The Chair advised that as much of the discussion of this agenda item should take place in public as possible.

The Assistant Director of Business Improvement, Sophie Ellis, drew the Commission’s attention to the key points in the public report – 50% of the 156 specified outcomes have been achieved as have 62% of the automated transactions, new hosting and support arrangements are in place, website traffic has increased even though the new website has not been promoted. Sophie Ellis said that work to improve the website will continue and that examples of what this would include are given in Appendix B.

Members commented that the spike in web and phone transactions in September 2018 was largely due to difficulties experienced in contacting Veolia and getting responses from them at that time. Sophie Ellis said that the data has been analysed and the contact comprised largely requests for information and containers.

In response to a question about members of the public being able to continue to contact the council by phone, Sophie Ellis reassured the Commission that phone contact was an integral part of the customer contact strategy and would not be withdrawn.

In response to a question about the priorities and timetable for delivering the rest of the project outcomes, Sophie Ellis said that the main focus would be to develop the remaining online transactions and refine existing customer accounts.. She explained that some actions would be quick to complete and others would take longer, also that a range of providers would be used in order to avoid over-reliance on one provider. There will be a pause in work when MS Office 365 is installed and, until the MS provider has been appointed, it will not be possible to predict how long that pause will be or exactly when it will take place.

Members of the Commission asked why new providers had been appointed prior to completing the review of lessons learned from the previous contract. Sophie Ellis said that this had been a pragmatic decision to keep the project moving forward and deliver some of the remaining smaller items of work quickly pending the lessons learned review.

The Commission RESOLVED to move to a closed session in order to discuss the exempt report that had been provided to them. The rest of this minute is a public record of this discussion, without inclusion of any commercially sensitive information.

Public minute of closed session

Sophie Ellis outlined the difficulties that had been experienced with the contract and on the actions consequently taken by the council. The Commission discussed the confidential financial information that was provided in an exempt appendix to the report and were given additional information in response to questions about the expected cost of completing the remaining parts of the project.

Members of the Commission stressed the importance of learning from this project to future proof subsequent projects and to compartmentalise risk. They also stressed the importance of listening to the views and experiences of service users and staff.

It was RESOLVED that a future report on lessons learned should be brought to the Commission’s financial monitoring task group.