Author: John Brace

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Council Excellence Overview and Scrutiny Committee – 31/1/2011 Part 6 – Strategic Change Programme update (continued)

Mr Green answered that he was very confident. Regarding the status across all project, the project manager had signed off as had the Chief Officer. In addition so had the Director of Finance and the SCP office. He said analysts had gone through, so had accountants and it had been signed off by all parties. … Continue reading “Council Excellence Overview and Scrutiny Committee – 31/1/2011 Part 6 – Strategic Change Programme update (continued)”

Mr Green answered that he was very confident. Regarding the status across all project, the project manager had signed off as had the Chief Officer. In addition so had the Director of Finance and the SCP office. He said analysts had gone through, so had accountants and it had been signed off by all parties. The only caveat was being realistic and honest. He said there will be ups and downs. For example the £200,000 PACSPE saving might be £210,000 or £240,000. There was a reason behind the cautious approach. If brought forward some projects would bring added savings which might add up to more than £10.75 million.

Cllr Phil Davies referred to appendix C (the DASS transformation programme highlighting the two largest savings which totalled £7 million. He asked for the confidence that these two Social Services savings will be met.

Mr. Green replied that it was the same as before. Projects had been signed off and they had made sure there was no double counting as a result of the EVR. One reason why the market management project could fail would be if suppliers didn’t accept the new price.

Cllr Green said from he had years of experience in being told they would do things and then were not able to. The previous track record had been quite considerable amounts of savings. The work required discipline and analysts. The Director of Finance had spoken with DASS regarding how realistic the figures are. For example there were no amounts for assistive technology. Asking questions realised benefits over and above the savings that were originally claimed. Where things change they were keeping a record as to why and what so it could be tracked back.

Street level crime website up and running

Street level crime website up and running

Street level crime website up and running

                               

As mentioned yesterday there were initial problems with the new “crime map website”. However the problems have since been fixed and you can go to the website to see what types of crimes have been reported in your neighbourhood (for the month of December 2010) and the location.

Clearly there’s probably nothing new for people who have lived in an area for a while, although I did notice a link between locations of local off licences and crimes recorded. It does however show the Community Mobile Police Station is in the right place, although I would guess some of the crimes reported in the area around it are to do with the crowds that visit the strip of pubs and clubs in Birkenhead (again possibly alcohol related). It is an improvement over the current way of reporting statistics and gives a more visual feel to reported crimes.

Hopefully Inspector McGregor (or one of his sergeants) will be at the Area Forum tonight to answer any crime-related queries.

38 Degrees – Save Our Forests campaign

I have been contacted by a resident about the Save Our Forests campaign which is regarding the government’s plans regarding the Forestry Commission. Locally Lib Dem councillors recently voted to increase the size of the Bidston Hill site of biological importance (which is a material consideration when deciding planning applications). Also Norman Street and Upper Brassey Street have had fifty trees planted (which makes both streets look more pleasant). The current position of the Lib Dems (and the coalition government is outlined below).

The government wants to resolve the current conflict that exists within the Forestry Commission as it’s a supplier of timber and regulator of that industry. The forests will be protected for future generations, although commercial interests may get forest land this will be in the form of a lease with strict protections built in rather than a direct sale of the land.

Public access and biodiversity will be protected and there will be safeguards to protect the public interest. First refusal will be given to community bodies and civil society organisations. Land owners will still need a licence for felling more than five cubic metres of growing trees. 70% of England’s woodland is already in private hands, the Forestry Commission controls 18%. The overall aim is to allow those who live closer to the forests greater powers to protect them.

When in government Labour sold over 25,000 acres of woodland with barely any protection. However the Lib Dem/Conservative government will put in place safeguards to protect public access, the natural environment and the interests of local communities.

The government is also planning to plant one million trees in urban and suburban areas in the next four years, which will be the first government tree planting campaign since the 1970s. There is a consultation process and the Coalition Government is trying to reassure the public that they will protect our forests better than ever before.

Millions jam street-level crime map website

Millions jam street-level crime map website

                                          

The government often come under criticism for large amounts of money spent on websites that hardly anyone uses. However the new website for looking at crime statistics on a more local basis has ground to a grinding halt due to demand.

I run a website that has thousands of visitors in an average day. It has no problem keeping up with that kind of load and peaks in demand, despite many of the pages having graphics and being written in PHP. Despite the government spending £300,000 on the website, the main problem seems to be scalability of the database.

Clearly whoever designed the website for them wasn’t thinking of scalability, but instead of doing things cheaply rather than designing it to be robust when lots of of people visited it.

If they’d just designed it in a more logical way, where you choose your area from a drop down list by force area, or like the election maps website there wouldn’t be such problems as it seems the web server’s CPU can’t cope with all the requests. This is one of the downsides to a dynamic rather than static site and sometimes it’s best to run CPU-intensive tools on a separate server and sub domain.

Clearly there have been comments in the IT industry before that (especially under the previous Labour government) that persuading ministers to fork over large sums of money for IT projects and websites was “like taking candy from children”.

Although it is now correctly identifying my force area as Merseyside, no maps (it seems to be using an API and Google Maps) are appearing. Local residents can however view crime statistics for Bidston & St. James on Merseyside Police’s website.

I hope it’ll get sorted out soon as it’s the kind of thing that residents of Bidston & St. James are interested in knowing.

Council Excellence Overview and Scrutiny Committee – 31/1/2011 Part 5 – Strategic Change Programme update (continued)

Mr. Green continued by saying the easy answer was no but he was not saying no in the future. They had built on 6-9 months of work and could move people around and possibly bring in specialists although they had very good people within the authority. When they supported people’s ideas to improve the service they tended to blossom and catch onto the idea.

Cllr Gilchrist asked about Equality Impact Assessment and referred to the work of Jacqueline Cross. He referred to 11.2 and asked although they were not required for the program as a whole whether they were conducted for each individual project and were held in a database?

Mr. Green said the simple answer was yes, this was held by the Strategic Change Programme Office. Peter Crawford’s software and paperwork was also held by individual project managers and Chief Officers who had copies as well. Cllr Green referred to Harry Jones and the case of minutes of a meeting that hadn’t happened yet being published. He said there would be no minutes before Friday’s meeting.

Cllr Davies thanked Mr. Green for the report and said it was helpful. He said he looked forward to the councillor’s seminar in March. He asked whether Mr. Green was confident that £10.7 million of savings would be achieved?