As part of the Local Government Finance Settlement in January 2024, the former Secretary of State Michael Gove announced that local authorities would be required to produce productivity plans.
This announcement was followed on 16th April 2024 by a letter from the former Minister for Local Government to local authority chief executives detailing what was expected in these plans. The pre-election period meant that the first available opportunity to agree LB Hounslow’s Productivity Plan was at Cabinet on 16th July.
How you have transformed the way you design and deliver services to make better use of resources
How has the organisation changed in recent years to become more productive? You may wish to consider what you have done around staffing, structures, operating models, etc. The population we serve has increased by 19% since 2011. Our core spending has reduced by 13% since 2010/11 and our settlement funding has shrunk by more than 70%. LB Hounslow has been doing more with less for over a decade and, as assessed by the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies, we are the local authority with the largest gap between local need and central government funding. Demography and funding notwithstanding, we have a long track record of delivering for local people, as evidenced by our LGC Council of the Year status in 2021.
How do you measure productivity in your organisation? Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness and, as part of our well-embedded performance regime, we encourage services to consider volumes, efficiency and impact.
What changes have you made to improve services and what effects have those had? Within the confines of a four-page response, there is insufficient space to detail the breadth of improvements to services as we continually strive to deliver value for money for businesses and residents.
What are your current plans to do with transformation over the next two years and how will you measure the effects of those changes? Our portfolio of transformation programmes as set out in our Delivery Plan has been in place since 2022. Our detailed plans, progress in delivery and achievement of outcomes and benefits are reported regularly to elected Members.
Looking ahead, which service has greatest potential for savings if further productivity gains can be found. What do you estimate these savings to be? Not only do we review all Council services annually through our service planning process, but we also respond to tactical opportunities as well. Most of our spending supports the most vulnerable in the borough and, if we want to deliver savings to the public purse, we need to think about systems rather than services and see stronger collaboration in local places between central government and the wider public sector. We would welcome discussions to scope system- wide efficiencies.
What role could capital spending play in transforming existing services or unlocking new opportunities? If you have already used capital spending to boost growth or improve services, we would be interested in learning more. We are already developing business cases to transform services and improve lives. Our programme of housebuilding and environmental retrofitting is one of many examples of capital investment being used to unlock wider economic, social, and environmental benefits.
What preventative approaches you have undertaken and can the value of these be quantified? We can point to a number of preventative approaches: our work with Supporting Families; adapting properties to help people live in their own home for longer; and our Safety Valve work keeping children in mainstream education. Among local initiatives, our preventative community solutions work delivers more fiscal benefit than it costs to deliver, and markedly more social value. Our public health work on vaccine take-up reduces ill- health and wider health system costs. We already use robust methodologies to gauge the efficacy of our activity and continue to improve our approach to evaluation to allow us to quantify the benefits of preventative work.
Are there wider locally-led reforms that could help deliver high quality public services and improve the sustainability and resilience of your local authority? Our collective experience of the pandemic shows what can be achieved when central government listens to local areas and allows local authorities to lead, demonstrating our community knowledge and leadership. We would welcome opportunities to provide system leadership in a variety of areas, including, but not limited to, health integration, skills and employability, and asylum and migration responses. To achieve the best outcomes for local residents would, however, require appropriate and sustainable funding levels and a fundamental rewiring of the central-local relationship.
How you plan to take advantage of technology and make better use of data to improve decision making, service design and use of resources
What are your existing plans to improve the quality of the data you collect; how do you use it and how do you make it available to residents? As per our Digital Strategy, we continue to integrate systems, improve information governance, and emphasise the importance of data quality. Within the limitations of appropriate data governance, we make data available to anyone who might be interested: our open data platform and Data Hub are available to residents.
Are there particular barriers from legacy systems? Yes – as platforms change and demands alter, legacy systems can pose challenges. With finite funds it is not possible to upgrade every system when technology advances and contracts can also limit our ability to move from one system to another. Hounslow is not unique in this respect and, like other authorities, we have planned refresh programmes to limit the detrimental impact of legacy systems.
How often do you share data with other organisations, and do you find this useful? Daily. Appropriate sharing of data with partners beyond the council, complying with GDPR regulations and information governance best practice, is fundamental to modern public administration.
Are there opportunities to use new technology to improve workflows and systems, such as predictive analytics and AI? Absolutely and, as per our Digital Strategy, we are already adopting new technology where it can provide better value for money or improve the services we provide to local people.
Your plans to reduce wasteful spend within your organisation and systems
How do you approach identifying and reducing waste in the organisation? How do you monitor progress? Our medium-term financial strategy (MTFS) plans across a four-year horizon, seeking financial balance across this time period. However, given we only have clarity on central government funding one-year at a time and with the unpredictable demand on our services and its financial impact, the Council has faced a challenging, changing budget gap over recent years. LB Hounslow takes a proactive approach to its financial planning, continually refreshing the MTFS and plan throughout the year. Some certainty over longer-term funding would enable the Council to plan with more certainty into the medium term. The process for closing the financial gap annually requires leadership and management to review services, identifying areas to reduce cost.
An annual service planning process combined with quarterly finance, performance, and risk meetings and quarterly portfolio review meetings led by elected Members ensure there is senior grip on council activities and, were it to exist, wasteful practices would be cut out.
Where have you followed invest to save and what was the result? We take a corporate approach to invest to save activity delivered through our transformation programmes. Over the current period (2022 – 26) we have projected £8.6m of savings across the medium-term. Both investment and the profile of expected benefits realisation are kept under regular review. Through our portfolio, programme and project governance we are continually looking for additional invest to save opportunities, utilising both revenue and capital spend. As these opportunities are identified projects are initiated, funding allocated and progressed to deliver additional savings and benefits for residents.
How much time and money do you spend on staff EDI training (internal and external), networks, and other programmes? How many EDI champions do you have as an organisation? How do you log and report the time and money spent on EDI related activity? How do you assess the effectiveness of that training? We expect every colleague in the Council to provide quality public services to our community. Hounslow is home to 300,000 people. It is self-evident that our residents have diverse experiences and backgrounds, and our ability to serve citizens well is contingent upon our understanding them well. To that end, we view our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion as fundamental to our work as public servants.
The delivery of our internal and external EDI service is provided by 3.5FTE. We do not log and report EDI activity any more than we would log and report other individual elements of our work. We have five equality network groups, each of which is chaired by a volunteer and activity related to the network is supported as part of their existing work commitments. The frequency of network meetings varies from group to group. We do not have EDI champions. In 2023/24 we spent £30,000 on internal EDI training – 0.004% of our overall budget. External training is delivered by our existing FTE.
What percentage of total staff budget is spent on a) agency and b) consultants? How do you assess value for money on agency and consultancy spend and what are your plans to reduce use / costs? How many of those consultants or agency staff have been in place for over a year? Consultant and agency spend in 2023/24 totalled 2% and 7.7% of our total non-schools’ staff budget respectively. Whilst the Institute for Government’s 2024 Whitehall Monitor highlighted central government’s over-reliance on consultants, this isn’t a line of expenditure that features heavily in our budgets. In 2023/24, we employed 174 agency staff for more than a year – almost two-thirds of whom worked in social care.
There is clearly a place for consultancy and agency services in an organisation employing 2,480 employees and managing a revenue budget in excess of £711m. We draw on consultants when we need a specific skillset for a specific project with defined timelines and agreed outputs. We use external expertise appropriately and will continue to draw on this resource when it would not be economically sensible to maintain in-house capacity.
What governance structures do you use to ensure accountability of spend? Our constitution sets out our legal governance structures, including Cabinet’s responsibilities and our scheme of delegations.
Do you share office functions with other councils and if so, how useful do you find this? We work across London and our sub-region depending on the service or issue. Examples of shared functions include internal audit, legal services, public health expertise, and risk management, as well as well-developed integrated health commissioning with health partners.
If you share external training costs with neighbouring councils, how do you factor out duplications of service between your council and your upper-tier council (if you have one)? Not applicable.
If you have one, what is your assessment and experience of working with an elected mayor, combined authority, or devolution deal? As a London borough, we have worked effectively with the Mayor of London for almost a quarter of a century.
What proportion of your paybill is spend on trade union facility time? The proportion of our paybill (not including schools) spent on trade union facility time for 2022/23 (the latest figure available at the time of writing) was 0.02%.
The barriers preventing progress that the Government can help to reduce or remove
What are the barriers preventing you from improving productivity further within your organisation? Insufficient funding. Local government in England lacks the financial levers and autonomy our OECD peers use to drive growth and improve outcomes for local people.
We are currently outside any Spending Review period and we only receive Local Government Finance Settlements on a one-year basis. To plan effectively, deliver transformation, and improve residents’ lives, we need more certainty about our medium- to long-term funding levels.
What are the barriers preventing you from improving services further? Local government is not central government’s delivery arm – a point long-recognised by other advanced states and core to resetting good governance and good government across the country. We want to work across the public sector to improve lives but collaboration between tiers of government is crucial if we want to address long-term barriers to growth and wellbeing and would welcome any and all efforts to work better together.
Are these barriers consistent across multiple services? Yes.
What would you need to improve those barriers? What do you need from government, the market or elsewhere. Given the work of central government takes place in local areas, we would welcome the opportunity to understand Whitehall’s own drivers and, indeed, suggest local-central collaboration is the best way to ensure public funds are spent well. As it stands, many of central government’s activities are opaque and the Government’s repeated unwillingness to publish Outcome Delivery Plans does nothing to highlight what matters to Whitehall or how local government might help central government deliver for local people.
