Agenda item

A Mortimer presented the report and asked Committee for any questions.

Cllr Adeleke queried the Sunrealm Contract where they have 24 hour emergency service, the contract says if there is a problem they will make it safe within 24 hours, so what happens to the accommodation, will the tenants be without.  A Mortimer confirmed they would respond within the 24 hour period and where there is a need there is a more rapid response time, if they are unable to repair the boiler, they leave electric heaters, so they would not be without heating, if possible if there is a facility to use the emersion heater, there will be hot water.  Cllr Adeleke asked if there could be an additional line to show that something will be provided in those circumstances.

Cllr Adeleke asked about the DBC share of 50%, is this a typing error, on Q3 you have 97,456 and 50% is 19,000.  A Mortimer confirmed there is a typo and will need to confirm on that figure.

Action: A Mortimer to provide corrected figure.

[After meeting note]

The typo was a missing digit as the gain for Q3 should have read £197,409.56

Cllr Adeleke asked about apprentices for Sunrealm and Osborne and whether they were local.  A Mortimer advised that both contractors try to extend it to the local environment to bring on the apprentices.  With Osborne figures you see the make up of staffing, how much is local, which is primarily secured through local job fairs and schools.

Cllr England mentioned that he believed that Osborne and Sunrealm have a better performance level than the previous contractors, so that’s a vote of confidence as long as it continues to be the case.  Cllr England asked about the 50/50 split when they beat a target cost, are we obliged to spend our 50% with them and recycle that back into what they get paid.  F Williamson confirmed we have the freedom to spend it elsewhere, in the spirit of the contract, the intention was that we would reinvest but because of the timelag for the audits to take place, we are working to a quarter in arrears and therefore especially at year end that money is then reinvested in the following year.  If there are higher priorities around other areas for investment such as compliance it may be that it is invested elsewhere and not within the Osborne contract.

Cllr England asked if we still used an independent cost consultant or do we just use the same one.  A Mortimer said that for this exercise we just used the one independent cost consultant but as part of the five year review we did use more than one.

Cllr England queried the KSI’s and if they were challenging they probably wouldn’t be achieved so are they challenging enough or are they set in such a way that we do expect them to achieve them.  A Mortimer replied that Osborne also have KPI’s underpinning the KSI’s which are overarching into the contract and the KPI’s sit behind them.  They seem to be easily achieved but not necessarily if the KPI’s behind them, where we feel they haven’t been challenging enough, these have formed part of the five year review and they are being amended now.  Even with the KSI’s they have not all been achieved, in the last year they have but the previous year there was some issues and there was some further work that had to be done before the fourth year was awarded.  F Williamson added that there is a review of the fifth year and we’ve undertaken some benchmarking, from that the new KSI’s will have specific deliverables against them, so that by the nature of it being a Strategic indicator it’s open to some interpretation and we want to sure that in the remaining period we have explicit deliverables and also although they have earnt five years, if they fail to perform in year six they can lose year 10.  Whilst they’ve managed a five year bank of additional years in order to maintain a level of performance that can be measured and also have an incentive attached to it, they can lose years as well.

Cllr England mentioned that following discussions with residents about when they want to contact the Police and they can’t get through on the telephone and the Police solution to that is to use a webchat and he wondered whether we had a webchat channel as it might be a good tool.  A Mortimer said that at present there isn’t a webchat but it’s something we could look at as to whether it’s something people would pick up on or not, from personal experience when someone has a problem they don’t want to webchat, they will either phone or if they are happy they will send an email.  Cllr Griffiths said in that the industry people are moving away from webchat, if it’s being done properly there should be a person behind it, most of the webchats now pick up key words and it just fires you back an automatic message.  If you have a live person sitting there it’s very cost intensive and they tend to also be a phone operator, so if they are web-chatting they are not on the phone, so then you have the problem that they can’t get anyone on the phone.