To receive any statements from Directors of Council Owned Companies.
In accordance with Procedure Rule 4.2.24 the total time allocated to this item shall not exceed 10 minutes, and no Director, except with the consent of Council, shall speak for more than 3 minutes.
Minutes:
Alistair Auty, Non Executive Director Wokingham Housing Limited:
WHL have now delivered 141 affordable homes since the Company’s inception. Another 70 homes have planning permission and are either onsite or moving towards being onsite over the next few months. We have around 350 further units that we are working on achieving planning permission on, and beyond this we hope to be able to add further units to the pipeline by working closely with the Council on other council owned land or through joint ventures with other parties.
WHL was profitable last year for the first time and is predicting profits over the next five years of £1.2million. Loddon Homes is the Council’s for profit registered provider, is working well and the recent update to the Five Year Business Plan showed the company is profitable from next year onwards based on a conservative approach on what schemes are to be completed and purchased by Loddon Homes during this period. Due mainly to shared ownership sales the company is expecting to generate cash revenues over the five year period and expect to be able to pay WBC Holdings Limited dividend payments during this time.
Loddon Homes welcomed a new Chair this year after Gary Cowan stepped down, thank you Gary, with Councillor Kaiser and then Councillor Clark taking up this role. Councillor Lindsay Ferris was also appointed to the Board as a Non Executive Director, providing cross party representation, which is something that will be welcomed across the Chamber. He joins the existing independent NEDs who already sit on the Board.
It was recently decided that the Boards of Berry Brooks Homes and WHL would be combined and deal with both companies business at a single meeting split in two as the companies will continue to trade as separate entities. It is proposed that the two Berry Brook Homes independent NED Board members join WHL and Loddon Homes, one going to each sister company Board. This will effectively fill an existing vacancy on the WHL Board and replace one of the Loddon Home NEDs who is stepping down this summer. I would also like to thank Councillor David Chopping for all the hard work that he has put in over the eight years that the local housing companies have been in existence, so thank you David. The streamlining of these two Boards will also provide cost savings to WBC.
Anthony Pollock, Non Executive Director Optalis:
Optalis continues to perform well in the challenging environment of adult social care. Financially, the company have again reported a surplus and remain bullish in terms of forecasted outturns. Optalis are currently running twelve projects across the business, ranging from enhanced GDPR and Quality Frameworks, in phase information platform and the roll out of successful technology based auditor tool for services. Of these, ten projects are rated as ‘green’, highlighting good progress across the organisation. In respect of the auditor tool it is something I will talk a little bit about later. In order to ensure that when CQC arrive that they do not seem to find a bit of a black hole the auditor tool is used to assess the services beforehand almost on an ongoing basis and this has made an extremely important contribution to the improvement that I am going to talk about now. The team has delivered a ‘Good’ CQC rating following an inspection of our Home Care Service, a further underpinning of the focus on quality. Workshops are now being planned to look at achieving ‘Outstanding’ ratings rather than just ‘Good’. We have over the last 12 months moved to a position of 60% of services being in the ‘Requires Improvement’ category, to 90% in the ‘Good’ category. This is an excellent result and indicative of a quality driven organisation.
The HR team have been engaged with teams to coproduce the delivery plan arising from the staff survey. Additionally Optalis are starting to benefit from the Apprenticeship Levy and developing a Behaviour’s Framework as a cornerstone of the values based approach. Staff retention rates are tracking below 13%, which compares with an industry average of 29, and even a couple of years ago when I was Chairman of the Operating Company we were in the 20s, so the current team have done exceptionally well. Growth perspective, proactive PR and market positioning has resulted in enquires from five local authorities who have heard and seen the success of the Optalis model. As a result of these successes in quality delivery, Optalis have one local authority who has asked them to carry out a quality audit on their behalf of their providers who have fallen short on CQC inspections.
Core website traffic has improved by 42% in the last 3 months and Optalis have appeared in national and local press every day in January helping recruitment and profile raising activities. Customer forums to support co-production have taken place and Optalis have introduced the person centred hour to staff training, which highlights from a customer’s own perspective the little details that can help ensure that care provided is personalised and meets the person’s needs.
Councillors Auty and Kate Haines indicated that it was their last Council meeting and thanked Members and Officers for their support whilst they had been councillors. Councillor Kaiser also thanked those Members who would not be there in the new municipal year for their hard work.