Agenda item

To receive a report exploring the applicability of the ISO 9001 standard to services being delivered by the Council.

The Committee considered a report exploring the potential application of ISO9001 standards and principles to services being delivered by the Council.

Following the Grenfell Tower fire a national initiative had been launched for all Building Control functions to acquire ISO9001 accreditation and whilst a number of local authorities, in particular large scale county or unitary authorities, held ISO certification for services which traded commercially alongside private sector organisations none held ISO accreditation for their services in their entirety.  Furthermore, there was no widespread use of the standards found in central government.

The Committee was informed that no evidence had been found to support a link between ISO accreditation and local government performance and it was stressed that given the time, staffing and financial resources that would be required to acquire and maintain ISO9001 accreditation a clear business case would be required before any decisions to pursue accreditation were taken.  Notwithstanding this, it was acknowledged that a number of the key principles underpinning the ISO9001 standard could have some applicability to local government and could be applied without having to pursue official accreditation. 

However, it was stressed that a significant number of the Borough Council’s services and functions were already overseen by external bodies who applied their own quality management standards and reporting frameworks to the Council’s work.  Consequently, the Committee sought assurances that if the principles of ISO9001 were adopted then the Council would need to ensure that care would be needed to ensure that unnecessary additional administrative and monitoring burdens were not placed on services, that assessing and measuring a service’s conformance to ISO9001 principles did not come at the expense of either doing valuable work or measuring and understanding process performance and that services here demand was variable were not forced into incurring additional costs in trying to meet standardised processes.

The Committee stressed that the cost of any work to embed ISO9001 principles into Council practice had to be balanced against any improvements that achieving the standards would bring to the services in question and that care had to be taken to ensure that applying the principles of ISO9001 to council services tangibly improved processes and did not simply become an audit of the service.

It was noted the pursuing ISO9001 accreditation was estimated to cost between £225,000 and £265,000 with money needing to be spent on additional staffing costs, consultants, documentation and external accreditation costs.  The Committee stressed that in the current financial climate this level of expenditure could not be justified.

The Committee acknowledged that the Council’s new senior management team had only become fully staffed at the start of January and it was considered that they should be given time to become fully embedded and develop their understanding of the Council’s services before any new initiatives were implemented.  The Committee agreed that Option 2 (That all functions work towards accreditation of ISO9001) be removed from the list of options proposed to Full Council for consideration.

It was suggested that a hybrid option that combined Option 3 (Focus on delivering service improvements through existing mechanisms including the Council’s new management structure) and Option 1 (Adopting the key principles that underpin ISO9001and related quality frameworks to help improve performance and customer focus) could provide a suitable way forward.

The Committee agreed that a report setting out the preferred options would be presented to Full Council for consideration.