Minutes:
(1) The Leader began by talking about the coming year’s budget and stating the published outturn for the last financial year was thoroughly good news - good news for Kent County Council and good news for our residents, with £100m of savings successfully delivered with an underspend of £16.2m enabling the recent announcement of an additional £6m investment for the repair and maintenance of roads and pavements across Kent, and £5m being put into the economic downturn reserve to help the Council through the difficult years still to come.
(2) He stated that the current year was now into the second quarter with a further £100m of savings well on its way to being delivered sensibly and intelligently with the whole organisation pulling together to deliver. He extended his thanks to all staff.
(3) The Leader then turned to the next financial year 2013/14, and yet another £100m of savings to be made, completing the 30% plus savings out of the base budgets excluding schools. He said that the proposals for next year’s budget would go out to consultation on Thursday 6 September and very much focus on the four ‘P’s - prevention, productivity, procurement and partnership. At the heart of this will be a fifth and the most important ‘P’, the people of Kent, the residents of Kent.
(4) Prevention will result in a significant shift in resource to deliver expanded preventative and support services including Adult Social Care; Children’s Services and investment in roads maintenance to avoid heavy end deterioration and high costs repairs.
(5) The Leader made reference to procurement and getting the very best value for money from the £800m on goods and services by challenging the orthodoxy, by knowing when to scale up/scale down and when to go local.
(6) He said that partnership and productivity going hand in hand, stating that ‘together we can deliver so much more’ as had been exemplified by the early work in the Kent Health Commission work in Dover and Shepway bringing primary care, social care and acute care closer together to deliver much better use of resource, reducing heavy end expenditure and intervention thus developing excellent community health support and preventative services that led to better patient care and improved patient outcomes.
(7) The Leader stated that integrating Children’s Services with health and other voluntary organisations to deliver joined up support and preventative services to families with both young children as well as joined up adolescent support services would result in a lower number of young people being taken into care. He said that the success of the Government’s Troubled Families agenda would depend on integration and partnership work to solve problems and support families radically differently with both incentives and penalties.
(8) He spoke about the multi-agency workshop he had attended that had exemplified the eagerness of agencies to come together, integrate district based teams, and operate very differently. With Health, Police, districts, counties, schools, voluntary and charitable organisations working together at reducing crime and anti-social behaviour, improving the outcomes for young people and their families, and consequently reducing the impact on victims of crime and antisocial behaviour.
(9) He went on to say that with the fifth ‘P’, the people of Kent, there was the need for a bold step change in how the public access our services, putting the customer at the heart of what we do whether accessing a school place, adult social care, applying for a blue badge or the process of applying for a statement of educational need for their child. The Council needed a better understanding of the customer journey and experience, building the ‘user friendly services’ around its customers and most importantly making sure that the Council know what good looks like.
(10) The Leader finished by saying that he was pleased with the substantial progress in the pursuit of continuously improving services to the customers of Kent with a lot less money and no increases in Council Tax.