Marissa Bartlett, Head of Joint HR Transactional Services, introduced the report and Appendix A (which was laid round and will be published with the minutes).

Marissa Bartlett said that HR had been carrying out an intensive piece of work over the past year, known as a “technical establishment exercise” in order to identify each post (generic job title such as Revenue and Benefits Officer) and position (particular role assigned to the people in each of those posts) that is budgeted for in order to produce a fully costed staffing structure baseline. Data has also been produced to set out the number of vacancies as at 1^st June 2015 and how many of these are filled by agency/temporary workers. She said that this is a work in progress and she would welcome comments on how comprehensive members considered the data in the appendix to be..

Caroline Holland, Director of Corporate Services, added that her intention is to provide information on budgeted hours rather than posts and positions as she believes this would be more meaningful to service managers and to councillors. She will also ensure that this information is consistent with the information on interim/temporary workers that is provided to General Purposes Committee.

In response to a question about what information was provided to service managers, Paul Dale, Assistant Director of Resources, said that the finance team provide detailed budget information on each post for managers to verify before the start of the financial year so that managers can check it and will fully understand their staffing budget.

Caroline Holland explained that the finance information comes from a separate system and that the data provided to the task group comes from the HR/payroll integrated iTrent system which, when vacant posts are also entered, will be able to provide the sort of HR monitoring data that the council requires. She added that when the contract for the previous HR system expired and the contract for iTrent began in April 2012, a decision was taken to focus on the payroll function to ensure that staff were paid that month. Vacant post information was not entered initially due to the importance of keeping to the go live date for the other two councils in the partnership.

Marissa Bartlett said that other councils do not use iTrent in the way Merton applies their staffing establishment control, which is why this has been a lengthy exercise and much care has been taken to ensure the data is accurate.

In response to a question about what the position would be with iTrent when the Merton and Sutton HR shared service came to an end, Caroline Holland said that the iTrent contract is for 10 years, with a break clause, so it is likely to remain in use. She assured members that the system could be developed

Task group members said they found the information in Appendix A difficult to understand and would prefer to have information given in terms of full-time equivalents (FTEs), vacancies and number of vacancies covered by agency and interim staff.to produce the information that they require. They stressed that they need to be able to see the big picture but also to have confidence in the accuracy of the information provided.

It was AGREED to invite Marissa Bartlett to a future meeting of the task group to present FTE staffing, vacancy and vacancy cover information  and summary level data.