Transcript

Good afternoon. Today's the 10th of June and it's 2pm and we are starting the coming over you and scooting panel. My name is Tony Miller, I'm the chairman of the panel and we will first introduce ourselves, who is here today. We'll start, then I'll start. Yep, so I'm Councillor, I'm the Councillor for our church. Councillor Emma Marshall and I am the Councillor for Arrow Valley West, in mortgage. Councillor Natalie McBray, the County Councillor for the Northern Trinity division. Tony Miller, chairman. Samantha Morris, secretary of the Democratic services, hundred earth. Joanna Weston, the scrutiny officer. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Karen May, the cabinet member of the community and I represent the Kent Hills division. I am a parent and this is part of a community. I'm Lisa Shepherd, I'm from Strengthener communities. And we have a press officer at the side of the room. Thank you. So welcome everybody. Declarations of interest. Are there any? No. Public participation. We have no members of the public here today. So we will continue to item number four to confirm the minutes of previous meeting. And that would have been the 24th of March, I believe. 26th of March. 26th of March. Thank you very much. Thank you. Would you like me to give you apologies? Yes, please. We've got apologies from Councillor Richard Dudaal and cabinet member Mark Hart. Thank you very much. Welcome, Karen. Good afternoon, chairman. We're going to change the agenda. So we will be looking at the volunteers. Thank you very much. Would you like me to kick off? Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you for your invitation to come along to corporate communities. And we'll be extruding this afternoon. The paper before you is about Worcestershire volunteers. Volunteering is really, really important as the data in the paper sticks out. We built an RMD here to help in the post Covid-19 world. And I really want to start off by saying a massive thank you to all the volunteers that are out there and volunteer their services to enable our residents of Worcestershire to have better outcomes in their lives. Volunteering not only has any positive impact in the services we deliver across the whole of the public sector, but it also has a positive impact on the health of the individual from a health and community perspective. We know it breaks down the barriers and prevention of social isolation. People learn whole new skill sets and they interact. But most importantly, at the end of the day, they go home with that feel good feeling from what they've done. I'm running on over now to Hannah Parrott as the assistant director for this area to take through the paper in depth detail. But happy to take any questions. Although I'm clearly appointed, I have laid a bed and read this paper, which is a really good paper, and I'd like to thank the ladies from my left for all the work they put into it. OK, thanks. Thanks, Karen. So very brief. Please focus on this thunder in terms of the detail. But just to go on, I want to say thanks to all the volunteers, particularly those that work within the community service and within libraries, museums, et cetera. You couldn't function without them. So I think it's important to give them a volunteer week last week for medical effects to all of the participation that you see with the current county classroom services. But there is more of a story to tell. So thank you for inviting us to come back. Previously, particularly to help things with that, we moved on since then. It's a positive story to tell. And so, as you can see, that's how I said the previous experience gets helpful. And if you're seeing in the 15, 16 months since we last came, it has changed significantly. Is the transition away from here to help? That was the COVID response. We neutralised that, particularly around clinics. That was the huge contribution of those volunteers. But we didn't take the decision that we needed to make away from that, as we did not have. But the need for that level of volunteering within the here to help service. So you'll see that in the board. We had just over 1000 people on the database, but they haven't been active for quite a while, actually. And so we offered them lots of opportunities to get involved in tax volunteering with other volunteer centres and also be passed on to the NHS National Response Scheme. So you can see the numbers. We did have 60 people that came back to go to different internal teams, and then we had still another 59 who passed their details on to their local volunteer centres. And we weren't able to track the NHS responders because we decided to go to that service. But that means there are volunteers in Worcestershire that volunteer nationally for the NHS Response Service. So we do know that. But we don't have the volume and everything that we would like, but we are working with them. Obviously, we've been moving forward into new areas of work around volunteering. You can see that we're still very, very strong base of volunteers in there. So direct delivery work, again, well over 1000 volunteers working out in communities. In the green space team, much the way it seems, as we know, practically doing, supporting their communities, going into AI libraries, health walks, all of those areas, where we know that they're contributing lots of things throughout case longer. We've also developed some new areas. So Coroner's is quite a new one because of that service claim in quite recent days that they asked to develop a piece of volunteers with that service and engagement. So we are now growing that co-production and engagement with residents, so we now have volunteers that are involved in that area. We also have a huge number that are involved in less direct, so not practical support, but the support panel, again, well over 4000 people. And there's about a 50% response rate, so every time service go out, then we guess about a 50% response rate. We don't know which 50%, because they're all organized, but we get a good return on those services that are going out. And the public health champions, again, 1500 of those that are in their communities, promoting those public health messages. So, significantly over, I think I checked, it's close to $7,000, but $6,000 is not actually an effect, so a large contribution to, obviously, our personal activity. We just put in there under point 10, just some examples of the financial contributions that we were paying the people. I'd like to do some of the activities, so the archaeology service, it's around 45,000, 11,000 clients from the archaeology service, 25,000 PCMs over the last financial year, so it will change the roles. We want to do more of that, to be able to demonstrate the new value that the role it is bringing, and we are looking at ways in which we can do that with our colleagues and the collective management volunteers. And we also have a huge amount of voluntary work that happens outside of the council directly, but through our commission services. I put an example in there, just one I know, gone around in the report, that sticks in my mind. So this is Mike's voice there, over half a million pounds worth of value of volunteer activity, and that's just one city's advice that we have for all. So if you start to add up the actual financial contribution, the work that these volunteers are doing, let's bring it to our community. And we have also got a, I think this is in the previous report as well, but we did that in this group, the internal group, the staff that are managing volunteers in the council, it's important for them to come together, support each other, work through any challenges, help each other with recruitment. We're going to the Worcester Volunteer Fair on Friday, we've got the waste volunteer lead coming, and a member of my team, and we promote everybody's volunteer activities, so we're all doing our bit to support each area that needs to recruit volunteers. Externally, we've also been doing quite a bit of work since I last came, so we've established a volunteer leads meeting, which is complete from statutory sector and voluntary sector in volunteering, so we've got NHS fairs, we've got the acute and the healthcare trust, the RCP, we've got the police, fire, ambulance, and we've got our voluntary sector, WeCan, which are the network of local volunteer centres, we come together quarterly, we talk collaboratively about shared priorities, again, any challenges, really interesting discussion at the last meeting, between, from the NHS saying how can we recruit a volunteer that has no proof of being able to work in the UK, but they want to volunteer, so volunteer centres, and we chatted that through, so some really practical, pragmatic support to each other as well. I've also meet quarterly with the voluntary sector network, WeCan as well, from a comprehensive point of view, to make sure that we're all remember what each other is doing, and we can work on shared priorities. And so the kind of part of it really is about projects that we've been working on, so we have been working through the VCSD Alliance and undertaking some mapping of the voluntary sector, so we've undertaken a mapping exercise, which is using those basis of voluntary sector organisation results in charity commission, those kinds of things, and that is showing there's just under 3000 organisations, normally part of the VCSC, that number is much higher, because as of yet, we haven't identified any of those that have unregistered, but we are working on that. We're about to launch a survey of the voluntary sector as well, to understand their needs and challenges, and that will include volunteering, and volunteer recruitment and retention will absolutely be four parts of that. The other project that we've just started working on is the accelerated reform fund, we've been given grants of £50,000 from the Department of Health and Social Care to develop a county-wide volunteer portal. And that is for everybody across the health and care system, it's not a council portal, it will be for everybody, so we have a shared approach and one place to go. And we wanted to really link that back as well with businesses, and helping them, facilitating their corporate and kind of social responsibility and getting them volunteering more in their local communities, rather than taking any of us somewhere else out of the area, so we've got that in there as well. Just a quick kind of overview of where you're at really. Yeah, just to kind of add to that, there is a real importance in a strong, well coordinated voluntary sector within Worcestershire, particularly with the pressures that we're seeing within adults and children's care and the prevention agenda and supporting people to live and age well, and the voluntary sector plays a massive part in that. So it is in our interest as the county council and the place leader to really support our voluntary sector to thrive and be sustainable. So all of the work that we're doing with the BTSE Alliance, just across the chair and chair of that, will go some way to strengthen that sector, to make sure that it is a really key partner in the ICB to need to get in care for our system. Because the voluntary sector has got a huge hard play in supporting individuals to be independent, say at home, eating well, et cetera, all the things that we know are close to our hearts in terms of our corporate plan. So the work that Lisa does and other parts of my area just goes somewhere. It's always more what we can do, but we have to make sure that we have support. I believe we've got a couple of questions. Emma? Yes, thank you. But I do understand from reading the report why his help was disbanded. However, I did feel a little bit of a progress that there wasn't the opportunity for us to scrutinise that decision and play a part in the changeover that might be happening. So was that something that had gotten me through the cabinet when we said that I need to make that decision? So you've got to steer from believing in the chief care. So it wasn't a decision as such, a kind of formal public decision, but we have a SID to do that. The pragmatic element was here to help was, was wedded to the kind of response. And we've just moved past that. And the relationships, the conversations that we were having, particularly with the mankind network, the group of voluntary volunteers, and this was happening with them rather than doing ourselves, et cetera. So that was the front. And to that end, well, not public decision, such a big step. And the demand for that service, the drop-top sequence. Yeah. So back in the day of COVID, which just seems ages away, doesn't it? But not as well. And the majority of volunteers were helping with the COVID vaccination. And they absolutely had to punch in terms of that. And then at the kind of very early stages in terms of partnering volunteers up with individuals to do shopping, but we moved on from them. And there wasn't the need to run, they just let it wander on the path. We wanted to do something proactive and promote volunteering opportunities within the council and beyond in order to keep that network as a possible. There was also a number of volunteers that were able to volunteer because they were working at the time, but because people went back to work. So it would be kind of worth it at times. I think throughout all of that, and certainly in the area that I'm aware of, in Waltham Hill, so it's a big network, I can bring alongside all that anyway. So you could kind of unpose people to what they could make a network, so you'd be that big friend, being a national contractor. I think from my perspective, Karen, you talked about the benefits to wellbeing and being involved in volunteering, and those of us that volunteer would absolutely agree with that because there's nothing there to give them the time to help community or individual. And I'm sure with me, if we kind of made that clear enough when we were talking about recruiting volunteers, I know it's good for skills, we had this conversation earlier, it's good for CV, it's good for skills, it's good for university, etc, etc. But really, it's good for your own wellbeing, it's brilliant, and it's good to see the numbers of people you've got volunteering, but have you got any stories about how it's impacted on them? You know, that more personal kind of feedback from people that we could be sharing to say, this is good for you. We have, and there will be in other areas, because we did do that as part of the peer to help, so we did have, I think volunteers week last year, there was a case study as part of the press release that we did, so we did do that as part of peer to help. I will have to go away, I'm sure that other teams will absolutely do this, I just don't have that. If I can share one, I know somebody in the house team may have experiences around the health and wellbeing agenda and how successful that's been, but we could do that. It's a really good idea to role in that, to how it benefits you, benefits society, and that would be a good factor. I think it's a good idea, if you bring anything to life, it's the right thing to do, rather than just hold paper. Absolutely, there are some really good examples, like we've seen an individual who works within our museum service, volunteer for a year, it's actually just the kind of social element he's now doing, and actually that kind of isolation and being able to come into a workshop and do what he loves doing, he's had a lot of other people, and it's a really important part in keeping him working. Yeah, we've got some difficult people. We know, cracking. I'd love everyone else to know, we've got some cracking. So the particular volunteering element from a coroner's point of view is when we're running call sessions, doing the meet and greet, the support in terms of the families that are coming in, kind of just being on hand to navigate people around the court, so it's an added value rather than a kind of British element of that particular sense, which is run by paid officers. So it's just kind of adding that additionality in terms of, to get them green, to get them to the court. I don't know, the last team are very active, and the very active English and shopping centres around the country. They do, you know, a good job in all that they do. So do you find you get enough support in letting everybody know what's going on? Media-wise, do you get it? Yes, I think there is an element, and it goes back to Councillor Facebook, there's always more that you could do, we could do that. Our first team are really good at promoting opportunities, et cetera. I think there's a piece of work that we wanted to do internally to look at how we support our own staff to volunteer in their own time, but actually support the opportunities for our own staff and remind the wellbeing aspect that we've got. And also, when Lisa first came into place to look at this, you would have libraries, museums, country parks right away, all doing things slightly different, but we're all one organisation, and so there's a corporate response to our volunteering. So there's some work there that you need to streamline, and also enable volunteers to move around services as well, where the volunteers will be successful in getting some funding, so we'll help out actually on a much broader scale in terms of opportunity. Many shapes, do you? Not necessarily directly, I think there are things in our particular services, there are community services directly, so there's a number that are registered through that, and that's the organisation that we would absolutely want to be engaging with, from a peer portal, and then for volunteers to help them run their activities. There are growing groups, 10 years ago they didn't exist, there's a lot of them, so yes we would absolutely want to work nationally as a network to get our portal to them so that they can use it and be able to tell their stories as well as part of that portal. We want to have case studies on them, and good news stories to tell people, there is somebody that lives in your community that has done this, to keep reinforcing that message about the benefits to volunteering, for you as an individual and your team. I think where it's helpful actually as well is the point around being able to see, you've got a similar idea, so I know for example Men in Sheds, in my division, a new group is trying to set up a Men in Sheds group and then connect with another Men in Sheds group outside of my division. I think being able to see that, see their experiences and engage with that is really useful, because it means a lot of people, when they have these ideas, whether they're engaging their community or starting a new voluntary organisation, they're very rarely going to be the first person to ever do it in Worcestershire, and so by being able to connect all these people together, you're sharing information, you're sharing knowledge, you're sharing learning, and that just speeds up the process and allows them to self-propagate rather than everyone starting from scratch. Yeah, thank you. One of my questions was going to be on comms, and we've kind of answered my focus. One of my things was, last week was the great opportunity for some of those who commented on volunteering but didn't, was that then? Because, gee, yes, hey, it's where we've been, and if not, can we have the next year off? But then also I wanted to ask is, when you volunteer for any of our sets, is there the ability for them to say, pay back any expenses that they might incur to make it available for people who might otherwise be financially unable to volunteer? Yeah, so there are, and we're trying to work on, again, as part of the policy that we're trying to kind of make it a more broad approach, but some teams do things slightly differently, so we're just in the process of trying to understand everybody's processes, which we've got that now, but there are some slight differences, so we just need to work through trying to make it equal, so that whichever team you're volunteering in, your expenses processed, and kind of eligibility, and it's the same. It's not a straightforward decision, I think, unfortunately, but yeah, it's absolutely on the agenda to be able to work that through. Just something that might come up, because it usually does when you're talking about volunteering and redundancy, and kind of a conversation that connects each other, really. Then there would be people that say, will the volunteers be paying for lots of the people that have just been maybe doing those types of things, so around cons, we can talk about cons, I think that's quite a sticky issue, and I know, in my experience, working for the downtown city doesn't happen, but there's still a way that I feel that it will, so I'm guessing we're prepared to still explain the differences, and yeah, absolutely agree with you, Councillor Mcveigh, and I think it's a question for Mr Taylor that sat outside. I'm very happy to say that you make a role redundant, you don't make that individual, and the law states that, in terms of volunteering, this is the add-on, this is what we've just had an administration around Coroner's Court, it's that person, sadly, with a box of tissues on the shoulder there, just to support. Agree, and I know that in libraries, that we can manage without the people volunteering to support the civil media challenge every year, because the number of children are coming through the doors, and so it is absolutely funny, I know, but I've just known that from the end of all that. So the actual financial benefit to Worcestershire has got to be well over, probably approaching a billion and a half? Yes, considerably. Way more than that. We've just got to work through, being able to start with understanding the council and then work that up, so we are looking at various online tools to capture that return on investment, so over the next year, we are going to explore how we can better do that, so we can give you more, but we know it's going to be in the millions. We've got to go to the point you put in here, and that was over 600,000. One of the other things that we're literally bearing in mind that we procure and contract with a number of large organisations is the social value of those contracts, is how do we strengthen that social value element and link it into our community. That's connected. We've got some work to do on that, to not say we've got some work to do, but that is the goal. It is across open children and families, but whilst we're here, do go into schools, specifically colleges and sixth ones, where people might be thinking about getting advice on careers, but about the benefits of their student union and going through the A1 to A1 first, is that something we are doing? I know we have this on our hands. I guess the kind of beauty of the breadth of the community service development, the skills and investment team sits with me, and then you've got the volunteering element, and there is the connectivity in that. You've got a lot of what she gives to children, a lot of that happens in the schools and community settings, actually there is that link there, and part of the learning is to support young people that are coming through. Progression for the volunteering is expected to do that, so that's absolutely there. There's always more that we can do, but yes, that is happening, and particularly in areas of disadvantage and just for the better use of that. Kevin, we'd really like to make it over 12 months ahead and invite you all back to say how things have progressed and the actual continuity value of the A1 and A2 value to Worcestershire would be very nice. Absolutely happy to do that. I don't think it's just the monetary outcome, I think it's the outcomes in the entirety of what we achieve. I think when Katja Mosher spoke about schools in the Duke of Edinburgh, that's a really good programme of work in that it enables people to do their voluntary contribution, and at the end of it achieve a level skill set they can take forward into their future careers. There's lots of opportunities out there, but I'd be delighted to come back if I'm really jumping in elections. Thank you very much, thank you for your time. It's still recording, we're still on the recording. The subject is. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm coming, everyone seems to be leaving. Thank you. Thank you, Richard Taylor. Thank you, Richard Taylor. Richard, thank you for allowing me, Karen, to come first. So, over to you. I think, as usual, I've done a report, so I didn't intend going for every point, so I'm probably just going to cover a few key areas, really, and then foodcheck, I'll say, and then just invite questions and then points of clarification. So, we previously talked about this at other panels, so I guess this is a fairly short pause, as you've been on a bit of that journey, and then really bring it to a point of, now the scheme is closed, what's been the, I suppose, the outcome of that in relation to our budget commitments and how that all plays out. So, that's the overview I was going to try and do. I mean, as a little bit of background, Council and Worcestershire Children's First, which is a Council owned company, in November 23, employed around 2,743 full-time equipments. So, the headcount will be a lot higher, but that's the EFT, which is what we tend to use as a measure. We faced a significant financial overspend, which you'll be aware of with the setting of the budget and the number of actions that have subsequently followed. I guess at the time in the backdrop when we launched the scheme, we had a projected net overspend forecast of around 22 million, just over 22 million. So, therefore, I think it's fair to say that we faced a significant challenge, and so one of the things we considered really is how we did look at some workforce initiatives to essentially meet some of those financial challenges. So, one of the things that we discussed and therefore agreed to launch was the voluntary redundancy scheme. It wasn't a scheme without any provisions. The scheme was quite clear that there were a number of provisions to be met, and I'll probably touch on just a couple of those so that you've got assurance that it wasn't, you know, probably the wrong set of margin, but a free-for-all approach with people just going forward and essentially exiting the organisation. It definitely wasn't. From the onset, I would say that both in leading up to launching the scheme, in launching the scheme, throughout the scheme and on closure of the scheme, we engaged with our recognised trade unions because this is something that all of us, you know, share the view which is impacting the workforce. So, at every single opportunity, I led conversations with our recognised trade unions, which is GMB and Unison, and they both helped design scheme provisions and kept up data throughout so that there was no need for the impact. So, I think that's something that we always wanted to do. So, we agreed to set up a panel approach so that we could consider the impact of all of those that would apply across the whole council, rather than necessarily a previous scheme or another organisation that would run it through each of their functional areas or directorates. We chose not to do that. And essentially, the scheme was quite clear. Everyone had the right to apply, but not to be granted redundancy. And so, right from the onset, we did exempt some post because one of the experiences not being in HR, with a central to workforce for a number of years is you never underestimate the impact of someone taking a very key decision to want to potentially look at what exiting an organisation. And then being told, well, you can't. Suddenly, motivation drops as a field if they decline. So, what we felt started scheme was be open that we, for example, could not afford to delete social workers from our establishments. So, right at the beginning, it was on the basis that they would be exempt from applying for the scheme. So, and that's just one example I've set out there. There were a number of others where we made that position clear. So, that was all put in. We had particular energy criteria, including cost. So, this was a scheme that wasn't a sense of the cost factor as well, which we apply. And of course, what I would say is, as a council, we have a capped redundancy scheme anyway. So, we actually cap our redundancy payments of £50,000 as a maximum. That's something that lots of authorities don't do, but we've always had that in place here. So, overall, we've had 192 applications across the council and company, WCF. Of those, 192, at the cessation of the scheme, and that's what this report sets out, 86 were approved. Those are set out within paragraph 20. The areas that those were essentially deleted from. The majority you'll see are from support services. And I always set out to be referred to as the naming service, but they're well recognised as being support services, essentially being chief executive units and commercial and change in those areas. And that's testament to the thing, really, at the start of the scheme, we were clear that if you're fulfilling the front line role, it's very unlikely we're going to be able to delete those due to demand increasing majority of those areas, which is probably where we face some of these financial challenges. So, that was set through. Overall, the scheme, I put some costs. So, the annual saving of the scheme, if you will, that would have been around £2.8 million. So, it's just over £2.8 million that essentially were posted through the panel approved and through the relevant directors, was agreed with, essentially be offered as a saving towards our overall savings target. Couple of extra things not written here. We did make clear throughout this, because the financial challenges were filled 23, 24. We wanted to realise a full year effect. And so, in all cases, we indicated that we would want the exit to be by the 31st of March. And that did create some operational difficulty because in a number of examples, we ended up essentially approving issuing contractual notice and the first and next thing. So, it was quite a quick turnaround, but important in terms of realising those savings. So, that's probably the summary I was going to give. I can expand on any point or if you think there's something missing, please let me know and I'll expand on that as well. And I'll stop there and check. I'm sure there will be questions with you, of course. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I've got a couple of things I wanted to fill out quickly. So, firstly, the £2.8 million and savings. Is that doing, taking into account how much we have to pay redundancy and I was going to say, I'm confident that everything for that is purely the savings. No. So, a really good question. I'll try and explain what I was going to say. That's the, so the £2.8 million, I'll just say, is the reduction in the revenue budget moving forward. So, we get that year on, year out, for hours, because essentially, if the posters are deleted, that becomes an ongoing saving for the effects moving forward into PMTLP. The one-off costs of that will have been paid for in 23/24. We've set out in the budget when we finalised the budget for 23/24. So, the, and that's why we decided we wanted everyone to have left by the 31st of March, because we were able to pay it off as a one-off cost in 23/24. Realised full recurring saving moving forward from 23/24 onwards. So, the £2.8 million is future savings, not the one-off cost. Thank you. I just wanted to drill down a little bit into where people were named. Oh, yes. And, of course, in all ages, I know that people are going to be concerned when they leave the conclusion support services. So, I wanted to kind of have some reassurance for people who might see this and be concerned that, how is this going to actually affect the frontline services of those three, including the support services? And there might be, there's other ones in here which are similar. So, you've got job protection and proof of care for people, early health children in need, functional or aid people. So, it's those people, and it's down to some things that they're quite frontline. You've said they're not frontline. If you could expand a bit more. Yeah, I mean, it will, and the way I describe it now, it will be the frontline services you've picked up. So, it's, you know, if you look at that child protection through care or inclusion, it will be within a frontline provision. The role would not be fulfilling the frontline role. So, as an example, it may be that there was an administration role where, when they looked at that, said we could lose the waft of a number of people. So, it would be, you know, it's the correct way, it would have been in the service house, we've indicated, but the assessments which would, and if I just run through the rigour we went through on that, the relevancy of strategic directors will have spoken to their team managers or assistant directors to those service areas. They will have looked at the request to say, can they improve that? That then went to strategic directors and then went to a panel of recommendations as well. And then the panel also then considered, are we able to delete those posts? Any doubt over impacts on frontline provision, if that decision were to be made, they would have sent those away to be further explored. And that's what did happen in a number of cases. So, a number of panels were held. And in these sorts of examples, we were sent back to say, is there any impact ultimately to frontline provision? So, I think really important, you know, I was one of those panel members and we can absolutely assure you that's the meeting we went through. If we were in doubt, we went away and we cleared it. It was never approved until we, you know, recognised, can a post absolutely be deleted and did it have any form of impact? If so, how is that impact going to be met? So, I'd be confident seeing the frontline provision, it isn't one of those frontline roles. So, just picking up on that then, no impact in terms of increased caseloads for the people that were left in those teams to kind of pick up? There may be, I wouldn't mislead, there may be a short load impact around caseload, but whilst they, you know, what we would have looked at is how do you mitigate that? So, how has it become manageable moving forward? That could be a change of process, it could be a change of service in terms of, you know, you may, this probably isn't a live example, but you could open 20 minutes later that essentially see you're able to still provide the service. So, those are sort of scenarios we went through, but it wouldn't in any scenario mean that that frontline role would have been impacted long term. So, I'm assuming that this will be limited and evaluated three months, six months down the line, check on things like sickness levels within teams? Yeah, I mean, we monitor that at AD level, which is where this primarily is a quarterly basis, but we have a monthly report that goes with if we see a significant increase, for example. So, we would look at that as a fun going, but separate to just the basis of this being a VR exercise. And that's about the other work that you've done with the staff on their mental health and resilience within the workforce and person. That's where all that comes in because it was looked at before, Jen, and then, you know, Welcome to the role, why should that say that earlier? But that, we wanted very much to save that funding for that, those works that you do, because they are so important on morale. And I just wanted to say again, I'm really pleased that that has been saved, so that those who remain with us can really still have an employee of a choice to do their services and support the guests. Absolutely, and I know you've supported in the past and around it, it's really great for that, because we know the impact. I mean, our sickness absence at Q4 the end of this year is 7.3 days per employee. That beats best practice elsewhere. It's improved our absence levels by about 1.2 days a year, and that's through that investment. It makes a huge difference about resilience and physical absence and attendance. So, yeah, it does all culminate, even though they're separate schemes. Yeah, yeah. With the redundancies, how does it affect the pension of that? So, if your redundancy, essentially for the vast majority, you know, the pension is a separate fund, so it's Worcestershire, you know, it's a pension fund administered by accounts versus separate fund, and so anyone who applied for, you know, redundancy would receive that pension in full without induction. That's one of the reasons a lot of people apply. There was, what I would say, and it's a small number, it was a capital scheme. So, one of the things that we allowed under the scheme is if, for example, you know, scheme provisions where the cost could not exceed 24-month salary. So, if you think about it on that basis, we then got a capped-redundancy scheme of 50K for a number of people applying with long service that would have quite excessive pension costs. Now, if that exceeded the 24-month cost, we did have a conversation with them about forgoing some of the redundancy so that they could then still access the scheme, and it was still a fall off the council. That's one of the things that we've done, which may have impacted overall some of those that came forward, their financial package at the end of that. It was taken up by a number of people, so I think it's fair to say, you know, the vast majority of us always looked to accept pension, and so, as I say, conversations then took place about whether they wanted to forego our redundancy costs and our table cuts. So, to a degree, the pension scheme allows full access without reduction. -Thank you. -I'm just quick to go on to that. Other than the respect you must pay, I'm assuming you've got a breakdown with, you know, age, people over the age of 11, and, you know, whether there are lots of younger people at the start of their careers that have gone, or older people at the end of their careers, and whether they'll be gaining their knowledge from within teams and things like that to some extent. So, yeah, how does that look? -Yeah, I mean, so, to get to the work, you know, it talks about we know as a demographic of our workforce, we've got an infinite demographic, so we have a long length of service. I mean, great things for the council. You know, our average length of service is about nine years. Most organizations, that's four or five, so we've got a significant, you know, degree of loyalty to the organization. The workforce age is -- the average workforce age is quite significant. Some areas, you know, in terms of older workforce, and because I guess what you get is older workforce, longer service, the costs are higher, because that's, of course, where you get to move forward. The redundancy and pension is often based on length of service and, you know, the amount of time we've been paying in the pension scheme. So there was, you know, in a number of cases, concern around certain people that may have applied and leaving in terms of deleting that post for the knowledge he leaves. And that was a consideration. So, you know, I said at the beginning, really, everyone had the right to apply, but the council also had the right to not grant that and refuse the application. And on some cases, that was what happened. You know, it was felt that we could not force and delete that post for that person, innit? Particularly during the relatively short timescales of everyone having to go at the end of the financial year. That's it. That's it. You lose the knowledge. The scheme did allow, and I should, you know, say that the scheme did allow slight extension where there were exceptional circumstances. So that was with the permission of the chief executive and that allowed an individual to stay till the end of June at the very latest. We did have a couple that were accepted. One of those examples, because I know it was in my team, so I'll be very open about that, they were undertaking a piece of work that was absolutely essential. So whilst we could grant redundancy, they, by exemption, were approved to stay till the end of June. Really good to have that flexibility. It is. It means we can meet really critical areas of work. Yeah. A few months on from this, I know obviously we have, as you said, a couple who are still going to be with us while we're going in this month. But by now, you may have been able to see how it's affected the mood of the organisational morale, and within that, why not be going to be undertaking another survey because of those effects. We will have anecdotal ones, but people, to get a really good view on how this has affected the morale and the attitude amongst staff, is that going to be undertaken soon, or is it going to be the next one? Perfect question. We're actually in the middle of it. So we've just, we launched, well, say that, we're due to close it in a week. So we've launched our annual survey. That literally closes the end of, I'm sure it's the end of this week, so probably that's around 16th. And that's where we'll be testing all of that. So it's a standard survey. We use Utrecht, so we test their motivation, energy on the job, and then we ask all of our questions around, well, you know, morale, do you enjoy work, et cetera, et cetera. So all of that is something we'll have at the end of this month. So that's the first one. The way I'll describe the other part of the question is demand hasn't decreased. So, you know, when people leave, you feel it. I mean, that's the reality. There's very little resource that isn't being utilised. So I think whether it be in a team that loses one or loses 15, they have felt the impact of losing those key members. So as I say, demand hasn't dropped. What we've been doing, I think, as a leadership team, as assistant directors and directors, is really working with those teams to say, how can we do things slightly differently? That means we can cope with that same level of, well, increased level of demand with that small resource. And in most cases, I think we've been very successful. I can't say we've got there yet. And we're still, you know, looking at what's that impact, as you say, three months after. But generally, we seem to have moved forward. But survey, absolutely key to see if we've got it right. And for us when we're doing our work presentation, when will that be ready for us to bring here, so we can make sure we've got it in the work? Yeah, absolutely. So we tend to, so I think it's a say at the end of this week, we close it. We then usually have around a month whereby the organization analyzes those results. We take that to our cell team. They were our chief officer group saying, look at what our organizational outcomes or actions are going to be around that. So I would say usually around all this September time is when we start to, you know, have full analysis in Power BI, an organizational action plan saying what are our key findings and what we're going to do about it. And then we start a program with our workforce to essentially say, here's what we're thinking, here's the things that we think are prominent, and here's what we intend to do. Within that survey, can you identify other people, what those personnel that have had their attitudes from 37 to 35, because some of them are aware of what is a little bit kinked, really. We still haven't concluded on 35, 37, the working-house consultation yet. So first of all, we haven't concluded that. It's less than 6% of the workforce. What I would say is in terms of it is an anonymous survey, and it's so important to have an anonymous annual survey so people feel safe in terms of giving us that feedback, good, positive or indifferent. We know where the impact is. The way I describe it is we know where the impact of the working-house consultation is. We know where the responses of the Your Voice survey comes back by direction. So we can almost get a feel for, well, if we know this group mostly represents a PEA, what the survey results show, but it very much is anonymous. We can't identify by individual. We do look by direction and functional areas. So we sort of know where, where to describe it. We know where everyone is, but we will never identify by individual. So if I, because I've seen the stats surveys come through, because I'm here, so if I filled that stats survey out, then you wouldn't have looked at me? No, I've done lots of them. I worked with them well beyond the average. I came up with the cancer thing. I was about to say we got the early last hits, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would get the things happening, aren't they, at the moment, that are the effect on us, such as the building, maybe not having a regular working-house. So it would be interesting to see whether you could pick up some trends. I would be amazed, I'd be worried if it doesn't pick up on staff are, you know, anxious around their budgets, anxious around, you know, working on the locations, anxious around some of the things that we're seeing nationally around local authority funding, for example. I think all of that, I'd be really surprised if that doesn't show in a two-year survey. Yeah, I've noticed in IT, when you speak to a guy in IT, that there's a definite air of, we're not going to be financed. It's difficult, you know, challenging times as well, I think. Yeah, yeah, in light of increased costs elsewhere, yeah. So I think this survey issue is probably one of our most important services, I think. More questions? Thank you for that, Bridget. Thank you, Keith. I look forward to bringing it to you. Survey results. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. We're five minutes late, probably 10 minutes late, actually. But we're on to our work programme now. We haven't picked up on the work programme. We've asked the volunteers to come back. That's the programme here. And Richard will be updating us in the future as well. I'm on the staff survey. We've mentioned about the media and fitting that into the work programme in the future. Is there anything else? I think it's going to take a little bit of time, realistically, before we can get the staff survey in. As Lloyd said, that looked like quite a full day, but I'm sure in your meetings we'll be able to look into that. We'll look at that. Yeah, engine counting. There's a lot on our forward list. So I don't think I want to be adding anything more at the moment. I think we should need to be trying to work through what we've got and how we've got the things just as... When they're brought back to us, it's more of a report saying how they've updated rather than at the age of each. Yeah, I agree with that. And then that gives us some flexibility, something really, really important comes up that we want to call in. Yeah. No? Okay. We'll call the meeting to an end then. Thank you very much.

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