Transcript

Transcript

wrong my phone. Okay, welcome to everyone, especially our speakers who've joined us today. It is the last meeting of the municipal year, and it is the last meeting of this scrutiny committee in its current position. And so after this, there will be a new scrutiny committee and possibly a new scrutiny chair. So first of all, I would like to give my thanks to all of the members of the committee who have worked so hard over the last two years, and how much I've greatly appreciated working with you all, and the excellent scrutiny work that we've done over the last two years. And so we're moving swiftly on items one, we have apologies from Councillor Mohadam, and Councillor Aiden, and we're very lucky that Councillor Frasier and Councillor Malloy from the other scrutiny committee have agreed to join us this evening to help fill in the space. So thank you guys. I have, I am too on the our agenda, declarations of interest, who wants to have two declarations of interest that I require over here, and then I'll go to the rest of the committee. Thank you, Chair. I'm vice-chair and member of the planning committee. Yeah, I just wanted to say I'm a member of the planning committee as well. Thanks. And do I have any other declarations of interest on the issues of regen or on the issue of the RLS contracts? Okay, fabulous. Moving on, we don't have any deputations this evening. Minutes of the previous meeting, anything that anybody is unclear about or disagrees with, everybody happy to approve the minutes of the last meeting? Wonderful. Okay, so I have moved the items around just very briefly so that we can do our recommendations tracker before our substantive items. Once again, as it is our last meeting, this is our last chance to review the recommendations that we've put forward and how they are being actioned. So I have a couple of points but I'm just going to go to the committee first. Does anybody have any questions or points of clarification on the feedback that we had been given on the recommendations tracker? Okay, wonderful. I'm going to do mine and if you guys see anything you can chip indicate and let me know. Oh, there we go. Council along, which one do you want to? I haven't got it in front of me but it's the one on cyber security. The new software is slipped drastically so it's going to be 2025 before it's installed and ready so that's nearly a year. So given it was something we were told to scrutinise. It's something that the next scrutiny committee needs to keep an eye on and the cabinet need to keep an eye on it as well. Fabulous. Thank you very much. And oh no, I've skipped too far ahead online. I will. That is noted for the minutes as well and for the next scrutiny committee. Some of the others just that we wanted to pick up on. No, it's none of these. Sorry, give me two seconds guys. Councillor, sorry, I should have checked the simple one. Councillor Mitchell. Slightly putting you on the spot. At the last scrutiny committee meeting when we were discussing our climate commitments and the dashboard, we made recommendations in regards to integrate including additional data and benchmarking data. And the response that we've had from the department is that they don't know what interditional information we want. Would you be able to have a look at that and feed back to the officers on what they are missing? Yeah, very happy to do that. Thank you so much. And then the ones I just wanted to pick up on in particular are we made a recommendation in regards to looking at a devolved advisory forum to work on monitoring and supporting the Council in achieving our climate commitments, completely understand the feedback that we've received about how difficult it is to have enough resources or capacity to establish a kind of formal climate advisory forum at this time. But I think the committee would like to continue to advocate for the fact that we would like a much more proactive engagement with residents and a great role for residents in how we're pursuing that. And I'm hoping it could be an ongoing conversation. I'm aware that this time I've understood that this time we don't have the resources to commit to it. But I would not like it to fall off the agenda and be forgotten about. And if anything changes in the future, I think we do need the residents alongside us to deliver behavioural change in the borough. The next one I wanted to come in on was just that some of the responses that we've received in regards to CPZs, for example, is basically the response that we've received is an explanation of how CPZs work and not an answer to the actual question. So on both occasions, we made a recommendation to explore whether CPZs help us achieve our climate commitments and whether an expansion would be useful in helping us achieve our climate commitments. We also asked for us to look at ways that we could increase efficiency and increase the speed of implementing CPZs that are requested by residents and basically both answers are just procedural answers of how the system works and doesn't tell us in any way what action the council is going to take to look at whether there are all turn better ways of doing things or improving the current system. So if that can be looked at, but the information on the freedom passes was very much appreciated. So that was really helpful as well. So yeah, those are the items from the recommendations tracker. Anything I missed? Wonderful. Okay, right, let's get on to our substantive items guys. So our first item on the end agenda is regeneration in Brent. I am going to go to Councillor Tatler first to introduce the item as the cabinet member. We do have a number of officers here, but we also are very lucky to have a member of the public who's agreed to join us today and give us some feedback on regenerating Brent. So we're going to go to the cabinet member, then the resident, and then I'll come to the committee. So thanks everyone. Thank you, Councillor and Chair. Regeneration in Brent is a huge, huge topic. And whilst we at the Council set the policy framework for the built environment in the borough, we are not responsible for a lot of the build itself and a lot of the construction, actually most of the construction and build ourselves. We set the direction about what we want private developments to bring, what we want the council's housing teams to bring in the capital program to bring forward. And it's an incredibly broad, broad and big area to cover, hence why the report is fairly high level on most things. And we're constantly reviewing and learning about how we approach regeneration, how we approach planning policy, how we also approach growth in the borough that isn't just housing. Regeneration, I need to stress it, isn't just housing that we're looking to deliver in the borough. And I'm happy to talk to any particular question or any particular theme that the committee want to explore further and happy to give more information subsequently to the committee tonight. I think it's really, really important as well that the committee and those watching online understand the financial context of house building, particularly in the UK and acutely in London. It has never been more difficult to build homes in our capital city than it is currently. And I can say this as the political lead, the Kamikaze budget of two years ago has sent interest rate skyrocketing, Brexit has meant that we have a massive shortage in labour, construction costs are going through the roof, building at this time is harder than it's ever been before and planning committee also we really were well aware of this, which has impacted the viability of both council schemes and also private schemes coming forward and what we can deliver. Brent is one of the five largest house builders in London, and that's a record that we are proud of. And we're also one of the biggest collectors in community infrastructure levy and delivering infrastructure alongside that. But it's not to say that my counterparts, my myself, across the like across London, Council Knight and her counterparts across London are really, really grappling with the impact of viability on all schemes and how we finance and fund house building, both private and especially public and social housing. And we're constantly learning some of the things that you'll see in the paper are beyond our control. The building regs, which are in this building safety act that's come in and the new requirements for development are really, really important. We need to see that we're happy to see that strengthened, but that has meant impact on viability again. So fundamentally, our policies look at delivering as much as we possibly can, but if it's not viable, things are difficult to deliver as we currently stand. And I will say this again, as the political lead, if we're looking for solutions around this, one of the things that we absolutely need is political and policy consistency and stability from national government. And we're only going to get that because the current government are flip-flopping on renter reform, on leaseholder reform, on planning reform. And actually, if we're generally going to look at sorting out growth and house building in the country and dealing with the housing crisis, we absolutely need to change the government. And I'll happy to ask the questions after that. Great. Can I invite our public speaker to the and I suspect you might know how our mic system works? I think so. Okay, so I'm going to give you two minutes as best as you can to keep click to it, please. Thank you, Chair. Most of what I say is mainly about self-kill, but I think many of the issues apply to other schemes as well. I think what's in the documents in front of you doesn't really address the problems as they now exist. I mean, it mentions the master plan of 2017. And I would remind people that self-kill and regeneration has been going on for 20 years, not seven, but a lot has changed in that time, particularly in the current situation. In various documents about the scheme in South Kilburn, in virtually every document that talks about the construction is underway, less than 50% social housing is being built, which is what below what Brent said when to start. And there is talk of viability going down to 20 to 30% social housing. That means that Brent will not fulfill its commitment to residents in South Kilburn about new homes and staying in South Kilburn, nor will it fulfill its commitment it made in the 2019 ballot to temporary tenants to get secure tenses. So there's a major problem there in terms of what fulfilling what Brent's promises are. The other issue is the quality of what's being built. It's not just that Scranville new homes is going to cost more to put right than it cost in the first place. And Bellport, very similar, virtually every block that's been built since regeneration in the last 20 years has had major faults around cladding, mold, heating problems and so on. You have a block which had burnt to your heating for two years. You have swift caught on Albert Road, which had scaffolded up for two years. Well, that thing was removed. Scaffolding went and now they're swaved and scaffolding again. We really shouldn't be putting residents through that. You told me to stop. Oh, okay, very last point is on delivery and information to residents. The carton veil boulevard was supposed to be finished last summer. Nobody's heard a dicky bird and simply with the help center, which was promised from the very start of the regeneration should have been built. I think some of the rate years ago, we hear nothing. Perfect. Can I ask you to switch off the mic? That's great. Thank you so much, Pete. That's really helpful. Can I ask the members of the committee, if you know, use chairs discretion, if I allow, if there are one, maybe two, if anybody has any questions for this speaker, either for clarity or for further information. Okay, great. So, Pete, if you do want to remain for the item, you can, but you can take the more comfortable seats rather than sitting at the main table. And thank you again for speaking with us today. So, okay, I am, I'm going to kick this off very briefly with just a quick comment, Councillor Tatla, which as you said, this is a document that gives, it's higher level, it gives an open view. Obviously, the regeneration areas that are listed in the document are substantial projects on their own. Obviously, my definition should be as a Councillor and Kilburn. I know a lot about the South Kilburn regeneration. Reading this document, there is only specific reference to the block that is the set of blocks that are currently going through planning. And so, obviously, I'm aware that there's a lot more going on. And I think appendices, which would have given greater detail on the specific rollout, the plans, the time scales, on the different, and the difficulties on the ground, as well as the financial viability issues on the Regent projects, I think would have been of great interest to the committee. But I think, I'll talk about it again at the end as well, but it feels like this is a start of a conversation because my, and I felt like there was a real focus on financial viability in the report that is provided. And I suppose my first question would be, given the economic situation, which is so strongly stressed in the report, what is our capacity to deliver the projects that we have planned? And most importantly, do we now have to rethink what regeneration looks like in Brent? Do we have to rethink our strategy of what we wanted regeneration to achieve in Brent? Thanks. Thank you. So, I can speak to more detail about South Kilburn and obviously Wembley housing zone, particularly because they're the remits that fall specifically within my area. And obviously, specific schemes around the affordable housing programme will need to go to Council at night. I can speak in general terms about all of that. Financial viability is hitting the entire sector really, really hard. And in Brent, we've taken the approach that we will look at every scheme because we don't want to stop house building at all. And we wanted to continue delivering because we have made that commitment to residents in our manifesto and also the policy documents in the various master plans. So, South Kilburn specifically, and I'll kind of address some of the points that were raised earlier. Antarctica, who's our head of a state's region, can also confirm some of the detail. So, in the affordable housing or the social, it's important to note that the South Kilburn promise is social rent. It's not London affordable rent, it's not London living rent, the South Kilburn promise is social rent. And to date, we have delivered 60% of affordable social housing rental homes in South Kilburn. And we will make good on our promise on the South Kilburn master plan. And that is something that we, including the school, including the medical centre, which actually the shell and core of the medical centre will be done by the end of May with the ambition of opening completely to residents by this time next year. And that's a promise in terms of infrastructure that we will guarantee. The Commonwealth of Ireland still is on, we are looking to kind of how we fund that one, but that's still an ambition that we want to kind, we will deliver improvements to the park, improvements to the green spaces, as well as the social rental homes. Similarly, with Wembley, with Wembley as well, Jonathan can speak to some of the detail on the Wembley scheme, on the Eugene Mahouse and the Wembley Housing Zone. But we have to remember with the Wembley Housing Zone, we didn't own the land, we had to purchase the land. That impacts viability as well. And we are looking at kind of how we deal with the affordable housing on the scheme. Ideally, we'd want to deliver 100% social housing on any of our land and schemes. But the reality is that some of our schemes, we will not be able to deliver so fully social rent homes on particular schemes. And we are looking, and I know Council at the night presented a paper, a cabinet, a few months back about looking at the impact of viability on our council schemes as well. Some of them will have to reorder, some of them will have to pause and look at the numbers, some of the schemes we've had to inject some more money, having conversations with the GLA about grant funding, about whether we can up some of the grant funding to enable the schemes to come forward. So we are doing everything actively possible to continue house building at social rent levels. But I want to stress, and I will continue to stress that the housing crisis isn't going to be solved just by building social housing. We have to be building all 10 years of housing because every housing tenure, it's a crucial part of the supply and demand issues at the moment that we're getting in Brent and across London. So we have to be building and we have to be seen to be doing. But ultimately, if we're going to see a difference in viability, the sector needs stability in policy, and that will only come from a government that's willing to take the steps to make sure that we're able to do that. And the current government isn't doing that. And actually, we need a general election as soon as possible to give the stability within planning, within rental reform, within leaseholder reform to be able to do some of this viability to be addressed. Thanks. And I think some very important points that I suppose what I would pin down specifically for us in Brent and Councillor Tatler is you've said that some of these schemes are going to have to be paused, some of them are going to experience severe delays. I kind of what this committee would needs to know is and would want to know is the programs that are outlined in the paper that was submitted to the committee, which of those are going to be, you know, which of those are we actually looking at pausing, which of those are not going to go forward. It just feels a bit like what we're getting is maybe this, maybe that, and there may be a reason for that now. But I think what we're getting is maybe this, maybe that we're not getting a this project is going ahead. This project is probably not going ahead. Like it's very hard to know which projects are at significant risk of not actually moving forward with the information that we've been provided so far. So the ones that, I mean, obviously the Council only had control of schemes that are on its own land. And the Regent team, we are responsible for South Kilburn and for Wembley, Great Area, or Wembley Housing Zone. There is no issue, both sites, both schemes are on site, so they will be built out. In terms of the affordable housing program, I'll refer you to the paper that Councillor Nye put forward about those schemes and what's coming forward and what isn't. The other areas that are detailed in the appendix about the schemes coming forward are growth areas, a majority of that land isn't in public ownership or Council ownership. So that will we can give the planning permissions, you know, that we can do that. We can do all the work around making sure the schemes have got planning permissions and we are good at doing that. Whether they get built out or not is dependent on the developer or the landowner to have the finances to be able to build those out. And that's what we don't have control over. Councillor GEORGIE. Thank you. I just thought, as we were talking about South Kilburn, I'd ask a clarifying point of the lead member. So the new units in South Kilburn, in your assertion, just now you stated that some would be at social rent level. It's my belief, my understanding, that they're all at London affordable rent level. Can you confirm that, please? No, they're all social rent in South Kilburn. That's our landlord promise. So they're all at social rent level. The new units, just for absolute clarity, the new units in South Kilburn are all at social rent level. Artega? Yes, all social rent that is being built is at social rent levels. Okay, so the information that I have contradicts that. So maybe it's something I can provide for you and we can make the committee aware of that after as well. Thank you. I mean, I'm not. Okay, it's not my router, but I'm wondering if the discrepancy is between decanted tenants and new tenants? Not all affordable rent, for sure, I shouldn't. Yeah. Sorry, was that an indication? Yeah, a Councillor Malloy? Yeah, the mayor of London, and that's the, if he's reelected, he'll set up at a London-wide publicly owned development corporation. Does that change the picture? It will make things easier in terms of other local authorities who don't build. We're a buyer that builds and we are actively pursuing that and the mayor of London actively uses an example of how we can build and do and do well. Development corporations have worked, we've got the APDC, which is a development corporation on our doorstep, the way a leader is a board member of the APDC, got one in East London, and actually what will enable things to happen is hopefully get things done quicker through the planning system, which is what developers are looking for to bring things faster. Yeah, so maybe I shouldn't have said development corporation. He's talking about making a publicly owned developer, you know, like what we take, like the services that are provided by private companies to bring chance at the moment. Yeah, hopefully. I mean, if it helps bring down the cost and retains a quality of building or improves the quality of building a new build, we're all for that. You know, more publicly owned companies doing that is a good approach. We do that sort of with i4b in terms of buying property and making that available for our tenants. So the London-wide approach would be good because actually quite often, and I know Councillor Knight does this in her brief, is work across London authorities to make sure that we're building or kind of working to enable to house our residents. So anything that's regional or London-wide, we welcome, provided we still have the ability to contribute, to make sure our voices are heard in what we need for brand and brand residents. I'm going to move us, well, no. So at this point, the only commitments that we're making are around South Kilburn and the Wembley Zone. All the other projects we're not making any commitments on whether we're actually going to be delivering. It sounds that we do not have the financial security to know that we can deliver any of those projects. The detail of that will you need to speak to Councillor Knight and obviously the finance team about what we can deliver. The commitment and the ambition and the aspiration is there for us to continue building. We may have to reorder how we do schemes. We may have to look at whether we do more intermediate products rather than full social rent products in some of our schemes to the viability to come forward on schemes forward, but in specific schemes where we've got them listed, you'd have to kind of speak to Councillor Knight about what works and what doesn't work because the picture is ever-changing. Okay, I'm going to shuffle us around a bit so that we stick on this point of viability. Oh, yes, who's, Kat, but do you want to think? I just had a clarification question. On page 34, it's saying that under South Kilburn Estate Regeneration, that 44% is a affordable social rent, but we said all, and I'm just confused. Am I thinking about a wrong bit? That's one specific scheme, one specific bit of South Kilburn. The whole scheme is a minimally 50%. It's a minimum of the whole scheme, of the whole estate regeneration. But this is 44% in this particular area. It's a few blocks within the whole wider scheme. Thanks, Councillor Frazier. I think Councillor Frazier's point again highlights the fact of by not providing the full context of each of the regeneration schemes, the data kind of sometimes loses some of its information, because obviously the scheme that the two blocks which are referred to in the paper, as you've highlighted, are about 250 homes. It's a promise of over 2,000 times, so we're talking about numbers which actually represent only 11% of the whole scheme, and that's only one project which I know a bit of detail about. There is also a lot of the other projects that are listed there. For example, Wembley are big projects, and we're given one paragraph trying to explain, as our resident said, 20 years of work. So this is one of those things where the devil is in the detail. I think you'll appreciate that any one of those schemes could be a paper on its own, and the work needed to kind of detail that you're talking about would be enormous. So we try to be high level with this and say, if you want us to come back with something specific on particular schemes, we're more than happy to do that, but at this point the brief was around the wider region promise. But I think it's important to have pulled the committee and those watching at home to understand that the funding model for South Kilburn also is predicated that half the scheme has to be private for us to enable us to build the new social homes that we're going to be guaranteeing on South Kilburn, including the infrastructure. So the infrastructure is paid for by sale, and sale cannot be generated by social homes. Only private homes can don't generate sale. So that's part of the funding model across Britain, that if we're going to pursue the element of prioritizing social housing, which which absolutely I understand, we have to be thinking about where the compromise is and why the compromise is that we don't get the sale to then deliver the necessary infrastructure that's needed. I'm going to move us around a bit. So I'm actually going to go to Sonia on funding models. So I'm moving you way ahead to number nine. Thanks, Chair. So considering the current economic climate have alternative funding models besides relying on private developers being considered, especially for projects with potential viability issues, we've been compromising more than I believe would like on a level of affordable housing. And now it seems the same as happening with still liability. I don't accept that premise in the sense that we've been compromising. The reality is that viability impacts us and private development is saying we have explored and the finance team can give you more detail about where we have. And we have explored alternative ways of financing our own Council schemes. South Columbia is slightly different, but we have looked at and explored. And when I was deputy leader managing the budget, we looked at alternative models of financing. The reality is public borrowing is very expensive at the moment. And we have to be able to service the debt we have or we finance any development or any capital program, whether we borrow directly from the public loan, public works loan board or whether we look at other ways. And we have looked at other ways of funding schemes. The stuff at home in now is one example of that where we bought a block using some grant money and alternative funding. But the reality is that if a scheme, whether it's us or whether it's a private developer, if it's not viable, but access to financing is impossible. So we have to demonstrate us, even as a Council, we have to demonstrate a scheme as viable in order to be able to pay the money back, whether it's through rent or whether it's private developers getting investment in, they have to demonstrate that it's going to be returned so we can actually finance the debt. That's how the funding model will work across any scheme, public or private. And the sale liabilities, we are one of the leading borrowers in attracting and not attracting, but getting in our sale requirements. All level of sale that we were able to generate, we are one of the best in London. And I think it's important to note that our sale that we've collected not only supports our rental program, which is our community grants across the world, which you've today, over 20 million pounds has been given to community groups. It's paid for medical centers, it's paying for upgrades in public realm and improvements to green spaces and open parks. But our strategic responsibility in London means that some of our sale liabilities in terms of the mayoral sale is paying for the transport infrastructure across London. So we've paid mayoral sale to help improve the Elizabeth, to help bring for the Elizabeth line. So we have a responsibility not just to rent residents, but to our role across London to make sure that we're providing what needs strategically to happen for infrastructure. Still got a follow-up. I'm glad that you mentioned the sale point, because there was something in the report about H and E and the viability meeting that they couldn't reach the minimum sale level that they needed to. So the finance team were talking to the legal team to see if there was something that they could do to work around it. Maybe that's what the weather we use in the report, but that's how I kind of answered it. And I'm just going to bring in my second point, because I might as well just do two questions in one. Has any benchmarking been done with other local authorities to come up with innovative solutions, considering the problem at hand is not unique to Brent? So I think, artistically, you might want to talk about the Hera for Dexter, but I know that every conversation that we have, both any of our regent teams, our planning teams, our finance teams, property teams, housing teams, they regularly meet together about how we can make sure schemes come forward and look at ways of making sure that the financing works are able to bring things forward. And we don't work in silos. I'm here because I'm accountable for regen, but council and I and myself regularly talk about how we bring things forward in terms of housing. In terms of kind of working with other council leads, so we do, you know, council night work with other council housing leads. I work with other regen and planning leads about what we can do across London. We work closely with the deputy mayors, Tom Coppley and Jules Piper, about how we can collectively work together. What I will be cautious about in terms of how we work together is that A, Brent is a very progressive and ambitious council in terms of what we're able to do in terms of policy and delivery. Not all councils are at the same level as us. So I don't want to, if I'm going to be crude, I don't want to be dragged down by other councils. I want to continue the progress that we've made in Brent and work with councils who are on par with what we're doing. And that's a difficulty because different councils have different struggles and different pressures. And we are, you know, we are known for regen and planning in Brent, and I don't want to take a step backwards if it means if we continue working ourselves. But we're open to conversations about what it could look like. We do work together as a locally regional, so the West London Alliance and the West London Economic Prosperity Board work together on things like the West London orbital. That's an important piece of infrastructure that we need in the region to unlock housing and employment. But that's really work across the piece with seven other councils across London. Most, it's on the West London Alliance. I sit on the Economic Prosperity Board and we work together on that. So they were opportunities are. We will do that. We will do so. Do you want to come back? Sorry, just my sill point on H&E. What exactly that eluded you and the report? Sure, I'm happy to pick that up. So slightly technical legal, so I might have to defer to Masha as well. When you demolish a block of affordable housing for you to then replace it with, say, private housing, you get a reduction in the sill. So you don't have to pay the full sill liability because you've demolished affordable housing in the case of Herifen Exeter. But the requirement for it is that the blocks have to be occupied for a period of six months over across the three years prior to getting planning consent. All of that basically means we are in the process of planning consent. And because the planning consent has been delayed due to the second staircase issue, the time period has now lapsed. So the deduction in the sill that we would have gained has now lapsed, which means there is another big hole in our viability of several million pounds. So now we're working with legal colleagues to find if there is a solution to this problem where we could potentially re-inhabit some of those units for a small period of time for us to reclaim the sill that we've lost. It's just another challenge to deliver it. So I did more positive than how it read in the reports here. I think you've got a clarification. And I should also point out, one of the bigger challenges alongside financial viability for any development coming forward is the second staircase disruption, because what that's meant is absolutely we want to make sure developments are far safe. They are as safe as possible, I should say. But what that's meant in terms of construction costs is that there's a reduction potentially and sometimes homes being able to be delivered, which then impacts the viability. So again, we've seen developers come to us in planning about saying that they're going to reduce a number of units because the second staircase or they're asking for potentially higher buildings or more densification to enable that skiing to be viable in order to have the second staircase. And so Jerry and his team, or I should say David Glover, who's I knew who they're planning, will be looking at those kinds of schemes coming forward. Perfect. Councilor Mille, did you want to come in now on funding models as well, please, or whatever you were nodding to there? I think it's relevant now, I think. While we're on funding and viability. Yeah, it's a general point. I mean, funding choices as much politically driven as they are operationally driven. I mean, there's a lot of political considerations that go into that. And yet, a lot of the elements of it are very opaque to ask council. I think we're going to have a recommendation about training on a social value. But in the viability process, a lot of what's opaque is because of commercial secrecy. I mean, I've tried to look at some of those things and I can't understand them because half the key information is missing. Do we have to sign contracts with commercial secrecy clauses in them? Why can't we just say, no, it's not in that. Just to comment on the planning application side of it, it's actually public information. The viability analysis is carried out and scrutinised by officers and presented to planning committee. So it is given a significant amount of scrutiny. There may be instances where the council is operating as a developer where some of that may be commercially sensitive, but certainly with any planning applications, that is information that is made available and can be scrutinised. And it's something that in order for us to be sure that we are maximising the amount of affordable housing that we do. The other thing to bear in mind is it's about also not overloading the scheme such that it doesn't go that it kills the scheme off. So that's why we're talking about seeking to maximise the amount of affordable housing through a process of strong scrutiny in terms of seeking to meet the policy but not threatening the delivery of the scheme. We were one of the first councils to publish to viability tests, I think pre-2018. A lot of it is technical and I think what I do trust is that the planning committee scrutinised those, because it's not my job to scrutinise the viability assessments, it's a job for the planning committee to scrutinise those reports and those viability tests coming forward. And I know that they do that and I also trust the team to say they know that our principles are around one of our red lines is affordable housing. So they work diligently and often for months on end to make sure that we get as much affordable housing as we can on every scheme possible. Our local plan policy is 50%. But the reality is that viability can often make it less than that. The mayor's fast track system is 35% of which both areas, 70% has to be social levels and we do what we can to enable that to be delivered, whether it's for rent schemes or for sale schemes. So I take a point about publication over in transparency, but I think we are as transparent as we possibly can, the democratic process of planning committee also enables us to kind of scrutinise those papers. So I might be being naive here, but what I don't understand is we sign a contract which says 50% affordable housing. A couple of years down the line, that's down to 30%. What was the point of signing the contract? I mean, that must be a clause in the contract that they can reduce that. Am I wrong? Sorry, apologies. I'm not sure you mean do you mean on our council-led schemes or do you mean on private development schemes? When the council engages, enters into a contract with a developer, like, for example, countries, either in South Cuban or whatever? No, there wouldn't be anything lower than what's been agreed. There may be clawback to say that they can give more. So we have, not to South Cuban, but say, out in the output of when we have big schemes, we've had, we've reviewed this planning and reviewed the viability in often. They can't go back on reducing it, but they can, if we can demonstrate that they can give more, we will say actually give more. I think that's Yeah, and often we will front load any schemes, whether it's our own schemes or private development, front load, all the affordable in the initial phases. One of the things that we have learned is making sure that regeneration schemes front load the infrastructure and the first affordable housing in the beginning of any build. So we've never cut down the proportion of social rent housing in any development post the planning, the first planning permission. Not that I'm, I don't think we ever have it. We can't do that, can we? I'm pretty sure we've had cases that have just gone back for a new planning permission. So with planning applications, there's a section 106 agreement which ties in the amount of affordable housing, and it's also common for us to have a review mechanism to actually increase the amount of affordable housing if the sales values do justify that at that point in time. They cannot reduce the amount of affordable housing that has been signed up to in the planning permission and the section 106 agreement. What does happen as we work with the process of the fact that we have challenging economic circumstances, we have additional legislative requirements on developments that has slowed schemes coming forward. For example, the second staircase has added costs and reduced the amount of buildable area, and that has meant that developers have had to reevaluate their schemes, build costs have gone up as well, and come back to us with a different offer, and we have to be realistic about that because the economic circumstances mean that the schemes that were originally came to us are no longer viable. Council Malloy, did you want to come back before I? So we have reduced the amount of social housing in a development post, the first planning permission. So it's done through a process, so I mean the altitude is your question is yes, but they are bound by the planning approval, but if they come back to us, it's fully evaluated through a new planning application, it has to go through planning committee. That's a reflection of the economic circumstances. Right, it will show me along. So, Council Georgia, you have a clarifying question, and then can I bring us back to the top as well? Okay, I wondered whether as we were talking about grant funding, I could just ask my question now. That's perfect, so it's all in the same sort of sphere. Okay, so I'd like, if possible, if you can tell, all planning approved schemes that have been affected by the grant funding difficulties that you outline in the report, and something that's come to light that I don't believe is not mentioned in the report, is changes in the rule around grant funding from the GLA, and what has the impact of these changes been. I understand that the GLA now doesn't fund new Council housing that involves destruction of existing housing, so what plans have been affected? Someone, do you mean our Council schemes or just schemes across the Brent? That's information that we'll have to get back to you on, because we don't have that on the top of our heads right now, but there will be schemes that have been affected by the grant. You can't outline those schemes now. Because we're not the only ones building, and Council Knight is overseeing the affordable housing program, so she'll have the detail about what our schemes have been affected. I think I should speak to kind of South Kilburn impact of grant funding. Kilburn, but yes, grant funding isn't, and every Council will tell you this, it has impacted our ability to build. The costs of grant funding doesn't anywhere near look at how much it costs to build. Now, can I give some examples? Can I give some examples of developments of schemes that have been impacted by this? Kilburn Square, Wilmer Court, Harraford Exeter. Yeah, and apart from Harra for an Exeter cell, or within the affordable housing program which Council Knight has already talked about in her cabinet paper. So if I summarise this one, so for point of clarification, the details on exactly which schemes are affected by the change in terms and conditions, for whatever better word you're going to provide us the committee with so that we can look at subsequent to this meeting. I think maybe to move the question along, because this comes back to our point about our concern about how many of the projects are going to be able to go forward. I would link it to my first point about do we need to rethink our strategy around regen and Brent? So for example, is this going to mean that we might start looking at refurbishment instead of replacement? Does it mean that actually there are areas where we had a strategy of pulling down old blocks and rebuilding them, and that's not a financially good option anymore? No, because the schemes that we were on for memory from Council Knight's area about the affordable housing program are predicated on their mainly infill sites, so existing buildings wouldn't be affected. These are new, these are new, these are actually new builds. No, okay, and interpreting people's. Puzzle Mint. So I'm going to bring us away from Brent's for a moment. I'm going to bring us back to sorry, I'm going to bring us back to some affordability stuff, which I understand you may or may not be able to comment on Councilor Tatlett if there are items that we need the information on. We'll do a summary of them as for information requests at the end, but Councillor Miller, you had a question about affordability, Councillor Giorgio, you had breakdowns, I can't remember if yours has already been covered. I think we're going with Councillor Giorgio first to unmaint it. So if we turn to paragraph 3.4.1, it shows a, and I'll get there myself so I can look at it, it shows a breakdown of affordable units approved, not delivered, and mentions that we have good delivery against targets. These are only headline figures. So it's difficult for the committee and residents who are watching to make an assessment on this without benchmark information and context. I have a series of questions which I'll probably ask in one go, and if you need me to repeat, I will do. Therefore, we'd like a breakdown of tenure types of these approved planned affordable units. Again, these have not been delivered. How many of the approved units are social housing? What are the targets specifically on new council homes? And that's homes for the tens of thousands on our housing waiting list. How do we compare to other London local authorities? And I'll just end by saying that granting planning permission is the first step, but what is more important is actually delivering the needed housing units. So how many units have been actually delivered? Council and I can talk to you about how many council homes she's delivered under the housing programme, and we can talk about South Kilburn as well. The rest of the housing is private lands. We are not in control of delivering private housing or social housing providers. We can give the planning permissions. We don't have any powers to enforce developers to build ones that have planning permission, and that's a frustration. And we often get people, councils can get penalised if things aren't being built, which is again, a frustration. The targets are specific to Brent. We can't benchmark. We are given each London authority are given to housing targets based on the London planned strategies around that. So each council will have a different total housing target to be met. Obviously, our own local housing targets around affordability is 50% of our policy, but again, viability will trump all of that about how much we can and cannot deliver. In terms of those specific data details, I will have to come back to the committee with that. But it's important to note the council does all its counter chore that we deliver or give permission to what can be delivered, and we will continue to do so. The housing delivery test is what we are measured against, and Brent has been consistently over performing and ensuring that to happen, and I'm very proud of that fact. And to deal with the housing crisis, you're absolutely right, Councillor George, that there is a huge waiting list, but let's not say that social housing is the only answer. You can't be the only answer because we will never build enough social housing homes. We have to build all 10 years of housing to enable people to be able to live in. We have a massive supply issue. So the data that you're asking for, we can, if you know about what specific data that's needed, we will get that to you. But we can't benchmark because our targets are Brent specific. Each council has its own specific targets. I was, for a moment, regretting that in Councillor George, you go first there because my question was actually about that breakdown of tenure point, which you answered. So thank you for that. I don't want to re-interrogate that slightly. So a source of frustration, I suppose, with the way that this report has gone in our session this evening is the strictness of the division, I suppose, between your portfolio and that of Councillor Knight and how little kind of each portfolio is able to say about the other one when we have you in front of us. I realise that that's not your fault at all. Councillor's happened, but it does make it a little bit difficult for us as a committee. And in particular, when you're talking about this breakdown of 10 years, so we've got that chart at 3.41 that does refer to affordable but doesn't refer to social. Presumably, I gather from around to because of a different legal framework and planning for what those things mean and what those requirements are. But so that I understand this correctly. If a developer says to us, well, a certain percentage of this is going to be, it's going to be criteria for affordability as defined by the Council, we're able to check up on that and enforce that through planning. But if they say the same thing about the units being social or under affordable and meeting the criteria for those, we're not able to do that. Are you able to say whether or not I'm accurately someone that's up here? No, you are. We are able to, because under an affordable living, when it comes under the affordable bracket, it's an intermediate product, I think. And to contact on those, there's section 106 legal agreement. So in some cases, a developer has a section 1 agreement and says X amount of percentage is going to be affordable, which 70% will be social, 30% will be intermediate products. And in a couple of cases, we've actually bought the entire section 106 agreement to make the all social rent or London affordable rent. I think I'll challenge the point around the strict division. There isn't a strict division. It's just that I'm politically accountable for the regeneration and planning element of it. Council Knight is politically accountable for the affordable housing program. We are in conversation pretty much every day about what goes on in terms of working together. It's just that with scrutiny, housing falls under the other committee. And so a lot of what you're asking will fall under that agreement, which is where Council Knight will have the detail. And it's only right and proper that she answers to those rather than me, she's talked specifically about stuff that's within her responsibility. And I wouldn't want to speak for her. We do as a cabinet have these discussions regularly on a basis. And the challenges that we face across the Council with its property housing, planning, or region, we are constantly talking. With no disrespect, that does sound like a very clear division and it does sound quite strictly enforced. I mean, an example of South Clinton, for example, we actually have officers based housing officers working with region officers in South Kilburn. You're sure I'm not talking about the work of it. I'm talking about how that work has held accountable and how it's discussed both here and by the public. And it also had our policy materials. If you wanted to do a strategy, you wouldn't be able to cover the things that are in Council and Knights area. And that's completely... No, no. But in policy creation, except the premise of the question, but in policy conversations, whether it's article 4s on HMOs or whether it's planning policy creation, we do work together on this because it directly impacts on stuff. I think it's important that actually it's... We have a very clear direction about what we want for Council House delivery and the Regent brief is broader than that. It's not just Council House delivery. And so therefore, it's important that we have that approach. I would have, I think, what I will say about the report is that if that's the detail that the committee wanted, it would have been... It would have been good to know that beforehand. So it would be Council and I could have been here to talk, both of us could have been here to talk to you about it. Absolutely. And I would apologise for that, but we get quite short sight of the reports ourselves as well to know what's in them. So I'm not going to get into a technical argument. Yeah, that could actually be a bit of a fact. But actually it's been in conversation for six months. So I'm actually going to... We're not going to rehash that. Not necessarily, but actually... No, exactly. But actually it could have been arranged. So on that point, Council has hardly very kindly pointed out that the affordability bracket, the subsets of affordability within that... And I suppose all I'm trying to say is that that would be really useful and interesting for us if it's possible to supply that. Yeah, absolutely. And what we can refer you to is that the Council, how we have to publish every year, and it gets referred to the GLA. And if you want comparisons to other councils, every local authority in the London area has to report annually about what's been delivered in the local authority. And so you can actually see, and that's publicly available, to see what's been delivered, social rent, affordable rent, and kind of the market rent as well. And discounted market rent in all the various 10 years. So that's available soon. We can provide that to committee. Thank you very much. And just like as by way of background, the reason that I say this is that for people on our housing lists, obviously the kind of social side of this and affordable rent, to a large extent, are of more interest than affordability as a general category in hybrid products and help to buy and all that kind of thing. I don't deny the importance of any of these various different groups of our constituents. But we do have a bit of an increased duty to look after people that are on their housing list, in particular when we're thinking about this stuff. And so it's just helpful for us to be able to separate that out. And yeah, it's not intended as a criticism that it's not in there, but it's intended as a request. Thank you. Great. That's really helpful, Councillor M you want to move on to the next one? Lead member. Is that where we're at? Okay. So as a Councillor, in one of the key growth areas in the borough, the impact of regeneration has been felt acutely, most quite by residents in Alpertin. So your report comments on the significant change over the last 10 years in Alpertin, and as a Councillor, being a Councillor for about four years, four and a half years, there's been a big change in that time as well. So I've often made the point of planning committee and in other meetings of the Council that regeneration can work if enough is done to mitigate the impact of large-scale development, and if immediate investment in the required infrastructure is delivered by the local authority, whether that's better transport, improvements in local parks, improvements to health services, more health facilities as well in the local areas. So are you proud of your record on regeneration? Yes. We have thousands of residents living in our borough. We are transforming the borough. The areas that you're talking about in Alpertin, which is what your party's policies, it's about Brownfield first. We're building on Brownfield. We're building more than any other local authority on Brownfield sites. In terms of infrastructure support, we've rebuilt Alpertin's school. We're rebuilding our Kelvin school. We are improving the parks across that ward, can outside improvements, we're doing transport improvements. We are one of the best connected boroughs in London. 23 tube and train stations across the borough, bus routes are improving because of the mayor of London. Every development now, in terms of climate and sustainability, we are making sure that car-free developments of people are walking using public transport more than ever. Medical centres, we've got planned for a grand union. It's one planned and grand union. We're building one in Mumbly Park. We're building one in South Kilburn. The one in Mumbly Park is due to open in the next month or so, I think, which is one of the biggest in the region. So when we're talking about opportunity, and I think where we need to go next is making sure that we continue to engage residents who are living in the areas of regeneration to make sure that they feel involved, A) in the changes to the building environment, but B) also can take up some of the opportunities. So if you're going to give an example of the opportunities that we're making the most of, Section 106 practically pays for our employment service in Brent-Star and Brent Works, and are practically paid for by Section 106. Their predominant work is in areas where we have higher economic inactivity, stone bridge halls, and so on when we have excellent outcomes for residents in those areas who are needing upskilling to getting into Word, to ESOL classes, and so on. So I'm not going to apologise for the regeneration. Can we do better? We will always work to do better. One of the things that we're looking to do is how we develop our community engagement strategies. So church and master plan was a really great example of how we've engaged a community in church and who, you know, haven't really been engaged with by any authorities. And we actively work, people in Jonathan's team, who worked actively with the residents and the community there about what they want for the area, and overwhelmingly what they tell the authorities, they want opportunities for the young people. And so part of the regeneration in the master plan for church end is that opportunity. Last night, Mo and I attended the induction meeting of the community review panel. 17 residents who applied from across the borough who are diverse and truly representative of the borough, different ages, different ethnicities, equal gender balance, different disabilities, are taking different professions, different educational attainments, are taking part in monthly meetings with developers and people who apply for applications in Brent to interrogate planning applications or approaches the developers are taking. Mo and I met some of those residents yesterday who are absolutely passionate about but Brent in the area they live in. We've got residents from Kenton all the way down to Kilburn and they are actively wanting to engage with us to help make changes in the system. And we are one of the leading boroughs on this. And we, if we can do better actively, we will want to see suggestions about what we can do better. But I'm absolutely committed to making sure that the voices that we hear in regeneration are the voices that aren't often the loudest. And that's really important for me. OK, I'm going to have to disagree with some of that. And I want to use the opportunity to state that most of the residents I speak with in Alperten to Kilburn to needs and do feel let down by regeneration and feel left behind by regeneration. They don't feel that the required improvements in the area are actually being made as quickly as they need to be made to offset to mitigate the impact of this large-scale development that's taking place. I'll give some examples like you did. There's still no step-free access at Alperten Tube Station, despite the need. Promised health facilities aren't materialising quickly enough. You mentioned the Health Centre in Kilburn. That's taken a lot longer than it needed to take, or that it should have taken. Community spaces are unaffordable and not actually being used by members of the community where they exist in. Improvements to the public realm are hardly ever maintained. They're maintained for press opportunities, and then after that they fall into ruin. There's been a stream of negative stories around regeneration in South Kilburn. Obviously, we heard from a resident from that part of the bar already on fly tipping, increased crime levels of squatting, residents call living in these areas a nightmare. That's not something that you want to hear. You want to hear what we want to hear as a committee. On top of that, there's actually 420 less council housing units available now to let in Brent, compared to 2018. I have to take issue with your assertions. I accept some of them, but a lot of them I don't agree with. I think, as a lead member, you should take some time to listen to residents in the growth areas who are being negatively impacted by the council's regeneration plans. A few things I think I'll come back on what you're saying. Yes, we want residents to be happy about where they live and they want to feel that they are part of the areas. In terms of infrastructure, what I will challenge back on is we secure infrastructure improvements in planning. The health centers that you're talking about, either Alfordton or South Kilburn or even Wembley Park, we secure them in planning. We secure them in regeneration. We're able to fund them through sale. The difficulty we have, and this is where the national government hasn't played its part, is that those relevant public sector bodies are often where the obstacle is. It's taken us a few years to get the agreement signed over in South Kilburn to get the medical centre agreed. Things like pharmacies, you have to go through a whole process to make sure that they're involved. TFL are struggling at the moment. We've been actively having conversations about step-free access, not just Alfordton, but other stations in the area that absolutely need infrastructure improvements. Your point about maintenance we are able to provide the capital within regeneration and planning about improvements to those areas. The reality is that local government budgets have been decimated across all authorities, and I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to say this. Your party was part of that initial process about austerity and how local governments funded. Kelly's here from Park. She will tell you that the budget that she has and proof is here. Actively has made it difficult to maintain. We can plant many trees. I can give still money right here, right now, to plant trees. If we, in two years time, can't afford to maintain those trees because our revenue budget has been decimated by the coalition government that you started and you're part of in 2010, then you've got to take some responsibility too. I will actively work with residents day in, day out to make sure that they feel the opportunities of regeneration, but we provide capital. If you want to talk about maintenance and antisocial behaviour, the police have been decimated, schools have been decimated, NHS has been decimated. I would talk about responsibility, but I think you need to be talking about responsibility for what your party have done in 2010 onwards. I'm going to allow one rebuttal and then we're not going to descend into a... I mean, it's becoming a party political slinging match. I'm trying to make clear points about what the residents are feeding back to us as both members of the committee, but also as ward Councillors, and as an Alton Councillor, this is an issue that I've highlighted over and over and over again. I've been at every single planning committee making the same points about regeneration, about the need for immediate investment in infrastructure, and I disagree with what you've said, and I still think you need to go out there, meet the residents in these growth areas, and talk to them about how they feel. And I do, and I can make the point about Kingsview residents, about kind of... I think you should go and meet residents in South Kilburn. I do. My case work is full of residents from residents who want support or who want help, and I will actively do that, and Cabinet, we will actually kind of do that. But I really, really object to the point that actually issues around maintenance and the revenue impact it has on particularly Councillor Schez's budget, that we are not actually taking responsibility about what austerity has done. And actually, we can provide the capital, you know, with injecting money into rose and pavements, but the actively, the Tony Kennedy's team that had to have to manage on a tiny budget compared to what they had in 2010, we can put capital in all time. But when you can't maintain those things, because our revenue budget can't allow us to, absolutely, I will come and speak to residents hand and foot all time. Any time you want me to come, I will come and speak to residents. Okay, but don't sit here and take, you can't take responsibility. So we might have a recommendation there. Oh, okay, before I bring in the... Will I bring in you two? Or will I do my... Okay, I'm going to be... No, I'm going to be selfish and do my point. I think what's helpful in this is very important points about austerity, Councillor Tatla, and the impact that has on what happens after the actual built environment is, shall we have one conversation? Okay, sorry, Councillor Tatla. Thank you for your points on austerity. I think they absolutely do have an impact on what happens after the projects are actually built. I think that is where we would be really interested in seeing what lessons we've learned from the parts of projects we have already delivered and how that is impacting what we are planning going forward, given that we know that every time we do these projects, the issues, we see the issues that happen, and part of it, that is what happens during the delivery of the regeneration, but also with some of the examples that Councillor Giorgio has raised with what happens afterwards when things, for example, don't come through because of our public sector partners, or because when, for example, we split an estate between a number of different social housing providers, and then we get into arguments about like, Who's going to enforce the parking? Who's going to clean that bit of the road instead of that bit of the road? Given that we're not doing regeneration, these projects that are outlined in this paper is not the first time we've ever done regeneration in the borough. I think what would be really helpful for the committee is for us to see in these plans going forward, what is it that we have learned and identified about what has gone wrong before, and what we are doing this, what we are going to be doing now and in our future projects, which shows that we have actually understood some of the problems, and we've looked at what bits that we can actually change, and I completely take your point, there are some bits that we do not have control over, but the bits that we do actually have control over, and you've just spoken about the Community Engagement Project in Church End, and I'm sure some of the ways in which that was designed and delivered was based on times that community engagement didn't work in our regeneration areas, so again, it would be really helpful for us as a committee going forward in this conversation about regen that understand what is it that went wrong before, what we learned, and then how we did it differently, how we're doing it differently, and that's the story about Church End sounds great to think, but without the peace knowing that we figured out what went wrong and what we're going to do differently is hard for our residents to feel that we're not going to get a repetition, and it also I think that's a point about how we're making sure that we're preparing to identify the new issues that are coming up, so for example, what was flagged about fly tipping, now that we're in a situation of increased delays in our regeneration projects, we're having to deal with issues that we didn't have to deal with in previous regeneration projects, for example, blocks becoming like unlivable during the phase of the regen, because we can't move quickly enough, and these are new problems, you know, you have mentioned in the paper, for example, the cost of having security on site in areas where, you know, as was highlighted, it becomes a target, because we can't do anything with the building whilst we're stuck in the middle, these new issues that are coming up, if we, having a greater understanding of what we've learned about before, helps us feel like, can we be equipped to deal with this, the new issues arising? Yeah, so there are, there are many things that, you know, in my time is this cabinet and cabinet lead, and it's nearly been eight years actually that I've been in this brief, and there are many things that we've taken on as learnings in terms of our own schemes, in terms of what we ask of developers coming forward, some of the things are kind of the big obvious big ticket items like infrastructure, or delivering the affordable housing upfront or improvements to the public realm, brand union, they do the improvements to Stonebridge Walk, Stonebridge Station walkway straight away, community trust and managing the community centre in brand union, some of it could be around design, you know, and kind of what we want and what our housing needs are, so some of the things, you know, it could be talking about people are changing the way that they live, you know, people are working more from home, are the designs that we're expecting of developers and our own schemes kind of responsive to that, so all those things that you're talking about will be kind of looked at and we're constantly learning about what we need to do, in regeneration quite rightly should be evolving in terms of how people live and are going to live, you know, the climate emergency is more and more prominent, we actually have an SPD on sustainability, we're one of the first councils to do that, we've got legislative requirements around biodiversity net gain, we're one of the few councils in the country I think that has a planning ecologist now that we employed full time that's working on biodiversity net gain because it's not just about greening an area, it's about actually the type of plants and the type of greenery that we're providing, so we're constantly evolving, looking at different ways of construction, different ways of managing construction, obviously, it's a key part of that, and also looking at how we fund things as well, and I know Archica and the team in South Kilb and are looking at different ways of delivering the rest of the South Kilb model to deal with some of the issues around management of the estate, you know, that's one thing that cropped up that we hadn't thought about when the scheme first began, but now it's clearly an issue, so what are we doing to learn about actually how do we manage the estate, how we go forward, Emily and the housing team do work with all the housing providers together about how we deal with things going forward and Councilor Knight is very aware of kind of how we need to make sure she's working with housing associations on the South Kilb and estate to look at demarcation and what we do and what we don't do, so there's constant learning going on and we can take a look at kind of giving you some more details about what we're doing, but it's an ever-changing thing, and planning policies will be responsive to some of the needs of our community, so growth in jobs will be one of those things, so we're making sure that some of our schemes look at how they replace jobs in manufacturing and industry to make sure that we're providing not just the homes that people need, but the jobs that people need, so all of that is an evolving picture all the time, but take your point and we're happy to come back and say maybe want more information. Great, thank you, oh brilliant, they all start coming out of the woodwork, however Councilor Fraser had actually indicated to speak before you guys, so we're going to go to Councilor Fraser, Councilor Mitchell, Councilor Miller. I was wondering about page 27, 4.2, why exactly are compulsory purchase orders, why are they not practical, not considered practical? That's one, I've got another question, which is a bit different, the marketing has the pitfall of bringing about more gentrification, the more attractive the area is, as an investment opportunity, the more local rents go up, and when you're in the whole scheme of things with regeneration, where does that fit? Because I'd like to be certain, as certain as possible, that this practice isn't hurt in our chances of securing higher affordable components during the planning stage. I've got an answer. So, officers can correct me if I'm wrong, but the marketing of the private homes won't impact the social housing because that social housing is secured through viability in the planning process, so once homes are marketed, once they're given planning permission, those homes are secured in terms of planning agreements. We can't control marketing, but we have influenced some developers, so St. George and Ryan Union, we've talked to them about actually advertising the other benefits of the development, rather than just the housing that they're going to be selling for the private schemes and the jobs that they've created for Brent residents, the opportunities for Brent businesses on that scheme. So, I take your point around that, but once we've secured the housing, the social housing or the affordable housing on a scheme, that can't be impacted by how a developer markets the private sale or the private homes that they want to sell or go on. The only thing that will impact the number of social homes or affordable homes is the viability, and that's something that the team heavily scrutinised to make sure that we can maximise on any scheme, the affordable housing. In terms of the compulsory purchase orders, the CPOs, they are incredibly burdensome, they are often used as a very last resort, well, often they are used as a last resort, and they have to demonstrate that there is a demonstratable good, public good, to enable them to be enacted. Where we have, the Council have used them predominantly is South Kilburn, we've agreed to potentially use CPOs in certain big developments like the Grand Union development in Alportton, if necessary, if the developer can't negotiate a sale for those pieces of land, we only ever use it as a last resort. My own personal view is, if we're going to unlock housing, whether it's Council or developer-led, CPO powers do need to be streamlined to make it easier, you know, it sometimes takes up to two years just to unlock one flat in our CPO, and that delays schemes unnecessarily when often those flats, particularly in our schemes, are absentee landlords. And so we need to be able to kind of streamline them to make sure that we can compile just repurchase them. Anyway, you guys won't add anything to the CPO question. Now, I think you've covered it. The legislation, a compelling case, has to be demonstrated for the public good to override private property rights. So, you know, it is difficult. You know, there's some, the Council predominantly has done on South, South Kilburn, a state regeneration purchase leasehold. It's a lengthy process, but we will back it in certain circumstances. You know, Alberton growth area is being given as an example. So, we can work in partnership with developers, but it is long and it's a difficult process. I'm aware of times that I'm going to be like, do you want to have? So, I also noticed that there isn't any reference to the effect of these concentrated developments on the private rented sector, in the surrounding areas. And I just wondered, aren't we, when you're considering putting things together, don't you think about maybe we're pricing people out? I take your point. And I think there are a couple of answers to that. And these are sort of my particular views rather than a kind of corporate view. So, we can't, we have to be able to have policy in place that allows people who are private landowners to do what they want with their land. We can't dictate to somebody, you can develop on a land or you can't because it might impact the neighbours or somebody else's property. We can't, we don't have legislative powers to do that. And just as I wouldn't be able to, as a cabinet member for planning, say to a resident that they want to have an extension because they need a grand floor bedroom for their grandmother, I can't tell them no. I can't tell a land owner that if they want to build a development on their scheme, regardless of what it does to the neighbouring properties, they've been studies done in other cities that demonstrate that if you build enough homes, actually the demonstratable impact on rents is negligible because the issue really in London particularly is around supply. What concentrates rent at the moment is either the high interest rates on mortgages, high rents on mortgages or actually supply demand. So, a lot of our issues currently on temporary accommodation are residents who are living in the private rented sector, who were able to afford rents before interest rates went through the roof on landlord rents and so are they now coming to us. So, if we address supply, the overwhelming evidence will tell us that actually we will address housing costs. And the other factor I think is important to know that regardless of what we do as a council, current wages don't meet living costs. Not just rent, but buying food, paying your bills, all of that comes into how people are falling to live within Brent and London. So, it's a bigger picture than just saying a new environmental impact on rents. Oh, I think I was asked five seconds. I hear what you're saying, but rents are going up rapidly and I think we are pricing people out and I think that has to be taken into consideration when we're talking about regeneration. My last one was on 5.11. Community centres have been provided by Brent Council. Some of the way the report is structured, it almost sounds like a good story and, but on this community centres have been provided, we talk about the yellow. The yellow is about, well, it's about to be sold as I understand it. It's closed and about to be sold. It's moved twice and now it's gone again in the short time that it's been open. I know you did mention about what happens about maintenance later, but things do tend to deteriorate and when they deteriorate, then we start to talk about rebuilding. So, two separate things in a way, but when it comes to, did no one think of that when this report was put together? Just a couple of just to respond to your questions. Firstly, we are not pricing out residents. That's the market. That's how interest rates going up. We can't control what rent developers put onto their schemes. We can secure as much affordable housing as we possibly can, but if we are going to be honest, it's the interest rates at the moment and inflation and cost of living. That's really, really making things difficult, whether you're a social housing tenant or a new graduate into the borough. We've had some horror stories around that. In terms of community centres, where we have control, again, is our own stock. So, the property team, if we're building something, say, Leary Constantine and the Brent Indian Association in Brent, we've got two community centres there. Property will be managing those and they will be for the community to use. The yellow, for example, is not a council building. It's owned by the developer, the landowner in Wembley Park. My understanding is they're not getting rid of the yellow. They're actually increasing community space in Wembley Park. There's going to be the green opening as well, another community space opening in another part of the estate. So, again, where the council are owning property and where we are, we are looking to protect them. We've got community spaces, whether it's a public library in Preston or South Kilburn or even the community space in Brown Union. We're working with people to make sure they stay open and community uses. I should also point out that other communities isn't just a blank hall. We want to be able to say community spaces could be affordable workspace to help some of our struggling businesses in SMEs and so on. I'm going to ask you to ground up because so many people are queuing up for answers and we have a whole other paper. So, Mary Mitchell had to indicate for it, but council Emily, you feel very strong. You've come in on your point, since it feels like it's a continuation, then councilor Mitchell then councilor. I think that's a compelling argument of public ownership of our community space really, isn't it? This point that we have control over and so therefore, we can make sure it stays open and maintain it. I wanted to draw back to the point, some really good points for emerging between yourself and councilor Fraser before about the cost of rent versus people's jobs and their wages and all of the rest of that. I agree with the point that we can't control the rental market locally, but speaking about people that need lower rents and are on lower rents and stuff, I think that this leads us down an avenue of, well, let's look at the qualitative side of this as well as the quantitative side. There's the argument about how many units reproduce and put all of that out, but what kind of units those are remains absolutely crucial, and I think that there's a good example of that, because if we solve the supply crisis, we're not going to solve the supply crisis by building 500 Donald Trump mentions, but we're much closer to solving the supply crisis if we're building at the end of people that need that supply are able to take advantage of. I'm sure you probably agree with some of this, but flipping that, you came back with the point about wages and people's wages ability to keep up with it, and that's a very important thing. It's good to see that there's mention of this in the report. It's good to hear that from yourself, but the main mention of employment land in here is through affordable workspace. I know we haven't got much time, so I'm not asking for anything expansive, but I wanted to ask what consideration is given to the type of employment land that we produce, because affordable workspace has been identified as a shortfall for us previously, but some of the developments going on in my ward, which I'm broadly on paper of, but I see reasonably well-paid industrial jobs going, and jobs being brought in that are more towards the retail land, lower paid, and affordable workspace that depends on self-employed people taking that up, which are going to be generated from somewhere. I wondered what you're thinking is behind what kind of employment land we should have and how that has come about. It's a good question, and I think it's an important one that was potentially the committee could look at in the next municipal year around employment, and I think it's important that the latest data suggests that Brent has spiked in terms of economic inactivity, particularly in the over 55s, and so that's a key area that we're trying to work on about what we need to do to support those people backing to work. In terms of employment spaces, so the vast majority of Brent employment, Brent businesses specifically are small SME, so independent self-employed businesses, so we need to create spaces with them to work together. We are looking through policy to create spaces or have areas where specific sectors can work. In and around Wembley, we have the Creative Enterprise Zone, we're seeing a growth and explosion of the arts and the creative sector in Brent, and the affordable housing, the affordable workspace element is actually delivering really great artist studios across this pub borough, which is really great to see. The Creative Enterprise Zone will look at playing in the strengths of eating road, particularly about jewelry making fashion, and supporting potentially a fashion school around that area as well, so we want to see that come forward. Our town centre managers are working with the retail offer in the various key town centres to make sure that we're doing what we can, but sectors in terms of employment, and we've got industrial planning applications coming through, and the reality is that currently we're seeing some residential planning applications not being seen through when coming back as industrial, because the return of industrial is at the moment better because it's so scarce in this part of London, and so what we're seeing and what we're encouraging is densification and intensification of big industrial sites, so park rural though, embarking on that with SEGRO, the new one I attended, I was turning V Park on Grand Union last week, which is based on a Japanese German model of stacked industrial, which is brilliant, and we want to see that come forward because it then looks at how people are going to work in the next 50 years, as opposed to how industry worked previously, but the big sectors in Brent that are looking for employment, where employment is where we need to fill spaces, social care is one of the big gaps that we need to fill, places and construction, obviously, where there's a big gap, so there is a whole piece of work around employment that the Brent Start team are doing really well to kind of fill in the gap, but need and diverting people properly and kind of within a compassion two-dose jobs is what Brent Start do, DWP are a very different picture, so I think there's a whole piece of work that needs to be done separately. I also point out that too many of those jobs are low income and aren't going to solve the economic crisis either, Councillor Mitchell. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to come back to the conversation on maintenance, because I think what we've touched on is maintenance of the public realm and elements that are within our power as a Council and obviously challenged by the funding crisis, but what we haven't talked about are two other areas of maintenance around the actual build quality, and we've heard from the residents today, but also we hear constantly from residents in our wards about some of the challenges there and how that impacts their daily lives, and also the ability for residents and Brent to actually hold re-holders and landlords to account for ongoing maintenance that's to do with the buildings themselves, and so the question in general terms is, is there more that we could be doing there to facilitate that, and I wonder if we could turn that into a recommendation of is it possible for us to do some scoping around are there other measures that we could look to put in place that go beyond just the basic legislation and ticking boxes in terms of compliance to really ensure that developers are building to extremely high standards, and that there is something in place whereby the mechanisms for maintenance are clear, and there's some accountability there as well, both for residents and for ourselves as a Council. Absolutely, and take your point, and I think there was a period in sort of the early 2000s around builds that I think not just Brent are struggling with in terms of build quality for some developments going forward, and that's something that re-holders and landowners are grappling with. Councilor Knight will speak to this because she has the relationships, any regen scheme that we do, we have a defect period of one year within the regen team, and then it's handed over to the housing association or the RP or whoever owns the building and so on, and Councilor Knight has those relationships, so we have a lot of soft relationships, so that soft power essentially, so we have relationships with those particularly RP's about maintenance, about particularly I think what my experience is the communication with residents has been missing, and sometimes myself or Councilor Knight will have to step in and kind of say you're not doing a job properly to communicate, so we'll accept that sometimes if things go wrong, things might need to be fixed, they just want certainty of when it's going to be done, it's going to be done properly when people come out, and that's a problem, not just for RP's, but we as a Council and our own staff need to make sure that we're on top of any of that kind of communication and we're constantly looking at doing that. If you're able to scope and find out ways that we can have extra powers to do, so please let me know because I think it's one thing that we are actively looking at how we can better build quality, one thing that we do encourage developers to do is use our own building control, the Brent's building control rather than an independent assessor where possible, we can't legislate for them to use building control because it's up to them by who they go to and off when it's a desktop exercise and so we want them to use our building control, where we have schemes, we are putting in place design guardians and where we can, we will go and check things where and look at the things that potentially could be an issue, and where we can foresee things we are insisting on things to be better, where we are going to be the RP, we have powers to stop or ask developers to improve things or build things in a way where we are not the RP, that's where the difficulty comes into, so if there's a way of scoping anything further in terms of powers that we have, I'd love to see what that looks like, but I think we're doing all we can in what we have in control with, one thing that counts on now I know is very keen on making sure that the key power and the current secretary of state for D-luck is holding not just councils, but our piece to account in terms of things like mold and kind of conditions of property, holding to account about what they're doing and so the key route for my advice would be to currently is if residents aren't getting any joy with their RP directly, go to the ombudsman, that's what I would say because the ombudsman will then enforce and they have the powers that councils don't on our piece, we have relationships with our piece, we don't have powers over our piece unfortunately and council and I if you was here would say the same thing, but in terms of new schemes we are doing all we can in the powers that we have to try and make sure that a build quality is important. I should also point out that the newest plug that we own in South Kilburn unity place, there are issues in terms of usage, in terms of this impacted some of the condition of the building, but the actual structure of the building and what we know is actually not the issue, the issue that's been reported on social media about unity place is actually usage by resident, not actually by the fabric of the building itself and so that's what we're saying to developers is build to good quality, build to high quality. Yeah those are all really helpful points and I am very ignorant in terms of the planning process, but I guess I just still question whether there's more we can do either within our soft powers and the mechanisms are already in place or whether we can in fact integrate more into the planning process than is sort of currently standard in legislation. I'd welcome if you're able to if the scrutiny can be able to scope other areas to find out what if there's anything else further we can do I'd welcome your kind of investigation on that. I would say planning does not cover and currently national guidance means that we can't cover build that's before building regulations, it's not for the planning process. Planning has oversight over design, not building quality or building regs, but we can try and implement these kind of materials that are used so we can say we don't use that cladding for example because it's you know it's not something for fire safety for example, but planning generally can't do that on building reg. Yeah so I think in terms of processes we do have design review process, we've got a quality review panel, we have a pre-application process and as part of the design we do look at the materials that are used and it is important to look at the the life of those materials as well. Councillor TATLAR also mentioned the SPD, the new SPD that we have on sustainable design, is about the long term so and I think there have been some learnings from some of the perhaps poor quality finishing materials that have been used in the past that haven't aged particularly well and I think there is a lot that is done even through planning now, I mean quite right, building controlled as have certain requirements in terms of the types of materials that are used but I think it is something that we do look at quite early and we do try to get developers to look at the quality of materials and details when they're designing their proposals but also there is the scenario of ensuring that that is delivered at the end of the process as well that is not engineered out so there are mechanisms that we have to try to maintain those standards that we get a quality build at the end of it. I think it's also worth just saying that the sector itself, building regs is there is a massive workforce shortage for building regs teams as well and surveyors and one of the things that I've done in my role is lobbying our front bench, our front bench about making sure there's a workforce strategy around planning, building regs, planning enforcement because actually if we're looking at growth and looking at how we support schemes and residents in the housing crisis part of that will be making sure that we've got enough expertise in this part of the process to enable us to make sure that things are built properly. Yeah that's not really helpful. I guess I still just feel like that is a very it's a no and I think I'm saying is there anything more that we could do? Is it worth like with respect? I don't think that we are not the experts in this area, we are not going to be able to identify best practice. I guess we're just asking if it's possible for you as a team to go away and just review again and make sure that every single mechanism at our disposal, including those soft ones, has been explored. Yeah so apologies and I should have made it clearer that I have those conversations with my counterparts, Jerry will have conversations with his counterparts, David with his and promised with hers about constantly reviewing what are the issues across the sector about house building and what we can do to improve and I think my challenge back is if we can't find anything across the region or across the city that we can do further to support build quality or affordability, if there's anything else anyone can suggest I would love to know what that is because we're constantly having those conversations across the region, opposite and at political level. I mean I have an opinion just nobody likes my opinion. Okay so we're wearing the time guys there's a lot of items that we haven't been able to cover this evening. I think the most important thing is it's quite clear that this is can only be the beginning of a conversation about the current region strategy in the borough and you know it's quite clear that this meeting has only started to pick up some of the areas of concern for councillors in terms of delivery on the ground, lessons learned and then also future viability and obviously we understand that we also might need to be broadening that to some of our other cabinet members as well which would be helpful. So I think my first recommendation it's going to be a recommendation to the committee itself which is I hope that the new committee which will be starting in the next municipal year will take on board what a significant issue this is for our borough and for our residents and continue and look again at what are the next steps that we need to follow in scrutiny to take what we've started tonight on in a way which is helpful and can actually start implementing helping the regeneration teams to implement the kind of changes that we might want to be seeing for our residents. Sorry everyone and then before I do the other recommendations 2.1 I asked that so as I said there were a number of questions that weren't got to particularly there were a lot of information requests that people have for items that they wanted to know about from reading the paper. If I asked that all members of the committee can let us know about their information requests their specific information requests on specific schemes or on the qualitative data that they would like to see so that we can pass that on to the department for it to be circulated after this meeting and that can also be used to inform the next committees and plans for future scrutiny around regen as well and then before I go to other recommendations that I heard from members if I can come back to our speaker and just ask for two points it's not even going to be two minutes just two points on outstanding elements that you would like to see scrutiny looking at in the future from tonight's conversation. Okay quickly on the quality issue I've been I'm glad it finally got addressed but one question I would ask is why are we using builders who have previously built box buildings so why are the builders who built Grandville new homes which is costing more to put right and it costs in the first place being used for further regeneration schemes in South Kilman that's quality question. On the viability I'm still not convinced that it's saying that for the whole of the South Kilman regeneration schemes that's beyond Heronford and Exeterrence Austin Dickens etc etc are we guaranteeing that we will keep the preaches that we made to residents and as a slight aside bear in mind that when we pass over housing to housing associations the service charges go through the roof so they are no longer paying what council tends will be paying but far more. Very last point I don't understand on the infrastructure thing there is no public library in South Kilburn and never has been and far from an increasing community centres we're actually seeing a decrease in community facilities because unlike the council who did have communal rooms in their blocks the developers are not putting communal rooms in their blocks so we're seeing a decrease in communal facilities. Thank you that's really helpful so just to pick up here I didn't say the public library in the South Kilburn I was talking about Preston. Okay I'll be able to say this but it's fine thanks for clarifying the one in Preston. Okay so I'm going backwards then on those points and also the ones I heard earlier this evening we had an endorsement for public ownership of community spaces because when we own them we can continue to determine what happens with them and we've had other papers that have come to this scrutiny committee work as well about community usage and public ownership of community usage so to re endorse that point that as well as us wanting to see as much community usage included in our regeneration plans and our master plans for areas as much as possible when we can own those sites we can actually deliver the best community usage in those areas instead of relying on developers or housing associations or our public sector colleagues to deliver those community venues. In terms of the point about build quality I mean my position would be and hopefully the committee would endorse it I think it applies to build quality and it also applies to viability is that you know my position has always been that local authorities are actually the strong partner are actually the the strong partner in building and delivering large housing scale programs in London because look around us as you said it's so expensive to build the only people who are invested in actually really wanting to build housing and large housing schemes are local authorities and our government infrastructure schemes if a construction company if a developer wants to build something they need us and our plans as much as we need them if I feel like you know ways that we can address some of those issues around building standards and around viability is we could just say no like you know Jerry you said oh well you know we'll if we we can't lose the project altogether I would say let's start saying no to developers and see where else they go and the thing is is that the concern that they will go to other local authorities we need to start working across London together this isn't a Brent specific issue this is an issue across London it's across the UK we need to be working I what I would want our cabinet members to do as you spoke about Shama is your work lobbying for legislation and lobbying at the GLA for us to work better together to a higher standard I would want to see all our London authorities working together to back each other up in saying we're all going to hold to these standards we're all going to demand higher building standards and we're all going to demand for those higher levels of affordable housing in our programs and we're going to try and stop you from undercutting us and pitching us against each other but it's a it's a lobbying request for you to work, push, to try and seek and we get our other London colleagues to sign up with us to be more robust in our negotiations with developers and to not feel like we're the ones going cap and hand to them they're the ones that need to come to us so I think what I will say to that is there is a regional body across London which is a GLA GLA have a planning and regeneration team and every big scheme goes through them and strategically they will help us deliver infrastructure and housing and it's their policy requirements in the London Plan that our local plan mirrors and most local plans in London are coming to all-wheel mirror the London Plan so there will be consistency across the piece what I will say and this is obviously a political conversation that I think all parties are grappling with the option of saying no to development isn't there the housing crisis is so acute that we need housing there are people in all income levels that are struggling to get into London and we need people because the social impact of not building housing means that primary schools are closing in neighboring boroughs so we actively need to think about if we're realistically going to tackle the housing crisis supply is the point and I will challenge anybody to say that we don't challenge developers Mo and I have conversations day in day out with developers about what our red lines are and this is why we often get criticized about having too many high blocks I will have high blocks if it means that we're getting as much affordable housing any scheme possible so I will challenge that I will continue to lobby with my counterparts on the legislative change that will enable us to do more thank you very much because like I said their recommendations not ongoing questions and as per your point I think our our thing is the good work that might be happening is for us to push for for more because you know we we will always want to see more if you get us 50 percent we're going to want to see 60 percent this I think the my feeling seems very strongly from tonight's committee that this committee and I think backbenches in this council and residents in this council we want we want as much affordable housing as possible so whatever you bring back to us we're going to always ask for the extra 10 percent keep doing that it's good screaming so okay and what else did I have in terms of recommendation I will apologize just I just want to just on the point about saying no that the planning committee has a constitutional role within the council and obviously they have the ability to way up schemes and they do say no thanks Jerry um and other recommendations did I have so I've heard paper information requests more robust negotiations with developers public ownership of community space and recommendation well I was I was wondering why when when it says that about the medical center no just I can't have any more questions no I'm not a patient okay it's not I was just thinking that there should be some kind of risk you know when we're talking about there should be something about the risks when we're talking about lessons learned particularly when medical infrastructure isn't in place when it said at the beginning rather than the end because it puts more pressure on residents if it's not there earlier so that has to be considered so I think that as sorry Catherine it sounds like reiterating yeah reiterating our earlier point of using what we've learned of what's been difficult or a challenge in our earlier schemes for example health centers not coming online early enough to inform our plan at the beginning and improve our like I try and mean that we get some of those agreements down earlier in the process it sounds like yeah okay Anthony recommendation councilman yeah I'm not sure how to phrase this as a recommendation but I just think we're missing a trick man so when we do the viability presumably offset costs and the developers profit margin against some forecast of future rents plus any sales you know but when you move a family from the private rental sector into affordable housing there's a massive saving on housing benefit and then I mean the 25 billion housing benefit a year goes almost exclusively to the private landlords you know I understand that's coming out of a different budget that doesn't affect our viability assessment but surely we've got some leverage with central government and I mean it's such vast sums is there any possibility of negotiating that into the viability assessment because that savings like research seems to suggest that it's about half the rental stream you know if the rent is a hundred the savings on that family from housing benefit is 50 so it's not nothing and it would swing a lot of our projects into viability but it means getting the cash off central government but they're just from one pocket to another it could be a lobbying ask recommendation and lastable I also well it's not a recommendation I also thank council attacked her commitment to meet with any residents in the recession regeneration areas that want to meet with her and that we will publicize that offer any last recommendations okay perfect thank you very much guys like I said it's a very very important issue we're bound to have you back I'm sure and thanks for your patience this evening and now I'm going to get rid of you really quickly to for your colleagues to come over sorry yeah yeah yeah I'm thinking about doing the thing as well so okay so thank you guys for your patience and waiting for us this is what happens when you have two very very important items on the agenda at the end of the year I'm going to go straight to councilor chef to kick us off and concise questions and answers everywhere I did have quite a bit written but I'm just going to keep it very short and sweet considering the timings this is just an update on where we are how it's gone so far since the start of the new contracts we've got all the head of departments here to update on their relevant departments Kelly had to leave but everyone else is here we've got Chris here as well so I'll let you guys kick it off thank you very much councilor chef so councilor chef our performance data for all RLS contracts more accessible to the public in an open data format we can definitely look into seeing how we can do that and what data we can put out there Chris and I will take their back that's why I'd like to hear council about thank you chair um Harrogra 5.1 refers to a vision that emerged for how the then environmental services department has a whole deep greater integration and efficiencies through a reorg this included a vision for the integrated back office to create a digitally and data led stream lined customer focus system which supports integrated working across all services a bit for word salad um across the wider council and provides seamless information flows um I think what we're talking about here is an upgrade of the systems um and into various departments do we know um how many department systems have been streamlined so far and what's that standing and what exactly does that involve in terms of in terms of the services within the public realm um department we've created a new contract back office if you like that serves the needs of our grants maintenance contract and the only contract with respect to waste collection and street cleansing uh rush me with this rush me now overseas the administration of of of those contracts um mainly fed by information from the fix my street um app and to it to today so includes the highways work that we do uh on the street as well so we've got for the first time supporting our frontline services a dedicated back office function that manages the governance of our contracts draws in the data processes and analyzes that data and allows us to shape the service delivery on the ground on the back of that understanding so that that's the main change that emerged from this RLS piece of work as a dedicated back office that manages our contracts just to further on that so does that mean that our systems talk to our contractors like the earlier um and continental or big two so um we've got the system set up directly with our highways and uh the only as well really thank you and so council george here just to say i was quite surprised to see um this in front of us because the the new contract has only been in place for a short time and i was under the impression i think the committee on the impression that this would only be able to be fully analyzed in the data that we are looking at and is providing this will only actually be able to be fully analyzed after a longer period of time um so anyway that's that's the first one um so paragraph 3.1 outlines uh some of the key priorities of the RLS program for example the report states that the program seeks to assist the council in its stated goal to create a clean green environment and fully engage with the community to understand their needs so overall would you say that the new contracts are so some examples would be appreciated well on your on your first point yes i mean the more time that we have to um bed these contracts in the better our understanding will be of how effective they are um we have had the best part of a year now for most of those services so we're starting to develop a fairly settled understanding of performance um the cleaning green is certainly the leading edge in terms of um you know that that performance and and the and the service outcomes you know through the procurement we were able to secure a number of social value benefits including um the planning of trees sustainability projects community engagement projects the greening of our fleet to the extent that we've now got an electric fleet in our parking enforcement service and electric fleet in our grounds maintenance um service so um all of the contracts and all of these colleagues here um this evening we'll be able to um confirm that there's been a number of initiatives brought forward and that the clean green focus is certainly center of um our operations and just to also add to the leader and i have been working with Chris and the team around some of the stuff around the wanted campaign enforcement officers and we're looking to revamp and improve that as well okay so if i turn now to blue bags um the infamous blue bags um so some follow up comments about blue bags performances mentioned in appendix four yeah sorry chair i just sorry um councilor millerhead oh don't ask a question first are you sure yeah perfect okay so um mentioned in appendix four um and it's noted that the blue bags were uh were a cost effective option um but there have been endless complaints i think uh we saw a petition on the brain council website with i think the most signatures that a petition has ever received in terms of uh you know residents not agreeing with the implementation of the blue bags um there were issues with the quality of the bags the size of the bags yet the council is still obviously preceded with the option so what plans do you have to act on the complaints from local residents so i think just before Chris comes in to add we've taken notice of the blue sacks and we've now got a new contractor providing the blue sacks as well um which are much more resilient and better quality too yeah there were issues with the quality of the initial batch of sacks um we've acknowledged that and we've changed supply and in the next set of deliveries for for for for blue sacks will be from a different supply and we're satisfied that that will be an upgrade and improvement on the existing um supply in terms of the sack system we're still satisfied that that's an appropriate choice for for or this waste stream um the sack itself does provide us with a better opportunity to manage um levels of contamination we haven't seen any of our paper and card loads rejected since the start of the contract that's in contrast to the blue bin the mixed collection service where contamination remains a very significant problem the cost and providing sacks obviously is much cheaper for the council than providing plastic bins so in that respect it's certainly more more cost effective and we're also starting to see that the um the value of the material that we separate using the sacks the paper and card probably attracts a value on average about five times more than the paper and card that's um recovered from winding the residual blue bin mix that doesn't doesn't get separated so there is certainly a very significant value and that's been borne out in separating that material in the way that we've now um designed into the service so for clarity does that mean that you're replacing all the bags that you've given out because if you're looking if you've now gone away and found a new contract to to produce the bags does that mean all residents who received bags are now going to have their bags replaced and what at what cost no we're not replacing all of them most of them are absolutely fine where we've had issues we'll be replacing those with new sacks okay um now this committee in a previous meeting discussing i think this was before this uh change occurred um we made um a recommendation that if residents required or wanted to see an additional wheelie bin uh for dual purpose recycling that they would be provided with um with one i think you went away you costed that up you've spoken to violia and that you were thinking of doing a trial in beginning in september 24th i think six thousand households um is that still on track we are still working around that trial and once you have more information we will update scrutiny so will the trial begin in september yes so we're working on aiming towards that yes thank you great i mean um i'm going to do one minor minor point on it um which crystal note because you have to get my emails about it and they also resident complaints but the blue bags weren't necessarily just about quality it's also about the conduct of the olea staff who were let's say less than careful in the way they transferred material from the blue bags to the recycling convoys um what have we been doing in terms of performance management of the staff on the ground to ensure that they are actually supporting us in achieving um the goals that we want to achieve with the use of blue bags so anywhere that sent me chris or the team a complaint we've made sure that we reported back to violia violia have retrained their staff on the ground and managers also do spot checks um in those areas to make sure that these people have been retrained are behaving to the right um correct standards for violia staff but if you do have any particular dresses areas rounds drop chris or an email and we can make sure that that group gets retrained and we look into it thank you very much i hope that can be uh publicized to residents as well when they complain when they've seen poor performance on the street um council mitchell did you have a question on performance before i continue with waste okay perfect so council afron thank you chair i just want to follow up on um the uh area regarding the the blue sex so appendix b shows um a drop in paper collections from october now that occurred at the same time when the blue sex were introduced as a cost-effective solution so um we also had an increase in residual waste um from october again so my question is really is what we're doing to tackle the increase in residual waste and is it a result of the the blue sack trial that we've seen an increase um so we had a number of changes from the from the new contract to the previous contracts with mainly having a different mirth as well whereas um so when we're looking at year to date um if we compare october to october there are many other factors also contributing to it so we have a contract with a different mirth who has a different tolerance levels of contamination acceptance rates the the previous one being much more favorable however it is a sort of industry-wide stance as well mirths have got much stricter on their um acceptance rates and not non-acceptance rates so that's playing a factor there and we're also seeing a downward trend in recycling tonnages across london boroughs and nationwide again due to cost of living choruses factors uh manufacturers having stricter guidance on their packaging which she's going to continue which is what we want to see as well um so it's it's not a straightforward as saying it was higher and now it's lower also we we did see a dip in october because of the service change however we have seen it increase January was actually higher than the pre-service change of paper and card um collected and we have also seen sort of February is it's shorter month so it's dipped but it's still higher than october november as the service sort of embeds and people getting more used to it i think that you know the important point there is that by taking that paper and card out of the blue bin mix it has accentuated the levels of contamination certain areas within that blue blue bin service and that in itself has started to shape a very significant program of work for our engagement team you know contamination of recycling in brent is is a significant problem just following up on that just want to understand um right to the um separations were we getting any revenue from the paper and card because i know there's values that have been calculated and there's those values stated but were we actually getting any revenue or you're only getting revenue since the blue sacs and trial and would you have a cost of how much is cost of additional or residual waste if it has seen an increase because i know speaking to some residents um they have accepted the fact that they can't put everything in the blue bags and they just go straight into the gray bins as well so is that has that what sort of cost are we looking at um for the increase as well from the gray so it was just going back to that part regarding the prior to that or we getting any revenue for the paper and card before the trial the difference in revenue returned for paper and card from the sac system is on average five times greater than the revenue returned for the paper and card within the blue bin mix that that that demonstrates the value of moving to that type of system in any case in terms of the overall financial model for that material that we're getting five times more revenue we're also not paying any processing costs in the way that we would have to meet a processing cost for that material within the mix so there's better value there and where we've got an increase in residual waste tonnages all of that is being managed still within the budget that have been set aside for this service so in terms of meeting our financial objectives through the service change and that that's been very effective in year one. Council along you had a supplementary? If incomes um I presume is it higher than expected or as expected um for the cardboard and paper income? The point that Penny's made that is that waste tonnages over the the last year in Brent and across London and this seems to be a national picture that's reflective of the the economic climate in in the UK at the moment is that waste tonnages in general have gone down sharper than expected so in that respect we're not meeting the profile that we might have anticipated at the outset of this contract nevertheless the point that I make is that you know we're generating improved income for the paper and card that we do collect we're not having to pay and processing costs for waste that doesn't exist in the first place and therefore we're able to operate our whole waste management collection system within the budget that's um that's set aside for it. Because we haven't got any finance data in this report so the extra income from cardboard and paper is offsetting losses on the rest of the contract is always that wrong? No that's accurate and in addition because that tonnage is less than anticipated our processing costs for for for that material is much less as well so there's a whole there's a whole whole whole picture to to be to be taken into account. Councillor SRI. So page 76 of appendix five outlines behaviour change plans with different audiences and I've got three questions on that. Firstly how much of that work has actually taken place? How effective has comms and engagement been so far in reaching different communities and what more could we do? And lastly do we have any information on the demographics less likely to recycle or the neighbourhoods less likely to recycle in order to undertake more targeted engagement? Hi I'll take this one. So in answer to your question first what has taken place? So currently for contamination we implied a new strategy at the sort of beginning of the year, January, February where we take a data led approach so the crude tag the bins you may have seen the tags we had them updated in line with the service change as well which of pictorial was well showing key contaminants and that's led by MURF showing us what are the key contaminants that they see regularly at the recycling facility. That then goes on to a Power BI report which we draw off every week and then the team of recycling officers they carry out visits to repeat offenders we have pictorial guides, letters, two stage letter as well for one that sort of gives them a further enforcement push and a visit as well with that. We do see repeat offenders often that is in shared sort of HMOs or communal properties where there's less responsibility which is a big target and priority for us. We're working with sort of again taking a data led approach looking at what Relundant have done, what's worked in other places, what we can then pilot and trial in there so we're doing different trials in communal areas at the moment that will inform larger campaign. We're also working on a bigger communications campaign which is going to be a new branded assets again concentrating on the key we've got five key contaminants that we've sort of highlighted and it's going to be looking at each at a time. Also bin stickers that are permanently there for those that are repeat offenders and when it comes to the data which you asked about demographics we do have so those tags that we have at the moment we're sort of putting them more into heat maps across the borough overlaying that with housing stock so we can look at trains there as well as we already know that there is a big correlation with lower deprivation and lower recycling rates and higher contamination rates but again that can also be with population size as well so we are also overlaying that so that we can be targeted in our strategy in our comms and future plans so that's what we're doing at the moment future plans we have a camera that is at the transfer station where the trucks tip the recycling so that we can see what rounds are performing worse we're also looking at the possibility of having AI technology on that to see what the composition of the loads are to then again give us more data on where is what products and what materials are higher but I mean it's always across the board it's always the same things really but then we can concentrate on what round to target same with communal as well so we can then also target those that are performing worse so yeah okay um no because I've just lost where I am councilor long land vlog licensing in wilston we've got selective license and been happening for a long time we've got land law license in across the borough that provides information about the size of the property and the number of tenants but what use are we making of that information because I know when you go round you can actually sit will work out oh they haven't got enough bins or they haven't got the right mix of bins you know at the moment we're door knocking because of the election so you know how many people live in a property so you know that they haven't got the right bin set up that information is going to be there for land law licensing but what use are we making of that information so we we have other systems we use accolade which gives us sort of licensee holder details and when it comes to how many people in the property we do often will carry out a site visit and then find that information out and work with managing agents on communal properties to understand their capacity needs and the landlord's licensing system that you state there it's something that we haven't actually looked into to use but if it is something that would be helpful to utilize and give us that data then definitely that's something we should look into it's probably not in a very usable format at the moment it's just this enormous PDF which is meant to be changing but it means you won't actually have to pay a site visit because you'll know how many people that property is licensed for and if it's got too many people in if you do go there then they landlord can be prosecuted but it's a simple way of saying how many live there what type of bins do they actually need because quite often you'll see one blue bin and three grey bins whereas we know that there could be a 50/50 split yeah it's definitely a useful tool if that it went once it's up and running and use a friendly then yeah absolutely yeah wouldn't make our lives in there. It's three wards we've had selective licensing for months you know so this and HMOs have been on there for years so I'm a bit of a loss to know why there's this lack of cooperation between the departments because we've been raising this since landlord licensing first started in the borough 10 years ago. I think Janice I'll take that a lot yeah I'll have a chat with Councillor night as well and we'll see what we can do with that yeah just because I would reiterate I'm concerned to hear you say oh we haven't thought to look at that before because it's been a recommendation of this committee since at least November 22 and probably before so it's I'm concerned that that recommendation hasn't percolated down to staff before because this is not new thinking on our front. Okay so I'm going to move us on to Councillor Frasier. Further to that point there's also the issue about waste management for those who live above shops. So I don't think it's you know less of a shot yeah and then another one is separate and different so that was education for people that live above shops because I didn't hear that mentioned. Yes so we do have a guide specifically for flats above shops along with a letter as well and when we have known issues again the team will carry out visits and re-educate and give them the information that they need. We're also looking into a larger program though with flats above shops and really understanding what drives those behaviours because often we see fly tipping and we assume that it's the flats above shops but with initial findings of finding that actually some of it does come from commercial as well as passers-by so it's all good and well educating and probably the information to flats above shops but if they're not the ones carrying out those behaviours then we're not solving the issue so what we're doing is looking at a bigger piece of research to really understand that and what solutions we can can do there. Okay um page 70 of appendix four talks about the bulky waste service outsource to any junk. Last time the committee raised concerns about the new eligibility eligibility criteria proposed in the bulky free waste collection policy that would mean the only residents claiming council tax support could access the service for free from April 2024 so the department committed to explore whether the eligible criteria could be expanded what happened with that? So Rushmi looked into it and we also benchmarked with other councils and she'll give us an up. So in terms of the eligibility at that time it was not just the council tax we added the housing benefit then come related job seekers allowance income people on pension credit and universal credit so all this system all these different benefits are in place and our customer service officers at the council are able to check internally all those benefits without having to wait for external agencies to provide us the proof and thanks and it has sped up our system so in addition to council tax these are the other benefits we are we look into when applying when be a customer's apply for the free bulky waste collections. Good glad to hear it and Councilor Giorgio we're going to move on to the street cleansing con. Sure thank you Chair so the last time the committee met to discuss this particular area we had major concerns about the move to intelligence led street cleaning as a council now because in it's an area that sadly has had to contend with never ending fly tipping or rubbish issues and I can say sadly that local streets have never been dirtier than they are right now and residents in my ward and neighbouring wards particularly in the Wembley area that's the area that I broadly look at and walk around and do you know regular walkabouts in it's just never looked as bad as it does look now so how effective has the intelligence led approach been so far do you think? Well we've now got a cleansing service that's properly tailored to the resources that are available to us so you know we've had to cut our cloth there's no question of that and the scheduled cleaning is much less frequent than it was previously in a good number of residential streets but we do have a much more flexible response service that's available to any location on any given day so long as we receive that information and we're able to act on the reports the neighbourhood manager will have a very key role in identifying those problem areas working with your residents and our contractors to identify where we might have a particular problem on any given day and direct that resource there before before before the end of the day you know the cleansing scores that we jointly undertake the scoring that we jointly undertake with Violi and in the same format that we've always done doesn't show any discernible downturns since we've moved to to the new contract so the figures actually have been able to establish that the cleansing standards are on a part with with previous but it does it does rely on on that reporting input but it does provide us with a much more flexible and responsive service than we did up previously for example in ramwood ramwood robe we're now able to deploy a cleansing resource on a Friday afternoon and a Monday morning to account for the busy busyness of the weekend in a way that was just not available to us previously in that major headache in that part of Brent is is now largely being resolved so that's a a good example of how a more responsive service does actually provide better value so thanks Chris I'm glad that you sort of tailored your answer to the fact that this is a more responsive service and that it relies heavily on reports being made and I'd suggest that the intelligence led approach actually works better for more affluent parts of the borough where residents are more likely to make use of the council's app fix my street to report issues of concern in their neighborhood can you confirm whether that would be the case well the the ramwood church end area is one area that we've been able to resolve in a much more effective way and with thanks to this this new service that that's not one of the more affluent parts of the borough it's one of the more deprived parts of the borough but has been given very special attention and unable to be has been able to be sorted because of this this different approach thing just to add our neighborhood managers our enforcement officers are all outside on the street and they're constantly looking to see where the hotspots are as well I think one one thing that would help the committee understand how intelligence led is working is whether you could provide us maybe with a heat map which clearly depicts where reports are coming from then the theory that I've just spoken about that you know it's the more affluent areas that probably are getting more attention and actually attention maybe when they don't need it as much as certain other areas where we know there have been historic issues with fly tipping and dumping so where so that's an information request the heat map to show exactly where reports are coming from because at the moment I do not believe that street intelligence led street cleaning is actually working on the ground just a kind of supplementary breakdown request to that as well which I think would be helpful because you made a point of saying that particular attention had been paid to the ramwood road church and area and if it's feasible I think it would be interesting to know you also made a point about neighborhood managers etc to get a breakdown of where the reports are actually coming from so when you do a heat map across the borough are we also see in those areas our reports coming from residents from councillors who I imagine in some areas are doing a lot of the reports from staff like the neighborhood managers like you see because again I think it would be really important to understand in what area you know is there also a discrepancy in certain areas where it's actually and also tell us about who's using who's using so I think right if you go on to fix my street I think all councillors should be logged into it you'd be able to see where the reports are coming from and what's happening you can get a break then sake is nodding away except for I mean I was going to make councillor miller do the fix my street but for example I do mine anonymously because no I don't want somebody looking at all the spots and you know I've had fun you know it's like no I do not need lots of other residents don't want their names like tagged on so if people do anonymous or we don't know who's doing it but as councillors we can see where the reports are coming from and where the hotspots are so then what I'm saying is if you get that information and break it down so we can see actually the so rather than expecting us to go through the entire map of data to give us some kind of qualitative information in regards to who is using the fix my street in terms of residents councillors staff professionals I think would be useful we can we can do that so I get a breakdown and my lead members brief we can we can certainly provide a breakdown and a map as you say of of the reports and and where they where they're coming from we can also provide a heat map of those areas that show that we've got poor for all cleansing standards or work standards fall down and our scoring will be able to demonstrate that that they will provide a very good matching overlay there's no there's no question of that the I guess the implication here or the suggestion here is that you know whatever there's a report we will respond in a positive way and that people might be making the most of that to to take advantage of a cleansing response we we will only have a action a response in a positive way if that street needs doing and there will be an inspection before any operation is applied anyway so we wouldn't be cleaning clean streets for for example I was expecting councillor Miller first and then I'll come to council background you can take all of the fix my street question well I mean it was just a it's just a supplementary on on why you've just asked to be honest I'll leave the rest but um I kind of find fix my street a bit like the um app but like more infuriating um if that makes any sense the user experience is it does the same things but the user experience it's not as good basically um I was wondering so we've got stats in here for the amount of reports that we've been getting um I've got two questions about that um so the first one is would it be possible for us to get stats on how many reports get started but not completed because you get the whole like confirmation email thing comes through and that'd be willing to bet that a lot of people don't fill those in and so does question one for you yeah yes we I mean we can we can we can certainly provide that um we've rushed me do you want to take this because there's a there's a reason why those are being logged in that way so um in the report we provided a table for fix my street and in that if you look at the bottom there are the number of completed jobs out of 10,000 we managed to complete 8,000 of them and there's a reason when at the start of the fix my street when this was brought in place it was fit for purpose we understand in terms of the user experience and the journey uh we are aware of that and we are in uh it has done one year and we have um kind of identified some of the things that we are in the process of reviewing the fix my street user app on the journey that the users have to make and in terms of the reports uh when a report is logged in uh message and a status goes to the customer whoever has logged the report in terms of what the status is it will the status will show completed if the contractor or whoever is dealing with it has managed to uh complete that report it will show complete wherever reports are being transferred to another service area or referred to another department or anything that's where the reports might say not completed but they have been transferred over to another service area to deal with it and that's where that 2,000 lakhs uh the 2,000 is not completed i mean um yeah i mean i was i was just about to ask about that because that's one of the one of the supplementary questions that comes up about that um so are we looking at doing a single uh a single review for fix my street and the various kind of user issues i've taken nod from Chris there yeah it's not just something that's like a rolling program of the tweak here and there but we are actually gonna you know list them all out and do a holistic you know what the the app itself was was deemed sort of fit for purpose at the outset but you know circumstances change and users preference change over time and the issues that we need to address through the app of have changed and and do change all the time and it's important that we make a commitment to a regular review around that system and its usefulness and and we're and we're about to embark embark on that so you know we'd welcome any feedback from yourself and fellow cancers as to and the the usefulness of it and any user issues that need to be addressed and we can take that as a recommendation time so one final bit on this um so it seems only periodically available but there's obviously like a league table of people to get fined for fly tipping and how many fines local authorities give out and stuff um when i have been able to check that data Brenner's been consistently near the top which i've always seen as bad news but then there's the stat for us that's come this year of us being you know the the worst borough basically in terms of fly tips that get recorded to us in the first place doesn't necessarily mean that they're at the most by the way but it you know it means the most of getting reported to us which are not quite the same thing um but i wondered like is there something in there about um is it actually easier for people to report here than it is elsewhere is that part of why this statistic yeah that's one of the reasons back that relationship between the reports and the fines when we get more reports in do we make sure the defined number is going to put effort into that is that something that we'll look at that is uh one of the reasons the reporting has been pretty good in Brent um it's also how different boroughs collect the data and put them together and compile them so we've been reviewing that as well i've had several meetings with the officers we've got some more coming up and this is so that we revamped all of that where you revamped the wanted campaign and we're looking at in getting extra um more enforcement officers as well um to help all those numbers as well um i can i'm happy to volunteer to be one of your test subjects on fix my streets because if you can get me to use it properly i think we'll be you'll be well on the way to getting most residents to use it properly so okay parking enforcement oh sorry councilor background i skipped over you can i just say that um personally um fix my street i find it quite useful um the the heat maps you can per ward um find whatever area so it's if it's a flight if it is later etc you can actually find it quite well so and the reports are quite useful so um personally i think it's um a step forward from what we had previously yeah it's not quite an app it's web based so it's it's obviously you have to get used to it um the only thing i would like to follow up on is when we get um the effects that are bought and it's you get sort of repeat bookings i know they can be reported as duplicates but it would be good if we can get office to spend a bit more time and closing out some of the open defects are sometimes left but we know they have been closed so if we can at least focus on getting the officers to make sure they're closing off the defects um but other than that fix my street and the reporting mechanism and the tools that you've got um i think is obviously a step forward thanks okay thanks uh thanks council acram um if i move us on to councilor patel thank you chair uh my question is regarding apatix one outlining services improvements as a result of new contracts in relation to parking for enforcements it mentions that there there was an introduction of a new enforcement plan for the borough uh ensuring that areas where there were higher number of controversies are visited more frequently uh my question is what impact impact has this had on the number of pcans issued and on what won't and on income on this domain we know that the number of pcans issued are exposimately 180-2000 in 2022-23 and it is estimated that the number is set to increase for for 20-23-2094-2220-2220 now we all know that income from these pcans uh provide the much-needed freedom pass pay for the much-needed freedom pass so can we have some comments on thank you for your question um okay so we we have done a lot of work around you know developing a more fit-for-purpose enforcement plan in the borough um focusing on areas where there's high numbers of consequences but also making sure that we've got cover in cpc's at the right time as well now that that enforcement plan is is reviewed every month and it's continuing to evolve to make sure we are sort of tackling the worst areas of the borough what that what that's meant is that we have increased the number of enforcement hours from around eight thousand um a month to around nine thousand a month um but those have been productive hours so in terms of of the the total amount that we're going to be getting into the parking account this year you know obviously it's year-end but the you know the invitation is that this will it will be just above 26 million about 26.1 million that's not just from pcans that's some suspensions time display permits um debt recovery as well and the previous year 22 23 it was around 22 million so we're looking you know just short of a 20% increase my my just next question is about regarding the hours nsl go and visit high streets we got example kingsby road most of the pc cars park illegally either on the cycle lanes or on the footpaths is after six o'clock in the evening where people are going and visiting restaurants uh what are what are we doing about you know making sure that uh uh staff or nsl staff enforcement staff are available to issue uh pcans uh after six o'clock when most of the you know uh enforcement is required okay so so we we do we do have um quite late enforcement during the week and kingsbury town center is known to us and it's probably one of the most in four streets in the borough um we've got a regular attendance there we also have continue to have late night enforcement friday into the early hours of saturday um and in saturday into the early hours of sunday so we are aware of of certain issues sort of where there's a good nighttime economy but people are parking obstructively and dangerously quite often and we are sort of targeting those areas so so there is sort of regular enforcement um kingsbury you mentioned we were also around sundays as well where there isn't restrictions and we're also sending enforcement there were on sundays because although there's no sort of restrictions in terms of um you know paying for parking we know that there's more with regular parking taking place so that that continues to sort what happened i'm just going to flag we have less than 20 minutes left um council meloy yeah so how does the nsl contract work they get a dibs on each penalty charge notice that they issue do they no um what we i mean we we have expectations around around outputs um they don't get any particular payment for any pcan issued it's not done that way but we we know that we expect we expect them to work with us and make sure that we have a certain amount of of outputs per hour and that tells us that they're enforcing the right places we also do on street checks to check sort of areas of compliance so we we have our client officers going out just to check what's happening so they're not issuing tickets but they're checking compliance as well so that's the way we sort of monitor to make sure that nsl are actually performing so they're paid for our work basically yeah yeah we we we would pay we would pay for the number of civil enforcement officers and the hours that they're doing and we get reports on how productive those hours are which gives us an indication of whether they're in the right place as well because giving them an interest in each penalty charge notice would solve the kind of problem like Chancellor Patel's talking about you know being there interested to get as many down there but i think there's legal constraints around around sort of motivating um issuing of pcans smart i didn't realize how uh i do what a big revenue spinner it was actually no so that nine million is our like profit is it after we paid the contract so yeah so so in terms of in terms of the the surplus um you know we were expecting obviously there's costs to the contract you know there were certain things in the contract where there are fixed costs but there's there's also variable costs including the amount deployed hours we pay for as well so whilst the the cost you know the the income goes up because we we're more active we we're more efficient we're issuing more pcans and hopefully getting better compliance um in certain areas you know the costs also go up but you know there is usually a surplus you know usually there is always a surplus in the um in the parking account um we're still working through the figures at year end but you know we're expecting it to be the sort of north of 14.6 million at this point in time and the surplus does get allocated towards the freedom passes and also towards highway improvements maintenance right a lot of money you know it's one little quick one i noticed that they do a lot on uh the nsl do a lot of neighboring boroughs because the teams work across the borders i mean it's relevant in Cuba in here because they do Camden and Brent um yes they they got they got Camden they got Westminster you're quite right they got quite a lot of boroughs boroughs in London which they tend to have a resource that's that's dedicated but people can move around within nsl's business and we've recently got a supervisor from another contract um to help uh on the Brent contract but she's now assigned to the Brent contract and there isn't regular sort of inter you know interchangeability between the contracts i think councilor molloy was probably more thinking like if you're on that side of the road and you see that side of the road it would be advantageous to us if somebody could do both sides of the road because we have so much crossover in kelvin that side of the road is Westminster this side of the road is Brent that side of the road is Camden can one person be like okay um so you know we would need to have a sort of reciprocal arrangement i mean that that's possible you know but obviously the traffic orders and everything else that's kind of a legal illegal agreement between us and the neighbouring borough okay um right uh council a long supplementary question but we've less than 15 minutes i'm glad we're talking about different boroughs because the practice in i think Westminster and others is um when a PCN's issued once the warden has actually printed it out if the driver drives off it can still be posted to the home address whereas in Brent we've got to physically put that um notice on the car am i correcting that and why are we taking longer to issue tickets in Brent compared to the Westminster's and uh Camden's okay so so you know boroughs will use the London Council's um code of practice for enforcement and there's different contraventions with different observation periods so i think what what probably happens a lot of the time when where there's an observation period and the civil officer is present you know people will drive off but you know you can issue a PCN by sticking out the window handing it to the person that's has the vehicle or by post you know it doesn't generally tend to be by post because it's usually an observation period and people usually taking photographs but it is possible it is something that that um can be done i mean most of the postal postal PCN's will of course be for sort of moving traffic contraventions and CCTV um but i'm not aware of how much of a particular issue that that is i would have to look into to see whether that's that's something that's a bit of a problem with in itself it's an issue for those who park on the double yellows and the zigzag lines in various high roads because of the officer he's got he's done all the times he's waited he's issued the ticket and they come out the shop and they drive off in Westminster because he's got the registration number we post it to the registration to home address um and they learn the lesson they know that if they park on those exact lines they're going to get a ticket in the future now they know they've got longer to wait in wisdom because they're not going to get the ticket the quieters quickly you know so this will get the traffic moving quickly they won't have so many slack risks so why are we not being as diligent in issuing a ticket that's the contraventions being proven why aren't we issuing the ticket just because the driver drives off before it can be put on his windscreen yeah council about you nearly made it nearly the whole meeting without speaking no there's there's less than 15 minutes left yeah i was i was i was just going to say something right we also have to have the the contract the relationship with dvla in order to make sure that we can access that data as well right so so if we don't have that access from dvla right then this becomes harder for the the operatives right for them then to get that data in order to send the PCM on forward i believe i think it sounds like maybe it's a recommendation for the end which is to look at maybe to do it as some small data comparison on how much post how many postal PCMs issued by other boroughs if we're significantly behind that think about what and then are they making better use of dvla information than we are i think that's possibly how we move it forward rather than continuing to have the same conversation with minutes left of the meeting yeah um how does this all take that away and looking looking to it um you know it's quite right we would have to process it and get a certain amount of information on the handheld in order to be able to issue a ticket but i'm looking to whether there are any that are abandoned and what we can do around that just got to say nsl raised it with me they're doing it in the other boroughs why not bring counselor buck thank you very much uh sandy a couple more questions for yourself um i'll try making sure um in appendix one it mentions that we had given the contract for cashless parking services to pay by phone then we took um decision was made to then take that back and give it to ringo could you elaborate if possible if you're allowed to on that and the second second question is also in relation to the parking app um it mentions about the the permits and um the residents have the options of receiving confirmation of bookings and reminders when their permits will expire and then it says residents and business permit holders receive reminder emails 14 and seven days in advance what's the difference between the two are you talking about um uh short-term stay parking where you get the booking reminders via text and are you talking about permits um for residents um in regard to that so yeah that's the two okay if i take the second one first um so so the the first you know the first um sentence around an option to to receive um confirmation um notices and reminders that relates to the resident visitor sessions and the the pay by phone on street so you could you know there's an option to to to opt in for those SMS SMS messages you know the cost 10p um the second bit is more around um the second bit is around 14 and seven days is is is is an email that's to account holders and that's free of charge would that be four things like the Wembley event day your any any any kind of repair me so you you would receive a seven and 14 days to the registered email address should that's correct yeah that should happen and then going back to your first question around around the decision around the cash is parking and permit contract so um that related to a a challenge um around the pricing book that was issued with the tender and what what happened was somehow the the the model didn't actually calculate the number so it related to the how mobilization would be treated um as i recall so even though the narrative was very very clear and it was arguable it did um introduce a degree of interpretation and therefore we had a meeting around around whether you know what what potentially would happen if there was a challenge and that was that meeting with senior officers council's legal team of procurement and you know it was decided on balance that the risk around the delays and the cost it wasn't worth it so therefore that that was that sort of um with the basis of the decision to re-secure just to confirm Ringo I've got it for five years now have they four years four years thank you okay i'm i'm going to skip over to the grounds maintenance uh contract on my own um so the grounds maintenance contact talks about the um also talks about the the new contractor continental landscapes how long have we had the contract with them now it will come up to a year in about august uptember time okay so i'm i'm going to specifically use one case example that i'm aware for um so the the report states that there has been um positive feedback from teams using sports pitches um and uh that there's there's been improvement in things like grass cutting and line drawings i'm going to highlight particularly in regards to the east lane pitch i think um grass cuttings and the straightness of lines are really minor because actually that pitch has been unsafe to play on for over three years and um in terms of so last wednesday when i went down there and had a look the pile of soil which is meant to be being used to fill in some of the holes and re-layer it is still there and i've the last i think the time one of the other times i photographed it last august i photographed it last may um so clearly like the work has not been delivered on that site so in every year the teams who um play on that pitch are promised by the next season they're going to be able to play it's now april it's the season started for the gala football team last week once again it's yet another year it's not safe to play on i think the other issue is is if you went down and had a look at the pitch just from the outside it would look like oh okay the grass is growing over but the minute you walk on to the pitch what you have to do is very very quick before you start finding the holes that are underneath the grass um and i've got numerous fact you can see my foot like you know completely down and think it's dane it's the the reason it's not able to see it is because it would be dangerous to play on you'd break your ankle um given that that's just you know one case example i can point to of the numerous sports pitches um in the borough i think the committee needs to see some actual qualitative and quantitative data on this on this uh this statement in the report that um the quality has much improved the sites are all now ready to use and that the feedback from teams is all positive because very quickly like that's one very quickly i can see where it's that's not the case um so i would like some pushback on on the continental contract and and some clarity on how we're monitoring that and who we're taking that feedback from and are we also getting direct feedback from the sports teams that have to use it and pay to use these pitches um because i don't like to turn scrutiny into casework specific things outside of this meeting i think it would also be useful to put specific time to put a specific action plan in place for this particular pitch because after four years i think you know we've done enough of the oh you know when we've talked about this before oh well you know the only going to look at this oh well now we're going to get a specialist contractor now we have a specialist contract still no change so i think a i want to know about contract monitoring but outside of this meeting i'd also like to discuss a point of contact and an action plan specifically for the east lane site yes we can certainly look into the circumstances there and and report back and provide you with the information you need and in current in terms of how it's currently been monitored how are we getting this feedback that everything's a okay uh well in you know there is close contact obviously with the with the sports clubs that make use of the sports pitches and also for our larger parks there's a very close relationship with the friends of groups who take an active participation in you know the stewardship of those sites and working with the contractors even without um the you know the involvement of our council officers there'll be a direct relationship there and that seems to be working in the right way but if there are sites that you feel that being let down the press um but just to come in for example so uh Liz invited me to meet meet with the friends of Gladstone and they were really complimentary about continental in comparison to what we only had done for them before fabulous thanks uh group of so i'm glad it's working some places so we'd like to make sure that that then is applicable across the other sites as well um not we might actually make it for once okay does anyone have any questions about the highways maintenance contract and pavement's pothole provision go for a council along could you do it in less than four minutes just being flippant but sometimes you wonder how bad does the pavement actually be before it actually qualifies for a repair um i know you know chip hazards come into it but you you do the fix my streets and it comes back doesn't meet our criteria i was thinking did someone have to fall over on the on wilston high road for this particular bit it's got the cars driven all over it's broken up and yesterday it said doesn't meet the criteria is there an escalation process i don't want to you know get everyone doing this but how do we escalate really bad bits of pavement which are only a small part to actually get them to be looked at properly um if you do have concerns with the inspection and decision outcome you can come directly to me um and i'll review and have a look at it um that's a very short and quick answer depending on where the defect is on the highway depends on the risk and the probability of somebody tripping on it or a vehicle going into it and that bays into the scoring when we do um inspect defects and categorize them there'd be categorizes high medium or low now we can repair all high priority defects and we put those orders through within for repair within seven days of inspection the funding that we have left enables us to do about 35 percent of medium priority defects so the email that you may get is not that we're not doing it but we have to look into it further and do an additional assessment because there's seven sixty five sixty sixty five percent of defects that we know are there that we've inspected but we can't afford to repair okay literally seconds okay um i think the important thing there is as councilor long said if something could be circulated um to um counselors in regards to things that are particularly flagged and then as you said what our time scales is off for things that can't that we literally don't have the money to to repair um three on that tony sent something out last week around reaction maintenance thanks okay i thought i was gonna do it in in two minutes but i'm gonna ask for a five-minute extension everyone okay with a five-minute extension but look okay so um because i need to do recommendations um so we have recommendations around um i think actually what would be helpful as an information request is if we can get the numbers of um reported payments files etc that we are not actioning because we literally don't have the money to do so i think that would be really really helpful that's all in the briefing i sent out last week perfect tony this is what i like to see already prepared because i think that's important for us to understand what we're not able to meet in our um budgets i realized as well there was a recommendation from the last paper i forgot to add to it which was um for there to be training sessions for counselors or social value and viability coming back to this one though what recommendations have we had for this evening on the contracts items yeah go for a cast back can i just follow back what i mentioned regarding fix my street um and officers not closing out maybe put something in place to make sure that officers are reviewing fix my free fix my street defects and closing them out in a timely manner not say three months after it's being closed out so if that can be reviewed and we can look into making sure that we have a time scale or when the defects are actually closed out through fix my street yeah for specifically for the highway and ones yes we can we can review that i know that we've had quite a few lighting ones that were left open we only have one officer dealing with all of those cases so there was a backlog that built up and we have them do in other works rather than closing them down at the time so we're trying to prioritize what our workflows are and what the priorities were for that time but yes i do take it on board officers when the job's been inspected and done they should be able to close it down or or at least take it to the next stage it may be as i said a further review no action taken or or inform you that the the repair will go forward if that uh recommendation council and will i i just wonder if it'd be worth considering rent council incentivizing the nsl employees to issue more pc n's than i've done it's given a div on each one and then bonuses all round we also had a record we had the recommendation that sandals already agreed to in regards to looking at using div la data we and i think those are the main yeah to send pc n's to home addresses a recommendation from council and mitchell uh these ones are already made but weren't in your wrap up there was a one around fix my street sort of ui um and there was also one around the um extension of the the recycling the plastic bins for paper and card the trial for that and adding on to that so much we covered it in the discussion the possibility of that being something that residents would pay for okay i'm seeing a green faces confused okay perfect okay what i would also in my last two seconds i would like to say um yeah thank you for bringing the the seven different contracts forward this evening i think the issue is the um it's very very difficult to cover so many contracts in one meeting and also as we said it's you know most of them haven't eaten and been in place for a year so i suspect we will be seeing you probably in six months uh time in some format in this committee to find out more about what's happening with those contracts but thank you for your time i really appreciate it and to the rest of the committee once again thank you sir uh calf few information requests no no okay it's one on um sorry cast all the all the parts that are that within the borough go out to councilors and and and the schedules for any works there and also preventative measures being taken with regard to the littering in parks thank you very much kah we will follow up on that for outside of the meeting and that's always such a pleasure to have you so there's there is no outstanding items on our scrutiny work program because this is our last meeting of the municipal year once again thank you to all for your hard work do i see any other business no i do not thank you everyone we almost after two years made it to the end of a meeting but we still we only ran three minutes over this time yeah thank you chair yeah thank you for the thank you for the uh past term chair um don't know whether you're planning on re-running again we won't we won't try and draw you out but um yeah please do yeah please you you you [BLANK_AUDIO]