We have space to cite only a few examples here.

The most significant is the absence of multi-year settlements for local government that provide realistically for growth in spending year-on-year (but without that growth being dependent solely on increasing council tax). No public organisation can efficiently plan for its future when it is kept guessing from year to year what the financial envelope will be.

The Government could also introduce reforms that would reduce bureaucracy for central and/or local government or allow council services to be put on a more sustainable footing:

1. the operation of numerous specific grant schemes, each with its own criteria and reporting requirements. In housing and homelessness alone, DELTA end-of-year returns had to be completed in April for three separate grants. Separately, disabled facilities grants require one DELTA return and five returns for the purposes of the Better Care Fund. The Government should commit to a radical programme to transfer specific grants that are provided every year into the general settlement, particularly those that are distributed by formula which can be distributed on their existing formulae;
2. end routing of funding for disabled facilities grants via the Better Care Fund: adding a middleman simply creates bureaucracy. There is no reason why the funding cannot be included in the general settlement for housing authorities – the duty to provide Disabled Facilities Grants (DFG) will not have changed and how much councils spend can easily be captured in an annual data return;
3. work with the Financial Reporting Council significantly to simplify the information that has to be included in accounts, and reduce the amount of information that has to be published under the transparency code;
4. remove requirements always to provide documents in writing in respect of council tax, business rates and benefits – where councils have email addresses or other electronic means of providing the information to individuals, they should be used;
5. allow revenues and benefits teams to use all council and Government data to which they have access in order to reduce fraud and to pursue effective recovery. A specific example is to change legislation to permit use of HMRC employer data to support recovery from individuals who are in employment;
6. revisit the decision that councils should collect the building safety levy. This involves unnecessary and inefficient duplication when there is an existing mechanism to collect Residential Property Developer Tax from developers;
7. despite the recent review, scrap Homes England’s role in funding social housing: allocate capital funding for social housing by formula to housing authorities;
8. bring forward legislation to remove the numerous statutory requirements to place notices in newspapers when councils can include all information in an easily findable public notices section of their website and use free, social media channels to reach far more people than ever look at a newspaper;
9. consider how the Government can support capacity in local government to sustain services. An example: the Local Government Association (LGA) has identified environmental health officers as one of the 5 most difficult to recruit areas in local government, which means that often costly agency staff must be used to fill gaps. The qualification route depends on a university degree which makes apprenticeships more difficult to fund. After the pandemic, one of the asks was for financial support to train the next generation of regulatory staff. A bid for £14 million went to DLUHC Ministers in the last spending review but it was not supported. This needs revisiting – and similar measures should be considered in other specialist areas such as planning and elections;
10. review activities of regulatory bodies such as the Food Standards Agency that seek “to the letter” compliance with their statutory codes. This may require review of the codes so that they become less onerous and reflect what councils are realistically able to deliver, given their financial situation;
11. more generally, commit to a rolling programme of review of regulations and statutory guidance affecting local government. This would allow simplification of processes that councils are required to or are encouraged to follow, removing unnecessary steps and facilitating lower cost service delivery; and also ensure that any expectations in respect of service standards remain realistic and are aligned with available resources.