Scrutiny Committee to consider national assessment of Council performance
Last updated | 12/04/2008
Perth & Kinross Council's Scrutiny Committee will hear next week (Wednesday 16 April 2008) how the Council has fared in Audit Scotland's assessment of local authority performance for the year 2006/2007.
Councillors will consider a report covering the assessment of Statutory Performance Indicators across all 32 Councils in Scotland. Audit Scotland placed the Council in the top ranking position in 2006/7 for qualified care staff in children's residential homes, daytime and community-based respite care for children, dealing with consumer complaints, and refuse collection.
The Council was also assessed as performing well in relation to respite care for older people, replenishing library stock for children, teenagers and adults, community use of learning centres and learning access points and council tax collection.
Some key areas for improvement in 2006/7 also showed progress. For example, the processing time for householder planning applications improved by 22%, and the number of home care hours provided for older people increased by 24%. The report highlights that the Council recognises the need to maintain its focus on continuous improvement in these key areas. This focus includes investment of £2.25m over the next three years for homecare for older people.
Improvement is still required on a number of areas including the time taken to process new benefit claims, assessment of homelessness cases, overnight respite care for children and use of libraries.
The recently introduced Single Outcome Agreements (SOAs) will change the type of data Councils and their partner organisations collect. This will move from information on processes to gathering data and evidence to support SOAs by showing the real impact services have on communities, e.g. community safety, attainment levels of primary and secondary school pupils, employment and training and average earnings. The Council is already making significant progress in this area and at the end of last year launched PKC Performs, which makes this information readily available to the public at www.pkc.gov.uk/performance.
Councillor Kathleen Baird, Scrutiny Committee Convener said: "This report from Audit Scotland should be seen in context - this represents where the Council was a year ago. A robust approach to managing performance is vital, and statutory performance indicators are useful in this process. It is important that the Council produces information about how it is performing in a balanced way by looking at strengths and areas for improvement. This report, along with PKC Performs, aims to do this. We look forward to considering the report at Committee."
