Agenda and minutes

Members are asked to declare any disclosable pecuniary or affected interests in respect of any matter to be considered at this meeting.

Any Member with a Disclosable Pecuniary Interest in a matter should withdraw from the meeting when the matter is under consideration and should notify the Democratic Services Officer in attendance that they are withdrawing as they have such an interest. If the Disclosable Pecuniary Interest is not entered on the register of Members interests the Monitoring Officer must be notified of the interest within 28 days.

Any Member with an affected Interest in a matter must disclose the interest to the meeting.  There is no requirement to withdraw from the meeting when the interest is only an affected interest, but the Monitoring Officer should be notified of the interest, if not previously notified of it, within 28 days of the meeting.

There were no interests declared.

To approve as a correct record the minutes of the meeting of the Committee held on 5 July 2023.

RESOLVED that the minutes of the meeting of the Committee held on 08 February 2023 were approved.

There were no urgent items of business

A verbal update from the Chairman of the Local Joint Committee.

The Committee was advised that the Local Joint Committee had discussed item 7 on the agenda. There had been questions on what work was being done to review and analyse the relatively high percentage of BAME leavers within the workforce. There had also been a request to amend the Grievance, Disciplinary and Capability graph within the report so that each year was shown incrementally.

The Committee was also advised that the trade unions had raised an ongoing incident at a Bracknell Forest Council primary school. The trade unions had raised concerns over the impact of this incident on staff and urged the Bracknell Forest Council to take legal action, as well as requesting a meeting between the school in question and Bracknell Forest Council.

The Committee is asked to note the minutes of the Local Joint Committee held on July 5.

The Committee received and noted the minutes of the Local Joint Committee held on

05 July 2023.

To review and agree the Workforce Monitoring Report for publishing.

The Committee considered the Council’s Annual Workforce Monitoring Report. There had been difficulties in getting a complete set of data from the workforce particularly around disabilities where 49% off staff had not disclosed their disability status. Furthermore 10% off the workforce had not identified their ethnicity. HR would be undertaking work in the subsequent months to try and identify why staff members were not comfortable providing this data.

The data and analysis produced in the Annual Monitoring Report would be shared with the Equalities Group as well as each departments management team, from which an action plan would be produced. An area which had particularly been identified as an area for action was leavers in the first year of employment, with a particular focus on BAME leavers. Progress on this action plan would be brought before the Employment Committee in 2024.

Since the previous Workforce Monitoring Report, a new system had been implemented of HR touch in periods after the 1^st, 4^th and 8^th month of employment. At each of these stages’ employees have been receiving questionaries on their experiences thus far at Bracknell Forest Council. Furthermore, there had been work undertaken to try and get more detailed responses within exit questionaries, particularly when the reason given for leaving employment was personal reasons.

Following the Committees comments and questions, the following points were made:

• It was difficult to draw analysis from the data on employees with disabilities due to such a sizeable percentage off the workforce not disclosing this information.
• The drop in numbers of staff from ethnic minorities in the top 5% only accounts for around 3 members of staff due to it being from such a small group of employees. However, this would continue to be monitored and progress would be reviewed against the action plan.
• Whilst an anonymous survey on disabilities could provide some data, it wouldn’t allow the Council to register this information against employees which required for the Workforce Monitoring Report.
• Despite attempts over the previous few years to encourage staff to disclose whether they have any disabilities, there has only been minimal improvements, with a rise in around 4% in the previous 3 years.
• Any dismissals for poor health must be in accordance with the Council’s HR policies, which would have involved a long process with multiple stages which would included; supporting the individual, looking for redeployment opportunities and ill health retirement, with any dismissal for ill health only ever having been used as a last resort. Bracknell Forest Council has never had an appeal over a dismissal which suggests the system is robust.
• Each individual department’s action plan would include break downs of staff by ethnicity, so action can be taken if performance varies significantly between departments.

RESOLVED that the Workforce Monitoring Report 2023/23 is reviewed and agreed for publication.