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Councillor R Mogford asked: Recently you posted on social media: “Lovely to welcome the Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, Derek Walker, to Newport. He and his team wanted to discuss the we* are making in harnessing data and AI to improve our performance, improve residents (sic) lives and deliver more for less.” Access to details and progress in this domain has proved challenging for me and no doubt for others, including some group leaders it would seem. Just as one example, I have tried to get meaningful updates on several occasions on the topic of the ‘Customer Access review Project:’ Below paraphrases some of the response received relating to this long-standing activity. In and of itself doesn’t it seems not to be making ‘great strides’, more like baby steps. I was told by seniors NCC officers, and I paraphrase: “We are in the process of an in-service restructure to create capacity to undertake the end-to-end process oversight role and will shortly be embarking on a review and revision of the main ‘customer journey’ processes. As detailed within the Digital Strategy, we will also be updating the website. Engagement with customers and Elected Members will be a crucial element of this “…group leaders have been updated a month ago and an update is going to Scrutiny shortly, as the project is still ongoing. The overall programme […] is complex and is uncovering a number of issues for resolution, as the system has not been reviewed in such depth for a long time. It needs to be right this time and enabled to interact more seamlessly with other Council systems.” Question: Could you inform us in greater details of the great strides and the projected improvements being made? Who is the ‘we*’you are referring to? (Any links to associated documents and reports would help also.) Given the challenges and delays do you have full confidence that these [NCC] projects you implicitly refer to are appropriately resourced and will deliver to the planned Budget, Timescales and Quality levels? Indeed, are these metrics even available? Councillor Batrouni responded: The information is available to all councillors. It is important councillors read the papers produced by the council on issues they care about, as opposed to gleaning information from social media. As set out in the question the programme is reporting to Scrutiny Committee in the next week, progress has also been reported to Scrutiny and Cabinet in the Digital annual report and is captured in service plans, also reported to Scrutiny bi-annually. Some examples of progress include Smarter Online Forms incorporating enhanced features such as ‘nearby’ to reduce duplicate reporting and introducing new forms. Improvements in high contact areas show that the total number of enquiries has decreased, improving focus on more complex issues. The discussions with the Commissioner also included our developing use of AI and automation across services, supporting a range of staff roles and reducing cost. Examples include the speeding up of housing benefits payments within temporary accommodation, automating DBS checks for taxi drivers, improved translation response times and extensive use of MS Co Pilot for a range of admin tasks.
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