Productivity in Local Government

July 2024

1. How have you transformed the way you design and deliver services to make better use of resources

We are not the same Council we were five years ago, and we know the next five years will bring even more change. We welcomed an LGA Corporate Peer Challenge in January 2024 to help us confirm that our priorities are clear and relevant and ensure we are in the best shape possible for the challenges and opportunities the coming years will bring. This included a request that the Peer Team consider our approach to transformation (LGA Corporate Peer Challenge Feedback Report and Action Plan). Importantly, we demonstrated that we have a clear understanding of the serious financial position we find ourselves in, and despite that, we have the capacity to transform our service delivery and can continue to improve our city for all who live, work and study here.

Like all organisations, the Covid-19 pandemic changed us forever. We have embraced new working practices and new technology, and we are genuinely committed to building on this new flexibility to work in ever more agile ways – providing services when and how people need them. This new approach and our belief that ’the Council can no longer do it alone’ is part of our One Coventry approach. For example, a One Coventry Partnership of circa twenty organisations locally rooted in the city, provides strategic commitment, collective capacity and resource across the city to enable impactful delivery.

We have developed integrated community prototypes and partnerships rooted in and driven by place. We worked creatively with shared resources, developing and improving ideas informed by local feedback to make positive change. This work has informed the development of our Integrated Place Based Services programme, referenced later in this document.

The Council Plan (One Coventry Plan 2022-2030) was refreshed recently to reflect the emerging priorities for the city which includes increasing the economic prosperity of the city and region, improving outcomes and tackling inequalities within our communities, and tackling the causes and consequences of climate change.

We are developing and building on the strength of our city’s economy to deliver inclusive growth, supporting businesses to innovate, grow and scale up. We continue to invest in this area, with £130m committed to capital projects in 2023/24 and major developments employing 229 local people in 2022/23. Our city is changing as we continue to push our ambitions for net zero – with the first all-electric bus fleet, the highest number of electric vehicle charging points outside of London, a new railway station and exciting plans for a Very Light Rail offer. As a city that pioneered the automotive industry, we continue to see the opportunities inherent in the green industrial revolution, including our plans for a Gigapark, our innovative testing of autonomous vehicles on Coventry roads, and our development of a drone skyway.

Delivery of the One Coventry Plan is monitored through the Council’s performance management framework (comprehensive assessment of KPIs). Findings are published annually including areas where we are making good progress, areas where progress is not as expected, and areas where the Council needs to take further action.

Governance structures have recently been reviewed and new arrangements implemented to include a refreshed Leadership Board and three new Strategic Boards with a more explicit focus on delivering our One Coventry priorities and taking forward work to ensure we are as efficient and effective as possible:

  • The Future Cities Board brings together all we are doing to drive economic growth and champion the green agenda across the city. This will include areas such as regeneration, inward investment, green transport and business support.
  • The Transformation Board focuses on delivering new ways of working, including more use of data and digital delivery, and more integrated delivery of services in communities. This will help us to modernise service delivery and release the accompanying savings to help us meet the financial challenges ahead.
  • The Safeguarding and Performance Board focuses on how we are protecting and supporting children, young people, and adults across Coventry, ensuring our services are designed and delivered to meet the needs of all of our communities.

In 2024/25, we will deliver a Transformation Plan that will improve the focus and efficiency of service delivery, joining up services across the Council and with residents, to ensure we support those in our communities who need us most.

Through the delivery of this plan our primary objectives are to:

  • make better use of data and insight so we can understand more about our communities’ needs and work with communities to support the development of initiatives to reflect those;
  • increase our focus on preventative strategies, co-creating new approaches with the communities we serve; this will include approaches that could replace the need for existing Council services;
  • work even more collaboratively through our One Coventry approach, where all teams and partners will work seamlessly to deliver differently for residents.

The Transformation Plan sets out the key elements of our major change and improvement activity and how, collectively, this work will provide the foundations for a new operating model for the Council. Progress is reported via the Transformation Board.

A major transformation and efficiency programme for the Council is the development of our “One Coventry Delivery model”. This is focused on the need to provide the right support, in the right place and at the right time. We are working collaboratively with partners, making best use of our collective assets and resources through co-location and integration and focusing on earlier identification and prevention of long-term need, reducing demand and improving outcomes for residents and communities.

Our future operating model will ensure we are making best use of our internal and externally commissioned resources. A review of our internal resources is focusing on removing duplication and joining up provision across services as well as creating progression opportunities for our workforce. This includes a review of functions with similar responsibilities to determine a future operating model to potentially include virtual team creation and/or centralisation.

Developing an integrated approach to commissioning, procurement and contracting will establish clear oversight of organisational spend and how this is managed. We are developing a consistent approach, theming areas of spend with cross organisational impact, identifying efficiencies and delivery requirements and focusing on making best use of grant funded services to support organisational priorities.

We will take an innovative approach to commissioning and service provision and develop new delivery solutions. Prioritising our areas of highest spend including children’s, adults and housing services, to reduce reliance on traditional methods and drive down costs.

The Integrated Place Based Services programme builds on learning from developing Community Prototypes and focuses on a review of our physical assets and how we deliver services to meet community need, rationalising our property where appropriate, co-locating and integrating teams in localities. We will also review our advice provision to enable access to information, advice and support at the earliest opportunity. This work will see more co-location of services – building on existing provision in localities – protecting services by delivering differently.

Coventry Connects is introducing a new approach to the way we interact with residents. Focusing on an improved user experience across all channels of access and working with all sectors to progress the digital inclusion agenda (see response to Question 2 below).

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

As part of our One Coventry Transformation Plan, one of the primary initiatives is our Coventry Connects programme. Our ambition is to offer an improved user experience across all channels of access, based on digital first design principles, and informed by resident feedback. We will streamline and automate end-to-end processes to simplify the user journey and drive efficiencies. The programme will also capture data across all services, allowing us to understand demand, inform policy and future service design and at the same time providing a more cohesive offer to residents supporting earlier intervention. Where possible, we will publish data to support reduced FOI requests and increase the levels of transparency between the organisation and its service users.

The team will work with all sectors to progress the digital inclusion agenda #CovConnects, driving social inclusion initiatives prioritised through partner engagement and scaling solutions where feasible to provide a city-wide offer, reducing the barriers residents face accessing digital tools, technologies and services, and in turn support residents on their digital journeys in a way that is meaningful to them.

Recognising the crucial role that data can play in influencing, transforming and driving the city council and wider city we have developed a data skills academy leveraging the apprenticeship levy with the apprenticeship training provider Multiverse. The academy offers training (and qualifications) for colleagues covering data literacy through to data science. We have 42 colleagues on the first cohort of the programme and are planning a second cohort to launch in the Autumn of 2024. By increasing data skills across the organisation, we will able to make better use of data and for this to drive policy and decision making. As part of a focus on data we will be looking to make, where appropriate, as much data as possible “open” via our existing Open Data webpages

We often share data with other organisations such as the DWP and the NHS. This is incredibly important for service delivery across multiple service areas. Our approach to focussing on data quality, increasing data skills alongside an overall ambition to make better use of data means that we will look to, where appropriate and required, increase the amount of data we share with partners where there is a direct benefit to our overall service delivery.

As with most local government organisations we have a large mix of systems in use to support the services we provide. Some of our systems are modern and forward thinking, whilst some, are more out-dated. Our legacy systems tend to be in areas where there is not a strong choice in the supplier market. These systems are often problematic and costly to integrate with or pull data out of. Where we have this challenge, we work closely with suppliers to build the relevant routines and functionality to enable to us to work with the data from these systems in a way that supports our transformation plans – but this is not always possible and does slow our progress.

Some of these challenges with legacy systems have presented during some pilot and proof of concept activity we are undertaking with regards to Generative AI. We have run a pilot of Microsoft CoPilot as a “general” AI tool. This has demonstrated the potential for productivity increases in traditional administration activities such as minute taking. We are currently scoping out what a deployment of CoPilot need to look like to address this. Alongside this we have undertaken a pilot of a more specialist AI product in one of our professional practice frontline, high demand areas. This has demonstrated the potential for significant productivity increases within this use case. We are currently building a business case for a procurement activity for a specialist AI toolset in parallel to considering the strategic, ethical, data protection, legal and governance considerations that need to be addressed as part of any AI deployment.

3. Your plans to reduce wasteful spend within your organisation and systems

Officers and members are continually seeking to improve services and drive out waste. This flows from the Council’s constitution through formal governance and throughout operational management and processes, with ongoing scrutiny from finance and procurement officers. Whilst this is a continuing focus of the organisation, the emphasis increases during budget setting or to manage in year pressures using a star chamber approach, financial modelling of alternative options, member briefings and service management team based challenge.

This runs in parallel to ongoing monitoring of existing saving delivery, budgetary control processes and consideration and challenge as part of performance reporting at the Leadership Board.

Coventry is always seeking opportunities both as an individual authority or with wider regional councils to not just remove waste but to improve services at the same time. At a regional level we led work to create a state-of-the-art regional material recycling facility, both improving waste management and reducing cost to the council.

From an organisational perspective we have sought to identify opportunities to increase temporary accommodation for homeless families and individuals, and recognising the escalating costs of Children’s placements are part way through a residential strategy to expand inhouse Children’s homes in response to the broken placement market.

We have also recently entered into a first of its kind contract with a Strategic Energy Partner in the city to initiate, develop and deliver innovative strategies, business models and plans that will drive the city towards net zero.

Coventry is a very diverse city and whilst we don’t specifically capture spend on EDI related activity, we consider it important that the council both represents the communities it serves as well and is able to provide equal opportunity for all to access services in the city.

As an organisation we are always conscious of the cost of both agency staff as well as consultants, however we recognise where we do not have the skills available, or we require short term specialist support which we cannot recruit to it is necessary to use consultants. Equally, we operate in a very challenging recruitment market particularly when seeking to recruit for example social care staff and whilst our preferred option is always to recruit to a post, agency staff are used to deliver essential services. We always seek opportunities to “grow our own” offering training opportunities, apprenticeships and through our Social Work academy however these options are not able to meet all our needs in the current market. A recruitment panel is in place which reviews all recruitment decisions and requests for agency to ensure all alternatives are sought prior to using more expensive options.

Officers and Members of the City Council engage fully with the Mayoral Combined Authority and in partnership have secured significant funding and investment on both a regional and local level. Capital funding secured through two Devolution Deals has seen significant investment in city centre regeneration projects as well as strategic transport schemes.

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

  • Local government funding
    • Single-year settlements
    • Real-terms funding cuts
    • Late announcement of finance settlements
    • Fragmented funding for local authorities
    • Competitive bidding for funding pots
    • Delays in the Fair Funding Review
    • Inadequate funding provided with the devolution of powers
    • Council tax referendum limits
    • Fixed price grants that don’t allow for inflationary impacts
  • Government reporting
    • Extensive monitoring required by Government departments for some funding through reporting, Boards and administration
    • Guidance on Government Policy/Schemes often appearing months after announcements, this delays delivery and results in time wasted guessing impacts/approach
    • Multiple ways in which Government collect monitoring information, i.e. via Microsoft Forms for UKSPF, via Delta for most other things, via Excel spreadsheet for Levelling Up Funds
    • Producing productivity plans
  • Council activity
    • Limits on Council's ability to change some discounts for Council Tax, leading to time spent on regular checks of eligibility
    • The burdens placed on authorities by excessive Freedom of Information requests and Subject Access Requests
    • The need to continue producing paper Council Tax bills, Planning notices etc. rather than just online versions
  • Social care
    • Uncertainty over the future of the adult social care precept
    • Build money that is only ever short term, for social care, and passported through ICB, of requirements agreement with ICB direct into long term local government budgets. Discharge Grant and BCF funding being two prime examples
    • Inadequate funding and resource for preventative measures combined with the lack of a solid evidence base on which preventative measures actually lead to prevention
    • Workforce shortages and difficulty recruiting and replacing workers
    • Shortage of foster carers in children's social care resulting in costly residential provision
    • Different ICT systems across different health organisations and social care – integrating information on the patient/service user is a significant barrier to effective integration
    • Cost of residential placement for looked after children
    • Establish a ‘care wage’ to support attracting and retaining skilled workers, and resource local government to implement this
  • Housing
    • LHA rates increased in 2024 after a four year freeze but this increase is for one year only – this means that the gap between LHA and the cost of privately rented accommodation leaves many families unable to afford housing, become homeless and are temporarily housed for an indefinite period at cost to local authorities
    • The continued existence of ‘no fault evictions’ results in families and individuals being made homeless for no substantive reason while placing the cost of temporary housing on the local authorities
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