Introduction
Surrey County Council, an upper-tier local authority to the south-west of London, has been on a continuous transformation and improvement journey since 2018. A Community Vision for Surrey 2030 was developed to set out how we all want Surrey to be by 2030. The Council defines its contribution to this through the Organisation Strategy 2023-28. Both continue to be delivered, helping us to tackle inequality across Surrey and achieve our guiding mission of no-one left behind. The council will be spending £1.2 billion in 2024/25, delivering services for 1.2 million residents. 66% of the council's budget is spent on adults & children's services.
This Productivity Plan, produced in response to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities' (renamed as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government following the General Election 2024) review of productivity in local government, sets out examples of what we have done in recent years, and what we intend to do, to transform our organisation and services.
Transforming services for better use of resources
We started our transformation programme in 2018 when our finances were precarious, and services were performing poorly. By 2023, we had delivered significant financial efficiencies of £86 million and £70 million of cost containment, whilst still managing to improve services for residents. We share some examples below.
One of our aspirations to strengthen productivity and efficiency is to allocate more resources for services that prevent residents needing to access higher cost, crisis response services. In 2023/24, the council spent £136 million on prevention across areas such as social care, public health, and transport. We have developed a prevention framework and accelerator to enable us to plan and deliver preventative services even more effectively and efficiently, leading to better outcomes for residents and more prevention-focused spend.
We have been further developing our relationships with the voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise sector, who are key partners in the prevention agenda. This includes reviewing our grant and commissioning spend to ensure value for money and working with strategic leaders in the sector to develop new delivery models to support continued sustainability and impact on shared outcomes.
A clear example of our transformation is in Children's Services. We moved from an 'inadequate' Ofsted rating for Children's Services in 2018 to 'requires improvement' in 2022 and are on track to improve this further. Three new children's homes are opening in 2024 and we will have the capacity to offer homes to up to 60 children by 2027, making Surrey one of the largest local authority providers of children's home places in the country and reducing our long-term costs.
In addition, our community outreach programmes have had remarkable success in supporting prevention. Our Warm Hubs hosted over 21,000 visitors, and the council has also helped 1,350 fuel poor households, representing a £0.5 million annual bill saving. With attendance increasing by 355% and satisfaction levels at 97%, Surrey libraries are the second most visited in the nation and have helped improve literacy rates and inclusion across the county.
We are also looking at our future operating model. Work has started to identify opportunities and model projected financial efficiencies. We are anticipating around £10 million of efficiencies through changing how we are structured and operate, and a further £20-40 million through customer transformation and demand management work over the next five years.
We are also committing major capital investment to support more residents at risk of being left behind. For example, our Additional Needs Strategy and Transformation Programme is on track to eliminate the council's Dedicated Schools Grant High Needs Block deficit by providing up to 6,000 pupil places across the county by 2030/31. In addition, we reviewed our services in response to our Local Area SEND Inspection, publishing an improvement plan (PDF), in January 2024, the recommendations of which are being implemented now.
Our five-year capital strategy enables us to make informed decisions on investments, asset disposals and maintenance. To reduce service provision costs in Adult Social Care (ASC), we have invested £47 million to develop 725 new affordable Extra Care Housing units, with borrowing costs fully funded through care package savings. We are also creating 500 new units of Supported Independent Living with a target for the council to lead development of around 110 of these units, with expenditure estimated at up to £69 million. 28 of the units are expected to be completed by the end of 2025.
Consultation closed in March 2024 on the £256 million River Thames Scheme, in partnership with The Environment Agency and affected district and borough councils. The projected saving is calculated to be up to £1.6 billion per flood. It will lead to a significantly reduced flood risk in Runnymede and Spelthorne as well as significant economic and environmental benefits.
Taking advantage of data and technology
The council is working to acquire capabilities and skills so we can define and achieve good quality data across all our services. Our strategic ambition (PDF) is to use data to understand the performance and monitoring of services, and plan and prepare for the future, predicting issues before they arise. Good progress has been made in building data science capabilities alongside building the knowledge and collaboration required to tackle cross cutting issues, like cost of living, ensuring that insight leads to action.
We have delivered more than 60 robotic process automations since 2019, saving over 41,000 hours of manual work and transaction. These include chatbots for customer contact and a digital registrars service for births, deaths, and marriages. Property sensors in our offices inform office efficiency and redevelopment plans, whilst car park sensors provide counting data to improve utilisation of the county office estate.
We recently set up the Resident Insight Unit (RIU) as a central function to place residents' voices at the centre of policy shaping and delivery. The RIU will ensure that engagements are developed with a comprehensive understanding of existing knowledge, context and insight, and work with senior leadership to inform strategy and decision making.
The council publishes a range of data and insight through the Surrey-i information portal. Content covers mandated transparency releases, key data reports, benchmark reports of council outputs, and a range of "open data" materials published elsewhere, but represented within a local focus for Surrey, for example, Census data and similar.
The Surrey Office for Data Analytics (SODA) brings together analytical skills across six partner organisations seeking to address major challenges across all our public sector areas. We also have a Multi-Agency Information Sharing Protocol (MAISP) tool so partners can work with us confidently when wishing to share information. One example is our Crime & Disorder Protocol which aims to prevent and detect crime and safeguard vulnerable Surrey residents.
We expect to make £18.3 million of efficiencies in our Adult Social Care services by maximising digital opportunities, including technology enabled care services, maximising the benefit of reablement services and strengths-based reviews of people's care.
The council has formed knowledge sharing partnerships on artificial intelligence (AI) with Surrey University and a range of other local authorities to make sure the steps we take are in-line with best practice and based on evidence and experience. Our draft policy framework will inform decision making by balancing risk against reward and maximising the benefits safely and collaboratively.
Reducing wasteful spend in our organisation and systems
The council puts a strong emphasis on budget accountability and each service is expected to contain costs within budget envelopes. Whist we do not believe that there is any wasteful spend within the council, we continue to review all of our activities with a view to driving greater efficiency wherever possible. We are acutely aware of our responsibilities for public finances, and we will continue to ensure that we deliver best value throughout the organisation.
The council has implemented spending control measures to drive a culture of strong financial management. In December 2023, we introduced recruitment controls, allowing us to review each vacancy, including agency staff, to assess if there are alternatives to recruiting on a like for like basis. Our Procurement Board reviews proposed spend and either approves, defers, or rejects proposed new contracts, and scrutinises consultancy spend. Capital spend is governed via a Capital Programme Panel, with Cabinet oversight. Investments and wholly owned subsidiaries are governed by the Shareholder Investment Board and Asset Strategy Board.
Our agile working programme has enabled removal of technical, geographical, and cultural barriers to service productivity. For example, providing better 'drop-down' facilities for community-based services, such as children's and adult learning, to enable more flexible work across the county, and not be anchored to one location.
Technology adoption has been key to Surrey's successful transition to hybrid working. According to Microsoft benchmarking, the council performs well compared to peer organisations. Our most recent Employee Pulse Survey showed 85% of our workforce are proud to work for Surrey and are trusted to perform their roles effectively.
In March 2024, the council agreed a Level 2 Devolution Framework Agreement with government. Work to implement the devolved functions is underway, and we welcome the opportunity to work with the new government to strategically align newly devolved functions, and any further future opportunities, with our local context.
Transferring Local Enterprise Partnership functions into one organisation across a single recognisable economic area has been positive and welcomed by local businesses. This includes the creation of Business Surrey - a single gateway for business support - which has started to enable greater joined-up working that did not exist in the past.
Productivity barriers Government can help reduce or remove
The following are actions government can take to help overcome key barriers we feel are preventing progress:
- Stabilise the financial environment for councils and avoid introducing radical distributional changes that could improve the financial situation for some authorities and worsen others. This is an important pre-condition for restoring multi-year financial settlements.
- Greater freedom to spend ringfenced grants to allow more local decision making.
- Stop the culture of bidding for funding and burdensome processes.
- Remove funding constraints on councils both in terms of government grant funding and the need to hold a referendum for council tax rises in excess of set limits.
- Children's services:
- Address SEND issues - urgent reform of the 2014 Children and Families Act and increased funding to match eligibility criteria or reduce eligibility criteria to match available funding.
- Fully implement the funding recommendation included in the MacAlister review.
- Provide local authorities with additional urgent funding to address overspends in children's services, until necessary reforms are made.
- Reform home to school travel assistance entitlement and legislation to make it more proportionate, affordable and fit for responding to 21st century demands. - Clarification of adult social care reforms, including charging and ensuring adequate funding is provided.
- Address high vacancy and turnover rates with greater support for the social care profession, including a review into a national pay scale, national standards of conduct and employee support, and a national body to drive improvement. - Improve how local highways authorities are funded and are able to act to better manage congestion on their highway's networks, including:
- Reform national funding allocations to account for actual traffic volumes, which would finally end a disproportionate underfunding of authorities in the South-East where there are significantly higher levels of traffic compared to other regions.
- Frontload funding reallocated from HS2 to road maintenance to allow us to deliver improvements now.
- Give local authorities greater oversight and enforcement powers over utility company street works, ensuring that utilities are regulated not only based on national or customer-level outcomes, but also community-level impacts such as prolonged closing of roads to allow for utility infrastructure repairs. In addition, give local authorities greater powers to prevent such prolonged closures and/or disruptions to the local network. - Clarity on changes to policy framework for waste disposal and treatment, including obligations for local authorities from Extended Producer Responsibility (Packaging) reforms.
- More effective and sufficient national investment in climate change mitigation and adaptation measures being delivered locally, which are fundamental to the delivery of both local and national net zero targets.
- Reform pay negotiation arrangements with Fire and Rescue services, including mechanisms to fairly manage disparities in the use of tools such as local allowances and pay increases, to avoid impacts on workforce planning and support development of a diverse workforce.
- Devolution of powers and functions with commensurate funding.
