Backwards is not an acceptable option

It’s understandable that the BBC would latch on to sickness levels at Swansea Council as the cost of public services is increasingly put under the microscope. Yet it would only have taken a slightly more detailed look at the local authority’s Annual Corporate Improvement Plan, which will be presented to councillors tomorrow, to uncover that there is most definitely room for improvement across the board.

This might come as a surprise to some people, given the marked reluctance by the local paper to even scrutinise council reports these days; let alone voice any sort of criticism. So it is in the spirit of community service that we share some of the down-lights in the 90 page report with Swansea’s council tax-payers - who might be interested to learn that their local authority has:-

·         Missed its target for additional cash from rental income.

·         Brought in £800,000 less in capital receipts than needed.

·         Recorded 12.9 working days/shifts per employee lost due to sickness absence.

·         Achieved an average of 65 days against the target of 31 for which permanently excluded pupils did not receive education.

·         Came in three points below the 25% target for recycling municipal waste.

·         Only determined 47% of planning applications within 8 weeks instead of the 60% target. There was a similarly dismal performance recorded for environmental assessments and enforcement actions.

·         Reported a fall in the number of people using the Council park and ride services.

·         Admitted that its community regeneration service was failing by nearly 50% to meet its own target for helping youngsters.

·         Somehow managed to get a drop in the number of visits to local authority funded museums and galleries (despite free admission).

·         Failed to reduce the percentage of carbon dioxide emissions in the housing stock (it actually increased).

·         Once again set a pathetic standard in delivering Disabled Facilities Grants, which still take well over a year to sign-off.

The report uses a traffic light colour-coding system to highlight problem areas and the section for Social services predictably resembles an outbreak of measles outbreak with far too many failings to mention here. Yet you might come to an entirely different conclusion from the report into Child and Family services, which happens to appear in the same agenda. Not that we expect anything too different at next week’s presentation either.

In the same vein, the council seems to have provided a thoroughly reasonable set of explanations for each of the poor performance results listed above. And as you would expect, this basically involves describing a failure to reach a target or to explain away a downward trend as nuffink to do with us guv, honest.

As we’ve reported here in the past, a succession of performance reports given by independent assessors has rated the local authority as somewhere between piss-poor and basket case. Yet neither the local press nor the political opposition seems to be remotely interested. No wonder it took an Assembly minister to intervene before somebody finally admitted that social services in the city was no longer fit for purpose!

The people who head up the political & management hierarchy at Calamity Hall are hardly newcomers to the job of running a local authority. The fact that so many key services are going backwards is unacceptable. At the very least it should prompt serious questions on how the council should go about finding some new faces along with a new sense of direction.