Session 2
Responding to Beecham – Mary Taylor
We are fortunate enough to be addressed by Geraint Norman of the Wales Audit office. We are all aware of the Welsh Assembly Government’s Making the Connections agenda and the associated Beecham Review of local service delivery which was published around this time last year. The Beecham Review reported upon the challenges faces by the public sector to deliver citizen centred services and stress the importance of making improvements to performance and delivery. Since then our focus as National Park Authorities has been on delivering the connections and Geraint Norman will take the opportunity to inform us of the progress we have made to meet these challenges in Welsh Assembly Government priorities.
Geraint Norman, Wales Audit Office
The purpose of me coming today is really to give you an update of where the think the National Parks are in relation to the Beecham Report and Making the Connections.
The first thing I tried to do when asked to come along today and present was actually go through all the policy documents and all the guidance that has been produced by the Welsh Assembly and others. I gave up having spent about an hour and listed about thirty odd documents. It really did get out of hand, so as an auditor I really do appreciate the fact that National Parks are working in a very difficult environment, you do have very limited resources and obviously fundamental for your success is using those resources as effectively as possible. We’ve heard a lot earlier in the day about One Wales, and that it compliments the Beecham agenda and Making the Connections and we’ve also heard recently some of the issues around future budget constraints. Working together is fundamental, I’m not sure how many times collaboration and working together is mentioned in One Wales and making the connections and Beecham but it probably runs into hundreds. It must be stressed that I don’t think we always remember that the National Parks do have a fundamental role, they may be small but they do have a fundamental role in delivering public services for people living in the Parks, visitors as well as other stakeholders. Touching on the Beecham report, it was published in July 2006 so it’s already coming up for eighteen months and Sir Jeremy Beecham said “Our message is that making the connections has made a promising start, good news but like broadband technology it has further to go” and I think that does reflect the position across Wales whether it’s a National Park, a unitary authority or NHS bodies, or indeed the Welsh Assembly itself.
Where do we think the Parks are? Our view is that good progress is being made but further challenges and certain difficult decisions remain to be made.
We’ve seen very good evidence of the Parks working with a range of partners from both within and outside of Wales. and it covers a range of areas from the highest level, Welsh Assembly level, coming down working at strategic level and then coming right down into operational services, working with schools, working with the other unitary authorities, Breathing Spaces obviously a very good example as well as Members training and induction.
Many different organisations out there have their own different cultures, different priorities. The police have different priorities to a unitary authority; a National Park has a different priority to the NHS bodies that are out there. It’s fundamental that you work together but it’s going to be difficult having the same priorities, having the same cultures, and it won’t happen overnight.
Let’s just quickly mention Local Health Boards, they have been much more formalised and obviously the Parks have a role to play in working to develop the community strategies alongside them.
One of the key problems I think Parks have relates to resources and spreading too thinly. If you’ve got thirty odd bodies you need to consult with, you’re talking about meeting with them once a year - that’s close to a meeting a week. There’s a lot of time spent meeting with stakeholders, meeting with other parties as well but it’s very difficult not to spread yourself too thinly and sometimes I think what happens is that you miss the point on issues, some things get done – some don’t.
The Spatial Plan was mentioned in the workshop session, and there are conflicts between regional issues as well as local issues. Again those conflicts are always going to be there and trying to manage those is going to be difficult and somebody in the group mentioned the M4 and the A55; I thought that summed it up very well – Is that what Wales is all about? - those sort of two key routes. Obviously it’s not but when you read certain documents, there’s an emphasis towards that.
Parks are often perceived as minor players. When you look at the Parks in terms of turnover they certainly are small organisations compared to some of the larger unitary authorities and NHS bodies. They are small players yes, but as I said they do have a key role to play but again getting that sort of space at the top table so to speak, that is difficult. There is good evidence that this is being done but maintaining that position is really a key challenge for the Parks as well.
The geography between the Parks is difficult and obviously with some of the unitary authorities too. We have a Park in the North, one in the West and one in the South-East – it’s going to be difficult to arrange a session like today with people travelling a long way. Maybe more use of video-conferencing are going to pay dividends but that’s not always possible so again it’s a challenge.
Then we move on to citizen at the centre – obviously social inclusion is mentioned throughout the policy document, making sure you’re in touch with your stakeholders, absolutely fundamental to any organisation. One problem for the Parks, obviously the stakeholders could be literally anyone from across Wales, across Europe, across the World, again defining who you’re trying to communicate with and what you’re trying to find out is key. We’ve seen some good progress getting information out of users and what’s really good from our perspective is you’ve used that information in terms of what people want and translated it into services or changed services - disabled access, better signposting, better websites, making sure that contact centres are where people want them and are up to the standard.
Consultation fatigue – a term you’ve probably heard before. Many organisations suffer from this, conducting consultations as a routine. This is not necessarily focussed on the Parks but again some good progress has been made but maybe there’s scope to further co-ordinate consultation and make it more strategic, make it more co-ordinated.
Just going back to the introduction where we had the video clips from Snowdonia, I think that’s a very useful and powerful consultation technique and we’ve certainly seen that in other organisations where they’ve gone along to stakeholders and patients in a trust for example and got their views in their own homes and videoing people, maybe videoed them for an hour asking them questions then using those video clips for promotional material for the management team or for training of staff for example. Good progress.
It wouldn’t be one of our presentations if we didn’t mention performance management. It’s one of those areas where to have a perfect performance management system is asking too much of any organisation, but we still think there’s scope to ensure that the performance management system is operating more effectively. One of the key things is to make sure that you take on board what people want, adapt the services to suit what they want and then measure the performance in those areas. Don’t measure performance for things that aren’t priorities or you’re not particularly worried about and it is very difficult to come up with performance measures. I can stand here and say, come up with some PI’s but it’s not as easy as that, a lot of time and effort and thought needs to go into it so measure outcomes and use that feedback effectively. Ffynnon is being introduced shortly which will help the Parks achieve what they want but not forgetting Ffynnon is only a piece of software, it’s not the answer to all of life’s problems unfortunately.
We’ve done work in HR on each of the Park’s, and found that further staff training is required, particularly around customer service. There’s some areas where further customer services is required and where facilities like the DC websites, for example, could be a bit more customer focused. Those have been taken on board and we’ve seen some good improvement there as well.
We’ve actually seen some good progress on IIP (the other Parks have all got accreditation) so that tells us something about the organisations, to achieve that accreditation is difficult and it’s not something that IIP give away lightly so that’s very positive.
Customer Service
Again that is fundamental to Making the Connections and Beecham and we’re seeing that customer service is built into training. HR are producing training plans that are focusing on customers and that’s another positive. We’ve just recently done some work on sickness management and we’ve seen topics like flexible hours and home working coming into the fore - the Parks are really heading the field on this one, doing really well in terms of helping people with their day-to-day lives which hopefully then gets a more motivated workforce. Ultimately, what we’ve seen is sickness rates in the Parks are on the way down and really quite low compared to the rest of Wales so a very good success story there.
Performance Management
We’ve seen from the work we’ve done that a lot of staff have clear targets, clear plans that reflect the corporate objectives and that those are monitored regularly. There’s scope for further work on that, making sure that all staff have clear plans that link to the corporate objectives.
There’s been a recognition as well that senior managers, managers, and people right through the organisation need additional skills – like management and leadership and the good thing is organisations have recognised that and taken action.
Recruitment and Retention
This is something that’s going to challenge all three National Parks over future years particularly as the marketplace gets more competitive for resources.
Staff appraisal under performance management is important – making sure that staff have appraisals on a regular basis; that their performance is monitored and that people are accountable, that’s a fundamental principle of performance management. By and large in all three Parks that is the case but there are instances where there are some people who are not performance appraised on a regular basis.
Some of the training that staff received is decided upon by those staff and it’s not always in the best interests of the Parks, not always linked to the corporate objectives so again making sure that, if you are spending out on training and development, that it is in the interest of the organisation and not the personal interest of individuals.
User Resources
A very difficult area. The Parks are actually making efficiency gains – for example, purchasing cards, more use of video conferencing, using technology. Again the challenge is the need for the Parks need to question the way services are provided and how they provide them. Delivering services that have always been delivered is not healthy, and you should look at in-house options for delivery and think in terms of being cost effective. Again, very easy for me to stand here and say it, but you need to go through that process and try and come up with those efficiency savings
Improving benchmarking of Services
As auditors we’re looking for Authorities to benchmark with others, whether it’s in the small pool of three in Wales or with larger bodies or with organisations outside Wales.
One of the key problem’s we’ve seen and this is not only in the Parks, is obtaining resources to develop resources, getting funds to pump prime service improvements and looking at capital schemes. It’s fundamental in our view that all the Parks look longer term at developing services and investing longer term.
Ensuring that targets are set and systems are in place to identify and monitor efficiency gains - From what we’ve seen there aren’t systems in place to systematically go through expenditure heads and monitor and identify efficiency savings.
Regulation
Not wishing to shy away from it, it’s certainly in the Beecham report, it was recognised that Wales was over regulated and as an organisation the Wales Audit office has reduced the amount of regulation, and the cost of regulation within Wales. As an example, my role now is as a Client Manager on all three National Parks and I’m the relationship manager on all three National Parks. We used to have four people performing those roles so hopefully there’s some efficiency savings there as well. One of the problems we do have is we do have to audit the Authority based on the guidance that WAG give us so we audit your accounts and we audit you in terms of WPI.
