Agenda item

Report of the Chief Executive (enclosed)

Councillor Alistair Bradley (Executive Leader and Member for Economic Development and Partnerships) will attend the meeting.

The Panel received a report of the Chief Executive that provided contextual information and proposed initial questions to promote discussions regarding the performance of the Public Service Reform Board.

The Executive Leader, Councillor Alistair Bradley attended the meeting to present the report and answer questions of the Panel.

Councillor Bradley explained that in April 2014, the Chorley Partnership had changed to become the Chorley Public Service Reform Board. This was to focus the partnership on a collaborative approach to transforming public services. Whilst being ambitious, this has enabled the Board to move from a traditional ‘local strategic partnership’ approach and structure, to one that has real focus and objective on improving services for the residents of Chorley by bringing together leaders from across public services that will consider how they can make changes within their organisations to improve quality and access of services.

The Board is chaired by Councillor Alistair Bradley and members of the board include, Chorley Council, Lancashire County Council, Lancashire Fire and Rescue Services, Lancashire Constabulary, Lancashire Teaching Hospital, Chorley and South Ribble CCG, Lancashire Care NHS Trust, VCFS Network, Live Well Champion, Age UK Lancashire, Department for Work and Pensions, Runshaw College and a business representative from Porter Lancastrian.

The Board operates to a terms of reference with its key objective being to work together to ensure high quality public services with the best outcomes and value for residents and provide better coordinated and integrated services which are intelligence led. This objective would be delivered through an annual work plan and Councillor Bradley provided Members with an update on the work to date.

The Board has been successful in securing funding from five main partners including this council and other funding streams to enable them to appoint a programme office and access to external funding opportunities to pump prime transformation work. This includes a jointly funded officer, who is based at Chorley Council; the programme office is currently funded from 1 October 2014 to 1 October 2015 and is tasked with the delivery of the work plan.

The work plan 2014/15 exists as a series of three enabling workstreams (data sharing, assets and commissioning) it was thought that if the Board could deliver some agreements and improvements in these areas, it would lay the foundations for future integration and joint working. Two were rated as green and one amber.

The aim of the intelligence led services and sharing intelligence work stream was to overcome the barriers to data sharing and better use of the intelligence that each organisation holds about vulnerable people to target support were it is most needed. This work was nearing completion and included a baseline of data held by each partner and the establishment of a working group to look at the barriers to sharing and develop an Information Data Sharing Agreement. Plans were in place to start sharing data and using intelligence across partners to support vulnerable and high end service users from March onwards.

As part of the integrating assets work stream, work had been completed on the development of a coordinated list of assets across partners in Chorley to recommend integrating assets by co-location of services, transfer or reduction in assets to make savings of 10% across the borough. A number of recommendations had been progressed that worked towards the integration of assets by co-location of services, transfer or reduction in assets.

The Leader gave examples of how partners could contribute assets such as the use of buildings or allocation of staff instead of just contributing funding to facilitate different ways of working, this included use of the Fire Station at Washington Lane.

Under the joint commissioning work stream, although slowest to get going, work was now underway to consider current commissioning processes with an ultimate aim to develop a locality based commissioning hub which would enable partners to jointly commission services needed within Chorley, to ensure non-duplication of services and economies of scale. Most of the partners had different footprints so this work was difficult and progressing slowly.

The development of a Chorley Wellbeing and Resilience system was currently underway that would bring together services that could promote and support wellbeing. The Board had successfully bid for a £1.23m Transformation Challenge Award along with Lancashire County Council and Rossendale Council. This was due to begin in April 2015 and a Programme Board was now in place that would report into the Chorley Public Service Reform Board.

Performance of the priorities is monitored by quarterly highlight reports that are prepared for each of the workstreams. These contain information on progress made, as well as identifying any issues or risks. A performance dashboard would also be implemented from April, which would give additional information that the Board could use to monitor a range of key indicators for Chorley that would also be presented alongside the highlight reports. It will focus on the three themes of Start Well, Live Well and Age Well. It was envisaged that now that some of the workstreams are starting to produce tangible outputs, they could be monitored through this process to ensure that they are producing measurable outcomes in the future.

An away day of the Board had taken place in February 2015 to review the progress made so far and to develop a draft work plan for 2015/16 which would be taken to the Board for approval in April.

The Board had move away from an Independent Chair a number of years ago, in the last restructure of partnership working, as it was less business focussed, although there was a representative from the private sector on the Board. The Council had implemented a new dedicated business forum that would run alongside the Public Services Reform Board until it was considered appropriate to combine them as it was the view from Central Government for the Public Sector to be operated on a more commercial basis.

The business forum enabled representatives from both business and education to work together on issues such as employment growth and targeted the right skill sets for schools and colleges’ that were needed in the borough.

It was also explained that Councillor Khan shadowed the Leader on the Public Services Reform Board so that there was a link to the Health and Wellbeing Board. Each of the nine Health and Wellbeing Board’s in Lancashire have a different approach and the County Council is not keen to standardise them, believing that they should respond dependent to local need.

The Panel were keen to ensure that the outcomes from the Board were communicated to Elected Members to ensure that they were kept abreast of any changes. It was acknowledged that the Council were looking to new ways of collaboratively working with its partners and that a new regime would help to achieve this. In order to facilitate this, it was extremely important that Members were kept fully informed so that they too could adapt to the new role and champion different ways of working.

The Chair thanked the Executive Leader for attending the meeting.