A draft presentation for councils wanting to benchmark their use of resources

1. The Planning Advisory Service
Productivity tool (draft)
November 2015 www.pas.gov.uk

2. Fixing the “150 cases per officer”
•Many groups share headcounts to compare
productivity levels, usually informally and
patchily
•“Cases per officer” sounds straightforward
But what is a “case” ?
What is an “officer” ?
•No one is comparing apples to apples
•So no one trusts the answers
•Benchmarking is a simple way to compare
basic inputs / outputs. Let’s get it right.

3. Three stage process
1. Agree standard approach
a) What is an “officer” ?(inc. external resources)
b) What is a case ? (broken out by category)
2. Calculate “easy” measure
a) Cases per officer and cases per £50k
b) Allows like-for-like comparison (eg Camden to
Islington; not Havering to K&C)
3. Derive more complex measure
a) Using old fee-setting benchmark data
b) Allows London-wide comparison

4. Ready ?
•Grab the spreadsheet
•Check out the sample council, see how it works
•You can then replace the dummy data in the
yellow cells with yours
•Complete it and send it in to pas@local.gov.uk

5. Sheet “resources”
•We’ve asked for different headcounts & costs
•The two ‘casework’ ones are used in the metric
•We’re not interested in departmental structures or
grades
•You can employ effective expensive people, or
cheap slow people, or contract out
•The cost is required to allow councils who
directly employ to compare with councils who
purchase
•Use direct costs, not overheads
•Should hopefully match up with your budget

6. Sheet “cases”
•We want 12 month count of determined
applications (exclude withdrawns)
•Broken down by PS2 category
•And include categories not reported to DCLG (eg
trees, conditions, NMA)
•The overall count is used in the cases / officer
metric
•The breakdown is used to derive the more
complex productivity measure
•If you’ve joined the PQF just ask us for this
data

7. Sheet “measure”
•Cases per officer
•Places with similar work can compare (Camden to
Islington, but not K&C to Havering)
•Cases £50k
•Allows places who subcontract some/all of the work
to compare similar work
•Comparison to allowance
•Do you need more or less people than the
benchmark fees position in 2012 ?