West Northants Cabinet focuses on strengthening performance tracking and transparency

At their meeting on Tuesday, 19 September, Cabinet members will consider proposals to add a series of new performance indicators – measures that chart how the Council is delivering upon its corporate priorities.  This forms part of a commitment to provide residents with even greater transparency on its service delivery, and more detail on the Council’s ongoing work to continuously improve and address critical challenges such as the increasing demand for services for vulnerable adults, children, and young people, as well as tackling homelessness.

An additional 27 new performance indicators are proposed for the Corporate Plan, with a range of the key drivers for these including:

• Adapting to regulatory changes – over the past 12 months, several government departments have put in place changes that not only impact how the Council is inspected, but have also altered national performance indicators and the way performance data is collected
• Providing more in-depth measures for adult social care, children’s and education services.  This will allow WNC to highlight areas of strength and ensure that they continue to perform well, whilst also ensuring greater transparency by identifying those areas requiring improvement and the plans in place to improve them.

The Council reports its performance on a quarterly basis from April each year, with Cabinet members set to receive an update on the progress the authority has made during its first quarter of the year.

Councillor Jonathan Nunn, Leader of the West Northamptonshire Council, said: “We are making further encouraging progress in improving our services this year. However, there are always challenges, and we are dedicated to addressing them head-on. Changing the way we report our performance is an essential step in our journey towards greater transparency. It demonstrates that we’re not afraid to make those challenges known, but also that we have robust plans in place for continuous improvement across our services.”

Key highlights of the Q1 progress update to Cabinet include the following:

• Leisure centres welcomed over 568,000 visitors, representing an increase of 24,000 in visitors compared to the same period last year
• Our focus on equipping and supporting young adults to continue to live in their own homes in their own communities means we have needed to place fewer adults in care homes than other East Midlands local authorities – exceeding our target at just 2.3 people per 100k population
• The current number of children on Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) supported by the Council is 3,391, an increase of 356 from the same point last year. This volume and increasing complexity provides an insight into some of the Council’s challenges in this area.
• A significant increase in both physical and virtual visitors to libraries with over 221,000 physical visitors
• Improved performance in processing planning applications with 87.5% of major planning applications processed within 13 weeks and 80.3% of non-major planning applications processed within eight weeks, against the national target of 70%.

A full report including key metrics and performance indicators is available on our website.

Cllr Nunn added: “We are pleased with the significant progress we’ve achieved this year following a successful second year of delivering services as highlighted in our annual report, although of course we acknowledge that there is still work to be done. The enhancement to how we report our performance not only increases openness to the information that residents can see, but also demonstrates the robust plans we have in place to continue our journey of improvement.”

Residents can find more information on past year’s achievements and the plans and aspirations for the current year in our annual report.