The Bexley Plan

Our strategic vision for Bexley is set out in our Bexley Plan. It is a continuation of our work over many years that will set Bexley up to be even better in the future, and articulates our ambitions for the borough. Efficiency and effectiveness are at the heart of this plan. It sets out our commitments, organised under three priority themes: aspiration for our residents, ambition for our borough, and an efficient and effective Council.

We want to support residents to live the best lives possible and to reach their full potential, and we want to secure investment so that current and future generations continue to live in a thriving place. We are good at what we do and careful with our resources, and our approach focuses on delivering for our residents with a strong emphasis on value for money. The Plan outlines 15 key Outcomes, as well as a comprehensive Action Plan to ensure delivery. These Actions are closely monitored, and update reports are presented quarterly to Public Cabinet. The Bexley Plan gives us a clear direction to deliver quality services for our residents, whilst simultaneously monitoring our productivity and performance as a Council. It is important that we are accountable to the residents we serve, and that is why we provide an annual update to residents about the progress we have made against our commitments.

Shared Services and Community Engagement

The Council collaborates with a broad range of external groups and organisations, in order to both enhance the quality of services provided to our residents, and improve our resource efficiency throughout the Council. For example, our Parking Services, Registrar Services for Births, Deaths and Marriages, Commercial & Investment and Pensions & Treasury services are all successfully shared with other authorities, namely Bromley, Kent and Westminster, improving the efficiency and productivity of the Council. This collaborative approach optimises our efficiency.

The Council engages its residents through partnerships with key stakeholder groups ranging from large public organisations (e.g. the Metropolitan Police), through third sector and voluntary sector organisations (e.g. Bexley Voluntary Service Council), to citizen run networks such as the Neighbourhood Watch. We established our network of Community Champions to help us communicate and engage with our residents, which was particularly vital during the Coronavirus (COVID-19). Supported by the Council with training, information sessions, guidance and up-to-date information, they continue to work with their neighbours, the Council, the NHS and our Bexley Local Care Partnership, Bexley Wellbeing, focussing on activities that improve the health and wellbeing and immediate environment of local people.

Another important shared service is Bexley Care. Our Bexley Care Partnership was launched in 2017 and is a collaboration between the London Borough of Bexley and Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust. This innovative approach brings staff together within one management structure to provide integrated community health, mental health and social care. It is arranged over three local networks, with each network having a dedicated Associate Director who directly manages integrated teams for those services.

The Council wholly owns BexleyCo Homes Limited, which was established to deliver private and affordable homes within the Borough. Its first development of 58 new homes was initiated in December 2019. The activities of BexleyCo are overseen by a board, which reports regularly to the Council, and presents an annual refresh of its business plan.

Following the completion of the Old Farm Park development Bexley Council received a £1.5m dividend from BexleyCo in 2022/23. This site delivered some affordable homes and enhanced open space for the borough. The most recent BexleyCo business plan projects that a further £34.550m dividends will be paid to Bexley by the end of 2032/33. The West Street and Hadlow Road sites have been sold to BexleyCo and development has started on them with completion expected in 2025/26 for West Street and 2026/27 for Hadlow Road. There are a number of further sites which have been confirmed and  BexleyCo are taking through the planning process. Once Planning has been achieved and Bexley agree to the funding then these sites will be sold to BexleyCo to progress the developments. There are also a number of pipeline sites being investigated for their development potential. BexleyCo aims to deliver 1,200 homes to Bexley residents by 2033. Where viable, affordable homes will be delivered and if not viable an offsite affordable homes contribution will be made. High quality affordable supported living homes are planned for the Lesney Park and Bursted Woods sites. Each new home will generate increased income from Council Tax, Community Infrastructure Levy and New Homes Bonus for the Council.

Prevention Services

Preventing issues from escalating is a crucial element of the Council’s services, so we aim to support residents early and ensure better outcomes for them as well as optimising the use of our limited resources.  We are really proud of our work in this area. We have invested in our Preventing Homelessness team to support people in sustaining their tenancies when their positions become unstable – we have prevented 670 instances of homelessness this year, an increase of 90% from 353 last year. We are also proud of our Early Help and Staying Together Teams in Children’s Social Care, who make sure children stay in a well-supported and safe family unit where possible.  Our Early Intervention Team work alongside the SEND Team and Educational Welfare Officers to identify difficulties emerging at school, and prevent them from escalating in a holistic support service including Educational Psychologists, Education Welfare Officers and Behaviour Support Partners. The issues that might be identified include parenting concerns, classroom behaviour, or Emotionally-Based School Avoidance – the reluctance to attend school due to emotional or physical distress, a serious concern facing many schools at the moment.  Residents are supported in an anticipatory, preventative manner before more complex interventions are required.

We are also delighted with the expansion of our free schools in Bexley. The new Cleeve Meadow School in Sidcup was opened for children with Special Educational Needs in 2020, providing specialist education for 120 pupils aged between 11 and 19. Furthermore, Shenstone Secondary School is currently being expanded to provide an additional 192 places for children with Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities, creating an ‘all through’ school that will take pupils from the ages of 11 to 19. The procurement exercise has been successful and the school will be ready for the September 2025 academic year. We are pleased to leverage funding that enables us to improve facilities for children with additional needs, enabling more children to be educated closer to home.

The Joint Local Health and Wellbeing Strategy was launched in October 2023. At the core of the strategy is prevention, early help, and reducing health inequalities, ensuring Bexley is a place where everyone can live a healthy and fulfilling life. Implementation of the strategy at a neighbourhood level is supported by Bexley Wellbeing. Bexley Wellbeing is multiagency and includes representatives from NHS primary and community services and the third sector, as well as Council officers. Each network considers the health needs for their own populations and have held workshops to define their own local priorities. Health Inequalities Funding from NHS South East London ICB has been pooled in the local Better Care Fund section 75 agreement and provides a targeted approach to the most deprived 20% population. Bexley Wellbeing is involved in forming recommendations for targeting the funding at those parts of Bexley where health inequalities are greatest, optimising the productivity of these joined-up services.

We have a successful and innovative trusted assessor arrangement in place with the third sector consortium, OneBexley, which enables providers to undertake Care Act statutory assessments and case management on our behalf. The consortium of providers bring a variety of expertise and reach across local communities, giving opportunities to work more closely together in providing person-centred services, which build on people’s existing strengths, support networks and local community assets. The consortium is contracted to work with adults who have non-complex social care needs, which has enabled Adult Social Care to concentrate on those with more complex needs. The programme has helped the Council to respond to demand appropriately, enabling work to be redirected from our Triage Team to One Bexley, ranging from advice and guidance, community assets and prevention support to Care Act assessments. The innovative changes have meant that people’s needs can be more rapidly met within the community, saving both time and money.

Our Home First model encompasses admission avoidance, intermediate care, end of life care, and support in the community, including care homes. We work together with our local partners with an emphasis on prevention of illness, self-care and treatment with support from local pharmacies and primary care. We prioritise avoidance of admission wherever possible through Urgent Community Response services and on-going treatment in the home setting, including through increased capacity in Virtual Wards. Whilst Virtual Wards are funded and monitored separately, this is helping to strengthen and extend existing services in Bexley, optimising service delivery.

We offer an Integrated Single Point of Contact and fully integrated triage hub for referrals for health and social care services, which has improved customer service delivery. Care navigators review referrals and ensure client needs are best met by the right services upon receipt of the referral. This includes signposting and facilitating access to prevention services, where appropriate. This has significantly improved the efficiency of these services.

Over many years, we have taken a strategic, outcomes-based approach to commissioning preventative services from the Third Sector. We have done this jointly through the integrated commissioning arrangements with NHS South East London ICB and pooled our combined prevention funding into the Better Care Fund. This joint approach to commissioning has been highlighted as good practice. Our investment in local third sector organisations has brought a degree of stability in funding, providing the foundations upon which to build a more preventative offer. These are just a few examples of the innovative Prevention work we have been conducting in Bexley, optimising the efficiency and productivity of our services.

Structures

We have undergone a significant transformation in our workforce to optimise our output. A major reduction in our staff, particularly at the senior management level, greatly increased our efficiency, and freed significant resource to focus on our frontline operations. We are also pleased to report that we have had great success in significantly reducing the number of agency workers we employ, even in services where agency staffing is often considered a given. For example, we’ve been successful in converting social care staff (both Adults and Children’s) to being permanently employed at the London Borough of Bexley, reflecting the fact that they enjoy working at the Council and providing them with greater stability of employment than is available through agency work.  We have also invested in additional places within a ‘grow your own’ social worker scheme with the Open University, apprentices and Frontline. Furthermore, our Social Work Academy for social workers in their ASYE continues, with 10 newly qualified social workers successfully completing their ASYE in 2023, and with Bexley retaining 9 of those as permanent members of staff. Another 13 have begun working with the Academy and are making good progress. We also have a clear plan in place for harnessing apprenticeships, which we will support over the next three years.  Sustainable recruitment and retention such as this which maximises our productivity remains a priority for our borough. 

Data and technology-driven efficiencies

Over the last financial year, we have made significant progress in our use of digitalisation and automation to redesign our processes to release efficiencies in repeated tasks. This builds on a strong track record over many years, with the establishment of business hubs, a productive Digital Team, and early success in migrating various forms and resident contact points to web services. We have also centralised ‘back office’ functions, a journey we started 15 years ago. Over that time, we have centralised business support, ICT, finance, HR, strategy, performance and project management. Our recent digitalisation work improves our productivity by supporting our residents to easily access our services where appropriate, and which reduces the need for face-to-face interaction. There has been a significant channel shift, whilst taking care not to exclude those who cannot use digital channels. We have closely monitored the website and call centre approach to ensure they work well, keeping track of wait times and abandon rates, and using website data analytics to inform future work. We also carefully monitor call rates with Capita, our contractor providing Revenues and Housing Benefit Services. As a result, we have seen a significant improvement in the performance of our telephone enquiries, with fewer complaints being made.

Bexley is now utilising a data warehouse to centralise its data management, which in turn allows better analysis of its data which helps us to make more informed decisions. The data warehouse allows for automation of key performance reports, enabling staff to focus on interpreting the data and acting on it to improve our performance, rather than generating data manually. It allows for triangulation of data from multiple sources across all the Council’s teams, and will allow for live and real-time data streams. This will in turn, as the system matures, allow for more accurate predictive analytics. It offers an organised point of information within the Council and self-service reporting to all staff in an easy to use and understandable format of Power BI. Similarly, we have recently digitised our HR and workflow data, which means that all the most up-to-date information is continually available, rather than manually producing monthly reports for leadership teams. This increases their access to the data and increases the productivity of our HR staff. We have similarly digitised a variety of paper-based processes, such as the administration surrounding allotments and cemeteries.

Customer experience

We have recently published our new Customer Experience Strategy, which centres on a major digital transformation programme. This will reduce costs, increase process efficiencies, and improve the customer journey. The resources saved by this digitisation will be redirected into supporting residents who struggle to engage with digital services, for example older residents or those who do not own smartphone.  digitally-excluded people. This, in turn, will help them to engage with our digital services, thereby further enhancing our efficiency and improving our customer journeys. It should also be noted that, by diverting more people to digital services, we increase our staff capacity to interact individually with residents who have complex needs, or who cannot use digital services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

We are cognisant of the major advancements being made in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the multiple opportunities they present in the workplace. We have recently undertaken a Council-wide trial of Microsoft Copilot, assessing how it can support efficiency and effectiveness in our services. We’re taking forward a number of benefits, including minute-taking in meetings, and speeding up more basic or administrative tasks undertaken by our officers in their daily work. We are also exploring other opportunities such as using AI in the quality assurance of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) and care assessments, although this is still in its early stages. We are continually seeking opportunities to improve productivity and to enhance efficiencies in our offices through the application of technology. 

To achieve our goals and to deliver on our key priorities, Bexley has developed oversight, review and governance systems to ensure we are continually working to optimise performance, productivity and efficiency, whilst diligently delivering the best results for residents.

Overview and Scrutiny Committees (OSC)

The activities of the Council are closely monitored by OSC, reviewing and scrutinising decisions, making reports or recommendations to the Cabinet or Council; and considering any matter affecting the economic, environmental, or social wellbeing of the area or its residents. This includes assisting the development of the budget and policy framework, reviewing performance, and challenging Members and officers where appropriate. 

External and Internal Audit Processes

The Council is subject to review from its external auditors, currently Ernst and Young Global LLP (EY). The external auditors submit a report to our General Purposes & Audit Committee, providing their opinion as to whether the financial statements of the Council and the Pension Fund provide a ‘true and fair view of the financial position and the value of money achieved by the Council’. Internal Audit is an independent assurance function that measures, evaluates and reports on the effectiveness of the controls in place to    manage risk and governance processes. Their annual report states whether our systems of control are consistent and of adequate strength to allow the Council to meet its objectives. This function supports the Council’s objectives and enables it to make informed and effective decision-making. The Council also has a clear performance framework in place, agreed by the Corporate Leadership Team and Members. Our corporate performance indicators are updated each year to reflect corporate priorities, and are reported regularly to Members. This allows Members to scrutinise policies and decisions, consider interventions to support outcomes and to monitor key financial and service area risks.

Leading financial transformation through effective financial governance

Over the past 18 months, Bexley has established a variety of new boards in order to lead transformational change in the Council’s effectiveness and optimise value for money. The Economy, Efficiency and Effectiveness (3Es Board) was established during the 2023/24 year and oversees a variety of relevant projects to enhance our efficiency and effectiveness.

The Council also established a Spend Panel during 2023/24. This provides crucial central oversight over spending decisions to ensure that each one is absolutely necessary and helps to identify areas for improvement in spending decisions made throughout the Council, such as the consolidation of procurement activities across departments. The Spend Panel keeps a tight focus on services’ financial performance and flags areas of overspending, escalating costs and reduced income. Any identified areas for improvement flagged by the Spend Panel are then overseen by the 3Es Board.

Our Assets Board has been established in response to the extent of our current financial challenges, leading on all asset-based decisions throughout the Council. Its primary aim is to maximise the utility and income generation of Bexley’s assets, and optimise the capital receipts we obtain from the selling of surplus assets. This Board is currently leading a full transformation in the way that Bexley handles and optimises its assets.

A Debt Management Board was established during 2022/23, chaired by the Deputy Director of Finance & Property (Deputy Section 151 Officer). This Board demonstrates the Council’s commitment to managing debt owed and identifying effective practices to ensure that bad debt is managed. It conducts deep-dive investigations into any instances of debt, ensures the Council is closely following a debt recovery process, and prevents any further increase in debt.

Strong Financial Efficiency

The Council has an excellent track record of collecting the income it is owed, rather than allowing potential funds to go wasted. We collect over 95% of Council Tax within the year and 97% of Business Rates within the year, whilst over 90% of debts (by volume and value) are collected within 90 days. Around 90% of invoices are paid within 30 days. These statistics continue to reflect our strong and thorough financial management, and our refusal to be waste public funds.

Managing Risk

Bexley operates a risk management framework that aids the identification, analysis and mitigation of risks to the Council’s strategic objectives, reputation, finances and other assets and its compliance with its statutory and regulatory obligations. The Strategic Risk Register articulates the key risks impacting the Council, informs decision making, provides assurance on current actions and identifies planned actions to manage key risks. Work continues to develop Bexley’s risk management approach in order to develop a Council-wide risk aware workforce. 

Review of effectiveness

Bexley conducts an annual review of the effectiveness of its governance framework including the system of internal control. Effectiveness is assessed on a variety of criteria, including governance frameworks, compliance documents, identifying issues that have not been addressed in the Council, and identifying individuals responsible for taking remedial actions. The results of the review are then considered by the Finance and Corporate Services Directorate Leadership Team before being presented to the Chief Executive and Leader of the Council. It is also included in the General Purposes and Audit Committee. 

Equality, Diversity & Inclusion

Bexley values Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) as important principles in our work, but we do not believe it is a principle that requires great financial investment. We prefer to incorporate EDI into our daily work in a streamlined, financially-efficient manner. We do not employ an Equalities Officer, and require employees to complete a single module of online EDI training via our Evolve digital platform, as part of our wider training offer for staff and managers to enable them to exercise their roles effectively. We have agreed a sensible and productive EDI Policy and Action Plan, which focuses on our statutory duty (PSED), and which is closely monitored to ensure its optimised delivery. Several of our employees participate in the Workforce Race Equality Standard scheme, and many of our senior officers serve as EDI ‘Champions’ for our employee working groups. We continue to be sensitive to EDI, integrating these ideas into our employee portfolios with exceptionally low levels of investment.

Bexley is an efficient, effective and well-run local authority, and we have been relentless in our focus on investing in frontline services and making efficiencies, savings and transformations. Bexley has thus far been very successful in weathering various external financial pressures, and we are proud of Bexley’s resilience. However, we increasingly feel the pressure of these financial burdens, as all local authorities are currently experiencing – our Core Spending Power has reduced in real terms by 14% since 2010. This figure would have been significantly higher if it were not for the increase in the Adult Social Care budget over the last couple of years. Furthermore, the demographics of Bexley residents is evolving, and has grown by 8% since 2010: Bexley has seen an increase in need, and an increase in complexity of need. Our Core Spending Power in real terms has dropped, per capita, by 21%. It is important that the government not only understands the difficult financial pressures we are performing under, but also aims to restore the strength of our Core Spending Power.

Setting the Council’s annual revenue budget has become an increasingly challenging process over recent years. The Council has successfully delivered a balanced Medium Term Financial Strategy in 2024/25 against a series of challenging circumstances, including responding to the impact of the pandemic; a growing and ageing population; an increase in demand and cost of services; short term government funding; new legislation and deferral of the Fair Funding review; high inflation and increasing interest rates. A number of these challenges will continue into 2024/25. It should be noted that this balanced outturn was only possible in 2023/24 because the Financial Planning Reserve and other reserve balances funded the overspend. This is an unsustainable situation moving forward, as we cannot continue to deplete our reserves. Furthermore, even in the short term, we have low levels of reserves, and therefore limited capacity to fund overspends in the immediate future. We have been delivering savings year on year, leaving us now with limited options to continue to find savings.

Whilst many of these issues are felt across the country, Bexley also faces several more unique challenges. For example, our output as a Council has been achieved despite Bexley being significantly underfunded, not only in relation to our need, but also in relation to other local authorities. The evidence clearly demonstrates that Bexley receives a low level of grant, and this dates back to the funding formula changes imposed by the previous Labour Government in the mid-2000s that has yet to be substantially reformed. We receive 48% less grant funding than our statistical neighbour Ealing, and 49% less than our neighbouring borough Greenwich. We have the sixth lowest value of funding grants, and the ninth lowest core spending power, in London. If we were funded in a similar and fairer way, we would have more resources available to support our financial pressures and provide even better services to our residents. We strongly urge the government to consider a new Fair Funding arrangement.

These funding restrictions are exacerbated by the issue of statutory fees: delays in increasing fees on a regular basis to keep in line with inflation and staff costs have a great impact on Bexley’s ability to plan the budget.

Furthermore, the Home Office and Department of Defence are frequently pricing local authorities out of temporary accommodation, and in some instances using accommodation deemed not suitable, which limits our capacity to respond to increasing levels of homelessness and provide suitable accommodation for children leaving care.

Similarly, we face several unique challenges in our local housing market. The London Borough of Bexley does not have its own housing stock – we are reliant on the Private Rented Sector (PRS), which in Bexley (with 68.6% home ownership, one of the highest in London) is very small, making us extremely vulnerable to changes in the PRS. An increase in demand from agents working on behalf of the government has occurred alongside an increasing in families presenting as homeless, due to the cost of living crisis. Although the number of families placed in temporary accommodation has reduced, the number of families presenting as homeless has gone from 171 to 267 since the start of the crisis, having peaked a year ago at 411. Given that these agents are required to place asylum seekers allocated to Bexley within Bexley, this will inevitably mean that more people with local connections will need to be placed out of borough. This has already resulted in a Judicial Review stating that we have to place people locally. It is vital that these agents reform their procurement process such that it will not escalate price in our small PRS. It is also essential that these agents significantly improve their communications with us prior to procuring property in Bexley, in order to check the borough had no other plans for that property. Currently, these procurement processes are causing a significant increase in financial and administrative pressure on the London Borough of Bexley.

The issues in our housing market are compounded by the expansion of permitted rights leading to more HMOs in the borough. This has a potential impact on crime, exploitation, community safety issues, and complaints from residents.

There is a variety of ways we could be effectively supported by the Government in order to overcome these difficulties and improve the services we offer to residents.

Systems management

For instance, we are currently facing a significant backlog in Probate cases in the borough, which impacts the supply of properties in our local housing market and reduces our Council Tax income as houses are left empty.

We are also seeing a backlog in our courts, in some cases up to two years. The backlog in Children’s cases is a particular concern, as it means children remain open to our children’s social care service, increasing the caseload of staff, having knock-on impacts to the capacity of our service. When cases are not completed within the 26-week period, the impact on the child’s welfare, as well as the additional costs, are significant. These issues are compounded by the courts reluctance to move from their costly, inefficient paper-based systems to modern electronic bundling solutions. Supporting Bexley courts to ease the backlog and to transition to efficient electronic systems is crucial.

Furthermore, none of the IT case management systems on offer commercially to manage cases in Children or Adult social care are able to produce the monitoring and regulatory reports required for the Department for Education or Ofsted without significant development, which requires us to hire additional staff or pay the companies providing the systems for additional development work – simply to meet the requirements of our statutory regulator. This has a great cost implication. For instance, key case management systems for Children’s social care cannot provide the required ‘Annex A’ datasets for Ofsted’s ILACS inspection without significant work to develop detailed reports, yet this is a statutory regulatory requirement. Another crucial case of this is the system we use to manage and monitor our SEND service. This cannot interface readily with the system our Schools data, which is stored on the systems used by individual schools. 

Loss of income due to statutory changes

We would also benefit from new funding or support in areas which are currently experiencing new financial burdens. We have taken on a variety of new duties and responsibilities without sufficient or sustained funding over the last few years, including the localisation of Council Tax support in 2013, the duties resulting from the 2014 Children & Families Act and the duties resulting from the Homeless Reduction Act in 2017. As well as these long-term duties, we have also experienced several more recent changes to our responsibilities and duties, which have financial implications for our borough.

Following recent new DfE guidance on school attendance, we now need to provide certain services free to all schools and academies which would previously have been part of our traded Education Welfare offer. There is no funding attached to the implementation of this guidance, resulting in a loss of income for our team with no recompense.

Furthermore, we were surprised that our health partners were not subject to the same Statutory SEND Improvement Notice as the Local Authority, following our recent SEND Joint Area Partnership inspection. The legislation surrounding these inspections must be updated to ensure that the health partners also receive a Statutory Improvement Notice, reflecting the joint effort and joint responsibility of delivering these services effectively. 

We are seeing a similar financial burden from the Youth Justice system module changes. The Prevention and Diversion Assessment Tool (PDAT) has been newly mandated by the Youth Justice board, and costs £999 for every child referred to us for an out of court disposal. This has been mandated with no funding from the Youth Justice board, whilst we still await confirmation of grant allocation for 2024/25. This means we are still unaware of how much of a financial burden this new mandate will put on our services.

We are experiencing a similar issue in Waste & Recycling, where the new requirements placed on our services have not been accompanied by requisite funding. For instance, although Bexley has been an early adopter of food waste collections since the early 2000s, and already meets the requirements for 100% of kerbside properties receiving waste collections, the new Simpler Recycling legislation will require us to introduce food collection services for an extra 12,343 households in flats by April 2026. Whilst we appreciate the £0.24m capital funding allocated from DEFRA to implement this legislation, the cost of a refuse collection vehicle alone is £0.25m, meaning that this funding is insufficient to meet the future service requirements. We are awaiting allocation of some revenue funding from DEFRA, which will be allocated in 2025/26, so we cannot yet know whether this will be sufficient.

Trading standards for Funeral Directors have also been recently proposed by the government, which would create new financial burdens. The proposed new project will require the identification and inspection of all Funeral Directors in the borough, a new venture as we only currently make visits to regulated businesses. If such a change to the trading standards is made, it is important that it is accompanied by funding or financial recompense.

We are also impacted by the need to cover the increased building control regulations and qualifications for staff that resulted from the Grenfell Tower response. The Home Office has also placed several new financial burdens on Bexley. For instance, the need for Bexley to use the Home Office Immigration Check service and pay for their staff is a significant consideration.

We are also aware of new legislation coming from DLUHC regarding High Street rental auctions. The new DLUHC legislation states that if a rental unit stays empty for 12 months or more, and is considered relevant for high street use, an auction should be conducted. Whilst this is mandated by the government, the legislation is of little relevance to Bexley, which runs on less than 5% vacancy.

We would also welcome support regarding the Ombudsman complaint process changes – these changes have led to additional tasks for our staff, as well as a change in response times, but with no added benefit for the Council. There is also no added benefit to complainants themselves – particularly when it comes to asking them to confirm what they complained about, and the longer timescales for responding. We would appreciate compensation for the additional burdens of these changes.

For instance, we used to provide adoptive parents to other local authorities and charge them to recoup the cost of the social work time involved in recruitment, assessment and training. Any such inter-authority arrangements are now handled by the Regional Adoption Agency covering Kent, Medway and Bexley. despite being a top-performing local authority in this area, we have been forced into the Regional Adoption Agency arrangement and no longer have the ability to independently trade, a service that we used to have a £126,000 budget for.

We would also like to see a change to make the market for Children’s Services placements not-for-profit as seen in Scotland and Wales. With the increasing demand for Private Voluntary and Independent (PVI) placements, and limited supply, the market is able to dictate its price with new placements regularly costing over £8,000 per week. Our budgets simply cannot fund this, and it places a significant sustainability risk for the Council.

We are pleased that some more certainty has been provided by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities on planning assumptions to be used in 2024/25. Whilst we have balanced the budget for 2023/24 and have set a balanced budget for 2024/25, we continue to review our planning assumptions to ensure we are able to reduce the budget gap in future years. The 2024/25 budget for instance is based on current assumptions and is likely to require the identification of additional in year savings and efficiencies given the current economic uncertainty, inflation, demand and the high cost of living. These assumptions within remain under continuous review and are reported to Public Cabinet throughout the year, but the short term nature of our funding discourages medium and long term strategic decisions and does not support efficiency or effectiveness.

In conclusion, Bexley is an efficient and effective Council, and we continuously find new methods to enhance our productivity through savings, innovative partnerships and technological advancements. However, we continue to face significant financial challenges and external pressures, in spite of this great work. Our potential to greatly enhance our productivity could be better-supported by the government. This includes providing enhanced, flexible financial support in recognition of the great pressures facing Councils due to external factors, and continuing to be flexible with support in the medium and long term due to the unpredictability of our budget assumptions. Establishing multi-year settlements would help us to plan services strategically and take invest-to-save decisions, removing the uncertainty driven by single-year settlements.

The government could also significantly support us by providing adequate funding for the new mandates and requirements it has given to Councils, thus far without any recognition of the financial burden this causes. This includes funding for changes to waste management requirements, changes to building standards, new inspections for funeral directors, and Youth Justice system updates. The costs of these new mandates have been absorbed by Bexley – new government requirements should be accompanied by appropriate additional funding.

Our productivity would also be greatly improved with improvements and modernisations in our administrative systems, specifically in schools and courts. At present, our productivity is hindered by the paper-based systems in courtrooms, and by the non-alignment of digital systems between schools and Ofsted. Modern, centralised digital systems and infrastructure would make significant improvements here, but such investment would be impossible without government support.

Finally, an important step the government can take would be to reform its Temporary Accommodation system, which currently has its contracted agents actively competing with us in our own private rental markets, driving up prices and leaving us without any housing available in our own borough, compounding the difficulties and high levels of demand on this service. Far from supporting us, this governmental system is actively causing us great difficulty and financial hardship. Higher levels of coordination and collaboration on this issue would make a significant difference to the output and financial health of Bexley.

While this document cannot capture all the relevant initiatives and examples, we hope that it is a useful overview. We would be happy to discuss further.