Productivity plan

This productivity plan has been produced in response to a request from the Minister for Local Government. It sets out some of the key actions South Gloucestershire Council has taken to improve its productivity and manage a challenging funding situation driven by inflationary costs, rising demand for services and a substantial reduction in financial support from central government.

Context

South Gloucestershire is a semi-rural district that runs from the fringes of Bristol to the borders of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. It has a highly successful local economy with major employers such as Airbus, Rolls Royce, Friends Provident and the Ministry of Defence all contributing to high levels of productivity and relatively low levels of deprivation.

While the district is on average very successful, it has concentrated pockets of deprivation and key inequality metrics are going in the wrong direction. For instance, the proportion of children living in low income families has risen by three points to 12.3% since 2016 and uptake of free school meals is rising. Poor public transport represents a significant barrier to economic opportunity and access to public services. West of England Combined Authority data has shown that large parts of the district have very poor connectivity to services.

Demand for our services continues to rise as our population ages, housing costs increase and increasing numbers of children with special needs or disability require council support. Approaches to the council for homelessness advice have risen by nearly 500 a year since 2016 from 313 to 917 (SGC Quarterly Housing Performance Monitoring Report) and the number of children in schools with SEN has grown from 14% of the school age population (5,551) to 17.1% (7,078) during the same period.

Yet in common with nearly all councils our settlement funding from central government has fallen dramatically – in our case by 75% since 2010/11 – which has resulted, inter alia, in a 22% reduction in headcount. The council recently undertook a Corporate Peer Challenge which praised us for being proactive, focused, confident and collaborative. Against this backdrop we have taken a number of key steps to improve our productivity.

Resource planning and performance management

The council manages its finances through a resource planning approach. Three rounds of panels are held across the summer and autumn to identify potential savings and turn these into fully scoped plans for delivery. The process is supported by both the finance department and the Transformation and Efficiency team, which provides a PMO function for all savings and ensures clear reporting to the One Council Portfolio Board, Strategic Leadership Team (SLT) and members. Savings are reviewed twice a year and, in some cases, revised or rebased where it has become clear that a particular project will not deliver the anticipated benefits.

This process, while resource intensive, has been critical to delivering the council’s target of £40.3m in savings over the course of the current MTFP. The Corporate Peer Challenge said that:

Resource Allocation Panels are particularly impactful and a notable good practice that the peer team feel the wider sector could benefit from. The annual process is now well embedded and was pivotal in establishing the savings programme, whilst ensuring corporate ownership and visibility of both the challenges and the solutions.

The council recently introduced a new four-year corporate plan which sets out our goals to respond to the climate and nature emergencies, tackle inequality, support children and young people to thrive, and support wellbeing and independence. There is a fifth, underpinning, goal of building better places. These goals are owned by our administration but are also the result of in-depth community engagement.

A new performance framework has been created to ensure our spending is clearly linked to delivering these results. Every service has been asked to prepare a service plan showing how its work will help to deliver the goals and this will be reviewed every six months by SLT and Cabinet, alongside financial information and budget decision making processes.

The council is committed to community engagement so that we make wise spending decisions. Our Community Conversations initiative has already engaged well over 1,000 people in face-to-face events and online surveys to help them understand the choices facing the council and to seek their views on how we can best implement necessary changes. We applied this approach to the 24/25 budget engagement process and will do so again this year.

We believe these processes provide a robust framework to ensure the council drives out wasteful spend and focuses its resources on meeting its widely shared goals for the residents of South Gloucestershire, in addition to meeting our statutory responsibilities.

Invest to save

The council has taken forward a range of invest-to-save projects. A notable current example is the Fit for the Future Programme, which will introduce a new ERP system and allow for automation and self-service in key financial and HR business systems. This is expected to enable substantial efficiency benefits in 25/26.

Other examples of invest to save activity include:

Adult Social Care: implementing an improved model of reablement to reduce long term needs prior to a funded package of support, supporting adults to lead independent and full lives, through the introduction and use of new technologies.

Children’s Social Care: improving outcomes for children and relative costs by reducing reliance on residential placements. A new Therapeutic Foster Care Pathway has been introduced to support children and young people with complex needs. Family link workers have been introduced to act as a first point of contact for agencies to enable early help.

Children’s and Adults Commissioning Transformation: we have actively shaped the local care provider market to secure fairer prices while securing a broader offer for residents and improving quality and outcomes.

Waste: the end of our PFI contract means we are able to invest in a new service and financial model to control costs, reduce carbon emissions and continue to improve recycling performance.

The council has also invested significantly in improving the prosperity of our local economy. This includes playing an active role in the West of England Combined Authority. The district is home to highly innovative business activity in areas as diverse as fusion and the internet of things. The council has played a key role in establishing the Bristol and Bath Science Park which is now home to the High Value Manufacturing Catapult.

The council operates around 70 operational properties. These generate around £8m a year in rental income and a new estates strategy is being developed to explore the scope to increase this. Two floors of our main office in Yate are currently available for commercial rent, one of which is already taken.

EDI

The council has both a goal in its corporate plan and an active strategy to tackle inequalities. This includes work to increase economic opportunity, improve access to public services, create a wider range of housing choices and ensure people get the help they are entitled to, for instance by accessing the right benefits and taking up free school meals.

This work is supported by 1.5 FTE of staff and an e-module on equality and diversity delivered during the council’s induction process. We regard this as essential to deliver our council plan, to ensure that our decision-making process has due regard to the most vulnerable and to minimise our legal risk of challenge through the Public Sector Equality Duty. In the long term our approach to EDI will help reduce demand for our services.

Digital, data and customer service

As part of its new corporate plan, the council is currently developing a range of new initiatives designed to further improve productivity. We have undertaken a discovery project to validate these themes and provide key lines of inquiry that will be developed into savings projects. Likely projects include:

Customer experience strategy: automating our simpler, routine enquiries to allow us to focus on our vulnerable customers that need more support. Improving our web offer so residents can resolve more of their own queries and applying AI to a range of customer service processes with the aim of improving the service for residents and reducing costs.

Data transformation: the council has an opportunity to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the way it collates, interrogates, visualises and uses data, allowing for improved predictive and analytics, better targeted early intervention and integrated support for people with complex and/or multiple needs. This will allow for cost avoidance and savings in our key demand-led services.

Applying automation and AI: in common with many councils, we are exploring the potential for automation and AI to remove repetitive transactional work and/or speed up processes such as case reviews in adult social care and customer contact, providing a triage service which will allow the council to increase the number of review and ensure more people are receiving an appropriate level of support.

All of these programmes aim to use investments in technology to improve the productivity of our staff, enabling them to focus on more complex work that adds more value to the business.

Barriers preventing progress

The council’s challenging financial position limits the leadership capacity, the ability to hire and retain talented staff and the capital available to drive more ambitious approaches to productivity. The lack of adequate funding, the unpredictability of single year settlements and the complexity of competitive bidding arrangements are all barriers to achieving further productivity.