City of Edinburgh Council: The audit of Best Value and community planning – podcast transcript

Anne:  This is Anne McCubbin here to talk with Martin Walker about our Best Value and community planning audit of Edinburgh Council.  Martin, how’s the council doing?

Martin:  The City of Edinburgh Council displays many of the features of a Best Value local authority.  It has a clear vision, direction and accountability and effective arrangements for scrutiny.  There are many examples of good service delivery and improvements are being made.  The council has a sound corporate arrangement in place and should be able to secure continuous improvement across all services.  However, it needs to work on getting better outcomes for the people of Edinburgh, particularly in refuse collection, street cleanliness and repair and in the process of planning applications.  The report also recognises the context within which the council operates being a capital city presents both challenges and opportunities for them and it works both to the city’s advantage but also places pressures on services.  The council also has to manage significant contrasts within the city between, for example, the more affluent areas and those which are more deprived.

Anne:  What’s particularly good about the council’s corporate arrangements?

Martin:  The council’s corporate and service planning arrangements are well established and they’ve got good links to the city’s context, vision and the community plan.  The council’s also made considerable investment in developing systems and business processes to support modernisation and continuous improvement.  This includes sound business management and performance management frameworks and also good arrangements for managing information and communication technology, community engagement and also procurement.  The council has a wide-ranging improvement agenda which aims to provide a stronger and more consistent customer focussed culture across all aspects of its operations.  So a key focus so far has been to improve the alignment of services with the main customer groups.  So, for example, it has services that cover health and social care, children and families, city development and also services for communities.  With these sound corporate arrangements in place the council should be in a good position to secure continuous improvement in the delivery of its services.  They provide good solid foundations to support the service delivery.  

Anne: So if the council has good sound corporate arrangements why are there still problems?

Martin:  There are some areas that still need to improve.  It sometimes takes a little while for corporate arrangements to fully bed in and then flow through to frontline services.  And also continuous improvement by definition is never complete, even things that are going well can still be improved on further.

Anne:  What’s the problem with refuse collection and street cleanliness?  Do you have more details of this?

Martin:  The council recognises how important street cleanliness is to the image of the city and to its residents so they’ve invested additional resources in this area in recent years and they’ve also launched a number of initiatives.  In a recent survey, results showed that the residents’ satisfaction with street cleaning is actually improving.  Despite this, though, the council’s cleanliness index of 66 is slightly below the national minimum standard which is set at 67 and also on 2005/06 the rate of improvement didn’t keep pace with other Scottish councils.  The refuse collection service has suffered from high costs and high levels of sickness absence and also high levels of complaints so the council brought in some external management support to help it make improvements and the satisfaction levels have risen since the summer of 2005 though they still remain below that which they were at in autumn 2004.  The council also needs to be able to demonstrate the competitiveness of the service and it needs to set a timetable for delivering on its own commitment to market test the service.  

Anne: What does the council need to do to address the issues raised in this report?

Martin:  The council has a good level of self-awareness and it knows where improvements are needed and its already working to make these improvements.  The first stage will be for the council to update its improvement plan and then deliver on that plan.  

Anne: Thanks very much, Martin.