Transcript

Good evening everybody and welcome to this meeting of the People, Overview and Screety panel on Monday the 10th of June 2024. The first item on our agenda this evening is the election of chair, so could I please ask the panel for nominations for position of chair please. Councillor Douglas. Thank you Mark, I'd like to nominate Councillor Helen Taylor for chair. And do I have a second of that nomination? Councillor Brahe. Councillor Brahe. Yeah. Yeah, you want to second it? And do we have any other nominations for chair? Councillor Croft. Oh, no other nominations? That confirms Councillor Taylor as chair for the municipal year 2024-2025. We'll just do the election of vice-chair 2, so can I have nominations for vice-chair for the municipal year please. Councillor Taylor. And do I have a seconder? Councillor Brahe. And are there any other nominations for vice-chair? No. That confirms Councillor Davies as vice-chair for 2024-25 municipal year. I can invite Councillor Taylor up to the chair's seat at the top to give the introduction to the meeting and we'll kick start the agenda. Thank you. Good evening all. Welcome to this meeting of the People, Opium and Scrutiny panel on Monday the 10th of June. My name is Councillor Taylor and I will be chairing this meeting. This meeting is held in person and via Zoom and streamed live to the public on YouTube. I would like to remind all attendees that participation in this meeting indicates consent to the audio and video being streamed live and acknowledgement after the meeting. It will continue to be available in the public domain. Firstly, it will be useful if all panel members and officers could introduce themselves so that the public are aware of who is in this meeting and the role that they are undertaking. My name is Councillor Taylor. I am the chair of the meeting. If I go to the vice-chair, I'm around the table. Councillor Brown, member of the panel. Councillor Jack Douglas, member of the panel. Councillor George Shaw, member of the panel. I can use no word, co-opty. I'm John Storey, member of the panel. Councillor Carol De Kost, a member of the panel. Councillor Suzanne Cross, member of the panel. Good evening, I'm Freddie Kevin-McDaniel, the Executive Director of Adult Services, Health and Community. Mark Bealee, Principal of democratic services officer. Lynn, I believe you're joining us online. Do you want to introduce yourself? Yes, thank you, chair, and apologies. I can't be with you in person. I'm Lynn Ferguson. I'm the Executive Director of Children's Services and Education. Thank you. Can I request that meeting participants do not speak unless I specifically invite you to do so? Once I've invited you to speak, before you do so, please state your name and the capacity in which you're speaking, if appropriate, if you have not already introduced yourselves. I will also ask officers to speak at appropriate times. If any individual attempts to disrupt the meeting, then I'm able to use my powers within the constitution to adjourn the meeting, or to have the individual removed. So we're now going to start on the agenda items. Mark, have we got any apologies for absence? Yes, chair, received two apologies from Tony Wilson and Mark Jervis, who are two of our co-opties on the panel. Excellent, thank you. And do we have any declarations of interest? Okay, so item number five is to agree the minutes from the meeting held on the 18th April 2024. Does anyone have any comments to make or alterations or do you want to agree the minutes? We're all good? I think we're all good. Excellent. So straight on to item agenda number six, adult social care realignment. I'm going to assume that is yourself, Kevin. It is, thank you, chair. So in front of you, colleagues, you have a paper that went to cabinet a couple of weeks ago. And the opportunity to bring scrutiny is to look at the the rationale for the change and what we might expect to see in the future of our adult social care. So if I do a slight introduction to the paper with some of the background, I'm happy to take any questions that might flow from there. So Councillors, you'll be aware that we have an unusual arrangement in the borough for the delivery of all adult social care. We share the ownership of a company called Optolis Limited, and we share that with Wokingham Borough Council. For both Wokingham Borough Council and ourselves, Optolis provides a range of services that we call provider services. Think of things like daycare, care services at home, which are regulated on an individual basis by the Care Quality Commission, typically medical in their heart, as well as care. They perform those services very well. Of the five CQC assessments, they're all currently good or outstanding. And for one service in particular, the supported employment service for adults with learning disabilities, the Optolis service is ranked first and second in the country, one for Wokingham, one for us in terms of the quality. Specifically for the Royal Borough, they also provide what we call statutory services. These are typically the assessment services provided by social workers and occupational therapists. These are to assess whether somebody has a need under the Care Act, and then go on to say how to plan with the individual how those services could be met. And then Optolis commission those services, either from Optolis in some cases, or from the wider market. There are as many people working in the care market in the Royal Borough as there are work for the NHS in Primley aligned to this area. It's a significant marketplace. It's unusual for that setup. Indeed, we believe we're the only council in the country that has that particular setup. There are a few who pay for social workers and occupational therapists from the marketplace, but all other councils have their strategic centre located in the centre. Over the last year or so, despite a very positive set of results around the adult social care system, for those who've been involved and read the last quarterly performance report that went to the corporate overview and scrutiny panel, the outcome survey suggested that last year people who used adult social care in its entirety, whether that service is commissioned by ourselves, delivered by the care providers or their engagement with hospitals, they ranked the borough as one of the best places in the country to receive adult services as a positive backdrop. But behind the scene, you'll have heard me talk about the challenges of, in particular, recruiting and retaining social workers to do that first piece of skilled work. And so we're proposing that we bring back that statutory element of the work from Optolis into my directorate. So rather than me commissioning Optolis, we'll have direct management of those teams. And in fact, we've had that mode working since the 1st of December when Optolis, as part of the staff turnover challenge they're facing, lost two of their senior managers in quick succession. And so we took the decision to start managing that directly from December. So we're making a proposal to bring those staff back. The paper sets out in overview terms, we believe that we'll be able to increase our offer to social workers. So from the 1st of January, we increased the amount of salary for social workers under the Optolis banner. But we've been unable to address the second element of remuneration in this space, which is pension. People employed in Optolis have access to a pension scheme, which is comparable to those working in care agencies and residential homes and is competitive in that field. But it's not competitive with those who are employed by a local authority, particularly in the senior roles where people have done five, six, seven years in a local authority. They're not going to give up the public sector pension scheme in order to come and join Optolis. So by bringing the staff back to the council, we can match that scheme. And then that leaves the third element. When these staff come back, they'll come up on Optolis holiday terms and conditions, which is something like 27 to 28 days. The council has recently increased its terms and conditions to 32. So one of the things that I'm sure we'll have to think through once the staff have come back using the legal process of TUPE is how we normalise that holiday process. That should enable us to attract and retain more of those skilled staff. In particular, it means that within the financial envelope that we currently live in within, because we have to pay for agency staff, we have fewer people working than we would have if we had permanent staff. So my hope is that this transition would actually give us more staff on the ground, which means a better response for residents and a better work-life balance for our staff, as well as something that's competitive. The second reason for the change is to enable us to make the absolute most of the new case management system, which we are in the middle of implementing. And again, those who saw the paper that went to the full council meeting in April, you'll recognise the council has committed the final million pounds to that two and a half million pound project. What we've identified is one of the things we need to make work better is the link between that system and the finance system, the system that we call aggressive, that sits inside of the council. By having both of those systems in the council, and all of the staff working with it as council employees, we can remove a double handoff that happens at the moment, because finance information goes into the optimist system, comes out and then goes back into the RPWM system. And you'll recognise the volatility we've seen in the forecast for adult social care. So the second significant reason is to make the most of that system we're putting in place for now and for the next five, six, seven years as that comes forward. In bringing this together, we're making a proposal to change the structure of the management and in the paper in section 213, you can see that we're proposing to have a simplified management structure. We're proposing to have three assistant and deputy director roles. The first role will be a deputy director, who will be a qualified social worker without leading social worker in the adult field, taking responsibility for the day-to-day operation of the service, making sure that work coming through is appropriately prioritised and that work is distributed around the teams as need be. That's not dissimilar to the arrangement we have at the moment, but we've had two people doing that work in the past. What we've identified is we want to use one of those resources to drive a role around quality, performance and improvement. It's become particularly clear with the work we're doing with the Mosaic system that the operational teams need support by people who are expert in creating management reports and quality assurance systems to give them the tools to be able to keep that performance, both quantitative numbers and qualitative work, working together. So we're proposing to put that into one group to drive those activities together. Longer term, we believe that we can join that group up with our performance and strategy colleagues across the council and our experts in public health, who are data specialists, to give us more insight into those areas where we can do more work. And the last piece is to grow the strategic commissioning work currently undertaken for us by optimists by bringing together all of the commissioning of services and the management of our finance, both the money we spend out every year and the money we collect from people for their contribution to adult social care into one team, which should hopefully enable us to answer the question, what do we think we need to spend our money on to make services better for people and where can we drive the most efficiency? So already, since we've been in this process, we've moved the commissioning of services for those with learning disabilities into the commissioning team. So we've started to bring those groups together. So it feels that we'll have a strong core within the council's management team, a team I hope you'll have a chance to talk to in due course in this group, to be able to drive adult social care risks. So I'll finish my opening remarks by making the observation that in principle for this move, we have the same people doing the same job, sitting at the same desks, using the same computers, but there's a significant change in the support services underneath to deliver that. So the paper talks about a sum of just over £300,000, which is currently part of the Optalis contract, so given to Optalis by the council's commissioners, who then spend it in a range of ways. We're proposing to keep those services where they're spent with RBWM directly and move some of those things away from Optalis. So that money will still be spent, but it was spent directly in the council. The exact detail is now being worked through. We've pressed the button on the transfer of staff, which we hope will happen on the 1st of August, and that money will flow through. When we see the budget for next year in particular, there'll be an order of magnitude of £300,000 for a full year effect that will be different. The risk, of course, is that when you have a group that is working and you bring the staff over and you change it and you change some of those support arrangements, it's possible that something we haven't yet unspotted and will come out of the woodwork. We don't see it as a significant risk, but nonetheless, it is a risk. Hence the section of the reporting finance signed off by the section 151 officer, which recognises there is a risk that we may discover that when we bring a service over here, the way RBWM requires it to be done might be different to the way it's being done in Optalis at the moment, and we might need to adjust some of the resourcing behind the scenes, hence the caveats in the finance section. I could talk for a long time about this. I'm happy to take any questions on this or the related future view of adult social care. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. I think the first one to press the button was Councillor Cross. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Kevin, for that update. No, it seems like not an insignificant project. You rightly say there's a number of risks and dependencies as well, and there seems to be a lot happening at the same time as well. You mentioned the 1st of August for the GP of the staff across, and the 1st of November, I noted, was when the Optalis agreements, the changes are finalised then. In the adult social care strategy document I was reading this afternoon, that's the 14th of October is the date for the Mosaic system to go live as well from the Paris system, which I understand has been in situ for years and years. So again, my question around that is what happens if that slips? Is there a dependency on that going live on the 14th of October for the 1st of November agreements to be live, et cetera, and that slippage could be like a domino effect? So that was one of the questions I had, because as you rightly say, that's aligning all the data with the Council's finance system at the back end. So that's, again, not an insignificant piece of work that's underway at the moment, which I understand. So that's one of my questions. The other question I had was on page, I believe, 23 of the document, there was some, as you say, not every question has been answered here, but Optalis will need to identify how to make these savings while leading provider services. So this is a cost recharge as well. So again, is there a risk here that maybe they don't identify them while they're still having, so it's like spinning plates, they still got to deliver the service, but they need to identify the cost recharge as well. And then my final two questions are on 4.2. Again, coming back to, as you rightly say, the finance details, the value for money piece. So 4.2 is noting, saying more resources will be required, as it notes in this report, but the cost of these are not known. So again, when will we know how many resources, what that cost will be? So again, to put into that financial envelope, as we all know, the Council isn't the best financial state. So to walk into a big project like this, not knowing some major cost elements is a worry to me. And then 4.3, it says, we hope that it's going to be cost neutral, but we don't know if this is today. And again, when I read words like hope in a document, again, it doesn't give me a lot of confidence. So again, when will we know whether this will be cost neutral? When will we know how many people will be, will we need to deliver this service? What would that cost be? Because again, there's lots of questions here. And again, it's money, which we all know the Council is pretty poor with money at the moment. So we don't have a lot of money, you know, to pay for these additional resources. So those are really my four questions around the case management system, around the cost recharge, around the resources, and around the cost neutrality. Thank you. Thank you for those questions. I'll try and remember them all and come try and cover them in my answers. So if I look at first of all about the dependencies, the Mosaic system is system in fact is independent of these changes, because we've already done the design work, we've already worked with the same teams. The delivery date for a complex project like Mosaic is always under review. And therefore we've made sure we haven't joined anything together. The bit that will be a challenge for us if it didn't happen is if we couldn't connect Mosaic to Aggressor, which we know is technically feasible, we just need to make that connection. So these two projects aren't connected in as directly as you might have worried about. You're quite right, however, about the linkage between the agreement with Optalis and all and end of all the moving parts. So the last thing in this sequence is finalizing the agreement with Optalis about what is their responsibility going forward. If I had to hazard a guess right now, it's the back of the chain and that's the one that may well not land in time, just simply because of where it will be. That won't matter because the nature of the contract we have with Optalis effectively enables us to change the service specification as we are going through that. And indeed, as we have done since the first of December, we've made the change with their agreement and their chief executive understands what it is we're trying to achieve. So I'm less worried about that piece. The cheapy, however, is a really important bit that we hit the 1st of August. If we don't hit the 1st of August because of the commitments that the council already has in September, effectively our next date will be the 1st of October before we could move that. I am hopeful of actually going into September with more permanent adverts out for social workers as I described. So that's the most crucial one. There's a team of about 20 people across the business working on the project. So I'm not overly worried about this date either. Consultation started on track last week. One-to-one meetings are happening this week and next week with the 100 or so staff involved. And we have no reason to doubt that it won't happen because the other advantage we have, for those who've worked in cheapy before, there's a very clear exchange of information that has to happen at least 28 days before the date. In this case, the staff transferring already have their payroll and banking information processed by the council because the council is the provider for optilist payroll. So what we've agreed with all of the staff is rather than having to fill in forms and us having to do 100 data entries, they've all agreed we can just transfer the data that is already paying them. So the risk that you normally have with cheapy is somebody doesn't get paid. We've got all that in place. I'm very comfortable with 1st of August. Comfortable with the mosaic is moving towards a line that will deliver it. Whether we have to change the optilist arrangements, because I'm going to ask one of your further questions about what does the final state look like? We don't know right now. So optilists know that in terms of their effectively, the optilists contract is made up of a number of elements as you'd expect. There's a big pile of money that pays for the staff who are directly employed. There's then a pile of money that pays for services optilists buy to deliver for people. And then there's an amount in the middle, which is a management overhead. It's the money that we gave them for effectively managing our services. They keep a bunch of that for provider services. But there's a very specific amount for statutory services with that money will not effectively be back with us from the 1st of August. So optilists are already working through what they have to do in their central management piece to deliver that. And that's, to an extent, that's their business with their board of directors, but it's a very clear scale. And we have commitment from the optilist board that effectively they will manage that reduction. Exactly how is still with them to be confirmed. So there is still a risk there. So I won't tell you we know the answer because we don't. But we know the size of the problem. We know the options and the things they're looking at. None of it is effect service delivery. It's about the central management of the service that have left. And because that's all coming back to us, it shouldn't be a significant issue. However, until it's landed, you're quite right to ask the question. That's the sense that was the central recharge. And the points in the financial element. So section 4.2, the finance team, as has been well reported, has been significantly reduced in capacity over recent years. And one of the concerns is that when we bring this service back, and we start to say, so what do we need to do to get a grip on that number, our finance team might not be big enough. And it might be that we need to change something. One of the opportunities of Mosaic is that it includes a number of technologies for automating 80, I'll use the 80/20 rule, the straightforward elements of invoicing and paying in this marketplace, where at the moment we do that entirely manually within the council. So again, the expectation is that when Mosaic lands, that will free some resource for us to do something more important with it. It might be working with residents on how to make the most of their benefits, it might be that we need to put some of that resource into the finance team to deal with the more difficult cases. But again, until it lands, we don't know. What we do know is that with the resource we've got now, we're delivering a good service, we're paying the bills on time. What we don't know is how, where we need to improve. It's our forecast of what's coming down the line. And that's what the Mosaic system is about providing for us. So the element you describe when you word more resource will be required is at the end of a sentence that starts with there is a risk of that. So it's not a definite there'll be more resource needed, but there is a risk there, which has been rightly identified by our colleagues in finance. And I take the point that with the section 4.3, it says that we hope this net change will be neutral. You can see in the table beneath that in section seven, you can see the list of support changes. So you can see that in addition to the 153,000 of the central recharge, which would come back to effectively pay for people who are already here in the council, some of that will give us some headroom, you can see the other things that are also coming back. We've spoken to our colleagues in HR where the biggest landing point is, and they believe that within this, they can manage the resource that the additional resource they need, and there'll still be some space for some unknowns to come through. The project team is meeting on a fortnightly basis and working through those mechanics. It's one of my challenges to turn that hope into it does, but I take the point. I think I've answered all the questions there. Thank you. Councillor Carol de Costa. Thank you. I'm really, really pleased to see that we will be comparative to our neighbours as far as social workers go, because we've been struggling for as long as I've been a councillor to make our offer as good as it can be. So that's really pleasing to see that within this report. I'm assuming that once we've made these changes, and if it does cost now, it's going to be more like investing to save in the long term, because as we make those changes, will we still be having to pay for agency social workers, and we've got that recruitment programme fully operational, because you don't suddenly wake up on the 1st of August and find you've got yourself a full number of social workers ready to go. So there's going to be a cost element initially, presumably, which we've already having to struggle with at the moment, because we can't get the social worker. So I would think that looking at the figures, there will be some kind of cost element that we'll have to invest now to get us over that hurdle of that full recruitment. Thank you, Councillor de Costa, I understand the question. So if we take social workers as a specific group, within the establishment that we have for the need of our social workers, we have an establishment for 37 social workers on a permanently employed basis, and the budget for 37 on a permanently employed basis. Full-time equivalent. At this moment in time, because you're quite right that we have to have agency staff, we currently have the equivalent of 30 full-time staff, predominantly made up from agency, and that spends all the money we've got. So at the moment, we have effectively seven less people than we would ideally want for delivering the services to our folk. When we transfer on the 1st of August, the permanent staff from Opulus will move across, and we hope that the current agency staff will also transfer to RBWM at the same, in the same terms and conditions that they're currently on. So we won't spend any more money, but we're spending right up against our budget. What we are hoping is that the progress, since January, since we increased the salaries, we've managed to have a couple of social workers who were going to leave us choose to stay, and we've successfully recruited two more who've been able to have joined us based on the salary alone. We're hoping that, effectively, the added value will then be able to push that on in the autumn. What we should then be able to do is start to reduce the number of agency staff, and as soon as we've released enough that we can then free another whole person, we can then start to grow our staff establishment within our, within our current budget. What we're not proposing to do is spend any more money on that staffing. The exception, of course, would be as if we can't meet our statutory duties with the staffing level we've got. At the moment, we're holding on, so that's our, that's our safe line at the moment. Thank you. Councillor Shaw. Okay, just a couple of questions. So, if, since Oxilos covered both us and Wokingham and we're pulling out our statutory services, was there a split in the statutory service provision in Oxilos for Wokingham and BWM, or are we effectively getting some, like, what's the deal with Wokingham, I suppose? Thank you, Councillor Shaw. So, when the, when Wokingham set up Oxilos originally, they were providing just the provider services for Oxilos and a small element of their statutory services. As long ago as 2018, Wokingham decided not to continue that path and took their bit of statutory out. So, it's only been, Oxilos have only been providing statutory services, sorry, have only been providing provider services for Wokingham for the last five or six years. So, we're aligning ourselves with Wokingham, which gives us the opportunity to say that, actually, Oxilos is really good at 24 by seven provider services that are regulated. How do we build that better across ourselves in Wokingham? So, one of the things for interest is, Wokingham asked Optilis to run a residential nursing home for them for the first time about six months ago, which they're duly in the process of, they've taken over, they're improving the standards, it's looking quite promising. So, one of the questions for us to ask is, that's interesting, is that an opportunity for Oxilos to take apart a place in the marketplace, which we're currently, we buy all of our places from commercial providers, is there an opportunity for there, in the medium term, for us to do more with Oxilos? So, Oxilos has a definite role, but we're not doing anything that Wokingham haven't already done. Wokingham are looking at this from the financial reason, exactly as Councillor Cross described, they're looking at the reduction in the fee to the centre, and they're saying, make sure Oxilos can still deliver provider services appropriately, given they'll have less of that money in the centre. Did you have a follow-up question? Sorry. So, in which case are we going to be offering the same as Wokingham, are we like directly competing for care staff then, if both our statutory services are passed? So, in terms of statutory services, we've been competing with Wokingham, Bracknell, Slough, Reading, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Hampshire, West Berkshire for years for staff, because these staff can choose to turn their car in at one of any of nine directions, and in about 30 minutes get to any one of those councils. So, we'll continue to compete with Wokingham and others, and what I would observe is there is absolute inflation in the cost of senior staff, without a shadow of a doubt. So, while we've upped our salaries for social workers at the moment, the spiral is only going one way, unfortunately, and that's something which we're working hard across the director's group to see if we can keep a lid on that for all of our benefits, in order that sufficient staff to meet the needs of people. From a statutory, from a provider services point of view, however, what we tend to find is if you can have a provider that is slightly larger and runs two or three provisions, you can offer better benefits to your staff, you can offer better career projection. So, one of the things Optilus have done really well over the last few years, they've taken somebody in on the ground floor, as it were, an introductory level in a provider service, they've grown their skills, they might be working on a service in Wokingham, they've grown their skills, there's then an opportunity to be a deputy manager, which might be somewhere else in the Optilus group, and they've come over to be the deputy manager with us, and a couple of years later they've taken a manager's job in another service in Optilus that might be serving Wokingham. So, I think we're gaining more than we're losing but there's always a risk that if we can't keep up with the, effectively, the rates of pay that are being driven by other councils, then we'll have a challenge, and that's one of the challenges that we see in provider services because it's broadly minimum wage plus type work, and as councils look to invest more of the money that government's giving us specifically for growing market capacity, that's going into Optilus more than ever, so frontline Optilus staff in these front-facing jobs for the last two years have had higher percentage pay rises than anybody else in Optilus to try and bring that pay level up at the front line until we keep staff. Good. Councillor Douglas. Thank you, Chair. Thanks, Kevin. I've got a question about where we are at in the process, but I can ask a couple of clarification questions first. In the diagrams on 211 and 213, what's going on with mental health in terms of whether it's a statutory service or not? It seems to change colour between the two diagrams? If I can clarify for everyone, the colours on the two diagrams, unfortunately, are different colour sets. They don't match. In the first one, in section 211, they're trying to describe the different management teams, and in the other one, they're the different portfolios within the adult directory. Mental health is a co-located service where a number of Optilus staff currently sit alongside Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust colleagues and are managed by Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust. Hence, in section 211, the light blue three boxes in the top left-hand corner. What we are proposing is when this comes across, the Optilus staff will transfer to RBWM and they will stay effectively working with our colleagues in Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust, but we're in conversations with the trust about us taking the management responsibility for that service in due course. But there's a long way to go on that piece because integration delivers a number of benefits for us, and we've got to make sure we get that right. If I may refer back to Councillor Cross's question about making things fit, that's something we need to make sure that Mosaic has landed first before we decide how we can make that work better. And is there any significance in the name change, mental health to mental health hyphen social work? So that's saying that effectively what we want to make sure we've got under the auspices of our deputy director is a direct ownership of the social work that's being done in the mental health team. So we wanted to explicitly call it out because at the moment Berkshire Healthcare Foundation Trust management team does both mental health and social work management. We want to have more visibility of the social work management. So we're calling that out. Thanks. And so last clarification question, in the table in 3.1, can you just run us through the figures in the second row, in the bottom row, greater than one pound, not 10,000 pounds, smaller than 10,000 pounds? Yes, certainly. So one of the things that we're asked to describe in the key implementations table is what is the main change that will happen here? And this is about spending money. What we're saying is that effectively we believe, effectively we will have succeeded if we effectively deliver this as a balanced move. If we save up to 10,000 pounds, we'll have exceeded our expectations, but we unmet if we spent one pound more than we currently have in the budget. That's what he's trying to say. Not the easiest table to decode. So my actual question, actually two questions now. You mentioned the changes that are happening, we're going to put up the table of document. Can you tell us where we're at, what the timelines are for that process? But more generally, this paper's already been to cabinet and been approved. You've already, you mentioned you pulled the trigger, now you press the button on the GPs already. And broadly speaking, where are we in the process? And have you, have you got any more to update us on in terms of the risks that have been identified? Do you have any more information about whether they're going to be realized one way or the other? So in terms of timetable, following the cabinet decision, we started the the cheapie formal process. So on Monday last week, we kicked off the cheapie process with a formal consultation meeting. All of the staff involved were invited, about a third attended in person, the rest have acknowledged they've had the information. The relevant union groups were involved in, in the conversation and gave some positive feedback to the way the process was working. So we, we believe we've removed one of the normal risks you get, which is somebody says, I didn't know this was happening. So I think we're past there. We're in consultation until the 24th of June consultation around the change. At this point, it's too early for me to say, have we removed all the risks? But based on the questions that have been asked of us so far, I only know of one thing that people are asking. And that's not a significant issue for the cheapie. So I'm comfortable that cheapie on the 1st of August will happen. And that feels like a good piece of progress. I should be able to update you in. Have we got another meeting in July? September, September, okay. By September, you'll know it's happened. So if there was a meeting in July, I'd be able to give the update that the cheapie was definitely moving forward. But I'd be happy to make a note through you chair, when we've when the consultation is concluded, if that would help the panel to know before the summer gets here that we're still on track. The second piece that's working is we're working through with all of the teams, what needs to change. We've identified that the transfer of funding the money is not an issue, because there is no change to who is actually providing the support services. It's just how we account for it behind the scenes. So the only area where there is work still to be done, where we don't currently have an answer, but there's work underway, is our IT colleagues are picking up one of a group of the individuals who are in the Opless group and doing the necessary background moves to move them from one part of our server structure to another. And we'll be able to test to make sure that works. But they'll then be, as ever, a switchover of 100 people on the 1st of August. Despite our IT being robust and pretty good, until it happens, I won't be happy until it's done. And the other item we were in discussion with relates to two elements of services provided by Opless at the moment. The first one is access to online mandatory training. That's currently delivered by an Opless system, which isn't available in RBWM's iHASCO system, because we don't use it, because we don't employ those social workers. So we're just negotiating whether we move that onto iHASCO for the 1st of August, or whether we keep the Opless system available until the end of March and effectively recommission in a better time frame. So mandatory training will be available to staff, we just don't know how. Likewise, one of the duties that Opless provide for us is, if an individual asks for access to their records, their care records, there's a process for giving that access. And that requires us to make appropriate redactions of third parties in there. That's currently provided, done by Opless. And again, while RBWM has a team, it's nowhere near big enough for the amount of work that comes through. So we're currently in discussion as to whether that individual who currently is a third party contract, whether that moves to us, or whether it stays with Opless contract until the end of the year. So those are the two moving parts we haven't yet got an answer to. But we know people are working on them, and we will have them by the 1st of August. Thank you. Councillor Storey. Thank you, Kevin, could I just check that I've understood one thing correctly, if I may, there's 260,000 pounds of additional cost here, which I'm already saying that includes an uplift to the salaries of social workers, which, which sort of makes you confident that that will be sufficient to recruit and retain 37 permanent staff rather than have this mixture of agency and permanent staff as now because the story the 260,000 was the estimate of how much the additional pension cost for those for all of those 100 staff would be to the council. So the staff transfer at the moment are on a private pension scheme run by Opless that will freeze on the 31st of July. And when they transfer to us, as part of the TUPE arrangements, we have to offer a pension, which is equivalent or better. The council must provide local government pension scheme terms and conditions. So the 260,000 is the is the employer contributions we will have to make to the Berkshire pension scheme for those 100 staff in order that they can access the benefit. It's that additional benefit that we believe will be attractive to people. Now it's split that we think that's the full year effect of the of the of the whole group coming across. And now you repeated many, many occasions here now is that the problem with what we had was that we didn't offer enough money to recruit and retain experienced social workers. So we increase the pay element, the salary through Opless on the first of January this year, it's already been done. And we and we did that by recognising that we've never had a full establishment of 40 social workers. So we reduced it from 40 to 37, and took the money from the three to be extra money for those who were for the establishments. That's how we did that in January, given that we're running at around about 30. Because of the agency need, we thought we would increase that salary. So we've already increased the base pay, the 260 will enable us to pay being that the added value pension, which is an element in in public sector life, particularly for experienced social workers and middle managers. For us to retain and recruit. So it takes away the thing we hear on the on the recruitment round when we get when we put adverse out and we get somebody gets who's that's interested, and we talk to them, we say, why, why have you taken this further, they say your terms and conditions don't match what I can get in Bracknell or Buckinghamshire. So yes, we believe we can now address that we think our adverts will will look as good as everybody else's, and in reality, be be as good as everybody else's, where we struggle. And this is a general council observation. Back in 2014, I believe it was the council opted to move out of national pay bargaining. So for those of you who are familiar with the public sector pay, people often talk about green book terms, that's the national set of terms and conditions. So when you see a figure that says government has settled with a national pay settlement of 3.6%, that doesn't apply to any role in RBWM, we have local pay setting conditions, that's part of the budget setting each year. So in recent years, there was a few years where there was a freeze nationally, but we still had three or 4% in our pay packet. So in recent years, we've caught up a little bit, but that's the area where we have a difference. But on the on the adverts and the terms and conditions people coming in the social work from the first of August will be comparable with our neighbours. And I'd hope we'd be able to make some hay in that spring in that autumn sunshine if we get some. Councillor de Costa. Okay, so I'd like to ask some questions about how teams might work together a bit more because finances are really important, but they're not what makes my mind work well. So when I look at the the the structure, where you've got your mental health, does that include like your dementia services, and things like that as well? Or is that just the people that have mental health illness? Or does it include anything to do with the brain? So in the second question is the question as well. Okay, so in the diagrams, those blue boxes are the statutory mental health assessment pieces. Within Optalis provider services, we've commissioned a number of services that are delivered to end users. Optalis will continue to do that. And we'll continue to, by the dementia service, we'll continue to commission that directly. And one of the things that I've noticed through dealing with providers of the vulnerable adult community is that sometimes it's really hard to get things joined up. So one department deals with one thing, and another department deals with something else. And what I'd like to ask you is, will bringing that initial assessment area within-house, are we more likely to have a seamless provision eventually? Because it's really difficult when it feels sometimes like the left foot doesn't know what the right foot's doing, and you've got to go one place for one thing, and then somebody else has to do this, and the OT will do this, and you have to wait six months for the OT and 10 years for something else. So will we have a better system at that first assessment point so that we can then get the providers in doing what they need to do? So I think I'm going to push back a little bit, Councillor de Costa. About a year ago, we bought a front door service together, which brings together social workers, OTs, and the reablement services which are commissioned by the NHS. They sit in the same location here. We have our commissioners sitting alongside them. And while I recognise we don't always get it right, what I recognise is, because we've been preparing for an inspection visit by the Care Quality Commission, in fact, they're in the building this week, we've identified that since last October, only on three days have we finished today without having made the connection for delivery of a service to a resident. So perhaps offline I can understand what it is that's driving your question, because all the data suggests that we're better than we ever were. And if you've got a particular example, I'm happy to pick it up. But to answer your question directly, this change is the same people doing the same work, sitting next to each other doing in the same way. So it won't fundamentally change it unless I understand what's driving your worry. I'm certainly happy to listen. Maybe we'll take that offline, because it's just about seeing that holistic way of dealing with people and not having people fall through the net, because we've seen a little bit of that. Anyone else that has any questions for Kevin? You've answered them very well. Thank you very much. Moving on to item seven, the work programme. Thank you, Chair. So just getting the work programme up. So yes, it's a good opportunity for the panel to consider what they want to look at over the course of the year. We've got those meeting dates in on the work programme. So currently got meetings scheduled for September, February and March 2025. We can obviously discuss ideas now, we can kind of consider which councillors want to take ideas away and scope those out into a scoping document and bring those forward over the coming month or so, so we can schedule those into the work programme. Cancer Babies has submitted one on the homelessness strategy, I believe, which I'm working through of officers over the coming weeks to see if we can fit that into the work programme. But yeah, we can also have a good discussion now on it, if anyone's got any ideas. But if not, we can sort of think about it offline, discuss ideas by email, and sort of form an escape and documents that way. But yeah, just get the power to think about what we want to look at over the course of the municipal year. Councillor Dacosta? In one of those, either the February or the March that we have a kind of like a feedback update on what's going on with the what we've discussed today, so we can just see how that's coming together. So I'll give you about six months. Can I suggest Councillor Dacosta that on the 23rd of September, we bring to this panel, what where what should be the published CQC report for adult social care, which will give us another strand of things that we now need to work on, because by then we will have landed first of August, and we'll be able to describe what the next six months look like. So I'm very happy to do that. Yeah, I'd like to see a six month check in as well. I think it's always nice to see how things are bedding in. I can give my apologies in advance for 23rd of September will be one of my deputy directors because I'm on holiday. You okay to make a note of that, Matt? Councillor Davies? So I'm quite surprised to see such a long gap between our meeting in September and our meeting in February. I was hoping that we'll be able to get the homelessness strategy work done before winter. Would we be allowed to change those meetings? Yeah, they're very flexible, the dates. And also we've got four scheduled. But if there are items coming through on the work programme, you know, let's say there's already a couple items in September, but let's say there was a couple items like homelessness strategy, and other things that the panel wants to look at, we could have a meeting in October, November time, before that, before Christmas, essentially, if there's that demand that the panel wants to look at. Absolutely, we can do that. Probably at the latest October, if we were going to do something like that, because you'd want it before winter bites, wouldn't you be able to do something? So maybe think about an extra meeting. Yeah. And anybody else got any suggestions for things on the work programme? I was looking at the forward plan for cabinets. And they've got the Berkshire local nature recovery strategy. I didn't know whether that might be something thinking about green spaces and the effect of mental health. I don't know anyone else thinks about that. No. I was gonna say, I think it's one of those, isn't it? It's like the empty homes is more. I think it is. It falls under the place directorate. Yeah, Andrew Durant, it falls under, so that would be the place. Place O&S panel would be where that one would sit. But yeah, it's a really good point about the cabinet forward plan. So I always encourage the panel to have a look at the cabinet forward plan, as it's based on a monthly basis. That's just minding me as well. We've got the air quality monitoring, which is on the cabinet forward plan for October. In my last conversations with Amanda about that, I think that will be coming to O&S rather than cabinet. So we'll have that on for the September meeting or potential October meeting as well, which is another addition we can add in. Maybe we could do that, set that then for October, because homelessness is going to be quite big. The air monitoring is going to be quite big. I mean, can I be happy to agree to have an extra meeting in October in theory now? Is that something that... We could do chairs, we could work on those items over the next month or so, and then we can sort of look at kind of where things will fit in, then we can sort of then go, right, we can then fit in a date in October, November time, if we have those items going through. Yeah, we can have a catch up about that and decide what we want to do. Yeah. Kat, stop for us. Yeah, if you leave it, don't put it on, just don't touch. Thanks. No, I was going to bring up air quality, actually, because the task of finished group, because, you know, it didn't happen. And I think it's one that we need to get going and potentially across place and people, O&S, if we can do a cross sort of scrutiny panel, because it touches both, I'd really welcome that. Okay, thank you. Councilor de Kloet, you did have your button pressed. I was just going to ask, did we ever get our visit to Heatherwood? I don't recall we ever got our visit to Heatherwood, because we were meant to be going out to Heatherwood when it was being rebuilt to have a look around at the new hospital. And I don't think it ever happened. John, do you know if it ever happened? I don't think it did, did it? Not, I don't think that this group. Because we were meant to be going, weren't we? They were meant to be taking us around. I mean, because I'm a local councilor, I have been rounded. Yeah, I've been there. But the group hasn't been rounded. Yeah, we were meant to be being taken around Heatherwood just after it opened the new hospital. They never did quite achieve that. So I wondered if we would be nice to do that, especially because they've had a little bit of time to be doing stuff now. They can show us what they're achieving and what they're doing. It would be really good. I can certainly, as well, be NHS friendly colleagues, I think would be the people that would be able to support that. Ken, I don't know if you can answer that. I'd be happy to talk to colleagues and get that organised. And I wonder if we might use that as an opportunity for a discussion with them about what they think the future of hospitals are with the redevelopment of the Frimley Hospital due to the opening in 2030, and the redevelopment of the Royal Barks Hospital. It might be an opportunity to have a look at what a modern state-of-the-art building looks like, and then have a discussion around what do we think we need in our hospitals, which might give you an opportunity to influence the future. I think we looked at that about 10 years ago, didn't we, looking at having a super hospital in the area, and whether that was not really feasible. I think there's a really good conversation to have with them about what needs to be in a district central hospital, and what needs to be out in the community more accessible. I think now would be the time to be having those conversations. I'm happy to take that as an action. It might not be then for an evening meeting like this, it might be a particular activity, but I can certainly talk to the trust to run the hospital and get that organised. Anybody else got any suggestions for the work programme? No? As ever, you can always email Mark or myself with those details. I think that's it. We're good, we're good. With the next meeting scheduled for the 23rd of September, and we'll obviously keep you all updated about a potential October as well. Thank you very much.