Agenda and minutes

Apologies were received from County Councillors Geoff Driver, Tim Ashton and Mark Perks.

Members are asked to consider any Pecuniary Interests they may have to disclose to the meeting in relation to matters under consideration on the Agenda.

None disclosed.

To be confirmed and signed by the Chair.

Resolved: The minutes of the meeting held on 3 July 2012 were agreed as correct.

Resolved: The Cabinet Committee on Performance Improvement noted the addition of County Councillor Mrs Susie Charles to the Membership.

Michael Walder introduced the Quarterly Corporate Performance Monitoring Improvement – Corporate Scorecard report.  Michael explained that the report shows targets for four indicators that have not met their first quarter targets but are forecast to hit their year-end targets.  The four targets concern:  Two targets for Help Direct, one for Major Investments and one for repairs to Carriageway and Footway Potholes,

Help Direct

Tony Pounder, Head of Commissioning for East Lancashire, Adult and Community Services presented the Help Direct Recovery Plan.  Currently Help Direct has a Year End Target to make 38,000 contacts.  The target for quarter one was 9,500 and the current performance for quarter one is 8,017.  The second year end target for Help Direct is to deal with 52,000 issues with a quarter one target of 13,000 and a current performance for quarter one figure of 10,541.

Tony explained that the transfer of Help Direct staff to the Customer Service Centre had some impact on the performance results and that the transfer arrangements were on track to complete in October 2012 which will bring stability in the teams and will see a more robust link between the Customer Service Centre and Help Direct and this will see an increased volume of calls coming through Help Direct.

The Help Direct leaflet is now in production and 1,000 copies per district will be distributed, which will enable Help Direct to step up their outreach promotion of the service again.

A communications and marketing approach has been agreed based on the learning from the pilot campaigns in Accrington and in St Anne's earlier this year, which will maximise the promotion and awareness-raising of the service amongst our partners, stakeholders and frontline staff;

Some unused contingency funds will be utilised for the Help Direct providers to "bid" for additional capacity to support the service following the transfer of the access arrangements and also assist with coping with the increased complexity of caseloads.

Help Direct is playing a bigger role in supporting those individuals who have lost services following Fair Access to Care Services (FACS) review, or have refused services following the increase in charges.  An exercise is currently being undertaken to contact these individuals to ensure that their situations are stable and to proactively offer the Help Direct service to them.  This will be repeated on a regular basis.

In responding to questions from the Committee Tony advised an exercise to obtain local information will be undertaken in the next quarter and that a further report will be presented to the Committee once the results of the second quarter are known.

Major Investments

Richard Bennett, Business Growth and Integration, Lancashire County Council presented the recovery plan for the Major Investments Performance Indicator.  Richard explained that the year end target is to make 10 major investments in excess of £50,000 from the Rosebud Loan Fund to key business sectors.  The current performance indicates that one qualifying loan was made in quarter one against a planned target of two.  It was noted that  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5.

Caroline Bradley, Management Graduate Trainee and Tony Moreton, Assistant Director for Sustainable Transport presented the findings of the Customer Experience Project for Online Bus Information usage.

The purpose of the project was to find out if bus service information via the Lancashire County Council (LCC) online bus information website is:

·  Easily accessible

·  Easily understandable

·  Easily useable and

·  Can be used to make a journey between two places in Lancashire

Thirteen mystery shoppers were asked to plan a specified journey and record their findings based on one of three scenarios:

·  Scenario 1 required searching for a specified bus journey using the LCC website.

·  Scenario 2 required searching for a specified bus journey via the internet without the method being specified.

·  Scenario 3 required searching for a specified journey via the LCC website and then carrying out the journey.

Key Findings

Those who accessed online bus information through the Lancashire County Council (LCC) website found it accessible.

Some issues were identified with the presentation and navigating the online bus information website.

Although the Traveline journey planner was found to be useful a number of issues were identified.

Caroline reported that the feedback was positive in general but a number of actions have been undertaken to improve the service as a result of the project, including:

·  Revising A-Z links on website so easier to access pages.

·  Comments regarding Traveline journey planner have been looked into. They have gone back to the regional partnership to investigate how fares could be dealt with on the site.

·  Project has fed into the Business Enquiry and development work that OCL are undertaking on behalf of Sustainable Transport for the Buses web pages. This has led to a ‘campaign page’ being developed on the LCC website front page that now links directly to Bus Services.

Resolved: The Cabinet Committee on Performance Improvement thanked Caroline and Tony for their presentation and noted the positive work undertaken to make improvements to the Online Bus Information provided by Lancashire County Council.

An item of Urgent Business may only be considered under this heading where, by reason of special circumstances to be recorded in the minutes, the Chairman of the meeting is of the opinion that the item should be considered at the meeting as a matter of urgency.  Wherever possible, the Chief Executive should be given advance warning of any Members' intention to raise a matter under this heading.

None noted.

The next meeting of the Cabinet Committee will be held on 12 October 2012 at 2.00 pm in Cabinet Room B, County Hall, Preston

It was noted that the next meeting of the Cabinet Committee will be held on 12 October 2012 at 2.00pm in Cabinet Room B, County Hall, Preston.