It is not essential to have a service level agreement in place from the outset, but sooner or later the ALMO will have to show inspectors that it is benchmarking services it receives from the council for best value.
Drawing up a service level agreement is an inherently political process – as it paves the way for the ALMO to decide to take its business away from the council, which could have disastrous consequences for the staff and the service that is left behind. "You need to be quite open with people about the intentions of the ALMO," says Margaret O'Brien, principal consultant at management consultant Vantagepoint.
Target practice
The first step is to identify which services should be included in the agreement. It must cover all that are funded by the housing revenue account, some of which will be outside the housing department.
O'Brien helped to draw up an agreement when Brent council set up its ALMO, Brent Housing Partnership. She says the hardest part of the process was quantifying services that had never been measured in this way. "Audit services, for example, was providing services to the whole council, and hadn't identified the staff working for housing," she says. "Getting them to divide the time up was hard because they had to rethink the way they worked."
Setting targets for more technical services such as the removal of abandoned cars is relatively simple. In Brent's service level agreement, environmental services must remove the cars within 24 hours and report on any departures from the standard.
Drawing up a service level agreement is an inherently political process
"Soft services" such as community safety are not as easy to pin down. At Brent, there are deadlines for the unit to finalise its strategy and action plan, and it must report quarterly to the ALMO.
The nitty-gritty
Once you've decided what the agreement will include, pick the format. A service level agreement is a binding contract and you need to ask your solicitors to draft the legal framework. For each department, the document should include the expected service level, standard, reporting agreements, notice periods and costs.
Notice periods will vary from service to service, depending on the logistical and financial implications if the ALMO decides to break with the council. In Brent, for example, the ALMO can opt out of the council's environmental services with three months notice, but must give six if it decides to leave the council's one-stop shop frontline reception.
Coordination's what you need
One officer within the ALMO should be responsible for coordinating the process from day one. Make sure you have adequate staff time and resources to negotiate the agreement. Although the simpler elements may be resolved in a matter of days, other issues may take a couple of weeks' work spread over a much longer time period. Set a deadline at the outset. O'Brien says preparing a draft agreement with a deadline for comments should be an early goal: "People don't see it as a priority, but when they see something written down in black and white, then they react."
Source
Housing Today
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