Agenda item

Members were provided with an information report on Covid Activity costings, as requested by Board Members at the last meeting of the Board on 1^st October 2020.  During that meeting Board Members had thanked officers for all of the hard work they were doing on Covid related activities and had suggested that they would like to see additional funding being made available to support the service.

The Head of Service explained that the WRS Management Team were giving active consideration to bidding to the Chief Executives for additional resources but that a paper would be bought forward to outline current spending levels on Covid related activity.

When the first lockdown commenced at the end of March 2020, it quickly became clear that local authorities were going to incur significant additional costs for work related to controlling the pandemic. The Secretary of State made an announcement declaring that both Environmental Health Officers and Trading Standards Officers would be responsible for enforcement of the business closure and control provisions that required some businesses to close, others to operate by delivery only and moved many hospitality businesses towards takeaway only activities.

Bromsgrove District Council, the host authority immediately asked all of its services to record all Covid related activity so that estimates of cost could be given to central government, in order that support payments might match the actual costs. WRS officers were already required to record the time taken on the majority of their activities, so it was a relatively simple exercise to add some additional coding into our time recording system and to ask officers to use these to record how much time was spent on Covid related activities.

Because we have our fee earner model for charging out WRS officers for commercial activities it was a very straight forward exercise to convert the figures to a monetary amount that reflected the full cost of the officer undertaking the activities.

The Head of Service drew Members’ attention to the table at Appendix A to the report, which contained the monthly totals, starting in April 2020 for the cost of undertaking Covid related activities on behalf of the six councils and the cost of the team embedded in the Local Outbreak Response Team.

Given the nature of the pandemic, WRS had not sought to allocate these costs geographically to individual partners. This would go against the “One Worcestershire” approach that all seven councils in the County had taken towards tackling the pandemic.

Members will note that these amounts are not insubstantial. The service has been fortunate that the Food Standards Agency opted to put a moratorium on routine food hygiene inspection at the beginning of the pandemic. This allowed for the vast majority of staff resource that would otherwise have been dedicated to food related work to be put into the pandemic response.

As the economy re-opened, with the service being in essence an economic regulator, the pressures the service and its staff had grown.  Balancing business as usual activity has become more difficult and additional agency staffing resource have been brought in to support the efforts. This would be funded by the monies due from the County Council to cover the cost WRS officers who formed part of the Local Outbreak Response Team. These pressures will only grow as numbers of cases rise and it was almost certain that more capacity would be required for the service to both deliver pandemic controls and respond to what we all refer to as “business as usual” activities.

The Head of Service highlighted that the Community Environmental Health team had been re-organised to deliver both Covid controls and an embedded unit within the Local Outbreak Response team, as detailed in the table on page 22 of the main agenda report.

Originally 3 members of the Technical Services team were moved into Community Environmental Health to help deal with capacity issues. They had now moved back into Technical Services to deliver income generation activities.

Work in the Local Outbreak Response team was being funded by monies from Worcestershire County Council (WCC) that central government had already provided for the disease response. This covered the cost of the additional capacity brought in to deal with business as usual activities.

WCC was currently awaiting confirmation from central government on further funding bids to provide additional capacity for backwards contact tracing within the Local Outbreak Response Team, for delivery by WRS; and for dealing with referrals from the national contact tracing system to deal with those people who have a positive test but have not responded to calls from the national system.  This was known as “lost to follow up.” WRS would pick up this work along with district colleagues to deliver this service aspect, including door knocking where local telephone calls did not lead to a response.

As Members will be aware, WRS had been entrusted with delivering the project referred to nationally as Covid marshals and locally as Covid Advisors. The district councils have pooled this funding for WRS to deliver this advisory work, but the funding was also earmarked for additional enforcement work. A proportion of the funding could be used to cover the cost of things like out-of-hours enforcement, so we avoided being short of capacity during the week and additional capacity generally. Work had commenced on recruiting this team and the first deployments took place over the weekend of 7^th/ 8^th November 2020.

This report should serve as a reminder to partners that, although many areas of local government are striving to move into Recovery phase, WRS remained an embedded part of the Response phase and would be for the medium term.

WRS would do its best to contribute to the Recovery phase as it did during last year’s winter flooding events.

Members thanked the Head of Regulatory Services for a really useful report and stated that WRS were really central to the response to the Covid pandemic. 

In response to Members’ questions, the Head of Regulatory Services drew Members’ attention to the table of expenditure as detailed on page 23 of the main agenda report.

There were 6/7 FTE (full time equivalent) officers working on Covid compliance and 3/4 on outbreak response. So approximately 1/3 of that amount £70k would be covered by the monies received from WCC, who had agreed to £162k of funding up to the end March 2021.  £120k costs of Covid enforcement had been undertaken by the district councils.

In response to Members, the Technical Services Manager explained that Covid advisors were ‘paired up’ and spread out, with particular attention paid to any areas with high rates of infection that have been flagged up.  Enforcement action could be taken if deemed necessary.  Officers were responding where there were identified areas of concern and in areas with rising numbers.  Marshalls were deployed to areas with the highest number of reported cases.  Covid Marshalls had been received well by businesses, shoppers and customers, who had welcomed the provision of face masks when they had forgotten theirs. 

Members took the opportunity to thank officers and to recognise the good work that WRS officers were doing in order to help deal with the current pandemic.

The Environmental Health & Trading Standards Manager further commented that officers took the approach ‘engage, educate and encourage’, enforcement was a last resort.

RESOLVED that the Information Report on Covid Activity Costings, be noted.