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, I'll start on it. Yes, I'm Councillor. I'm the Councillor of Brown's Church. Councillor Emma Marshall and I'm the Councillor for Arrow Valley West, in Redwich. Councillor Natalie Mac Bay, the County Councillor for the Northern Trinity division. Tony Miller, chairman. Samantha Morris, in between the Democratic services, 100 Earth. Joanna Weston and the Scrutiny Alpha 7. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Karen May, the cabinet member of the community and I represent the Kent Hills division. I am Anna Peric, and this is part of the period. I'm Lisa And we have a press officer at the side of the room. Thank you. 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. 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 are going to slowly change the agenda, so we will be looking at the volunteers, focused on the agenda. 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 in this afternoon. The paper before you is about Worcestershire volunteers. Volunteering is really, really important, as the data in the paper sticks out. We've built an R&D 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 a 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 wellbeing perspective. We know it breaks down the barriers and prevention, social isolation, people learn whole new skill sets and they interact. Most importantly, at the end of the day, they go home with that feel good feeling from what they've done. I'm running over now to Hannah Parrott as the assistant director for this area to take through the paper in in-depth detail, but happy to take any questions. Although I'm clearly appointed, I have laid the 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. Thanks, Karen. So very brief, thanks to all the volunteers, particularly those that work within the community service and within libraries, museums, et cetera. It couldn't function without them, so I think it's important particularly because it was volunteer week last week. But there was more of a story to tell, so thank you for inviting us to come back. Previously, particularly within the peer to help, we've moved on since then, it was a positive story to tell. And so, as you can see there, as I said, the previous survey gets help, and if you're seeing in the 15, 16 months since we last came, it has changed significantly. So obviously, the first part is the transition away from here to help. That was the COVID response. We utilized that, particularly around clinics, that was the huge contribution of those volunteers. But we didn't take the decision that we needed to move away from that as we did not have the need for that level of volunteering within the peer to help service. So you'll see that in the board, we had just over a thousand 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 our local volunteer centres and also be passed on to the NHS So you can see there the numbers, we did have 60 people that came back to go to different internal teams and then can't still, and 59, we passed the details on to the 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 on that. But obviously, we've been kind of moving forward into new areas of work around volunteering. You can see that we still have a very strong base of volunteers in there, so direct delivery work, again, well over a thousand volunteers working out in communities. In the green space team, much the way it seems, as we know, practically doing, supporting their communities, day in day out, libraries, health walks, all of those areas where we know that they're contributing lots of things throughout Pennsylvania. We also developed some new areas, so Coroner's is quite a new one, because obviously that service came in quite recently, so they asked us to develop a piece of volunteers with that service. And engagement, so we are now growing that co-production engagement with residents, so we now have volunteers that are involved in that area. So we also have a huge number that are involved in getting less direct, so not practical support, but the viewport panel, again, well over 4,000 people, and there's around 50% response rates every time service go out, so then we get about 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, 1,500 of those that are out 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. And we just put in there, under point 10, just some examples of the financial contributions that we were paying the people to do some of the activities. So the archaeology services around 45,000, 11,000 clients from the archaeology service, over the last financial year, some people have changed, so let's take their roles. We want to do more of that, maybe we can demonstrate the new value value that the volunteers bring, and we are looking at ways in which we can do that with our colleagues and the 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 my oyster, over half a million pounds worth of value of volunteer activity, and that's just one city's advice. And we have four, and so you start to add up the actual financial contribution, the work that these volunteers are doing, let's bring into our own county. 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 that we have each become, 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 and volunteering. So we've got NHS fairs, we've got the acute and the healthcare entity, the RCP. We've got the police, fire, ambulance, and we've got our voluntary sector, We Can, which have been a 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 also meet quarterly with our quality sector network, We Can as well, from a context point of view, to make sure that we all remember what each other is doing and we can work on shared priorities. And the final bit really is about projects that we've been working on. So we have been working through the VCSD Alliance and undertaking some mapping to the voluntary sector. So we've undertaken a mapping exercise, which is using the next basis of voluntary sector organisation, results in charity commissions, companies like those kinds of things. And that is showing there's just under 3000 organisations, normally part of the VCSD. That number is much higher because as of yet, we haven't identified anyone who's registered, 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 a part of that. The other project that we've just started working on is the accelerated reforms 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. And last time, we actually had volunteers leave last week. Yeah. Is there any, sorry, I'll just kind of add to that. You know, there is a real importance in a strong, well coordinated voluntary sector within citizenship, particularly with the pressures that we're seeing with the adoption of social care and the prevention agenda and supporting people to live and age well. And the voluntary sector played 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 BTSC Alliance, I just appointed chair and chair for that. We'll go some way to strengthen that sector to make sure that it is a really key partner in the ICB's and integrated care for our system. Because the voluntary sector has got a huge part to play in supporting individuals to be independent, say, at home, eating well, etc. All the things that we know are close to our hearts in terms of our corporate plan. And so the work that Lisa does and other parts of my area just goes somewhere. It's always more of a look and dig, but we try to make sure that we have support. I believe we've got a couple of questions. Emma? Yes, thank you very much. Well, I do understand from reading that involves why his help was disfounded. However, I did feel a little bit of a grasp that there wasn't the opportunity for us to scrutinise that decision and play a part in the change over what we had. So was that something that had gotten me through the cabinet, or was it a delegate responsibility 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 haven't said 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 week and that much the group following through and volunteers. And this was happening then, rather than doing ourselves, etc. So that was the front end. To that end, it wasn't a public decision. 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 very early stages in terms of partnering volunteers up with individuals to do shopping and things like that. But we moved on to them. And there wasn't the need to run. They just let it wander on the block. We wanted to do something proactive. And promoted volunteering opportunities within the council and beyond, in order to keep that network as a private obstacle. 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 the time, and certainly in the area that I'm aware of, I've been involved in the household, it's a good memory network. I can bring it alongside all that anyway. So you could kind of unpose people to what they could make a network. From my perspective, Karen, you talked about the benefits to well-being and being involved in volunteering and those of us that volunteer would absolutely agree with that because there's nothing there to give you advice on how to communicate with an individual. And I'm sure with me, if we kind of make that clear enough when we're talking about recruiting volunteers, I know it's good to scale around this conversation. You know, it's good for your CV, it's good for skills, it's good for your university, etc, etc. But really, it's good for your own well-being, 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 of the council. We did do that as part of the council. So we did have volunteers be glad to do those in case studies, part of the press release that we did. So we did do that as part of here 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, Chairman, I'm going to be in the house team, they have experiences around the health and well-being agenda and how successful that's been. We could do that. It's a really good idea to roll in that to how it benefits society and that would be a good factor. I think it's a good idea. If you bring anything to the council, it's the right thing to do rather than just hold paper. Absolutely. There are some really good examples. I've seen an individual that works within our museum service volunteer for years. 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 lots 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 cases. Coroner service. Coroner service, yep. So the particular volunteering element from Coroner's point of view is when they're running call sessions, doing the meet and greet, the support in terms of the families that are coming in. And just being on hand to navigate people around the court. So it's an added value rather than a kind of ritual element in that particular sense, which are run by paid officers. So it's just kind of adding that additionality into it. I know the LECS team are very active and very active in machine shopping centres around the country. They do 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, going back to the Facebook, there's always more that you can do. We could do that. Our FES team are really good at promoting opportunities, etc. Then 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 also, when Lisa first came into place to look at this, you would have libraries, museums, country parks right away. Or doing things slightly different, but more one organisation. So there's some work there that you need to do. And also enable volunteers to move around services as well. Where you can have the volunteer that this is a big success, and we're getting some funding that will help out actually on a broader scale, alternative opportunities. Many shapes, do you? Yeah. Yes. Not necessarily directly, I think there are things in our community services directory. So there's a number that are registered through that, and that's the organisation that we would absolutely want to be engaging with volunteer portal and then support for volunteers to help them run their activities. Really, they're a growing group, you know, 10 years ago they didn't exist, and now they're there, there's a lot of them, and they're a huge group. So yes, we would absolutely want to work with 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 at that training point. 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. I think for you as an individual, it's happened to 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 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 a Men in Sheds. 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 thoughts. One of my things was, that 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 help and make sure, obviously, I think the problems you are, we can then get some stuff out. But then also I wanted to ask is, when you volunteer for the other assets, 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 process and kind of eligibility will be the same. It's not a straightforward decision, I think, unfortunately, but yeah, it's absolutely on your agenda to need 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, conversation with an expert in a way, then there will be people that say, will the volunteers be paying for the people that have just been maybe doing the entire thing? So around cons, we just can talk about cons, I think that's quite a sticky issue. I mean, I know in my experience working for the County of Hamptons, it doesn't happen, but there's still a way that I feel that it will. So I'm guessing we're prepared to, I think, explain the differences. Absolutely agree with you, Councillor Mcveigh. I think it's a question for Mr Taylor that's sat outside. 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 Coroners 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, we manage that, we volunteer 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? Well, 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 after the evening. And that was over 600,000. And that's just a snapshot. One of the other things that we are looking at, bearing in mind, that we procure and contract with a number of large organisations, the social value of that contract, is how do we strengthen that social value element and link it into our community. So whatever we're agreeing, contract wise, whether that's through a runway or large organisations, then really do not take that at the heart of what we need to do. That's connected. We've got some work to do on that. To not say we're going to put some work to do, but that is the goal. [inaudible] Do go into schools, specifically colleges and sixth ones where people might be thinking about getting advice on careers. But about the benefits of diversity engineering are going through the ability of our firms. Is that something we are doing? I know we have this on our hands. So I guess the kind of beauty of the breadth of the community service development, the skills and investment teams sit with me. And then you've got the volunteering element and there is the connectivity in that. You've got a lot of what you know gives to children. A lot of that happens in the school settings. Actually, there is that link there. And part of the learning is to support young people that are coming through. Progression of the world and volunteering is expected to do that. So that's absolutely there. There's always more that we can do. Yes, that is happening. And particularly in areas of disadvantage. [inaudible] Kevin, would you like to sort of maybe look 12 months ahead and invite you all back to say how things have progressed and the actual monetary value to Worcestershire. Absolutely happy to do that. I don't think it's just the monetary outcome. I think it's the outcomes in its entirety of what we keep eyes as well. When Katia and Marsha spoke about schools in the Duke of Edinburgh, that's a really good programme of work. It enables people to do their voluntary contribution and at the end of it, achieve the level of 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 can't really jump into elections. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. [inaudible] We're still recording. We're still on the recording. [inaudible] Thank you very much. [inaudible] [inaudible] Thank you, Richard Taylor. Thank you, Richard Taylor. Thank you very much. So over to you, I think, as you saw, 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, food check, I'll say, and just invite questions and then points of clarification. So we previously talked about this, this other panel, 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, you know, 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 through the setting of the budget and through 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, you know, 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 those, 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 as to how 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 engage with our recognised trade unions, because this is something that all of us share the view which is impacting the workforce. So 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 they know the impact. So I think that's something that we always want 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 posts, because one of the experiences not being, you know, in this, in HR, I deal with certain centres of workforce for a number of years, is 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 when you can't. You know, suddenly motivation drops as a field of, if they're declined. 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 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, you know, a sense of the cost factor as well, which we applied. 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 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 for 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 frontline role, it's very unlikely we're going to be able to delete those due to demand increasing the majority of those areas, which is probably why we faced some of these financial challenges. So that was a step through. Overall, the scheme, I put some costs. So the annual saving of the scheme accumulated in around £2.8 million. So it's just over £2.8 million that essentially were posted through the panel, were approved and through the relevant directors was agreed with. Essentially, the offer is the same 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 the full year effect. And so, you know, 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, you know, essentially approving issuing contractual notice and the first and next thing. So, you know, 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. I'll stop there and check. Yes, I've got a couple of things I wanted to fill out. Firstly, the £2.8 million savings, is that doing, taking into account how much we have to pay redundancy and everything? I was going to say, I'm confident that everything that is purely savings. No, so really good question. I'll try and explain what I was going to say. So the £2.8 million just over is the reduction in the revenue budget moving forward. So we get that year on, year out, because essentially if the post doesn't meet it, that becomes an ongoing saving for the effects moving forward into the MCLP. The one-off cost of that will be paid for at £23.24, which is set out in the budget when we finalise the budget for £23.24. 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, realise 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 made to be entered from. 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 best provide services of those three complete support services. And there might be other ones in here which are similar. We've got child protection and proof of care for people. Early health children in need, a function of the law, aid people. It's those people, and it sounds from this that they're quite front line. You've said they're not front line. If you could expand a bit more. Yeah, I mean, the way I describe it all, it will be from my services you've picked up. If you look at that child protection through care or inclusion, it will be within a front line provision. The role would not be fulfilling the front line 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 of asking. It would have been in the service house we've indicated. But the assessments, 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 with recommendations as well. And then the panel also then considered, are we able to delete those posts? Any doubt over impacts on front line provision? A decision once being made that would have set 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 front line provision? So I think really important, you know, I were one of those panel members and I can absolutely assure you that's the route we went through. If we were in doubt, we went away and we cleared it. It was never approved until we recognised, can the 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 front line provision, it isn't one of those front line roles. Just picking up on that then, no impact in terms of increased caseloads for the people that weren't left in those teams to come and pick up? There may be, I wouldn't mislead, there may be a short load of impacts around caseload. 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 is 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 front line role would have been impacted long term. 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? I mean, we monitor that at AD level, which is where this primarily, it's 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, so the ongoing, 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 person. That's how all that comes in, because it was looked at before, Jen. Welcome to the role, I should not say that earlier. 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 with that, that has been said, so that those who remain with us, we still have a choice to do certain services and support the guests. Absolutely, and I know you supported me in the past and it's really grateful, because we know the impact. I mean, our sickness absence at Q4 at the end of this year is 7.3 days per employee. That's, you know, beats best practice elsewhere, has improved down, you know, 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, has it affected 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 Councillors versus a 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 though, 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 were the cost could not exceed 24-month salary. So, if you think about it on that basis, we then got a capped redundancy scheme at 50K, but 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 affordable for 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, a vast majority of us always looked at 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 allowed full access without production. I'm just quick to go on to that other end of the spectrum, I suppose. I'm assuming you've got a breakdown with, I don't know if you could have aged at people that will make a difference, 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, talks about we know as a demographic of our workforce, we've got a different 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 organisations, that's four or five. So, we've got a significant, you know, degree of loyalty to the organisation. The workforce age is, you know, 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 in leaving in terms of deleting that post for the loyalty loops. 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 afford to delete that post for that person, isn't it? 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 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 stay until 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 until the end of June. Really good to have that flexibility. It is. It means we can meet really critical areas of work. A few months on from this. I know, obviously, I've got, 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 organisation morale. And within that, why not be going to be undertaking another survey to see those effects. We will have anecdotal ones, but people to get a really good view on how this has affected morale and the attitude amongst staff. Is that going to be undertaken soon or is it going to be the next one? So, perfect question. We're actually, we're in the middle of it. So, we just, we launched, well, say that we got, we're due to close in a week. So, we've launched our annual survey and that's literally closes the end of, I'm sure it's the end of this week. So, probably that's around 16th. And that's why 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, etc, etc. So, all of that is something we'll have at the end of this month. So, that's the first thing. 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. 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, increase that demand with that small amount of 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 looking at what's that impact, as you say, three months after. But generally, we seem to have moved forward. But certainly, absolutely key to see if we've got it right. And for us when we're doing our work, 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 organisation analyses those results. We take that to our cell team. Our chief officer groups look at what our organisational outcomes or actions are going to be around that. So, I would say usually around all this September time is when we start to have full analysis in Power BI, an organisational action plan saying what are our key findings and what we're going to do about it. And then you start a programme 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. So, within that survey, can you identify other people who have had their attitudes from 37 to 35? Because some of them are all a little bit kicked, really. We still haven't concluded on 35, 37, the working hours consultation yet. So, first of all, we haven't concluded that. It's around, it's less than six per cent 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, the way I describe it, we know where the impact of the working hours 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 represented here, what the survey results show. But it very much is anonymous. We can't identify by individual. We do look by director 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. Because I've seen the stats surveys come through. So, if I filled that stats survey out, then you wouldn't admit? No, I've done lots of them. I worked with them well beyond the average. I came after the counsellor. That's so good. Yeah, I think that's it, yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are things happening, aren't there, at the moment, that are the effect of such a building, maybe not having a regular working plan. So, it would be interesting to see whether you pick up some trends. I would be amazed, I'd be worried if it doesn't pick up on staff are 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, and I 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, in light of increased costs elsewhere, yeah. So, really, I think this survey issue is probably going to be around most of the services, I think. More questions? Thank you for that, Bridget, nice to meet you, and I look forward to meeting with you. Yeah, thank you, thanks everyone. Five minutes late, probably ten minutes late, actually. What we haven't picked up on in the work programme is we've asked the volunteers to come back. That's the programme here, and Richard will be updating us in the future as well. 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 be okay to know realistically before we can get the staff survey in, as Lloyd said, that would look like quite a full day, but I'm sure in your meetings, we'll be able to look into it. 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, how we've done things, just as, when they're brought back to us, it's more of a report saying how they've updated, and then that gives us some flexibility, something really, really important comes up that we want to call in. Okay, we'll call for the team to rename that. Thank you very much.