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Cleaner York report published

York Council looks like it will soon get to grips with improving cleanliness standards in the City.
Manual sweeping in the Acomb ward click to enlarge

Manual sweeping in the Acomb ward click to enlarge

A report, to be considered on 25th January, makes several recommendations, although the most significant may be that the management of street cleaning will be devolved to local Ward Committees.

The report does, however, say that the funds available for cleaning will be reduced.

The report says, “Cleansing will take place with a minimum frequency of quarterly and a maximum of daily, depending on the location. Although in some locations there will be a reduction in the frequency of visits by a large mechanical road sweeper the new schedules will allow the vehicle to be driven more slowly which will ensure improved removal of detritus. This will not only improve cleanliness standards but also remove the matter in which weeds are able to grow”.

Mechanical sweeping in the Acomb Ward click to view

Mechanical sweeping in the Acomb Ward click to view

The report notably fails to say what standards will apply to sub-urban shopping areas, public spaces and communal areas on estates. These are often the places which have the biggest litter problems

Litter and Poop scoop bins

The report makes a welcome proposal to increase the number of litter bins. The number of litter reports started to increase when the last Council removed several bins. (They responded by stopping the publication of statistics showing the number of complaints being received – see below).

Combined litter and poop scoop bins

Combined litter and poop scoop bins

The Council will also move over to combined litter/poop scoop bins. These are emptied by the same operative and end up in landfill.

Enforcement

Despite fly tipping costing the Council £69,000 to remove in 2014, only £2248 was recovered from fines. During the same year, 8 fixed penalty notices were issued for litter dropping and dog fouling.

Reporting problems

The Council is promising that its much delayed on line issue reporting system will finally become available in the summer.

It means that the current – dysfunctional – “report it “system and the outdated “Smarter York” app will be scrapped. The latter, introduced  in a hurry in 2011 by a new Council administration, lacked the convenience and flexibility of commercial systems such as “Fix my Street”. The Smarter York app is currently costing the Council over £12,000 a year to maintain with use having dwindled to less than 4 a week.

We will see; but the Councils promise to soft launch the system, before promoting its use, is a welcome step forward.

The Council is also promising to launch a “One Planet” App which will allow residents to advertise surplus items for “exchange”. We assume that they mean what effectively would be a version of Freecycle.  The system would also “receive alerts regarding which type of waste to present on which week and a scanning facility to indicate if an item is recyclable based on York’s collection policy”.

Performance indicators

Attached to the report is a welcome glimpse of the performance indicators  “lost to view” a few years ago.

They aren’t complete but their publication is a welcome step forward by the current coalition administration (see below)
KPIs
Performance indicators

Sublime to the ridiculous?

York Council agenda hits new levels of mediocrity
York Guildhall

York Guildhall

The agenda for the next Council meeting looks like it will be a boon for the insomniac. Apart from the proposal to increase Councillors pay – which perhaps inevitably gets the prime place on the agenda – the rest is largely a jumble of random thoughts.

There are now two Leaders reports (presumably to satisfy the rival egos of the coalition partners). Neither provides any new information. Both are comprised mainly of anecdotal commentary on what third parties have achieved (York BID, Enterprise Zone etc.).

The Council’s Leader (Chris Steward) seems to be preparing the way for a “U turn” on Council subsidies for the Guildhall project and the York Central development, together with building on the Green Belt. 

His deputy (Keith Aspden) skates around the fact that, 4 months after the City offered to accommodate Syrian refugees, not a single child has arrived in the City.

The Council has changed its constitution so that written questions cannot be tabled to report authors (or any other post holder for that matter). Thus another opportunity to promote informed decision making has been lost. In its place is a limited time for verbal questions, the answers to which will be lost in a jungle of political ducking and diving.

 So what should the Council Leadership have been briefing residents on? Well there are at least three obvious, and worrying, issues:

  1. Lack of management leadership. 6 months after a temporary Chief Executive was appointed, there is still no sign of a permanent
    Caravan site propsal for West Offcies

    West Offices

    appointment. In turn, this means that posts further down the hierarchy remain unfilled. Some Chief Officers seem content to contribute to the anarchy by taking to the bunkers whenever residents raise (often valid) criticisms.

  2. The absence of KPI data on street level services is a disgrace. In their absence none of the post holders at the York Council can be judged on their effectiveness.
  3. The “front office” (the first point of contact for residents) is slow to respond and occasionally chaotic. The responsible Executive member (Council Leader) really needs to explain why a – deeply flawed – “on line”  issue handling system was launched two months ago without proper testing.

Elsewhere on the agenda there are four motions. All fall into the pious hand ringing category. Passing them will make little difference to York residents as the levers for change are held by third parties (with the possible exception of a proposal on elderly people’s isolation).

Still the new Council – although shy about the urgency of decision making – is still better than the one it replaced. By this time in 2011 there had been a covert attempt to sell off the Union Terrace car park while adding £20 million to the taxpayers debt burden.  

So perhaps indecision is better than hyper-decision making!

Stags, hens, geese and horses to be scrutinised by York Council

But still no sign of a review of basic service standards

The agenda for the Councils environment committee has been published.

After last months revelation that virtually no performance management information is being gathered by the York Council on services as basic as overgrown footpaths, damaged play equipment, fly posting  and dog fouling, many would have expected that any so called “scrutiny committee” would  promptly  investigated the missing data.

Man GooseIt seems not, as the committee continues to sail safely within its comfort zone.

So they will be:

  • Considering an update on the “horse bailiff” service – 4 horses were seized last year when “fly grazing”. There have been no instances this year. The Council spends £40,000 a year on this service
  • Receiving a report from the “stag and hen party scrutiny review task group”. Among the, less than earth shattering, conclusions reached by the group were that stags/hens were only a small aspect of the drunken behaviour problem sometimes evident on the City centre, that the number of hens visiting the City outnumbered the stags (!), that lack of late night public toilet facilities is an issue and that work to draft an “alcohol strategy” had stalled.
  • Getting feedback from the Friends of Rowntree Park on “Goose Management”.

As the horse bailiff doesn’t appear to have much work to do, is it possible he will be used to seize any stags, hens or geese found fly grazing around the City?  

A board funny drinkingThe meeting will also consider a report on restrictions in the use of advertising “A” boards.

This has been on the Councils agenda for 15 years or more, but it became a more prominent issue three years ago.  The Council is still trying to work out how an “A” board licensing system might be implemented. Progress is not expected until next year.

In the meantime the present free for all will continue.

Does the York Council even know how good its public services are?

A response to a recent Freedom of information inquiry suggests that in many cases they don’t.

Key public servicesWe asked for performance information on 20 key Council service areas (see left).  They are the kind of services that every resident is likely to use – or see – each year.

Performance information had been gathered routinely, and reported publicly, up to 2011. However, over recent years, the York Council has seemed to be increasingly reluctant to provide  information about basic service standards.

The Council said that it didn’t measure how many issues it received – or how it responded – for five public service areas. They were:

  • Dog fouling
  • Fly posting
  • Play equipment defects
  • Public open space/park maintenance issues &
  • Council estate communal and garage area defects.

    Garage area maintenance standards not recrded

    Garage area maintenance standards not recorded

That shocked us – not least because some involve safety issues.

We asked for information on the:

A Number of issues reported    

B  Average time taken to resolve issue  

C  Target completion time           

D  % of issues resolved within the target time    

E  Longest outstanding issue at the month end 

F  % quality checks which were considered to be satisfactory

The Council was able to provide volume information, on the number of issues that had been reported, for most of the activity areas.

Areas where the number of problem reports were increasing included

  • Trees, bushes and weeds overgrowing paths
  • Graffiti &
  • Street lighting faults

The number of reports in other activity areas was fairly stable over an 18 month period.

Looking at how quickly issues were resolved,  the only target times regularly achieved were for  clearing full litter bins “within 3 working days” (a fairly generous target) and removing “obscene” graffiti  within 1 working day.

If you telephoned the Council offices in August you had a 75% chance of your call being answered in 20 seconds.

 A visitor would have waited, on average, 8 minutes to be seen. 

However residents emailing the Council and expecting a response within one working day, would be disappointed. The Council has stopped recording the length of time taken to deal with electronic communications.

So what’s the longest wait that I can expect?

Well the Council doesn’t measure the longest outstanding issue. So no one knows.

But there must be some quality checks?
Some issues like weed growth never seem to eb resolved

Some issues like weed growth never seem to be resolved

Well actually no.  The Council says that it doesn’t record the results of quality checks undertaken by inspectors nor does it undertake any customer satisfaction surveys with complainants.

So work undertaken isn’t routinely checked and recorded.

Maybe the issue hasn’t even been resolved? Just ticked off on the work management computer?

Who’s to blame?

Poor management practices, Councillors, Directors, computer systems?  The Chairs of the Council’s Scrutiny Committees – who should guard the public interest – have generally failed to table performance information.  

So perhaps everyone shares the responsibility?

Will they put things right?

Maybe. The, still relatively new, Council deserves some time to put things right. But they need some quick wins to restore public confidence.

They could start by putting these, and other, basic KPIs on their “open data” web site and updating them each month.

The sooner that a new Chief Executive is appointed by the Council – and its management vacancies filled – the sooner we can expect to see an improvement in service  standards.

The full set of results, covering the last 18 months, can be downloaded by clicking here or here (Sendspace Excel spreadsheet) 

Our thanks to the FOI team at the Council who clearly tried very hard  to provide the information that we had requested.

KPI extract

Quango policing group publishes agenda for Monday meeting

The “Make it York” shareholders committee has finally published the agenda for its meeting on Monday.

That is only two working days before the meeting is due to start.

It gives residents who want to address the meeting only 24 hours to register to speak.

Supporters of retaining the Christmas carousel ride in Parliament Street were hoping to make their case to the panel of 5 Councillors although the short notice may deter them (they will be making representation to the full council meeting later in the week anyway)

There are only two items on the agenda.

Performance out-turn April to September 2015 click to enlarge

Performance out-turn April to September 2015 click to enlarge

Financial figures show income £82,000 below budget in the period up to July.

Expenditure is lower so the company was in balance at that early stage of the year. The out turn disguises a significant shortfall in Shambles market rent payments.

The second item relates to performance against target.

The Council continues to be sharply critcised for failing to set KPIs for the events programme and the Shambles Market activities that MIY now supervises.

In any event, most of the first quarter indicators are blank. Even the traditional tourism monitors are largely missing.

So will the committee see through the prevarication and challenge the  arrogant way that this organisation has gone about its business since April? 

We will wait and see.

 

 

York Council‘s new web site labeled as “impenetrable”

Angry mob score web site

The York Council has launched a new web site design.

Heralded as an attempt to make contact with the Council easier, many users have struggled to find the services or information that they are seeking.

The Council claims that the site design was inspired by conversations with local residents.

We have yet to find anyone who says they were consulted and the ordering of information looks to be more what an official has impulsively decided residents should want to know.

Reporting issues on line is still not possible under the new arrangements. As long ago as 2008 the Council had a working internet based system which allowed residents to report a wide range of issues and include – if they wished – photographic evidence.

This was trashed by the Labour Council when it introduced a “Smartphone” App which is so limited in application that most users rapidly abandoned it in favour of, more flexible, commercial options (My Council)

The new Councils commitment to openness has already been challenged. Its reputation is unlikely to be enhanced by the new web site which makes monitoring the responses to Freedom of Information requests more difficult. Responses – which are far from up to date – are now assembled in someone’s idea of a community of Interest; making research into the latest information released a tedious and time consuming occupation

Initially launched without any access to performance information, the site does now contain links to rapidly aging KPIs outturns. The most recent are these for the period ending December 2014. Nearly 6 months later and there has been no update.

Some of the information is incomplete and some out of date. 

The assembly of information under the “open data” link – which is supposed to improve transparency – is largely impenetrable. Other pages (i-Travel, Libraries, “Rewiring”, Make it York, Smarter York etc) have been hived off onto independent web sites resulting in a confused web of options for the uninitiated.

The site is claimed to be easier to access from mobile devices and, perhaps not surprisingly, Councillor are now being issued with tablet computers at so they will be able to take advantage of some of the new “functionality”. 

The site also has a “where’s my nearest” search facility and text to talk features both of which may be of use to some users.

But, all in all, this looks like a web site that was launched too soon and with too little research into the York communities information and communication needs.