Agenda item

6.1  The Chair introduced his presentation on Key Performance Indicators, explaining that it was important that the sub-committee had discussions based upon facts rather than on anecdotal information.

6.2  He thanked staff from the Environment and Housing Department for the information they had provided to make the presentation possible.

6.3  The Chair referred to the handout on key performance indicators (attached to the minutes for ease of reference), and explained that the indicators selected are those where there is a discrepancy between the performance indicated by the information received by councillors and the data. He explained each indicator in turn and what the data shown on the graphs is telling the Council about performance.

6.4  According to the indicators the council was performing well or excellently against each perfomance indicator selected.

6.5  The Chair reminded the sub-committee of a previous scrutiny which was done last year on housing performance. This scrutiny had a clear draft recommendation that the performance indicators should be looked at in more detail, which forms an important part of the rationale for the current scrutiny project.

6.6  The sub-committee discussed the significant propotion of members complaints and enquiries that are related to housing repairs, and the percentage of all repairs that this formed. They also the disucssed the need to retain balance between the issues raised in casework, which usually are predominantly focused on the complainant, and the facts around the repairs themselves and how the information on these is recorded.

6.7  The Chair informed the sub-committee of some work done on behalf of the Environment and Housing Department by consultants to give an idea of what the outcome of a formal assessment of housing repairs would be if one were done now. The results were not favourable, again highlighting that there are improvements needed that the scrutiny process can help to identify.

6.8  The sub-committee disucssed how the various statistics are collected and the fact that many are self-reported by the council’s contractors on a system known as i-casework. There are complications in the data collection and interpretation because of:

-  Length of time within which a repair is expected to be completed is variable according to priority. In addition, if communal repairs are recorded in the same system as individual repairs this can skew the statisitcs.

-  Satfisfaction call-backs are done by the call-centre but there is a need for greater clarity over the scripts used – for example the experience of the Tenant’s call centre working party listening to example calls was quite different to what was recorded in the satisfaction survey.

-  Coverage- whether the indicators are capturing the whole of the experience which is emerging through the casework.

-  I-casework statistics in themselves will not be wholly reliable as not all councillors are using this system.

-  There is a lack of clarity around the recording processes for queries and repairs that are re-raised numerous times because they are unresolved.

-  The fact that not all repairs and regeneration work goes through the call centre and this may be adding to the sense in the community of repairs remaining uncompleted becasue they are being handled within a different system.

6.9  It was agreed that there is a need for verification of the satisfaction statistics, and the sub-committee recognised work has begun on a separate satisfaction survey, not run by the call-centre or contractors to look into this issue further. Ithe sub-committee agreed that it would be helpful for them assist this by giving some thought to a more pro-active approach to test the hypotheses around the performance indicators. Any survey work done by the sub-committee would need to have a rigorous methodology which meet market research society standards.

6.10  The sub-committee discussed equalities issues around the call centre, in particular language, especially in the context of the call-back surveys. It was confirmed by the chair that this issue was one of the concerns highlighted in the consultants report.

RESOLVED

1)  That the sub-committee should spend some time listening to a selection of calls to the customer call centre to esatablish how the call handling process works

2)  The scripts which the call centre are using to inform their responses to customers should be made available to the sub-committee to aid this process.

3)  The sub-committee should meet with the Tenant’s Council call centre working party to share information and intelligence about the issues around KPIs