At a time when local government faces an uncertain financial future and mounting public debt, there is enormous pressure on councils to cut budgets and yet deliver improved levels of public service.
In the area of housing, Birmingham city council has had to face an enormous challenge given the huge size of our customer base and the size of the organisation - the credit crunch means we have more people needing social housing while there is a national shortage of housing stock and less available resource to deliver the services our customers desperately need.
Sales of council land are finite and yielding less revenue, so we need to be inventive to find ways to improve service delivery at the same time as cutting costs.
As part of the council's overall determination to transform our services through the business transformation programme, our aim since 2006 has been to deliver a more efficient and customer focused housing service that meets the three-star criteria set out by the Audit Commission and delivers real improvements for our customers where it really affects them – in their homes.
Whatever the size of an organisation, there is one crucial element that any change and improvement programme needs to consider – how to involve your staff and enthuse them from the very start to share the journey and have a personal investment in the success of the transformation.
Key lines of enquiry
We chose to empower every division in the housing service through our housing transformation programme to draw up and take ownership of a 'three-star improvement plan' to show what changes were needed and how they would make them, benchmarked against both the Audit Commission's key lines of enquiry document and other best practice three-star organisations.
These individual plans were then overseen by a senior management team which would both mentor and challenge, with monthly updates for each plan presented by the relevant manager.
John Lines and Elaine Elkington
So instead of imposing a corporate vision from above, the individual divisions, who of course had the most direct experience of their specialist areas, were encouraged to think for themselves moderated and guided by senior management.
Some of the key innovations that have come out of this work include:
• The value for money matrix tool, which that helps to calculate whether a service is providing value for money. The process involves asking customers for feedback, investigating costs and comparing them with the costs and customer satisfaction from other local authorities and housing providers. This has proved very successful and has been cited as a good example of current best practice by the Audit Commission in its strategic housing inspection in January
• The roadmap tool monitors the progress of our housing transformation projects to provide clarity across the breadth of our transformation work. We knew that having a number of projects running concurrently needed an understanding of the interdependence between them. At any one time we can see the progress that has been made and the effect each project will have on another project. We continue to monitor the cashable and non-cashable benefits through our existing performance management framework
Partnerships are another key tool. The city housing partnership, set up with housing associations, private sector and the Homes and Communities Agency, has been very valuable and a landlords' forum has been set up to work in partnership with private landlords to help them provide good quality homes and services to some of Birmingham most vulnerable residents.
By working in partnership we have been able to license many of the city's houses in multiple occupation with approved private landlords working to best practice. Our award-winning home options service, run in partnership with neighbourhood offices and specialist agencies such as St Basils, has enabled us to take a more proactive approach to tackling homelessness in the city.
'Ending Rough Sleeping Champion'
By making the best use of support that is available through other third sector agencies, this has culminated in our national recognition as an 'Ending Rough Sleeping Champion'. Since 1998 our pioneering work to tackle rough sleeping has reduced rough sleepers from 56 to four. Our success has been the result of strong partnerships with a range of statutory and voluntary organisations.
Customer interaction is also important. The tenants' performance monitoring group is a group of tenants who review our performance each month against our key performance indicators. They have the ability to issue 'improvement notices' if they are not satisfied with our performance.
There is also a task and finish group that monitors our progress against our action plan to deliver the promise in our housing agenda of better housing services for residents and tenants. This group is informed by an advisory panel of residents and tenants.
We promised our customers back in 2006 that we would work to deliver them a three-star service. By 2010 our decent homes programme to bring all council homes up to the decent homes standard will be complete; we have already reached over 90 per cent in 2009. And it's not just our customers who are happy: the Audit Commission inspectors commented on how proud the staff are of the service they provide and the organisation for which they work.
There has been a real culture change in the directorate. The business transformation programme has reinforced our feeling of self-belief. It's a complete change to how staff felt five years ago when we were a 'no star' directorate. There's a definite can-do attitude and the achievements staff have made over the last four years has given them a thirst for improvements that deliver better services for our customers.
Councillor John Lines is cabinet member for housing and Elaine Elkington, is acting strategic director for housing and constituencies at Birmingham city council
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
