Our 15 service areas have undertaken service-specific self-assessments. These assessments provide an overall position statement for the year based on specific issues relating to performance, customer experience (including complaints) and the use of resources (financial, workforce, ICT and assets). VISIBLE SERVICES & TRANSPORT 1. Our Position Statement Overall, Visible Services & Transport continues to perform well within the context of meeting its corporate priorities and customer needs. Through the use of: ICT to enable smarter working; customer feedback to inform core service provision; income generation; positive collaborative and partnership working; delivery of key strategic projects; and staff engagement and development, we have made been able to achieve service improvements despite continued significant resource constraints. We also recognise that significantly more work needs to be done in these areas through our corporate transformation programme in order to keep on top of the financial, workforce and service demand challenges we face over the coming years. Whilst overall, we are improving our performance in relation to our key local and national indicators we recognise that, in terms of national benchmarked data, we need to make further improvement in some service areas. For example maintaining the highway network, cleanliness of highways and visits to sports and leisure centres where our performance remains in the 3rd and 4th quartiles when compared with Welsh local authorities. We are addressing these matters within the current Service Plan. We are the 3rd lowest cost refuse and recycling authority in Wales according to national benchmarking data (WLGA Waste Finance Benchmarking) with overall expenditure on household waste services reducing by 1.1% when compared with the previous year. We also recycled an impressive 64% of our waste in 2015/16 ranking us 3rd in Wales. Existing collaborative arrangements in our Prosiect Gwyrdd, organic waste treatment and civil parking enforcement, for example, are enabling us to ensure service sustainability whilst delivering services modelled around the needs of service users. We are also working more with our customers, communities and the voluntary sector to build their capacity to undertake work that in the past would be undertaken by the service. Good progress has been made in increasing participation rates in physical activity and sports. According to Sport Wales, we are leading Wales for active participation in sport by adults. In addition, participation amongst children and young people has increased (since 2013) by 8%, with 52% of 7-16 year olds in the Vale now participating in sport or physical activity on at least three occasions per week, the third highest in Wales. Our Greenlinks community transport service, introduced in 2013 to improve access to public transport, has been very successful with a 59% increase in passenger journeys since its establishment. 1 Our customer experience results to date indicate that customers are generally happy with our services and where they are not we are becoming more responsive and learning from complaints. Through our proactive approach to listening to and acting on customer feedback and complaints, we are addressing issues to prevent them from escalating and are contributing to delivering more customer focused services. The Service has a robust approach to managing its finances, ensuring that during 2015/16 we outturned within budget. As at December 2016, the projected outturn for Visible Services & Transport is a balanced budget and we remain on track to achieve our savings target for 2016/17, although there has been an overspend in Waste Management and Cleansing which has been funded by Highways, Engineering and Transport. We remain committed to achieving our savings and a balanced budget and have responded positively to both service demands and cost pressures by taking steps to reshape our services and working more collaboratively, locally, regionally and nationally. We are putting in place realistic plans to ensure we are well placed to achieve this. 2. Service Achievements (April 2015- December 2016) Visible Services & Transport is contributing positively towards achieving the key outcomes relating to the Corporate Plan Well-being Outcomes 2 and 4. Highlighted below are our key service achievements to date: The Vale recycled an impressive 64% of its waste in 2015/16 ranking us 3rd in Wales. We continue to work with key stakeholders to improve the way we dispose of our waste and how the Council collects it. At Q2, we have achieved a further increase in the percentage of local authority collected municipal waste that has been recycled with 41.30% of municipal waste collected being recycled, an increase on quarter 1 performance (40.89%), exceeding the target of 35%. Five seaside locations in the Vale of Glamorgan have received national coast awards, including two prestigious Blue Flag awards, as part of Keep Wales Tidy’s Seaside Awards 2016. Barry Island. Both Whitmore Bay, Barry Island’s main beach, and Penarth Marina received Blue Flags in this year’s awards. While Southerndown, Cold Knap, and Barry Island’s other beach Jackson’s Bay all scooped awards. The prestigious Blue Flag for beaches is acknowledged in 46 countries around the world. The programme aims to raise environmental awareness and promote good environmental behaviour among tourists and local populations and best practice among beach and marina management staff. The Council has again been recognised for its commitment to providing clean, green spaces for residents and visitors to enjoy. At this year’s National Green Flag Awards, the Council continued its trend of increasing the number of parks to be presented with a Green Flag Award. In this year’s awards, Barry Island Promenade became the latest green space in the Vale of Glamorgan to be recognised as one of the best in the country, achieving high environmental standards. The first Green Flag Awards were awarded in 1997 and since then, the Vale of Glamorgan has received awards for seven green spaces, including the latest award. It is the benchmark against which parks and green spaces across the UK are measured. The other Green Flag locations in the Vale of Glamorgan are Penarth’s Belle Vue Park, which was 2 the Vale’s first award winner, and has held the award for 12 years. Barry’s Victoria Park has held a Green Flag for 8 years. Romilly Park, Central Park and Alexandra Park/Windsor Gardens have each held theirs for 3 years and Knap Gardens, for the past 2 years. Green spaces managed by volunteer and community groups, were also included in the awards. The Green Flag Community Award (formally Green Pennant Award) was awarded to four new locations in the Vale of Glamorgan this year. Barry Community Garden, Birch Grove Woodlands, Old Hall Gardens and Elizabethan Orchard were the new additions. They join Upper Orchard Field, Wenvoe Community Orchard and Cwm Talwg local nature reserve, which has held its Green Flag Community award for the longest, being successfully awarded every year since 2004. Wildflower and wilder areas in our parks and open spaces have been increased during 2016. We increased our feature park “Floral Meadow” planting to over 2900m2 and our naturalised “wilder spaces and natural wildflower areas” to over 16 hectares. An additional 880m2 of wildflower turf was laid at the Eastern gateway sites. Further “floral meadow” planting of 500m2 will take place during Spring 2017. Phases 1 and 2 of the works associated with the metro scheme have been substantially completed which has delivered improvements to bus shelters and provided a northbound bus lane along the northern section of Port Road, Barry towards Culverhouse Cross. Phase three is on track to be completed by the Developer for the housing scheme at Culverhouse Cross in Spring 2017 which will then enable the full length of bus lane to be formally opened to bus operators. Inspection of our highways and relevant land show that over 97% are of a high or acceptable standard of cleanliness. This mirrors our performance in the same time period last year. We have successfully secured funding for the delivery of Boverton Flood Alleviation Scheme with a Principal Contractor appointed in December 2016 and the main construction phase due to start in February 2017 with its completion programmed for Summer 2017. We have successfully implemented part night lighting throughout the Vale of Glamorgan further reducing the Council’s energy costs by a projected £180k over 3 years and making considerable savings in terms of CO2 emissions contributing to significant environmental improvements within the Vale to the benefit of its citizens. The main construction phase of Coldbrook Flood Alleviation Scheme to reduce the risk of flooding to over 200 properties and 3 schools in the Barry area commenced on site in January 2016 with major civil engineering works currently ongoing throughout the Barry area and anticipated completion later in 2017. We successfully continue to achieve financial targets in CPE service, with the service continuing to be self- financing. he joint approach with Bridgend CBC ensures consistent enforcement of parking infringement across the Vale. The Council’s Street Lighting team were one of seven Council’s nominated for most improved performer award at the APSE Performance Networks Awards 2016. We progressed the project for the improvement of Five Mile Lane by obtaining planning consent and appointing employers Agent with the intention of progressing to tender stage in Spring / Summer 2017. The scheme being fully funded by the Welsh Government with minimal risk to the Council. 3 The Council’s ‘Big Fill’ initiative, which aims to provide individual residents with the opportunity to highlight potholes in their local areas, continues to be very successful visiting many of the 23 wards and encouraging residents to get involved reporting potholes which we then repair. The Highways Construction team continues to be financially self-sufficient with a projected income of some £3m being generated in 2016/17 to assist with the Directorate’s service’s budget coming from income.