To consider a report that presents the Performance and Risk dashboards.

The Committee noted a report that presented May’s performance and risk dashboards and highlight areas for review, challenge and possible investigation.  Members noted areas of good performance such as the total recorded crime having reduced on the previous year and the proportion of stage 1 complaints dealt with on time has increased to 83%.  Members welcomed the news and the Senior Leadership Teams aspiration for 100% rate of response, however they challenged whether enquiries from Councillors that would ordinarily be directed straight to an officer should be directed through the information compliance team in order for these to be logged and tracked.  The Jo Beer, Policy and Performance Review Manager advised she would consider the approach and feedback to Members.

Members proceeded to undertake a ‘deep dive’ into the following performance indicators:

·         Breastfeeding prevalence at 6-8 weeks after birth;

·         Smoking status at the time of delivery

·         Smoking prevalence at age 15 – regular smokers; and

·         Protecting all children and giving them the best start in life

Sue Matthews, Children and Young People Lead, Ian Tyson, Assistant Finance and Commission Officer and Doug Haines, Epidemiologist from Public Health Commissioning were present to respond to Members questions. 

Doug informed Members that Torbay’s performance for the breastfeeding and smoking indicators were compared to national figures.  Members challenged whether it was realistic for Torbay to ever achieve the national figures and whether a comparison against other authorities with similar levels of deprivation would be of greater use to judge Torbay’s performance.

Members queried the level of control the Council had over the Public Health indicators, when a number of the indicators were services that were delivered by outside agencies.  Doug advised that where the service was a commissioned service, Public Health had direct control of targets through the contract process.  Where the indicator was the responsibility of another agency, Public Health could only use their influence to deliver the target set by the performance indicator.

Members requested Doug to consider whether there were better data comparators that would provide a more useful picture of Torbay’s performance.

Members went on to consider the ‘protecting all children and giving them the best start in life’, in particular referrals to children’s safeguarding service.  Russell Knight, Group Manager, advised that the quarterly reported figures for this particular indicator had to be changed following the discovery of an error with the report generated via the Paris software.  It was only after recent analysis that the error was discovered hence the correction to the published report.  The error has been corrected and processes have been reconfigured, the generated figures will be forwarded to service managers to examine before being submitted to the Policy and Performance Team.

Members challenged the derivation of the targets.  Members were informed that some of the targets were national aspirational figures with others being based upon local historical data.  Members noted that a new set of dashboards were to be presented to the Children’s Improvement Board which will use comparators such as Department for Education statistical neighbours, where information locally is used, a key to aid understanding can be provided as some of the targets are open to misinterpretation and once seized upon can be difficult to counteract.

Members questioned whether some of the targets would make more sense if they were expressed as an actual number rather than a percentage as percentage for some indicators could be affected by other variables that would impact greatly a figure when expressed as a percentage.

Having concluded their ‘deep dive’, Members were informed that following the end of the financial year, officers would be reviewing the information contained in the dashboards with some of the indicators changing in order to provide a balanced view of performance.