Erewash Borough Council Response to the Audit Commission Report for December 2007

Erewash Borough Council welcomes the Audit Commission report which recognises that "Real Improvements at Erewash are helping to meet housing needs".

Since the inspection in September 2007, we have sustained our work to further improve services to customers and we are determined to demonstrate continuing and promising prospects for improvement.

Whilst we are pleased that our areas of strength have been recognised, we plan to build on them further.

Our plans include:

• Using our clear housing strategy, supported by up to date housing need information, to help us to develop a new strategy to take us beyond 2008;
• Further develop our homeless prevention role and, where appropriate, share our best practice with others. We have learnt much from partners and other organisations over the past 18 months but we can now demonstrate best practice ourselves, particularly in our work with young people;
• Carrying out a review to ensure that our clear targeting of grants is maintained and working to ensure that the most disadvantaged people living in Erewash receive high quality advice and financial assistance;
• Working with partners and developers to further increase the numbers of affordable new homes developed in the Borough. We believe that Erewash is a good place to live and that there are significant opportunities over the next 5 years to build new homes that meet the needs of the communities that we serve. We are ambitious for our residents and we will seek to influence the quality of homes being built.

We are aware of the areas of service that require focussed improvement and we are continuing to challenge ourselves in these areas:

• We are finalising plans for new reception facilities in our conservation listed Town Hall at Ilkeston and we have set aside £250,000 in our capital programme to fund these works. Our ambition is to provide our customers with a modern facility based in a historic building that will help us to provide excellent services in an attractive, welcoming and customer focussed environment that is accessible to all;
• Our service standards are being revised in consultation with our customers. As a service accredited with Chartermark, we are committed to providing our customers with the highest quality information and service;
• We are aware that the speed of our delivery of disabled facilities grants needs to improve and we are working with Derbyshire County Council, who assist us with Occupation Therapy assessments and adaptation works to further streamline the grant delivery process;
• We are using our Delivering Improvement Business Planning and Budgeting Guidance Framework to help us further improve our performance management. We will continue to compare our service delivery costs and performance with others, refine the information we collect and seek to improve our services further. This will be at no extra cost and, improving efficiency, could lead to even reduced costs.

Over the past 18 months we have worked hard to improve our housing services and we are pleased that we have been able to demonstrate to the Audit Commission that our homeless services and strategic housing work are now areas where our strengths outweigh weaknesses. We are aware that we must give particular focus to improving our private sector housing services further over the next 6 months and our improvement plans give priority to this service area.

Since the inspection in September 2007, we have also undertaken an extensive consultation on our revised Corporate Equality and Diversity Plan and we have prepared an action plan to achieve level 3 of the Equality Standard in 2008. We are committed to improving our performance in this area.

We are working with the I&DeA to strengthen our understanding and competence in delivering improved value for money and our managers will have completed training by December 2007.

We have used the 2006 Audit Commission inspection to challenge ourselves and improve our services to customers and we remain ambitious for further improvement over the next 12 months. We have demonstrated significant improvement so far but we consider that we have the capacity to do more. Our workforce are our greatest asset and we will be working together to use all their talents to provide more service improvements to our customers.

Our housing partners continue to work well with us and we will be writing to them all to thank them for the help that they have given us since 2006 which has led to us delivering improved services.

The Council notes the recommendations set out within the Inspection Report and we commit to monitoring of achievement of these actions closely through the Leadership Group, Service Effectiveness Scrutiny Committee and the senior management team.

External challenge has and will continue to help us move forward and we would like to thank the inspection team for their report.