and April are traditionally some of the busiest months of the year, with new Council Tax / Housing benefit notifications going out, as well as around 10,000 garden recycling renewal letters this year. These large-scale correspondences in turn create an increase in enquiries to the Council offices. Despite this, there was an improvement in wait times, with 95% of these face-to-face queries seen within our target of 15 minutes. The proportion of customers provision remains ‘self-service’ steady at just over 15% (against a target of 10%), meaning that they didn’t need to speak to a member of staff and freeing up officers to deal with more complex queries. By the end of June we had collected just over 30% of council tax and business around the same as at this point last year. Around 67% of residents chose to use direct debit for paying council tax, a figure which remains broadly constant compared to last year. The benefits caseload, fell slowly and steadily during 2013/14, has levelled out more recently. The caseload remained around 10,100 throughout the quarter. This in turn has meant that the average time taken to process new claims and changes in circumstances has been under 5 days around a day less than in – over the previous quarter. In June Cabinet received the financial outturn for 2013/14, which showed that the Council ended the year with a balanced budget, and indeed underspent by around £95,000. The percentage of sundry debtor income received small – payments from residents who don’t usually interact with the council (parking fines, pest control services etc) - averaged around 80%, 10% lower than in previous quarters. This was due to a delay in receiving section 106 monies, although these were received in June, and subsequent performance has returned in line with trend.
and April are traditionally some of the busiest months of the year, with new Council Tax / Housing benefit notifications going out, as well as around 10,000 garden recycling renewal letters this year. These large-scale correspondences in turn create an increase in enquiries to the Council offices. Despite this, there was an improvement in wait times, with 95% of these face-to-face queries seen within our target of 15 minutes. The proportion of customers ‘self-service’ provision remains steady at just over 15% (against a target of 10%), meaning that they didn’t need to speak to a member of staff and freeing up officers to deal with more complex queries. By the end of June we had collected just over 30% of council tax and business around the same as at this point last year. Around 67% of residents chose to use direct debit for paying council tax, a figure which remains broadly constant compared to last year. The benefits caseload, fell slowly and steadily during 2013/14, has levelled out more recently. The caseload remained around 10,100 throughout the quarter. This in turn has meant that the average time taken to process new claims and changes in circumstances has been under 5 days – around a day less than in over the previous quarter. In June Cabinet received the financial outturn for 2013/14, which showed that the Council ended the year with a balanced budget, and indeed underspent by around £95,000. The percentage of sundry debtor income received – small payments from residents who don’t usually interact with the council (parking fines, pest control services etc) - averaged around 80%, 10% lower than in previous quarters. This was due to a delay in receiving section 106 monies, although these were received in June, and subsequent performance has returned in line with trend.
cabinet-report-new-style-performance-report-q1-2014-15-v4.docx