The Chair has requested that, with the approval of the committee, the following item of business be considered as an urgent matter for review.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government

Dame Mary Ney's rapid stocktake of lessons learnt from the Leicester City/Leicestershire experience of responding to a local surge in COVID-19 cases. Document attached.

At the Chair’s request, and with the agreement of the Audit and Risk Management Committee, Members considered a report from Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government - Dame Mary Ney's rapid stocktake of lessons learnt from the Leicester City/Leicestershire experience of responding to a local surge in COVID-19 cases.

The report informed the following learning points and good practice:

Learning Points

 1. Review the national and local governance frameworks to clarify the interface between them, how councils will be engaged and to strengthen local political oversight.

2. Councils need to exercise local outbreaks scenarios so they are well prepared.

3. The management and effectiveness of announcements of changes in local restrictions could be improved by the use of a checklist of requirements.

4. Ongoing work is required to improve the testing data available, in particular, data on ethnicity and workplace.

5. Councils should ensure they understand their communities and have community cohesion arrangements in place so that community and business engagement is effective.

6. In devising tactical control plans don’t underestimate the range of skills and local knowledge that councils can deploy at pace from across the organisation.

7. There is scope to further the role of local councils and to move to a more preventative whole system approach on the ground bringing together scaling up of testing, tracing and supporting self-isolation and shielding.

8. There is a need to refine the application of the new regulatory framework in achieving compliance of businesses and events.

9. In Civil Contingencies arrangements, the role of local political leaders and local elected representatives should be reviewed.

Good Practice

10. Implementation of a Local Political Oversight Board to provide a forum for local political leaders to have collective oversight of the management of the outbreak.

11. Integration of the PHE Incident Management Team into local resilience structures and establishing a joint outbreak management team.

12. Community and Business Engagement building on local knowledge and community cohesion work.

13. The local approach to scaling up testing – City Reach – used on the ground teams drawing on the local knowledge of council staff, local NHS staff and volunteers to undertake door to door visits.

14.  Tracing contacts using the range of existing council data bases and systems as well as on the ground teams.

15. Bespoke Data Base built to capture activity and testing outcomes of the City Reach Teams.

David Armstrong, Assistant Chief Executive provided a short status report and local summary of the Covid-19 responses undertaken by Wirral Council and other partnership organisations.

Elspeth Anwar (Assistant Director Public Health Consultant) then provided a summary of key learning points on the governance, local planning procedures, preparation, testing, local intelligence and data in Wirral. The Assistant Director Public Health Consultant apprised Members of detail on a variety of programmes that provided evidence of Wirral Council’s positive efforts and success in working with local communities and businesses.

The Audit and Risk Management received assurance that the lessons being learned in other Local Authorities across the country were helping form effective arrangements to tackle the pandemic in Wirral, and across the Liverpool City Region.

The Chair thanked the officers for their reports.

RESOLVED – That the verbal reports be noted.