Best Value Duty

Theme 6 - Service delivery

Self-Assessment Heatmap
SD001 SD002 SD003 SD004 SD005 SD006
SD007 SD008 SD009 SD010    

Best Value Duty - Description of a Local Authority Whose Service Delivery Delivers Best Value:

  • Well-run local services are customer- and citizen-focused and meet the needs of diverse communities. They should improve outcomes for the people who use them and achieve the best balance of cost and quality (having regard to economy, efficiency and effectiveness). 
  • Service plans should be evidence based and clearly aligned to the local authority’s priorities and strategic plans, which will reflect the priorities identified through community planning. Services should take account of feedback from citizens and service users and be scrutinised by a transparent and robust performance framework. 
  • Poor individual services can often be an indication of broader governance and financial weaknesses within an authority. 
  • Equally, corporate governance failure almost certainly will at some point negatively impact how services are delivered locally, in terms of missed opportunities or silo working and a failure to make strategic connections. 
  • Local authority data, the assessments of other government departments and service regulators and ombudsmen identify whether services are being delivered efficiently and effectively, and whether authorities are responsive to customer complaints. 
  • Authorities should benchmark service provision with comparable authorities, for example by using the metrics available on Oflog’s Local Authority Data Explorer.
  • The Council’s Corporate Business Plan is our top tier strategic document describing the overarching aims of the Council, underpinned by five corporate strategies. Service Area Plans are developed to deliver the objectives and outcomes described in the corporate business plan ensuring that all services contribute to the overarching aims of the Council.
  • Activities identified in service area plans are assigned to teams and individuals to deliver as part of their annual objectives and delivery is monitored through regular 121s and reviews. An individual’s objectives are aligned to the organisation’s priorities which promotes and embeds accountability and clarity.
  • The Council operates a committee system that means that decisions are made after review, debate and scrutiny from a group of Members that sit on the relevant Committee. Committee reports are available to all Members for transparency.  Members can attend all Committee meetings and if they are not a Member of the Cttee, can ask to speak through the Chair, to put forward additional opinion and position on an item which may represent feedback from residents and communities in their ward. In this way, residents views from across the Borough are used for policy development, and resources are directed to the areas and communities that need them the most.
  • The Council’s utilisation of various types of resident engagement has meant that residents have many opportunities to scrutinise and give feedback on the services they receive. This helps shape Council policies and services to meet the needs of different communities. 
  • The Council have implemented service improvements at the earliest opportunity especially if recommended by Regulators.  This was recently demonstrated when the Council responded to the Regulator of Social Housing by swiftly improving housing services to meet the performance standards required, whilst being transparent with residents by updating them on the progress rectifying the issues identified.
  • Dashboards that summarise all of the Council’s KPI results are published quarterly to inform residents of the quality of services being delivered to improve transparency. 
  • The enactment of the Procurement Act 2023 brought forward a review of procurement processes and procedures. Changes have been made to contract standing orders for them to apply to the new Act and the current Public Contract Regulations 2025, but further amendments will need to be made as the new Act is embedded.
  • The Council has prepared a new Contract Management Framework which has been used in the Housing department as part of the ISO9001 quality management system. The framework should be rolled out as best practise across the organisation, which includes ensuring that staff undertake the contract management foundation training required.
  • There have been various consultations that have given residents the opportunity to contribute to the discussions that aim to develop more citizen focused services. However, the Council must ensure that they are receiving feedback from a diverse group of residents in Runnymede that represent all communities in the Borough. Otherwise, the Council may miss valuable insight from minority groups or hard-to-reach communities when setting priorities, developing policy or directing resources to maximise benefit for residents.
  • In order to ensure alignment with the Ombudsman’s revised complaints code the Council is devising a new system to capture, process and report complaints consistently across the organisation. The Council can then systematically evaluate the identified issues and the actions taken and employ more detailed data analysis which will support evidence-based decision-making in-service reviews. 
  • The Council will improve feedback on the complaints they receive and the improvements that have been put in place to resolve the complaint through the public website. This will demonstrate transparency and instil greater confidence within residents. 
  • A report detailing procurement activity and performance across the organisation will be presented annually to Standards and Audit committee to increase Member Scrutiny. 
  • Corporate KPI performance is to be reported to Committee from Q1 2024/25 rather than a Member Working Party to improve Member scrutiny of key performance indicators
  • The organisational culture assessment and the ‘Your Experience Matters’ staff survey (July 2024) will both look to test whether there is a ‘bottom up’ golden thread that runs through to individual objectives and accountability. The surveys will also identify whether staff understand that their objectives are directly linked to delivery of the CBP and strategies. 
  • The approach to community engagement will improve when the Council establishes the Citizens’ Panel. The panel will be demographically representative of the Borough to hear from different groups of residents, including hard-to-reach communities and underrepresented groups to understand how services can best meet their needs. This data will be used to make more evidence-based decisions about Council services, and it will ensure that decisions are representative of the local community. 
  • A savings methodology will be devised to ensure that cashable and non-cashable savings and benefits from third party contracts are better captured by procurement and the relevant services.

Next Steps Identified in Action Plan:

Through self-assessment, we identified five key actions to implement to improve service delivery, laid out in page 19-21 of the action plan.