Transcript

First of all, good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the General Purpose Committees. Please be advised this meeting will be recorded and posted on the Council's YouTube channel. Can all those speaking please ensure you switch off your microphone before addressing the meeting and remember to switch it off when you have finished. Item 1, apologies for absence. Item 2, knowledge of business. Item 3, any declarations of interest? Item 4, are members happy to approve the minutes of the last meeting? Thank you. We'll move on to Item 5, appointment of member level bodies for 2024 to 2025 following by election. Are members happy to agree the appointments listed in paragraph 4.4 to 4.5 of the amended report? Thank you. We'll now move on to Item 6, appointment to the vacancies of outside bodies. Are members happy to agree the proposed nominations? Thank you. And Item 7, establishment of appointment panel for the chief officer recruitment of the director of legal and democratic services. And I'll bring officers in, Assistant Chief Executive Ian Tasker to present. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. GP Committee is asked to agree a post that has a salary range of over 100,000 as per the chief officer appointment process laid out in sections 4.1 to 4.9 of the report. This is the director of legal and democratic services, chief officer grade A, salary range 148.823 to 160.576. And also to note that the chief exec has delegated authority to establish in consultation with party group leaders individual appointment panels for the appointment of chief officers based on the requirements of the post. May wish to note that general purposes committee approval was confirmed for the post of the director of legal services back in August '23. The post has been covered by an internal acting arrangement since. A reorganisation exercise has been completed to move the corporate governance and democratic service from its previous location in communities environment and central into the director of finance and legal service under the director of legal services. This has been a more appropriate place. This reorganisation continues ongoing review and alignment. Due to the change in the post, general purposes committee approval is sought to the salary of the revised post of director of legal and democratic services. The grade of the post remains unchanged. Thank you very much. Do members have any questions surrounding item -- item 7? Yeah, the two alternatives. If it remained as it was with temporary posts, how much would that cost? Sorry, if the post remained as it was at the moment, being covered sort of by temporary, I'm assuming it's agency. Is it agency workers? No, it isn't. So I was wondering about the costing difference. No, it's actually being covered by an internal acting up onto the grade that the post exists. So there will be no additional cost or reduction of cost by going out and doing this permanently. Any other questions from the panel? No? Okay. Are members happy to agree decisions in section 1 of the report? Agreed. Thank you. Now we'll move on to item 8, establishment of appointments panel for chief officer recruitment for DAS. I'll hand over back to assistant chief exec to present. Thank you very much, chair. GP committee has asked to agree a post that has a salary range of over a hundred thousand pounds as per the chief officer appointment process laid out in sections 4.1 to 4.9 of the report. This is the director of health and adult services, chief officer grade A1, salary range 172,308 to 184,082. Following the resignation of the director of health and adult services who's moving to work for the civil service, the post will become vacant and it's an essential leadership role and therefore will need to be recruited to. Members may wish to note that the JD has been reviewed and updated because it's a number of years since the last time this was appointed. Thank you very much. We'll move to members if they have any questions or comments. No, I don't. Okay. Then we wish our DAS all the best in their new role in central government. Are members happy to agree the decisions as outlined in section one of the report? Thank you very much. When I move on to item six, establishment of the chief officer recruitment panel, AD for social care and operations, back to the chief assistant chief exec to present. Thank you, chair. GP committee has been asked to agree a post that has a salary range of over a hundred thousand pounds as per the chief officer appointment process laid out in sections 4.1 to 4.9. This is the assistant director social care operations, health and adult services, chief officer grade D, salary range 93-070 to 103-851. And to note, the chief exec has delegated authority to establishing consultation party group leaders, individual appointment panels for the appointment of the chief officer based on the requirements of the post. Following a reorganization of the directorate management team, this is a newly created post within the leadership structure within the directorate of health and adult services. The post is critical to the delivery of the new adult social care operating model and the MTFS savings for 24, 25 and subsequent years. I'm happy to take any questions. We'll move to members or questions or comments. I'll bring in Councillor locale. Did this post not exist before? I understand you've done a restructuring. Is this a new post? This is a new post, yes. The post will manage the service managers for a range of the operational social work teams such as hospital discharge team, reablement and complex care and the OT. And the teams are all frontline teams and comprise social care staff. So it's adding an extra layer of strategic management over some very critical fronts facing services that deliver important day-to-day services. It might just be worth walking us through the journey of these policies and how they've come about, how you've managed to engage different stakeholders around the council and also has it gone through cabinet members and scrutiny. Thank you. Thanks, chair. So the committee's been asked to approve the suite of policies that we're putting in front of you tonight. Some of these are refreshes of existing policies and some of these are brand new. We've dealt with these in conjunction with our information governance colleagues of which David White sits into my right. And we have consulted with trade unions where that is appropriate. It hasn't yet been through standard digital scrutiny. That will happen in January when we next go through our cycle of annual scrutiny. I'm happy to take any questions. Councilor, I'll move to members now. Members, any questions or comments at all? No. Can you just outline how the conversations with trade unions when I see the section on there about bringing your own device and how that works in the context of things? Thank you. Yeah, thanks, chair. There were no objections from trade unions. The bring your own device is optional. So these aren't enforcements that we're bringing in to staff. It's something that we're doing which has MTFS savings potential attached to it, but it's certainly nothing that's obligatory. So what we want to do is give staff the opportunity to work in a more streamlined way so they can work on one phone. That brings us savings and it helps make their experience better. We're bringing in a policy to back that up to make it safer for them and safer for us to do. We have no objections. I should have said, sorry, chair, the cabinet members fully briefed as well. Those not here tonight. Okay. Thank you very much. I'll bring in Councilor Brian Mulligan. Thank you. Just again, on the use of personal equipment, it looks like this refers more to private phones than sort of personal laptops. Does it cover personal laptops as well as, you know, if someone's working from home, for example, I've not brought their work laptop accessing Office 365 through that. This one's phones only. So we're exploring laptops, but that's not in the scope of this policy. Okay, I don't see any questions for questions. So our members happen to agree the decisions at section 1.1 to 1.6 of the report. Thank you. All right, we'll now move on to item 11, proposed departure from market supplement allowance policy for digital data and technology posts. And we will go straight to the presenting officer, Kate Collingwood. Thank you. Thank you, chair. General purposes committee is asked to approve the continued departure from the market supplement allowance policy for these posts. So to be clear, we brought in this policy three years ago in 2021 to support the development of the digital team as it now stands. The departure from the existing HR policy is on two counts. Firstly, it allows us to pay the average of the public sector benchmark for digital posts as opposed to our GLPC rated pay. And secondly, it allows us to offer that to prospective candidates before we have a failed recruitment. So two departures from our general policy. That was agreed by this committee three years ago. What we're proposing here is just a continuation without any changes of that existing policy. You'll see a point in the paper where we've gone into the impact of that. Overall, 16 people in the digital team, that's out of a head count of about 95, 16 people are in receipt of some type of market supplement. The total outlay to the council is 91,000 pounds as a result of that. The equivalent to pay that through an agency would be somewhere in the 300 or 400,000. So we think it's about a 75% saving based on doing that through an external agency. So the head of HR who is here tonight and I both consider that to be a financial success for the organisation and we're proposing to continue. Happy to take any questions. >> Thank you. Does anyone have any questions? If not, I'll start and give the panel a chance. So when does the team plan to depart from the market supplement allowance? When will we get to a position where we won't have to rely on that for that? >> That's a great question, Chair. I think that would have to be nationally negotiated. So the GLPC, our normal way of paying people still doesn't make us competitive in the digital market. So this is the most financially efficient way of doing it and the most procedurally efficient way of doing it. We don't have any other standard way of doing that. If we compare that to the civil service, they did bring in salary, digital salaries that were nationwide but at the moment local government isn't in the same position. There isn't enough force behind it. >> And in the context of where councils are in terms of undertaking digitalisation and they're bringing in digital teams, how do we benchmark across, understanding that we are a council on out of London waiting and I'm just trying to get the rationale for your market supplement here of continuation. Actually, are we arising to where other councils are on a benchmark place or actually is the market supplement benchmarking us across? >> Yeah, I'd say we're doing really well on that, Chair. So at the moment, Greenwich's data on public sector digital salaries is so good that the rest of the country now follows our benchmarking data. That's because we've been scraping this data from publicly available job ads for four years now. So the London office of technology and innovation have taken our salary benchmarking and now publishing that for other authorities to use. So we're very confident that the way we pay is the right balance between economic efficiency for this council and the realistic digital job market. It means -- it doesn't mean we can compete with the likes of Google, but that's okay. We have a better mission than Google, in my opinion, but we can compete readily with other authorities and with the civil service, which is where we're pitching ourselves. >> Thank you. It seems to me that the department has got their eye on the ball in terms of analysing salaries and being in that position, so thank you for that. It gives reassurance to the committee that actually we are thinking about when the right time is to be on a market supplement allowance and when time is to depart from it. Committee, any other questions? I don't see any. Are members happy to agree decision as outlined in section 1.1 of the report? Thank you. That concludes the meeting, the general purposes committee and the next meeting will be on the 4th of December. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.