To consult with employment panel on  a small number of incentives as part of the council’s drive to recruit and retain people to ‘hard to fill’ roles; for example, but not exclusively, qualified social workers, solicitors, trading standards officers and planners.

The organisational development business partner introduced the report. The views of the panel were sought on proposals for flexible approaches to incentives for hard to fill roles. It was noted that there were a variety of reasons why the council might find it difficult to recruit to certain posts and to retain staff in those posts.

The head of HR and organisational development would determine which roles should be considered as hard to fill and retain to and advise on the application of enhancements to terms and conditions. The definition of hard to fill would include where a recruitment campaign had been unsuccessful or where data showed a lack of national supply of qualified individuals for a role.

It was noted that the council had looked at the practices of other councils and in particular those of neighbouring councils where Herefordshire would be in competition for staff.

Failure to recruit to roles resulted in increased use of agency staff and consequent increased costs.

The following points were raised in discussion of the report:

·         the council had to respond to the market place;

·         national agreements were in place around basic pay for social workers but not all councils were part of this national arrangement and some councils, including neighbouring councils, had added supplemental payments to boost recruitment;

·         there were around 500 vacancies for social workers in the region at this time so there was a high level of competition for the same pool of people;

·         care should be taken that enhancements to boost recruitment and retention did not impact on the morale of other members of staff;

·         market supplement arrangements could be applied and removed as necessary;

·         results of the regular confidential staff survey were reported to the management board and a link would be provided for members of the panel to the most recent figures;

·         some standard questions were used in the staff survey for benchmarking, then additional questions were added depending on the focus for each survey, it would be possible to include questions to judge the impact of the policy;

·         national benchmarking figures included turnover, vacancy levels and percentage of agency staff

·         turnover was just under 17% in children’s social care but was expected to rise when the latest figures were produced, percentage of agency workers was just below the national average, key metrics were reported to services on a monthly basis;

·         there had been an increase in the number of CVs received for vacancies in recent months but the quality of applications had not been good;

·         the policy was not expected to have significant resource implications, there would be an element of rebalancing within budgets as successful recruitment of permanent staff would result in savings on agency costs, specific additional funding for recruitment of social workers was previously agreed by cabinet;

·         social work posts that this policy would apply to relate to statutory work so the council could not use other organisations, for example charities, to provide services;

·         there had been an historical pattern of qualified individuals moving into agency employment due to higher rates of pay, Herefordshire was part of a regional agreement which capped rates paid to agencies, this had helped to manage costs but councils on the borders of that region such as in Wales did not form part of that agreement.

It was requested that the implementation of this policy be reported to councillors and particularly to the employment panel on an annual basis.

Resolved:

the panel supported the implementation of the proposed policy subject to consideration of reporting mechanisms