Productivity plan
Introduction
The borough of Great Yarmouth is a diverse coastal area, focused around two urban centres - Great Yarmouth and Gorleston and surrounded by a rural hinterland of small villages represented by 21 parishes stretching from Winterton in the north to Hopton in the south. The borough sits on the edge of the Norfolk Broads, approximately 20 miles east of Norwich. It is a holiday destination for millions of visitors, a place to call home for our communities and the centre of England's offshore energy sector. As a Council and place leader, it has a shared ambition for the Borough and the people it represents.
It is also the 32nd most income-deprived out of 316 local authorities in England and 21 of our 61 neighbourhoods are amongst the most income-deprived in England and only 2 are in the least income-deprived. These unique characteristics alongside wider local government funding pressures makes delivering services challenging.
The Productivity Plan for Great Yarmouth Borough Council is supported by a suite of documents including:
The following addresses the four questions posed by the Minister for Local Government in the letter shared with Local Authority Chief Executives in April 2024.
Transforming the design and delivery of services to make better use of resources
With strong political and managerial leadership, the Council is delivering a number of major projects secured through successful bids to external funding bodies on a cross-party basis, enabling mature, long-term decisions. We consult with our communities through locality-based partnerships, feeding that understanding into our strategic thinking.
With staff as our biggest asset, we are delivering against our organisational development strategy action plan, through retaining and developing our workforce prioritising succession planning and reducing the reliance on external contractors. In the last 12 months sickness absence has been reduced through proactive management and regular 1-2-1's and performance development reviews are carried out for all staff.
In 2019 the Council moved to four yearly elections. This was following a referendum and since then has allowed for longer term financial and strategic planning aligned to the four-year corporate plan. Over the last six years the Council has used a matrix style of management across the leadership and management team whereby it empowers members of the management team to lead without overly bureaucratic processes.
During the last two years the Council has changed the delivery model for the provision of services from previous joint ventures to insourcing of the housing repairs service and a wholly owned company for delivering grounds, cleansing and waste services. The reasons for this is to provide greater accountability and improved governance arrangements to deliver frontline services.
The Council has a proven track record of working in partnership through the Great Yarmouth Health and Wellbeing Partnership, Community Partnerships and collaborative Community Hub; these enable a joined-up approach across more than 30 agencies to influence the wider determinants of health, reducing inequality.
The borough Council has demonstrated forward thinking with its partners to deliver services to its residents. As a borough council that understands its communities, Great Yarmouth facilitates the work of customer-facing partner organisations working in the borough with potentially vulnerable citizens. This is by way of a collaborative model of working known as the 'Great Yarmouth Community Hub' operating model. This model ensures prevention and hardship cases are jointly considered with commissioned agencies and VCSEs to avoid, duplicating effort across statutory and non-statutory services.
However without continued partnership funding, this model would be at risk in future years.
The Council has a five year corporate plan and each year it produces an annual action plan including a set of supporting indicators for corporate projects and services which are reported on quarterly and proactively monitored during the year.
Plans to take advantage of technology and make better use of data to improve decision making, service design, and use of resources
The Council is in the process of refreshing its Digital Strategy that was approved in 2019. Since then the council has adopted agile working and has set aside funds for investment in technology on an invest to save basis. Replacement of legacy systems remains a priority of the digital strategy and this is already underway for key services including Housing, Environmental Services, Licensing and Planning that will be customer focused and enable an improved customer experience, such as self serve. Use of AI as an opportunity to make better use of resources where appropriate is also being considered.
The digital inclusivity of the Boroughs residents is also a priority and extension of wi-fi provision within the town centre and areas of lower areas of internet access are being prioritised from external funding through Town Deal and Future High Street.
Plans to reduce wasteful spend within the organisation and systems
The Councils spend is prioritised alongside the Corporate plan which identifies the local priorities so there is no wasteful spend against the priorities and outcomes set locally. Over the past ten years the Council has responded to the increasing financial pressures from local government funding reductions and increased inflationary pressures to ensure services can be delivered in the most efficient way. Each budget process is subject to robust challenge of areas of spend and income to ensure that there is no "slack" or "wasteful spend" within the budget. This annual process includes cross party working and has led to annual savings of the net budget averaging in the region of 7-9% per annum over the last four years.
Annually as part of the budget setting process additional income opportunities are identified for delivery alongside savings proposals, including invest to save opportunities. This has included the following:
- office rationalisation project to reduce use of office buildings
- reduced Council Tax Support and Sharing arrangement with major preceptor
- business cases for all capital investment projects
- increased fees and charges above inflation
- reduced the size of the establishment
Barriers preventing progress that the government can help to reduce or remove
The Council like others has continued to face significant financial challenge year on year. The continuous reduction in funding has seen a reduction in real terms spending power. This coupled with the national context including the continued period of increased inflationary pressures, high energy costs and increases to the National Living Wage, all increasing the baseline of the Councils revenue budget not matched by income and grant increases thereby having to identify and deliver annual savings from core services, now to a point that future deficits will impact directly on services and residents.
Areas where government could support are outlined below and includes addressing the fundamental imbalance in the funding for shire districts that disadvantages authorities that have characteristics and challenges like Great Yarmouth for example:
- Lower council tax base
- 85% of our properties are in the lower bandings of A to C, in comparison to the national average of 66%
- Current Council tax capping
- for shire districts the higher of £5 or 3% limits the ability for those in the lower quartiles to increase council tax to generate income
- the percentage capping limit further restricts those with historically lower band D's which is perverse
- Historic allocation of New Homes Bonus
- having a high proportion of lower banded properties is further hampered by the inability to deliver new homes in the quantum compared to others
- we are required on average to deliver two homes for one reward of NHB
- this is especially frustrating when we have an agreed local plan and have achieved our housing targets which is not rewarded by the current scheme
Essentially the funding system has continued to reward LA's that are already in a stronger financial position from the combined benefit of historic levels of higher funding from New Homes Bonus, higher levels of Council tax and where there is already a high tax base ie higher value properties.
The most significant central barrier to local productivity is single-year finance settlements. Without a clear indication about funding for multiple years, councils cannot effectively plan and deploy their resources over the medium to long term.
Councils have also been hampered by the tendency of Whitehall to design and decide policy that affects councils without engaging the sector as fully and as early as it could. This has resulted in initiatives and funds that are more complicated than necessary and that are difficult and, in some cases costly, for councils to implement. We strongly support much closer policy co-design between central government and local councils.
Furthermore lack or insufficient funding being provided for changes to legislative requirements for example the introduction of food waste which are not adequately funded.
Funding not being provided in response to changes in demand, for example the increased demand for new affordable homes which would save on funding homelessness and housing benefits.
Councils would also benefit from much greater flexibility for our council (and all councils) to decide how to raise and spend money locally. Central prescription and ring-fencing constrain our ability to allocate our resources effectively.
We incur unnecessary spending and waste valuable officer time complying with rules, requirements, restrictions and processes imposed by central government and regulators. These include:
- the number of specific, formula-based revenue grants and their separate reporting requirements - it would be much simpler and more efficient to roll all specific grants into a single provision in the Local Government Finance Settlement
- complicated, inconsistent, and misaligned processes for submitting data returns to central government
- lack of join-up between central government departments on issues including housing, homelessness prevention and asylum dispersal to alleviate in year demand and revenue pressures
- numerous statutory requirements to place notices in newspapers or issue written copies of routine notices
- excessive amount of information that is required in annual accounts or has to be published under the transparency code
- statutory overrides such as the requirement to value assets for accounts every year
- regulatory bodies seeking "to the letter" compliance with their statutory codes
A further barrier which the Council like a number of others have no control over are continued pressure on spend outside of our control, for example Internal Drainage Board levies for which the funding is not received and no control of the levy and often with little or no notice. The IDB increase for 2024/25 accounted for 91% of the additional income to be generated from the increase revenue to Council in the year (after allowing for a council tax increase to the cap). A longer-term solution for funding IDB Levies is needed, the current system only serves to place undue pressure on LA budgets and lacks the ability to plan.
Essentially, as a borough we have worked effectively and collaboratively in leveraging in external funding to deliver regeneration that will deliver tangible benefits in the longer-term, in the short to medium term the main action that government can take is to provide adequate funding for the borough to deliver services against the quality that residents expect.
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