• Elizabeth House will not open to the public until further notice. Posters advertising how the public can contact the Council are on the main doors and we have arrangements in place for the most exceptional cases. For your information, yesterday we had 27 visitors to Elizabeth House, of which the vast majority were renewing parking permits, we only had one visitor with emergency needs. We will keep this situation under review and will open our doors again as soon as is safe to do so;
• Homeworking : as you will aware, we have been gradually increasing our capacity as an organisation to work remotely over the last few weeks. We have now reached the stage however where we only want those officers in Elizabeth House who meet the following definition, those staff who cannot work from home and they are delivering one of the Council’s business critical services. The business critical services for the Council being:

• • • Finance/Payroll;
    • Building Control emergency staff;
    • Communications;
    • Community Support including those redeployed to support Hubs;
    • Customer Services including contact centre;

o    Emergency Planning;

• • Environmental Protection;
  • Food Safety;
  • Benefits – Housing and Council Tax  (significant increase in demand already);
  • Homelessness/Rough Sleepers/housing need officers;
  • ICT;
  • Legal;
  • Licensing;
  • Premises and Safety;

For other members of staff they will be expected to work from home, in the event that they have no homeworking capacity they are still expected to stay away from Elizabeth House. However, it is absolutely essential if staff are in this position that they are contactable and that the SDC TAB is updated with their contact details. We have significant additional equipment expected to be delivered this week. Management Team are working with the Service Managers in  prioritising the roll out of this equipment to those that currently have no homeworking ability and are delivering a business critical service.