Performance and Establishment

Written by Cllr Jean Fooks and published in Cabinet on Tue 23rd Jun 2009

Performance not up to scratch

At the Cabinet meeting on June 23rd, Cllr Jean Fooks as the shadow cabinet member for performance raised three particular areas where the Conservative administration is failing to meet its targets.

First, on the number of young people between 16 and 18 years old who are not in education, employment or training, the NEET group. Although the economic downturn is of course having an effect, it is particularly important that we as a county council do all we can to get our young people into education, employment or training. Some young people have opted for more education, but there are far too many out there doing nothing, with inevitable consequences that they may drift into undesirable activities and fail to realize their own potential in terms of employment and fulfilling occupation.

Liberal Democrats are more than willing to work with the administration to try to reduce the number of NEETs.

Second, stability of placement for our looked-after children. The target was for 70 to 85% of our children to have stable placements. The performance was only 67.8%. It is hard to over-emphasise the need for our looked-after children to remain in the same placement as long as possible, as it affects their emotional stability, their school and their social contacts. The Chair of the Children-in-Care council, Sarah Lawrence, addressed the cabinet on just this issue -saying that having the same people involved , the same school , etc, was the most important thing that would help them.

One way to improve performance here is to have more foster carers to enable the right carer in the right place to be found. There has been slow progress in producing a new leaflet - said to be because it has to be given new branding! We were promised a new recruitment leaflet months ago and it has still not appeared which does not bode well for our being able to recruit the much-needed extra foster carers. Having too few is leading to more children being placed in expensive independent foster care.

Third, the target to reduce CO2 emissions is not going to be met. Some data is unavailable, staff do not appear to reducing their mileage as expected and indeed required. This is very disappointing as climate change is with us and we must take the lead in reducing carbon emissions.

In this as in the other areas, the Liberal Democrats are very willing to work with the administration to achieve our targets.

Establishment Figures

Jean also spoke on the Establishment figures. There are some increases in staffing in the policy unit, and an alarming number of vacancies in care support for both children and older people, and traffic engineers. We were told that these figures were not accurate and that better reporting would happen soon- it is important that we do get accurate figures on which to comment. LibDems will be watching these figures very carefully in future to see if the vacancies in frontline services get filled and there is not an unnecessary growth in other areas such as policy and communications.