Mid Ulster Council performance ‘can still be improved’

By Adam Morton, Local Democracy Reporter

MID Ulster District Council’s Chief Executive has welcomed a report monitoring Council’s performance for the first nine months of 2021/22 year describing it as “excellent”.

However, speaking to members of Council’s policy and resources committee at a meeting earlier this month, Adrian McCreesh acknowledged the report was not perfect and confirmed Council’s senior management team is considering how best to improve performance.

The report reviews Council’s performance against its seven statutory and three corporate performance improvement indicators and standards, along with an overview of the corporate health indicators for the first nine months of 2021/22.

It also provides a performance progress summary against Council’s four corporate improvement objectives and their associated project plans.

Overall, Council is currently monitoring 35 improvement actions/measures throughout the four improvement project plans during 2021/22. In Q3 of this year, 24 actions are on target; eight actions are trending away from target; one action is completed; one action has been missed and one action is awaiting data/no longer deemed in year priority by Council’s senior management team.

The eight actions trending away from target include Council’s desire to increase the re-use of its technological hardware; increasing community involvement in sustainable food growing; introduce and pilot a sustainability assessment for 50 per-cent capital projects; the submission of a draft plan strategy for independent examination; establish a digital leadership team; develop digital systems to support financial services; research, develop and implement a pilot capital project procedural guide and the development of skills/competency matrix/tool to map required and desired skills for capital projects team/client services teams and conduct training/development programmes to optimise efficiencies and work flows by April 2022.

Council also missed its target to research the application and introduction of alternative fuelled vehicles into Council’s fleet/diverse plant and develop a fossil fuel usage baseline report on fleet/diverse plant.

The local authority had planned to purchase two alternative fuel vehicles however, the order for the delivery of vans was cancelled by the supplier impacting the order placement for electric vans. Council’s director of corporate services is assisting with options for the alternative procurement of the vans which will be required for monitoring comparison.

Commenting on the report, UUP group leader, Councillor Walter Cuddy said the report was fairly comprehensive but asked officers if there was “anything within the report we would need to be worried about”.

Mr McCreesh said the report is “as good as I have ever gotten from school” but told the chamber there are areas Council must look to improve on.

“Wherever there is a deficiency or red area, you have to focus on it and our senior management team are considering the areas we are under performing in,” he told the chamber.

“We are asking ourselves why that is the case, what are the issues and the internal circumstances and very often, the external circumstances causing that.

“You can’t blame Covid for everything but it has been such a disruptive period that it has impacted on performance. Overall, in terms of performance and job creation, we are satisfied with our actions to achieve performance targets.

“It is not perfect but we strive for perfection and we will not ignore those areas where we have fallen short. We take this report seriously and the senior management team will address it.”

With attendance recorded within the report at 95.5 per cent, Councillor Derek McKinney asked if there is room for improvement or if Council’s senior management team is satisfied with those attendance figures.

An officer confirmed the local authority was satisfied with the figures at present but said there is room for improvement in the coming years.