Issue - meetings

To provide an overview of the Council’s workforce, strategic workforce planning and employee wellbeing.

Cllr Dana Carlin, Cabinet Member for Finance & Corporate Services, introduced the report for this item which provided an overview of the Council’s workforce, strategic workforce planning and employee wellbeing. She drew the Committee’s attention to Appendix A, which was a copy of the People report that is provide to the General Purposes Committees. She noted that the overall numbers had not reduced, particularly with the recent insourcing of Homes for Haringey and the Fusion contract for leisure centres.

Referring to paragraph 3.3.1 of the main report, Cllr Carlin said that the Council had a dedicated wellbeing hub with support and resources available on the staff intranet and various programmes for employees.

Dan Paul, Chief People Officer, reported that the Council had agreed a Workforce Strategy in July 2024 which led to a process of planning within directorates and services. The process developed by Human Resources for this was summarised in section 3.2 of the main report and was ready to be rolled out from Autumn 2026 in line with the new Corporate Delivery Plan and Council service planning in order to help deliver the next administration’s priorities. On workforce wellbeing, he noted that this was regularly discussed with the trade unions and, as illustrated in Appendix 1, sickness levels were currently on a downward trajectory.

Cllr Carlin and Dan Paul then responded to questions from the Committee:

• Cllr Small acknowledged and welcomed the recent success in bringing down the number of agency staff. However, he queried why, according to Appendix 1, there were the equivalent of 45 full-time positions who were off-payroll interims and consultants. Cllr Carlin responded that most of these were not consultants but were positions in certain areas with recruitment difficulties. While efforts were made to reduce this, this was an issue across all local authorities and included areas such as digital, surveyors, lawyers and finance. The Council aimed to address this by recruiting and training staff from universities, though this was difficult to do in competition with the private sector. She added that there were some staff who preferred to work on a consultancy basis rather than a Council salary, but were also generating significant income for the Council in the work that they were doing. Dan Paul clarified that the posts included in the Off Payroll Workforce section of Appendix A were only those costing £500 per day or more. He reiterated that these tended to involve technical or hard to find skills and some were short-term cover for senior posts so were not always more expensive than a permanent employee.
• Cllr Small queried whether there were aspects of the Council’s pay bands and structures that made it more difficult to recruit in certain areas. Cllr Carlin confirmed that it was possible to override salaries in hard to recruit areas and that this decision was taken on occasion. However, in some areas, even this was not sufficient to overcome the recruitment difficulties. Dan Paul added that this practice was referred to as a ‘market supplement’  ...  view the full minutes text for item 87