Agenda item

Report of the Corporate Director of People.

The Committee received a report describing the Resilient Harrow programme which had been established to transform the delivery of Adult Social Care services and to support delivery of the Adult Social Care Vision reported to the Health and Wellbeing Board in March 2018.  Appendix I illustrated the current programme structure and a table in the report showed how expenditure in Adult Social Care had increased from £34 million in 2013/14 to £51 million in 2018/19 and would continue to increase at a time when the Council’s resources were already stretched.

The report provided examples and summarised a range of projects designed to ensure that in the face of increasing demand, appropriate, good quality care is provided to meet the needs of citizens within the limited resources available.  Appendix 2 provided a summary of the projects pursued including their outcomes/benefits their current position.

The report went on to identify a number of other initiatives including examples of joint working, cross council and partnership working, and commissioning.

Since its inception in 2019 the Programme had achieved a number of outcomes including:

·                     the establishment of robust governance structures  at project and programme level;

·                     introduction of  robust effective systems to measure and report progress and performance against agreed objectives;

·                     predicted savings of £1.263m by March 2020; and

·                     the  successful creation of foundations for further initiatives.

The Resilient Harrow Programme Board had agreed in November 2019 to discontinue the programme in its current form (many of the projects having been completed and operating as business as usual) and the report explained that revised governance structures would be used to monitor closed projects and the delivery of future projects.

In order to provide members with a flavour of how the projects were progressed and the outcomes/benefits secured the Committee received a detailed presentation by Officers from Adult and Social Care Team on the project titled Empowering People with Disabilities and its two sub-sections Learning Disability Integration and Harrow is Home.

In response to questions from members a number of issues were clarified/explained including the following.

·                     as a result of the changes made to the Committee Timetable because of the General Election, the Market Position Statements and related commissioning plans would not now be submitted to the February meeting of Cabinet but to a later meeting;

·                     a Training Programme for staff affected by the restructuring of the Service had been organised and would be refreshed and offered to new staff;

·                     whilst feedback from users had been positive there was a need to carry out more in depth research and improve the methodology;

·                     empowering involved adopting a person-centric approach, encouraging the individual to identify their own preferences and goals and to make their own decisions;

·                     the Regeneration Team had been involved in the development of the Programme;

·                     there was no evidence to suggest that the Programme had had the effect of lowering people’s expectations about the level and quality of services they would receive.  Indeed the feed back from people had been positive with no complaints received;

·                     information used to measure levels of engagement e.g. sports activities  came from a variety sources including stakeholders involved in the Health and Well-Being Board and  the Borough Plan;

·                     with savings of £312,000 achieved to date the saving of £400,000 planned for in the 2019 – 20 MTFS arising from changes to care packages would be delivered;

·                     the savings achieved were not an indication that the previous budget had contained an element of flab; the savings were the result of meeting people’s needs better and more efficiently and effectively; and

·                     whilst the improvement in the number of older people still at home 91 days after receiving treatment together with improvements in reducing delays in hospital transfers were welcome and an indication that the Programme was being effective more work needed to be done to improve performance even further.

Although the Programme had been discontinued the Portfolio Holder for Adult and Social Care, after reiterating the role that the Regeneration Team had played in the development of the Programme, emphasised that the work would continue having been incorporated into the Harrow Regeneration Programme and other Council processes.  Whilst the Programme had been successful, a   number of questions remained unanswered and would not be properly addressed until Central Government had produced a Social Care Policy and provided sufficient resources to Councils to support the Policy.

RESOLVED:  That the progress of the Resilient Harrow Programme and the Plans for the future be noted.