Council Departments

3C ICT

3C ICT is a shared service between Cambridge City Council, Huntingdonshire District Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council. The shared service was established in April 2016 to provide a more efficient way of delivering ICT services across the three partner councils.

The services we provide include:

• day-to-day customer support via the Service Desk

• software and business applications support

• network and infrastructure services

• web and digital development

• project management

• spatial services including GIS, Land and Property Gazetteers and street naming and numbering

• technical architecture

• information governance.

3C Legal

The 3C Shared Legal Practice launched on 1 October 2015. The Practice is headed up by Tom Lewis.
Cambridge City, Huntingdonshire District and South Cambridgeshire District all share the service, with Cambridge City taking on the role of employing authority.

The team provides an in-house legal service for three councils, including drafting contracts, recovering debts owed, preparing planning agreements for new developments in the city, prosecuting for breaches of the law (including anti-social behaviour, noise nuisance and breach of licensing laws), and giving advice on local government law.

The Head of Legal Services is also the Monitoring Officer and advises members about the code of conduct, conflicts of interest, the constitution, and propriety issues.

3C Building Control

3C Building Control is a strategic partnership between Cambridge City Council, Huntingdonshire District Council and South Cambridgeshire District Council, providing Local Authority Building Control.

3C Shared Services was created to streamline services and provides a pool of high-level expertise in areas that benefit all three councils.

The One Leisure Active Lifestyles Service aims to improve health and wellbeing and reduce health inequalities.

Customers of the service are mainly the general public as well as organisations and groups such as parish/town councils, hospitals, schools, and youth service providers who access the services separately as a commissioning customer.

Front-line health professionals use the services as a pathway for their patients or service users. The team also supports the delivery of the One Leisure Facilities Strategy.

The team delivers schemes and projects such as Exercise Referral, Wellbeing Walks, Right Start Group Exercise Classes, Disability Sport, PEDALS, sports activity programmes and Healthy You.

The Risk and Controls Team's purpose is to ensure risk management at HDC is carried out to the highest standard. This will prevent/reduce potential risks and issues arising from various areas of the organisation, acting as a risk advisory and compliance group.

The Communications Team is responsible for providing both internal and external communications, including working with the media, marketing activity and public relations.

The Corporate Fraud Team prevents and investigates fraud across all council services to prevent financial and reputational loss.

Responsible for the prevention, detection and pursuance of those who attempt to commit fraud against benefits, discounts or exemptions, as well as investigation of other matters, such as fraudulent housing applications.

The team also supports and works with our local housing providers by investigating allegations of tenancy fraud. This helps to protect the valuable housing stock and ensure it is being used correctly for the people who need it most.

Customer Services operates from the ground floor of Pathfinder House for face-to-face enquiries and the first floor, where the Call Centre is located.

Our highly trained teams deal with a huge variety of different services across all locations, including but not limited to: Planning, Building Control, Environmental Health, Housing, Licensing, Land Charges, Housing and Council Tax Benefits, Payments, Council Tax, Business Rates, Electoral Services, Sundry Income and Fraud.

For those of you who may not know what we do, the Democratic Services Team is responsible for providing a comprehensive support service to the council, its Cabinet and Panels etc. The Team is overall responsible for the servicing of a range of meetings.

In summary, our services include:

• ensuring compliance with legal and procedural requirements relating to meetings

• updating the council's Constitution in light of recent legislative change

• administration of council decision-making arrangements

• administration of council representation in external organisations

• co-ordination of all information submitted to meetings

• preparation of agendas and minutes

• publication of Notice of Executive Decisions

• servicing and giving advice at meetings

• administration of the Overview and Scrutiny function

• company secretarial support to HDC Ventures

• governance support to 3C Shared Services

• helping to ensure the effective implementation of decisions

• liaison and support to 71 town and parish councils and 9 parish meetings

• servicing all licensing and regulatory hearings

• monitoring the online e-petitions facility

• giving advice and general support to the 52 members of the council.

The Document Centre is our in-house centre for scanning and post/despatch services. It provides an efficient, effective and high-quality service which is responsive to our customers' needs.

Facilities Management is responsible for the maintenance of all council buildings (other than leisure centres and the commercial estate), ensuring that they are a comfortable and safe place to work.

Specifically, this includes the fabric of the buildings, heating and ventilation systems, building services, fire and intruder alarm systems and the internal and external cleaning and decoration of the buildings.

Facilities also maintain records of asbestos where this is present in older buildings, make sure that any equipment that contains water is safe from legionella contamination and arrange the testing of electrical equipment and fixed installations.

Finance provides a wide range of financial and other support services to the organisation, including:

• supplier and creditor payments

• billing and collection of sundry debts

• management and monitoring of the corporate credit card (purchase card)

• risk management advice

• insurance arrangements

• financial advice and support to service managers and members

• corporate accounting services including banking, investments and statutory financial reporting.

The Housing Needs Team, located on the first floor of Pathfinder House, is responsible for housing-related issues like homelessness and the housing register and works with a number of internal and external services. This 24/7 service supports some of HDC's most vulnerable customers.

The Human Resources function provides strategic and operational people-related activities to support HDC in developing its people and managing their performance in order to deliver the very best versions of ourselves to the communities we serve.

By engaging, empowering and enabling our people to deliver high-quality services for our communities, we can ensure that HDC delivers in line with its corporate strategy.

We offer a full HR service from recruitment, diversity, skills development, change management and supporting the business and managers with employee relations, employee engagement activities and organisational design.

Our key priorities are to ensure that we help the organisation to have the right people, with the right skills in the right roles, both now and in the future; to set the tone and expectation on how our people will be managed, developed and supported. We achieve this through providing support to all staff within our organisation, ensuring we have robust employment policies and processes and putting in place measures to ensure we remain compliant with regulations, statutory requirements and best practices in order that our people can be productive and flourish as individuals.

The Local Land Charges Register was designed to ensure that purchasers of property or land were made aware of existing obligations or restrictions (known as "charges"), which are legally passed onto successive owners of the property or land.

A search will identify any matter affecting the property or land which is registered as a Local Land Charge.

Examples of charges include:

• council grants that may need to be repaid

• tree preservation orders

• conservation areas and listed buildings

• conditions imposed on planning permissions

• enforcement notices

• Community Infrastructure Levy

• road agreements

• legal agreements.

Huntingdonshire District Council operates six leisure facilities including the One Leisure St Ives Outdoor Complex, One Leisure Huntingdon, One Leisure Ramsey, One Leisure St Neots and Burgess Hall Conference and Event Centre.

The Operations Division is based at Eastfield House, Latham Road. It provides the management and operation of the following services:

• refuse, recycling and garden waste collections

• waste management

• street and amenity cleaning

• parks, open spaces and amenity areas

• bulky waste collection service

• the 'Street Ranger' service

• CCTV

• emergency planning

• car parks

• vehicle fleet and mechanical plant

• markets.

This team produces the council's planning policies which provide a framework for making decisions about the area's future.

The Revenues and Benefits Team provides a range of services, dealing with over 79,000 domestic properties, 8,800 benefit recipients and 5,500 business rate properties.

The Team looks to maximise collection rates on both Council Tax and Business Rates accounts and ensures all relevant exemptions and discounts are granted correctly.

Through the administration of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Support, the Team provides essential financial help to households across the district.

The Improvement and Delivery service is a newly defined capability in HDC to enable successful change. This takes the form of:

• Business Analysts to work with internal services and external partners to assess current service delivery, provide objective analysis to define improvement opportunities and support the design of new initiatives/projects to implement the improvements

• Project Managers to work with Business Analysts, internal services and external partners to input into the design improvements and then successfully deliver the project within time, cost and quality to allow HDC to realise the benefits

• Project Management Office capability to ensure the appropriate level of controls and assurance are in place, determined by the size and impact of the improvement and where significant, to support organisational-wide project and programme managers to provide documentation and reporting on progress and risks

• data analysis capability to work with internal services and external partners to identify objective measures of performance that can be tracked throughout the delivery of the project to demonstrate improvement and successful realisation of benefits.