8.4 The overall picture
Over the last five years the Council has faced a huge programme of change. Some things were initiated by the Council (e.g. move to new offices at Cambourne, new ICT systems and the Transformation Project) and were undertaken to enable the Council to achieve improved performance in the future. Some of the changes are as a result of external forces (e.g. capping and travellers issues). This amount of change has placed a severe strain on the organisation and the available staff resource.
Throughout this period, we have continued to improve our year on year performance on the majority of performance indicators, which is highly gratifying and is a great credit to all of our hard working staff.
Our comparative position with other district councils fell back in the year 2003/04, but steadied and slightly recovered in 2004/05. Our comparative position must be seen in the context of our spending position. For most services we are in the lowest spending quartile among district councils. Hence, currently our overall performance is midway among district councils, but our spending is among the lowest. This top level assessment does not do justice to the fact that for some services we are among the highest performers.
Our aim is to improve our focus on performance management so that we raise an increasing number of our performance indicators into the upper quartiles – particularly for those indicators which reflect our priorities and the aspects of services which local people value - while retaining our low spending position, hence providing improving value for money.