The Leader welcomed the contribution that scrutiny makes to decision making and said that Cabinet have implemented many recommendations from scrutiny. He illustrated the achievements and challenges facing the council by outlining a day in the life of a hypothetical family in Merton. The achievements cited included food and bulky waste collections, excellent schools and library services, good local parks, lunch clubs, being a safe borough, ambitious plans for regenerating Mitcham, Morden and Raynes Park and frozen levels of council tax for last three years. The Leader reminded the Commission that Merton had won the Municipal Journal’s best achieving council award this year, highlighting the role that low spend, high performance and partnership working had played in this achievement. He said that one of the key challenges was to retain and expand employment opportunities in the borough.

The Chief Executive outlined some of the strategic issues facing the council:

·         ensuring the energy from waste plant meets the borough’s needs and to explore potential additional benefits for other waste services that could accrue from working in partnership

·         improving the quality of leisure facilities in the borough

·         working with the NHS and other partners to improve the health of local residents and to protect St Helier hospital

·         implementing proposals in the government’s care bill whereby local authorities would have responsibility for keeping track of how much each person has spent on “qualifying” care services (the government is proposing a cap on individual expenditure on adult social care)

·         identifying the best provision to meet the need for additional secondary school places

·          understanding the drivers behind the above national average  increase in referrals to children’s social care services and numbers taken into care

·         Continuing to improve the speed with which adoption applications are handled

·         Improving the youth justice service – currently average in comparison with other London boroughs

·         Continuing to provide quality and value for local residents

The Chair of the Children and Young People Overview and Scrutiny Panel said that the Panel had considered a report on adoption at its last meeting and had found that the numbers in Merton are relatively small and so average performance is disproportionately influenced by delays with one or two cases. He added that the figures showed that the average time taken is already decreasing substantially.

The Chief Executive said that the borough had begun to address its funding gap prior to neighbouring authorities and had made significant changes the way services are provided as well as reducing the number of staff by 20% since 2009. A small funding gap remains for the next two financial years but it is likely to increase again from 2017/18 if the Office of Budget Responsibility’s predictions of national debt are accurate as the government will have limited room for manoeuvre in relation to local government funding. He added that recent growth projections are more hopeful so those pressures may be mitigated – the council will plan for the worst and hope for the best.

In response to a question about council tax levels, the Leader said that the administration planned to freeze these again next year if possible but recognised that this would be difficult.

Members asked what shared services were being considered, what the optimum level of aggregation of services would be and what was being done to monitor the longer term performance of the services. The Chief Executive said that a lot of conversations are currently taking place around potential shared services with other boroughs. The pension service will be shared with Wandsworth and a 4 borough shared regulatory service has been agreed plus discussion with Wandsworth on sharing social care and with other South London councils on sharing back office functions. The optimum number of partners varies according to the nature of the service. Where there are economies of scale, then the larger the better. Where the service is more complex and/or there needs to be more involvement in day to day detail of the work then a smaller shared service is better. A client monitoring officer is assigned for each shared service to keep track of performance and hold the service to account.

ACTION: the Chief Executive undertook to find out whether shared service monitoring includes mystery shopping.

In response to a Commission member’s comments about Lord Rogers’ thoughts, made at the recent Future Wimbledon conference, on redesigning Wimbledon Broadway, the Leader said that they would be looked at should any organisation bring any proposals forward. The Chief Executive added that the Conference had been a good example of politicians from different parties working together for the good of the borough.

The Leader and Chief Executive made further points in response to questions:

·         the council could choose to give older people concessionary prices for leisure centre use but, under the terms of the contract, the provider GLL would have to be compensated for any income loss. The council’s public health team could work to increase uptake to offset income loss.

·         in relation to making further savings from 2017, it is likely that every approach taken to date would be used but to a greater degree as well as looking at experience from other authorities

·         the management of the council’s debt is ultimately a political choice, taking into account the level of debt and the cost of servicing it

·         the council has introduced the London Living Wage for its directly employed staff. Contracts with external organisations are monitored to ensure that their staff are treated fairly

·         targets have been sent to increase the amount of waste that is recycled. In response to a question about how schools could contribute, the Leader said that some have solar panels on their roofs and Peter Connellan, co-opted member, added that schools had separate paper recycling bins .

A Commission member pointed out that lunch clubs are not funded by the council. The Leader said the Council provides grants to voluntary organisations such as FISH and the Merton and Morden Guild and these organisations decide how to spend them. He undertook to review support for lunch clubs.