Issue - meetings

To consider the Chief Executive’s Corporate Performance Overview Report for quarter one (April to June) of the 2009/10 financial year.

Copies of the report have been previously circulated with the Executive agenda for 15 September and are available with the online version of the agenda.  Members are asked to bring their copies to the meeting.

The Commission considered the Chief Executive’s Corporate Performance Overview Report (CPOR) for quarter one (April to June) of the 2009/10 financial year, introduced by the Head of Performance and Partnerships. The CPOR complimented the Performance Monitoring Report (PMR) circulated to all Members in August 2009. The CPOR contained details of the Council’s 282 actions which supported the 13 Medium Term Objectives. At the end of the 1^st quarter 273 (95%) of these actions had been completed or were on target to be completed by their due date and nine (3%) were in need of some remedial action. Proposed remedial action was cited within Annex A alongside the action.

The Council was introducing a new Performance Monitoring System known as PARIS across the authority which was due to go live in quarter 3 with a complete system transfer from quarter 4.

As part of the development of the new performance management system the Head of Performance and Partnerships invited Members comments on the reporting format of both the CPORs and PMRs.  

Arising from the subsequent discussion the following views were expressed by some members:

• The reports contained a lot of text which made it difficult to pick out key information
• It was often difficult to understand what information was meant to be gained from the graphs and many regularly contained no data
• An improved commentary next to each graph would make interpretation of the data easier
• The timing of Overview and Scrutiny meetings needed to be better coordinated with the publishing of PMRs as reports were often out of date by the time they were brought to the Commission and Panel meetings
• A more comprehensive summary at the beginning of the report would be helpful
• The key issues for possible scrutiny should be highlighted
• Key successes should also be made clear
• Examples of Local Authority best practice in the production of CPORs and PMRs would be provided for members to see which reporting styles might be most appropriate

An opportunity would be given for Members to make an input into the reporting format for CPORs/PMRs.