Agenda item

(Report of the Portfolio Holder for Housing and Planning/ Portfolio Holder for Environmental Health and Community Partnerships and the Assistant Director Growth and Regeneration)

The Chair welcomed the Assistant Director, People, Zoe Wolicki to introduce the report of the Portfolio Holder for Environmental Health and Community Partnerships to update Corporate Scrutiny on progress made in implementing the Assure corporate project, who highlighted that the report was only in the name of the Portfolio for Environmental Health and Community Partnerships, and not the Portfolio holder for Housing and Planning, before passing over to the Head of Environmental Health, Wendy Smith and the Head of technology and Information, Gareth Youlden to summarise the report.

Officers highlighted the following  -

Ø  From an Environmental Health point of view the project was progressing well.

Ø  There is an Officer dedicated to systems administration working three days a week progressing the transition from M3 to assure.

Ø  Setting up the configurations for licenses with enquiries, licences and inspections working the test system is well underway.

Ø  Training from NEC on the reporting side of the system is pending.

Ø  It is anticipated that the Licensing workload will be ready for transition by the end of March.

Ø  Document usage has been analysed and culled allowing the removal of any documents no longer used.

Ø  Licensing represent about 75% of the current EH workload that needs to transition and the aim is to ensure the transition is before the de-support date and the remaining 25% will flow from the Licensing transition, the risk of which is much lower.

Ø  From an ICT perspective at the end of last year the M3 and Assure Environment has been brought up to date including application versions so that users have all of the latest functionality.

Ø  There is some work due next week to further improve the security of the system which an aspiration of making the system available externally when Officers go out on site.

The Committee made the following comments/observations and asked the following questions:

1.     Are we on top of implementing the system?

Officers confirmed that they were.

2.     What happens if we don’t meet the end of March deadline?

Officers confirmed that this is just a de-support deadline, that the Council can continue to use the system but that if there were any technical issues with the M3 system, NEC would no longer provide support. The aim is to move Licensing over first but Environmental Health will continue using the system beyond that date but transitions as soon as is possible.

3.     Are there any insurance implications?

Officers confirmed that the Council will continue to be licensed to use the system after the end of March.

4.     Is there a plan in place for if any support was needed?

Officers confirmed that they think support will still be available at a cost, this would no longer be included in their package.

5.     Will the two systems run in parallel initially to ensure that things work in the new system?

It was confirmed that Environmental Health are currently working in a test system. Licensing will transition first whilst other operations will continue in the M3 system until they transition, so there will be two systems operational for a period.

6.     A briefing note was requested for the meeting on the 7^th March just to keep the Committee up to date as the cut off date for removal of support gets closer, no Officer attendance was requested,

The Chair thanked the Officers for attending and invited them to leave the meeting.