Transcript

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and those in the chamber and those on Zoom and those of you watching this at home. This is the housing committee and we should have a good evening I'm hoping. Can I just reiterate my earlier urging of can you make sure your mobile phones are either switched off or muted please so we don't get any interruptions. Thank you. We've got do we have any apologies for absence. Yes we've received apologies from Councillor Sharp and Councillor Case who is substituted by Councillor Crispa. Thank you. Any declarations of interest out there please. Thank you. So we now need to approve the minutes of the meeting held on the 19th of March. Can I approve those as a true and accurate record. Is that agreed. Any against. Thank you. And the meeting on the 23rd of May. Can I approve those please. Is that agreed. OK. Give me a second. Do I have anything you want me to sign. No. Talk amongst yourselves. I believe we don't have any standing order 30 questions. Is that correct. So this goes into item 6 our first substantive item and Carol Snowden will take us through the sea cadets planning application. Carol. Thank you chair. In March 2023 committee approved a budget of fifty thousand pounds for the appointment of consultants to work up a planning proposal to the point of pre-application advice and a public consultation for the sea cadet site in Caterham. Since then we have appointed an employees agent architect and other consultants such as an ecologist highways and energy consultants and an arbor culturalist. We have a pre-application advice meeting booked in for early July and have started making plans for the public consultation for late July. The approved budget of fifty thousand pounds has nearly all been committed and an increase in budget is required for the additional consultants required in the next phase and for the planning application fees. In February a bid was made to the Brownfield land release fund for grant funding of two hundred fifty thousand pounds to cover the remediation of the contamination on the site demolition of the buildings on the site and some other associated works. We will hear in late summer or early autumn whether we have been successful or not. The time scales for the BLRF are tight and if we do not succeed it sorry if we do succeed in securing grant we will need to be in contract for the funded works by the end of March 2025. It makes financial sense for this contract to be the full contract for both the demolition and the remediation of the land and the construction of the houses. Because of this time scale we need to split a planning application in summer so that it can be determined in time. An approval for a full budget will be brought to committee in autumn after we have learnt whether we have been successful with the BLRF bid and when we will be able to get a thermal works cost estimate for the construction of the new homes as the design will be finalised. I am happy to take any questions. Any questions? Is that all clear? Everybody is happy with that? Thank you. So that means we look at the recommendations at the bottom of page 15 and the top of page 16. Is that agreed? Any against? Excellent that is passed. Thank you. So that brings us on to Q4 key performance indicators and Mr Devon Shear will take us through those. Thank you Chairman. Good evening members. Good to see you all. This report sets out the 2023/24 Q4 performance against the key performance indicators for this committee. Members will note the four key performance indicators that were not met at the end of Q4 as detailed on pages 30 and 31 of your papers. Narratives have been provided in Appendix A outlining the reasons for this. This report also presents the committee's risk register and the current mitigations in Appendix B. Appendix C provides members with an update on the council house building programme and Appendix D sets out the performance indicators for 2024/25 monitoring indicators and the statutory tenancy satisfaction measures that we will be collecting this year. The recommendation for this report can be found on page 29 of your papers. Happy to take questions. I've got a couple so I'm going to jump in first. One is on page 36 I believe average cost oh no that's rubbish. Here we are page 35 number of households living in temporary accommodation. It's just we just record it as households and I can hear one particular Councillor asking a question about this at full council already. How many people are involved in that because a household can be anything from one person on his own to a family of six. Can you give me some indication? Thank you Chairman. So I don't have specific figures for this evening but I can get them circulated. Out of the households that we have in temporary accommodation the large majority of them are family sized households so they will have at least one child. There are only three single persons or single person households in temporary accommodation at the moment. We have seen an increase in larger households requiring temporary accommodation and that's why we've secured three three bedroom properties through the local authority housing fund funding that we was provided last year. As I said Chairman I'm happy to circulate specific figures to the committee afterwards. Thank you I'd appreciate that. My other question is on page 52 item 4.2 it refers to the number of affordable homes being negotiated with developers and there's a few sites mentioned there and the one I have most knowledge of is the one that's Hilbury Road at Warlingham which talks about 45 affordable units and I believe it should be 45% and as with the council has approved 150 units that's a whole lot more than 45 units. Yes you're absolutely right that's my error so instead of 45 units it's 45% which I believe is 67 affordable units. Is that the only one of those where there is an error? Yes I believe so. Thank you okay Councillor Gaffney. Thank you very much chair just a couple of really minor points. The risks and status update page 44 H5 it says revised operating model in place in request for committee approval to move to a cut and drop service has been submitted with the March committee papers. That was agreed as far as I remember at the March meeting so probably needs to just be updated and H8 does not have a risk rating so I suppose it should have a yes or no just for clarity sake please. Thank you. Thank you Councillor Gaffney. So you're correct in the narrative for the grounds maintenance so I can provide you an update for that now. So members will be aware that last year the grounds maintenance regime was under significant pressure due to weather resourcing etc and there was significant delays in our ability to maintain grounds maintenance and grounds and open spaces on our housing sites. To resolve that this year this committee resolved that the service move to a cut and drop or a cut and let fly service cut and mulch whatever you want to call it. Anything other than let fly? Well there we go and that was approved in March as I said. That has started although there has been issues again with weather and there has also been issues again with breakdown of machinery so today I was informed that both of our ride on tractors have gone into the workshop. The service is managed by the head of environment and he and myself have been working together to resolve this issue and have acquired the services of contractors to come and help us catch up on the sites that we have fallen behind on so hopefully by the end of this week we would have caught up on all the sites and we were in the process of procuring some additional machinery to help us move forward. In terms of H8 you are correct also that is whether it should be on the corporate risk register or not. It is on the committee risk register currently. It is not currently on the corporate risk register. In terms of a rating it has a rating of 12 currently. I believe that is one. Unless I am confusing matters. Councillor Gaffney. It is just in the last section where it has a yes or no. It is on corporate risk register. It just doesn't have yes or no in there. So it is just a matter of putting yes or no in there just for clarity sake. It is a typo. My apologies it should be no. It is not on the corporate risk register currently. Okay anyone else got any questions or observations? Councillor Klein. Thank you chair. As you know there is temporary accommodation as in hostels which are currently located in Whiteleaf. There are two. Are there any plans to build long term any further hostels in Tandridge because currently we are using the travel lodge which appears to be the only hotel that the council have got a contract with at the moment. I am just wondering if we are going to build any more hostels across Tandridge. It is one of those things that has come. I think the answer is we are actually buying something is that correct? Thank you Councillor Klein. So we are actually in the process of considering our options around more additional temporary accommodation through the local authority housing fund. Which will negate the need for hostel accommodation and bed and breakfast. Bed and breakfast travel lodge isn't the only hotel we use. We use a number of them where they have availability. Both inside and out of the district. Travel lodge is the easiest to get to from here hence the reason why we use that more frequently. So myself, David Gray and Carol and Nicola from development have considered the options in terms of any development going forward. Now we are aware that there is a need to demolish or redevelop some of our existing temporary accommodation. So that plan is in place and we are aware that we also need to replace that existing accommodation for TA units as well. So there are plans set out to do it. The number of TA will increase both through the LAF and our own development. How we manage to do that short term and how we manage that will purely depend on the demand that comes in for that. But in the interim it will mainly be bed and breakfast use unless we have space in our existing hostel in Whiteleaf. Am I wrong that we were looking at using some of the money the government is giving us for Afghan refugees etc to buy a larger house for temporary accommodation? Yes, so we have got two schemes. We have got the local authority housing fund and we have also got the refugee schemes. So the refugee schemes will be specifically for that cohort of individuals. That stock or that unit will remain in our housing stock long term. So we will be able to use that longer term for larger accommodation for those off our housing register. Similarly to that that we purchased through local authority housing fund as well. But one of the things that the government was saying was we could use it for temporary accommodation. If there is no requirement for us to use it for the refugee scheme yes. Did you want to come back at all council Klein? Anybody else? No, right okay. Well that brings us to the recommendations on page 29. At the bottom A and B. Are those agreed? Any against? Thank you. So we move on to item 8 the budget out turn and this will be led off by Rona. Thank you chair. Good evening members. I would like to take you to page 65 of the report. This is showing you the housing general fund out turn for the financial year March 24. As you will see we originally had a budget of 713. So total budget for housing general fund was 713,000. The actual out turn for the financial year was 668,000. So we had a small under spend of 45,000. The under spend is explained underneath in the narrative. Which I won't go through just now. The actual under spend was just small bits and pieces. It wasn't any in particular. I will take you on to page 66. Within the budget we had to achieve some savings. 210,000. Those savings were 100% achieved in the financial year. Again there is some description as to what those savings were. You can read them for yourself I'm sure. I was going to take you then on to page 68 which is the housing revenue account. The housing revenue account as I'm sure you now all know always has a net no budget. So basically it balances to nothing. The actual under spend within the budget against the actual was a 1.7 or 1.8 million pounds under spend. That was a lot to do with depreciation. Depreciation was less than actually budgeted. That again was driven by capital schemes not spending as much as they were anticipated to do in the budget. So a lot of that actual saving came from depreciation. All of that money gets recycled back into the HRA fund. It is ring fence fund and does not go into the general fund so all of that will be used to build houses or to finance new build houses or development. Again there is a saving tracker for the housing revenue account. 150,000. 150,000 was achieved in the year. Then page 70 we are showing the capital programme for the housing general fund. There are two schemes for the housing general fund to do social housing grants and also disabled facility grants. The actual spend in the year was on the budget at 503,000. So budget was achieved. Page 71 housing revenue account. We actually had a budget in 23, 24, 26 million. We actually had an out turn or a spend of 13.7 million. So we underspent with 2.4 million. That 2.4 million is called slippage and we are considering carrying that forward into the next financial year. However it won't be used in the general fund. It will be still ring fenced and kept within the actual HRA. I am happy to take any questions anyone has on the report. Thank you. Any questions? Ah yes, Councillor Lockwood. Thanks for letting me speak. I am not on this committee so thank you chair. Just a quick question about Medo's side. I noticed that you have a slippage in the underspend for Medo's side and in your last meeting. So the underspend is mentioned on page 65. And in your previous meeting you agreed the reduction in the rent increase for Medo's size pitches. Are there going to be any implications going forward on the spending for the refurbishments and maintenance work that is needed on Medo's side? Obviously I have a vested interest as it is in my ward. Mr de Vincer. Thank you chairman. Thank you Councillor Lockwood. The short answer is no. So we are committed to maintaining the site and committed to carrying out the repairs that we said that we would. There is work planned in for this year around car park consultation and also that much anticipated tree work that has been outstanding for some time. We are due to be having a new tree officer starting, the long awaited tree officer, at the end of July. So hopefully that will be able to help. But we are in contact with our tree contractors. Currently there is an issue with making arrangements to access the back of Medo's side with the landowner behind. So perhaps Councillor Lockwood you might be able to assist with that. I would be more than happy to do that because I do know most of the landowner is around the back there. Any other questions? Yes, Councillor Damacy. It is just an observation and I don't know whether I heard correctly. Just talking on the housing revenue account about the underspend. I think we have only drawn attention to the fact that depreciation had been less than anticipated there. But I thought looking at the numbers here that in fact the primary contributor to that were underspend on energy costs in particular electricity and gas which I thought had been due to as I understood from previous explanations that expectations with regard to how high energy costs were going to go were fortunately a little overcooked if I may say that. So we managed to come in lower. So that is just to point out I suppose or just to highlight presumably that is a one off. This isn't something that is likely to be working to our benefit going forward. It was a one off sort of accounting event last year. Am I right in that respect? So the actual electric and gas as you point out has had a saving of 430,000 in the HRA accounts. But the biggest actual item was the depreciation and that is why I actually mentioned that which was about a million pounds. So the electric and gas as you pointed out we were slightly cautious with our budgeting to say we over basically increased the budget to too much. So there was actually a 430,000 saving against budget on that particular line. The HRA does use a lot of electric and gas. They are one of the biggest I think they are the biggest in the council. So that has the biggest swing when we have over increased that. The actual budget for 24/25. I am trying to think but I think it is still in there for 24/25. But I don't know where the electric and gas is going to go. Potentially we might need a little bit of that because I think we are all still suffering slightly from that as householders. So there might well be a little bit of when we actually come to the out turn next year there might well be some savings coming through from that too. Any other questions or observations? I just wanted to add to that because the assets and FM team which I manage is responsible for energy procurement. We procure our energy through a broker and they forecast trends for us and they buy in bulk for a number of clients when the market suits. So we are able to take advantage of dips in prices through that mechanism. When we set the 23/24 budget they were advising us that energy costs would double over the 22/23 amount. And I think there was a huge amount of uncertainty there with events in the Ukraine and the Middle East. That increase didn't come to fruition and that has caused the underspend. And for those of you on strategy and resources committee you will see a similar underspend in the general fund for the non-housing assets. And we are in the process of working with our energy broker to understand where that might go for the 24/25 budget. But I would expect some of that inflation to help us contribute towards savings in future years. I think it is fair to say the world is still volatile and energy costs are volatile as well. Anybody else got any questions or observations? In which case can we go to the recommendation on page 57 which is basically to note the report. Is that agreed? Any against? Then that is carried. Right. Okay. This brings us to item 9 where we are considering passing the resolution to exclude the press and public. Those of you on Zoom will remain but the members of the public will have the broadcast switched off. But we have to decide if we want to do it or not yet. So does anybody wish to discuss it? In which case are you agreed that we pass the resolution to exclude the press and public? Is that agreed? Any against? In that case that is agreed. Thank you for watching. Those of you who are watching at home and we will turn your broadcast off. Thank you very much. [end of transcript] [BLANK_AUDIO]