Dundee City Council’s success in promoting adoption of the living wage by employers across the city is one of the highlights of a reporting analysing data on the council’s performance.
The policy & resources committee meeting on Monday June 7 will consider analysis of the Local Government Benchmarking Framework Performance Indicators for 2019-20.
Members of the committee will also hear that the data will be vital in helping the city to recover and move on after the pandemic.
In the report, measures covering council service areas are detailed and compared with similar councils across Scotland, based on factors like deprivation and urban density.
Councillors will hear that since 2016, Dundee City has seen a reduction of 7,000 people who are earning less than the living wage.
The number of living wage accredited employers based or headquartered in Dundee has exceeded the year 3 target in the Council Plan 2017-22. The levels of interest in the accreditation have been high due to the recognition of Dundee City becoming the UK’s first Living Wage City.
Other highlights in the report include:
• Reduction in teachers’ sickness absence
• Significant improvement in reducing the average number of days taken to complete non-emergency repairs since 2013/14
• The percentage of funded early years provision which is graded good/better has also increased from 89.8% in 2018/19 to 95.9% in 2019/20, a percentage increase of 6.1%.
• The cost of museums per visit has decreased from the previous year, and there has been an overall change of -61.5% from 2010/11.
• Significant improvement in reducing the amount of days people aged 75 plus spent in hospital when they were ready to be discharged More…
Committee convener and council leader Councillor John Alexander said: “This data is important in helping us to understand the impact of the pandemic as we move forward and will help us in planning our recovery.
“While there are improvements across many of the areas of this report, we are certainly not complacent and are well aware that there are aspects of our performance that need to be enhanced.
“We are working hard and we have action plans in place for all of these.
“Our council plan and the wider city plan outlines our ambitions to make the city a better place for everyone.
“This report shows the range of council services covering all aspects of people’s lives and where we are intervening to make a difference.”
Information about benchmarking data can be found on the Dundee Performs webpages here
The policy & resources report for Monday is here
Dundee City Council
Dundee draws skilled workers from a 60-minute catchment population of 640,000 and has a local population of over 140,000. The availability of a large pool of highly skilled labour is a key feature in the Dundee economy. Flexibility in the labour force is currently more prevalent in Dundee than in Scotland as a whole. All forms of labour market flexibility - part-time, temporary employment, self-employment and shift work - are widely operational within the city. Labour force stability in the city is excellent, enabling companies to plan with confidence. Labour turnover levels are less than 5% and absenteeism averages 2%.
