‘Essential services only’ provided by council

By Elgan Hearn, Local Democracy Reporter

Powys County Council will only be providing essential services as it moves into lockdown mode once again.

The authority is asking staff to volunteer for redeployment from non-essential to front-line vital services such as social care.

It also means that several council scrutiny meetings scheduled for this month have been cancelled, as staff are unavailable to discuss issues with councillors and clerking staff are being re-prioritised.

The details were revealed at a meeting of the Economy, Residents, Communities and Governance Scrutiny Committee on Monday, as positive rates in Wales continued to rise.

Committee Chairman, Cllr Mathew Dorrance said: “There’s a number of potential items for consideration that have been stuck in the scrutiny work programme for some time and I’d like to see some progress in bringing them forward.

“Could we have some clarity about the council’s position, are we business continuity mode?

“If so I would understand why some of these are not progressing on some of these, can we have an indication of where we are at?”

Head of Democratic Services and Scrutiny Manager, Wyn Richards, said: “I can confirm we’re in business critical mode at the moment and will continue to be so for the time being.

“We’re now trying to limit the length of meetings as well just to ensure we have officer capacity to be able to do everything.”

Head of Legal Services, Clive Pinney, added: “We’re also trying to get staff to go back on the redeployment list so that we can support our front line staff. I’m afraid we’re going backwards at this moment in time.”

Cllr Dorrance said that they had explained why there had been no movement in the work plan.

“It is what it is, and I think we all understand and accept the reasons.”

PCC first entered business continuity mode on March 23 as the UK entered lockdown.

For a six-week period all meetings were cancelled and started again by remote attendance using Microsoft Teams, from May 5.

Meetings were kept to an hour and were broadly to scrutinise PCC’s response to the pandemic.

In June, councillors started asking for longer meetings, looking at a broader range of issues.

On Wednesday, Wales First Minister Mark Drakeford MS announced Wales would enter a third lockdown from December 28.