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Finance and Economic Overview and Scrutiny Committee - Wednesday, 8th May, 2024 2.00 pm
May 8, 2024 View on council website Watch video of meetingTranscript
Yes, I do. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. It's nice to see everybody again. It seems such a long time since we were here. Welcome to this five months in the economic overview and scrutiny committee. I'm Councillor Bridget Lay and we'll be chairing the meeting today. To my right is Democratic Services Officer Amy Pride. Can I remind members that the meeting is being recorded and can also be watched as a livestream or later via the SKDC webcast. It would be appreciated if you could switch your mobile phones to silent, please. There is no scheduled prior drill today, so if we hear the alarm, please make your way to the nearest exit to the assembly point at the front of the building. If you wish to ask a question, can I ask that you please raise your hand? Thank you. We have a couple of members that are stuck on the A1, apparently there's an accident. So I would like to adjourn until quarter past two to allow those members to arrive if that's okay with everybody. Okay, so we will start again at quarter past two. Thank you. Okay, thank you all for that. So we are recording now. Do we have any public speakers, Amy, please? Thank you, Madam Chair, and we haven't got any public speakers today. Thank you. And do we have apologies for absence, please? Thank you. We've received apologies from Councillors, Lee Stepto, Gloria Johnson, and Nick Robbins, and Councillor Mark Whittington is substituting for Councillor Gloria Johnson. Councillor Virginia Moran is substituting for Councillor Lee Stepto, and Councillor Graham Gill is substituting for Nick Robbins, and just to note that Councillor McSoy is on his way, but he's not quite here yet. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, if any members who have an interest to declare, then please do so, or you can do this at any time during the meeting also. So we have the minutes from the previous meetings on the 15th of January and the 20th of February. If we can take a vote on accepting those, please? Do I have a proposal? Robert, Lednam, thank you, and a seconder. Return, thank you. All those in favour? Thank you. Did we have anybody against? None, and anybody abstaining, please? One, just two. Thank you. Do we have any announcements or updates from the Leader, or we haven't got the Deputy here today, can we? Councillor Graham? Are you coming up to the front? I'll come out to the front shot. Thank you. Thank you. You're going to think I've got a big announcement now. I haven't got a big announcement. Other than to say that your committee requested some more information about the Council Tax Scheme for Veterans Feasibility, that has been delayed due to a staffing issue. It's nothing sinister, and we wish to get well soon. We are fully expected to be in a forthcoming meeting. The second thing is, if anybody is watching and doesn't stay to the end of this meeting online, please note that the economic development strategy is now online, live for consultation, and we welcome all your feedback, whoever you are, particularly if you're something to do with the South of Stephen. That's all I've got to report. Chair? Thank you. Sorry, I missed a point. The updates from the previous meetings, all actions are complete, so I'm sure everybody had a copy of all the details that you needed. Sorry about that. My mistake. Thank you. Item 7 is the maintenance strategy. Actually, are you doing the update on that? Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I'm pleased to introduce the report on the maintenance strategy. This is a new thing, a maintenance strategy for corporate property assets. One of the reasons why our properties are in such a poor or have some of them have been in such a poor state of repair, including leisure centres, car parks and other buildings, is because we have had no maintenance strategy in place. Following a condition survey of our properties, which is almost complete, I believe, we are now in a state to have an introductory corporate management strategy, sorry, corporate maintenance strategy, long overdue, very welcome. The bad news is it's going to tell us that our buildings are in a state, haven't been maintained for many years, and there is an amount that we need to spend on our buildings in order to keep them open, functional and fit for purpose. It's news to some people, I guess, but to those people. I've been in, I was attending meetings of the Deepings Leisure Centre Forum back as far as 2010, when it was well known that the buildings weren't being maintained properly. Since May, I'd like to say I would surprise, but we know that we have some maintenance to do. So instead of just being reactive and responding to a roof leaking here and a fence falling down over there, we're now going to be proactive, shifting the ratio of reactive to proactive maintenance. I believe the target is currently, it's about 80% reactive and 20% proactive. We want to flip that, so it's 80% proactive and 20% reactive. That's where we want to be. I don't know if we have anything else to, if Giles or Richard would like to add anything to what I've said, if I've missed any of the bullet points, I'd be grateful for your input. Okay, just to add, because I can't resist saying anything at any items, you know, so just to add really that in this year's budget, a million pounds has been allocated to support investment in the assets, which is very welcome. The condition survey, as has been said, will drive forward how we prioritise that, that that isn't sufficient and it's going to take many years and a lot more investment to get the assets back up top to performance. What the strategy is also attempting to do is make sure that we go through a sifting process really to target that finite resource in the best way. And that's really underpinning the corporate plan and service delivery, so we'll be looking more forensically at where that money's spent and making sure it's spent wisely. And as has already been said, Leggio is probably one of the most prominent asset bases where it needs significant investment. We've got three aging centres, very resource intensive, but we also know reputationally it's quite damaging where we have downtime and we have disruption in service. So those sorts of examples, car parks being another where any disruption is very outward facing, so we're very mindful of that. The strategy will also link through to the asset management strategy and the disposal strategy, because there may be examples where from a cost perspective it's not a best value for the authority to continue to hold that asset anyway. It might not be the best way to deliver services and it may be that it's better disposed of and that receipt used to fund future program works as well. So this strategy document hopefully will help clarify where that investment goes and then it's put to use. I think as we get through this year and we look to head for the 2526 budget setting, it's probably no surprise that we'll be putting forward to for members to consider further investment going into the assets as well. So the million pounds we've got this year, I can anticipate similar requests being put forward in the future, that's partly doing with the backlog but that's partly just to stand still as well, because the levels are so significant that it's going to take many years in order for us to address the backlog of work. But as Ben said, unfortunately in the past such requests for planned maintenance investments not being granted by Council and hence why we're in the position that we're in but hopefully now we're more aware and better sighted on it than we have been in the past. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. Giles, did you have anything to add to that as well? I'd just add to that in the fact that we have also invested in a new asset management system for the corporate property team and that will house the information from the condition surveys and it will enable us to forecast our budgets more accurately going forward and that will build upon, obviously, the information coming back, so I just want to make sure I was aware of that. Thank you. Councillor DILTS? Thank you, Madam Chairman. Just by way of information, I think Councillor Baxter, the Leader mentioned the passenger centre. I've just come from a meeting of the county council executive where for information was approved, the funding of 850,000, i.e. to match the money that this council has agreed to put in to go to the Deepings Community Leisure Centre Community Interest Company towards the costs of refurbishment and operating the Deepings Leisure Centre building as your Leisure Centre subject, of course, to a lot of caveats to protect the county council's interest. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Thank you for that. That's good news for the Deepings Leisure Centre Group. Were you aware of that, Councillor, around? Can I just say Councillor Noor? Okay. Well done. Councillor Turner. Thank you. I know that there's a few of our—I'm looking at the appendix B in the summary of all our estate and five or six of those things that we have a claim on our, in fact, leasehold. Now, does that create some sort of differential with the repairs and maintenance that we have to take on those properties, or are we paying to rent somewhere and doing it up, as well, to simplify things? So, most of the properties on the report are freehold, but if you take, for example, Warth Road, Morley Story Car Park, it's a leasehold property. Now, is it in the council's best interest in the future to maintain all these leasehold properties, of which there are few in the total estate, or would it be better to either buy them or dispose of them and rebuild it somewhere else? Very good point. Councillor Baxter. Thank you. I think Mr Wiles might have something to add, but we have some problems with the buildings where we are renting and part of the issue is that, like we should with our own property, we are obliged to return them in the condition that they were given to us. That's why we have spent, I think, nearly half a million on the roof of the Stanford Arts Centre, which doesn't belong to us, I think it belongs to Burley. And similarly, we've had some debates over the last year about Warth Road Car Park, which is attached to the Morrison's and the Library, and there are other issues around that car park, but yes, we have an obligation to keep it in a state of repair, and I don't know if Mr Wiles or Mr Teesdale wants to add anything to it. It's just so really the lease will be specific about the maintenance responsibilities, so it's down to the composition of the lease. Some of them will just be operating leases where we're in occupation, but we don't have any liabilities on building themselves. Others will be full repair and insurance leases where we have got that obligation, but that's normally reflected in the rent, so you take the most storage being given as an example, the rental of that is a pound, but we take full responsibility for the maintenance and upkeep of it, so it depends very much on the lease itself as to what our obligations will be. Thank you. Thank you. Was there anybody else that wanted to ask any questions at the moment? Councillor Soya, welcome to the meeting. Thank you, Chairman. I hope you've got my apologies. Rather nasty accident on the A1 a few hundred yards short of the great public services. I'd just like to make a point, and I think very delink to this. Given Burley's involvement in our activities, I've been trying to find out something about the finances of the Settle Family Trust. Now, there are several trusts linked to Burley, but I can find nothing whatsoever about the Settle Family Trust, which I suspect is rather a large one. I just wonder if any members here have any information about it. I've searched the Charity Commission's website, and I've searched Trust's websites, but nothing comes up. Although the Burley State, or the Burley House Preservation Trust is there, it seems to have 12, 30 million in it, but as I say, Settle Family Trust, no information at all. I'd be rather interested given that we are involved with that particular trust. Does anyone – I don't know if anyone has any information. Thank you, Vee, question. Would you like to disturb me over my cough? Councillor Bax, do you want to come back to that? Only to say the Settle Family Trust did come up in conversation yesterday when we were talking about, I think when we were talking about St Martin's Park, but I don't think it relates to the Council's maintenance backlog, so I'll probably pick it up elsewhere after the meeting. Okay, Councillor Gail. Yeah, thank you. Certainly welcome this document. Chair, the Leader's surprise that the document didn't actually exist beforehand, but as I say, I think it's well-written. I also had the comments about the lease hole as well. Given which it's right, obviously, that the different leases will have all sorts of different responsibilities. Given that, should we make it clear that this document only relates to those free-hole properties that we have? I mean, as I say, we wouldn't want officers believing that this is a licence to pour money into lease hole properties where we would have all sorts of different obligations. Thanks. I think the dependencies is there kind of having good faith to give Councillors a fair representation of the asset base the Council has because it is significant. Obviously, this is only, I'm sure it's sort of been referenced, but this is only general funds, so the HRA will have its own maintenance responsibilities. This is only corporate property estate, but within those lease hole classification, there are significant sums of money that are needed, as Councillor Baxter says, if we ever get to the end of the lease and we want to hand the lease back to the owner, then there will be a massive dilapidation issue when we would have to significantly contribute towards it. So, we are very aware that under the lease hole obligations, there are issues that we need to address, and there's already been said, San Fratock said, there has been a classic case where over £1.5 million has been spent on that asset in recent years, and that's not reflected in the value of the asset to the Council because it's not ultimately within our ownership, and similar challenges arise with the multi-story war throat at Granthon. So, I think it's right that they're in there purely and simply because they will put an obligation on this to fulfil the obligations of that lease, otherwise we could find ourselves into a legal process with the owner if we're not fulfilling those obligations. Thank you. Councillor Wittington? Yes, thank you very much indeed Chair. I've got two questions actually on the appendix we go in front of us. It's the list of properties. The first one, there is a reference on this to Granthon Library on Warth Road. Well, my understanding is that the Library Service is actually County Council, so I'm not entirely sure why we, as the District Council, are involved with that when the Library Council has some clarity around that. But also, there are quite a few Granthon assets on here. I'm thinking about things like the crematorium and a few other bits and pieces that potentially at some point, given the Granthon now as a new town council, assets that potentially provide services that may at some point, grab the new Granthon town council and maybe decide who wants to negotiate the SKDC to take back to be run by the new town council. Now obviously, if there is a lot of backlog maintenance on some of these that potentially might be negotiated to go back, just wondering how that might complicate the process for the new town council, if it's trying to potentially look to take some of these buildings and services back across, if there's a lot of backlog maintenance around that, because that might almost stime with the new town council even before we started. So, I'm going to clarify, I think it said that they're basically my questions. Thank you very much. Mr Wylers, can you help us? Yeah, I won't answer the Library question, but I'll answer the other ones. In terms of any asset transfers, clearly that's got to be mutually agreeable between the two parties and that would be reflected in the level of negotiation. We'd expect any potential purchaser in that example to have their own condition survey and they'll be fully cited on what obligations they're taking on, and that could be reflected in any financial transaction that takes place between the two parties. We've seen that in the past at Stanford Town Council, and they recently took assets from the council. They took it at a nominal consideration, but had were fully cited on the costs they would be incurring as a result of that, through any maintenance or through any ongoing financial liabilities they're taking on. So ordinarily, it would be reflected in the value, but clearly that's got to be a mutually agreeable transaction between the two parties. Thank you. Can we just let Giles answer the next question? Councillor Wittington, then you can come back, is that OK? So, yeah, just in relation to the Library, obviously, historically for some reason, the Council entered into a lease with the Isaac Newton Centre owners, and then sublet the Library to LCC. So we're intermediaries in that, and, yeah, we are just a clarifying the process of trying to remove ourselves from that arrangement and have a direct link between LCC and the owner to a century removal of our liability, because we're just, yeah. Councillor Beeson Ashling, did you want to say something? Sorry, I saw your hand up earlier. No, you were just waiting, OK? Sorry. Councillor interjecting. Can I just check, is Born Leisure Centre owned by LCC? It is. What type of lease is it that's on there? Is that a minimal or negligible rent for repairing? Yeah. OK, thank you. Coincidentally, we looked at it yesterday, it's a 99-year lease signed in 1990, but it's nominal rent, i.e. a pound, but full repair and insurance arrangement. Thank you. It's quite an extensive report and very welcome. Thank you very much for that. So we move on to the next item. Oh, thank you, pardon? Councillor, I saw you. It may have been covered already, if so, I apologise. There are 10 lease-hold properties listed altogether. Are they all repairing leases or are they non-repairing? Are you able to help with that? We did have a question on this earlier, Councillor. I don't think we'd feel, yeah, I would imagine the majority are, which is why they're in the listing, but I wouldn't want to confidently say that without fully identifying it. So we could just email members after, just for clarification, if that's OK. OK, thank you. Can I just ask, when is this going to be reported to the Cabinet, for approval? There's no date on here to say when that's going to happen, so I just wondered, please, thank you. I'd say at the earliest opportunity, subject to officers and cabinet members availability, but soon. OK, thanks very much for that. Oh, yes, Councillor on the lease-hold properties. Normally, when you deal with lease-hold properties, the actual owner will carry out either yearly or fine yearly inspections. Is that being carried out on the lease-hold properties? Yeah, that's an obligation on the owner of the building, not on us. Some do it and some don't do it. I'm obviously going to name names, but it's as good as the owner themselves carrying that out. We have an obligation to keep those assets in good repair, and obviously, we need to be, if you like, held to account for that, but that's obligation on the owner, not on ourselves. Yeah, I'm just trying to get to the point that, obviously, we are getting a condition report from those, but normally, they are pretty strictly, normally, giving timeframes to get them up to scratch as work in progress, but, like you say, obviously, some of them aren't that too worried. Okay, thank you. We will move on to Agenda item 8, which is on the West depot. Is Ashley, are you presenting this one as well? Thank you. Yes, thank you. It is my delight to present you a report on the Turnpike Close Grantham waste depot. Following the budget approval, the planning approval, and the conclusion of the procurement process, the report sets out the next steps required to enable the project to reach the delivery phase. I'd say the construction phase, and then the delivery phase. As for bid currently exceeds the budget allocation, the successful bid has been asked to review their costings, source alternative third-party suppliers, and revisit their proposals in order for the price to be reduced. That means we realise that it's slightly above budget, and we are looking for ways without compromising the purpose of a function, or the sustainability of the building, ways to reduce the budget so that it's within the envelope of spending agreed by the Council. This activity that is loosely known as value engineering should be concluded in the next few weeks. There will be no changes to the design that will affect the planning permission, because we don't want to come back right around the planning permission exercise again, and the administration is fully committed to sustainability, and so we're not compromising on that either. But there may be parts of the design, the materials, the phasing, that mean that we would pay the contractor less than they at the first opportunity said was necessary. Subject to the completion of this value engineering is expected that the contractor will begin mobilisation onto the site. They'll start work on the site, with the works starting during October this year. The governance of the project has been discussed at the previous committee meetings here, and I think the point of the recommendations, Madam Chairman, is that previously we had agreed that we would have a subgroup of this committee to discuss depot issues in order that this committee doesn't become dominated every meeting by a talk of the depot. Cabinet members and officers feel that there is no need for the depot to dominate this meeting, and that the work that is required of this committee meeting is adequately contained within your agendas, and so in order to keep everything public, it should be public, or on pink papers, to request recommendation number two that we have regular reports to this meeting rather than a separate batch of meetings elsewhere. As for the rest of the content of the report, it is relatively brief. It doesn't go into vivid detail because we're still at that value engineering stage, and we wanted to avoid pink papers. So, what's on here is in the public domain. I'd welcome questions. Councillor Wiesington. Yes, thank you, Mr Deach. I just want to return to the issue of the fellow engineering that the Leader of the Councillors, obviously our line. It can obviously appreciate that since the original budget of 8 million was agreed, it's subsequently been increased as to why we're into the process of fellow engineering. The time to help indicates that the value engineering phase finished on the third of May, but I appreciate it properly overrunning slightly. But will these be brought back to this committee at some point in the future? Because potentially, obviously, whilst there's a scope there for fellow engineering to bring some of that cost down, then there may also be instances where perhaps some of the costs, we're in a time where building materials and costs are still increasing. Some of those may start to go the other way. Obviously, it can work both ways. It can work to our benefit. It can work again, so I'm just wondering if details of these movements will be brought to this committee in the future, albeit they may, I appreciate it, they may have to be on pink papers, but I'd like just some clarity around that, please. Thank you. Councillor interjecting. Councillor interjecting. Councillor interjecting. Thank you. I'll give item at least whilst in a moment, but in paragraph 1.1, you'll see that the Cabinet delegated approval to the Deputy Chief Executive in consultation with the Cabinet Member for Property and Public Engagement. That's Councillor Cleaver to enter into a contract with Lindham Group and following the conclusion, sorry, and that's to develop a submitted design to stage four supported by a value engineering process in order to align the overall contract price with the approved budget and following that, it's bullet point three, says, following the conclusion of the value engineering, delegation be granted to the Deputy Chief Executive in consultation with the Cabinet Member to enter into the construction contract. So, we don't need to get a committee approval and cabinet approval for every step of the process, that would make things long-winded. However, you have got a committee in June and I believe another one in July, hopefully, when we fully intend to report progress. This committee is looking at the bigger picture. I would hate to think that we were getting down to kind of the colour schemes and the details of whether it's a RSJ1 or an RSJ2 because that would challenge my understanding of RSJs. So, I don't know if Mr Wiles want to continue? Yeah, I think it's just to echo the point, the delegations have been granted from Cabinet to keep momentum really on this project and we're in a very intent part of the process. We're trying to drive the cost down, it will not compromise the end product, it will work within the parameters of the planning permissions that are being granted. So, I think it's a freedom that officers are working within with the support of Cabinet, just to make sure that we get the budget lined down to the necessary level. I mean, we're happy in the future to give a committee an overview of the value engineering activities and what they've led to, but it will be about some of the finishes and some of the modifications internally. It won't be, as I expect, particularly exciting reading, but it will give members assurance, if you like, that the end product has not been compromised throughout this process. But, as Council witnesses have alluded to, the market is quite volatile and the prices are changing. So, the way Lindham have constructed their fee and their construction costs is that they've gone out to third parties and got prices. So, what they're having to do is revisit that supply chain and see if they can source those same materials from different providers, which will change the prices. So, that's the kind of activity that's underway. We are making good progress with it, but we're not quite there yet, but we met them a week last Monday and we made some significant strides forward. So, we're still confident we're on track within the overall timetable that's been described. What we're hoping to do for your next meeting and thereafter is produce you a project dashboard that gives you that oversight, because I imagine the committee's rightly cited on the key milestones, the risks, the overall budget envelope, any particular cost, any particular unforeseen events, and that's what we're hoping to be able to present you thereafter so that the committee can get assurance that the project is on track or if it isn't, what we're doing about it to make sure that we ultimately deliver the project. Thank you. Thank you. Did you have something specific, Councillor Wittenton, that you were okay? Because I don't think I actually, when I've made my initial comments, referred to this committee micro-managing this contract, and I think Councillor back to the lead might have misunderstood where I was coming from. I've had considerable experience of managing in my professional career as an accountant in the public, sex, managing these large projects and can see how creep in costs can come in. I wasn't talking about micro-management, I was just talking about as part of the scrutiny of the expenditure of public money that we are made aware of the details of the design, not that we've actually been saying, oh, yes, we like that, no, we don't like that, but just so for the clarity of the scrutiny of the expenditure of public money that at some point in this committee is made aware of the outcome of that though engineering, as I say, potentially costs go up and costs and costs comes down. This isn't about others' committee asking for financial scrutiny of the depot project, it's not about micro-managing it, thank you. Thank you for that. Can I just explain? Mr Wiles has said that he's going to do a dashboard which he also said at the time that he would do an overview of the value engineering. Would that be sufficient for you, Councillor Wittington, or is this something more specific that you wanted? Okay, thank you. Councillor Baxter, did you want to say something? Yeah, I just want to say, it sounds like we're in agreement because as you can see, recommendation two is that this committee is asked to request that regular reports on the construction of a new waste depot are presented at each meeting, so that's exactly what we're hoping that you're going to ask us for, so there's no, we're on on the same sheet I think, unless Max has a question. Councillor Sawyer. Thank you, Chair. What is the figure in terms of cost above which we will not go? Second point, I did ask some time ago if I could have a list of the estimated costs reach part of the proposed depot, that is the office accommodation, accommodation for staff, the photo sales, the surfacing and so on, I've yet to have that, so I would appreciate that. Richard did say he would let me have that, let me say it was some time ago. Back to my first question, which is the cost above which we will not go? Okay, well your second question, then hopefully Mr Wiles will be able to address that with the outside of this meeting. If that's okay, Mr Wiles, is that okay? And if you're able to answer the first question, thank you. Yeah, I'm just mindful we're in a public meeting and people may be watching this, I think in terms of the cost, what I would say is the Council has set a budget on this project of 8.8 million, that includes the construction of the depot but also the project management and the external consultants of some of which members have met in previous presentations, so that's the overall budget envelope in which we're working to, so that's the context in which we're having these discussions, but I'm just mindful that the value engineering at the moment is in a position where we're trying to drive those costs down to the absolute minimum without compromising the quality, so I don't want to suggest there's a figure on that that others may hear and therefore stop at, if you see what I'm saying. Thank you, and again the dashboard will explain details. Yes, thank you sir, and I am happy to be paper as it were at any time, if any of this information is not to be put in public domain. Yeah, thank you. Okay, so yeah, a welcome decision that these things will be discussed in public domain, I think that's good, please with that, it's an important project. We want to maintain and maintain scrutiny on this. You mentioned that there'll be an update in June, just looking at the timetable, the value engineering we're supposed to finish May the 3rd, so that's a few days late, that's fine. What are we going to hear in June, I just want to push you a little bit harder on will that be finished, will we, what's coming back to us in June, so I just want you to be absolutely clear about what we should expect at the next stage, to the next milestone is on this. I don't think that it can be clear because we, these are progress reports, so we will be reporting progress as it is, if there is a milestone that we've passed, then we will report on that milestone, and I'm looking at the offices a bit because if the value engineering was due to be finished four or five days ago, then it wouldn't have been in time for this report to feedback, and there will be more detail coming out, we're going to be talking about the construction of this project for most of the next year with regular reports along the way, and then hopefully we'll be celebrating how well-run it is and how fit the purpose it is for another 30 to 50 to 70 years beyond that, although I won't be here in 70 years time, so as for like, what exactly are we going to report back in a month's time, if I knew that, I'd have put it in this report because it's unknowable. Councillor WHITINGSTON? Yeah, I, again, as I said, I've been involved in quite a lot of these projects in the public sets before, and we normally, well, I've worked in an environment where we use projects, management, software such as Princeton or something like that, which is used to report on all these milestones and to identify when there is slippage and whatever and there are key milestones, kind of a thing that's sort of an iterative loop to go back. So I'm also surprised when the leader's comments that is that in place, do we have that? Do we know if we're hitting these key milestones? What methodology project plan methodology underlying all of this are we utilizing to ensure we don't go off track? Thank you. Councillor Daxter? Thank you. Officers will remember that we have a project board consisting of the consultants, the key staff, and there's a seat for cabinet representation on there as well. If you want gun charts and prints to reports and if you want the vivid detail, I would suggest that that's, first of all, could you put your microphone on please, Councillor Whittington? I'm afraid you're answering a question and I've not asked. You're answering your question, not my question. My question is, does that methodology exist? So I'm asking, I didn't say I wanted to see the report generated, just, is that methodology in place and if so, what methodology are you using? I'm not interested in micromanaging this, I'm just interested in the methodology you're using. I'm not, you know, so I think you're answering a question that I've not asked with due respect. Thank you. Councillor interjecting. Mr Wiles, did you want to come back on that, sorry? I do, just to give the committee the assurance, I believe we went through this in quite some detail. The November meeting, we talked about the governance for quite a big period of that meeting. Just to give the assurance, there are weekly project meetings, there are monthly project meetings and it comes to this meeting as well. So the layers of governance around this are robust, as you'd expect on a project at this size. We also appoint external project management support through a company called GLEEDS who are project managing this as well with all the other third parties and under the consultants who are part of this overall project. So I think hopefully the assurance has been given that the Robles headed up by Debbie's team, Debbie and her team, we've got Robles project management in place, which you wouldn't expect to anything less because there's been made, the point's been made, it's taxpayers' money, so we need to be really mindful of that. And therefore, all the project management around it is fit for purpose in my view. Thank you. Thank you for that. Is that okay? Councillor Wiesington? I'll ask your question. Councillor interjecting. Is there a methodology? Yes. Okay. Sorry, Councillor Gile. Did you want to come back? I didn't know if you're handling this. Well, I think we should answer it now. I mean, I think it is a valid question at this early stage. I mean, GLEEDS will obviously have a methodology, so yeah, I mean, as I say, we welcome what comes forward us in June. I mean, just to answer the question, obviously, it looks as if we're going to get a professional services contract reported to us in June, and that in a project like this, you only as could as your next milestone, not the last one, so yeah, I look forward to the next update. Thank you. Thank you for that. Okay. Councillor Harrison. Thank you, Chair. Just a quick question. If we hadn't reduced our contingency fund by 9.8%, would we have had the money in place that we wouldn't have to do any value engineering? Mr. Wales. We didn't actually reduce the contingency, the debate at the time was whether the contingency level that was put forward by the cost consultants was fit for purpose, and at the time and based on the evidence and information we had to hand, it was considered it was. So there was never a reduction overall on contingency. I think it's also fair to say that both or the bidders were fully cited on the cost envelope of this project. And this has been reported back at the cabinet meeting if you recall when the contract award was granted and the figures were given in that public document. So both the bidders who came forward overshot the cost envelope that was put in front of them for reasons of which obviously are known to them, not to us. And that's why we haven't a value engineer because they've gone over the budget envelope. We've been clear with both those bidders that the budget set by Council is the budget. So we need to work within that, hence why we're in value engineering. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Turner. I very much doubt Richard would have a project commission. I was going to answer the question that has already been answered from Councillor Whittington without following modern professional standards because that would be really not good in his role. And secondly, there is a provisional program summary in 2.2 of the document that lays out the future program so we can expect certain things to happen at certain time. Thank you for that. Councillor Green. Yes, thank you. I suppose the fact of the matter is that we are behind on the value engineering period that wasn't visaged as terminating an effect by the 3rd of May, obviously, a number of days ago. And I'm just wondering, I mean, this must mean that it's already having knock-on consequences because if we look at the progression of stage 4 design, that was supposed to start immediately after the cessation of that value engineering period. So I just want to understand what the consequences are from the delayed value engineering period and perhaps spell out, you know, what that means and where we want to be for the time of the next committee. I mean, it must be said that it appears that we're already late, we're already over budget, and there aren't even any spades in the ground yet, although certainly the chainsaws have been out for a number of trees on the site. Thank you. Well, we're not over budget because no contracts have been signed and no contracts won't be signed until they are within budget, and we're not behind schedule because some of these events are running in parallel. So, for example, the work on the NEC 4 contract has been drafted as we speak, and the value engineering period was slightly delayed because of the calling period that needed to take place following the decision by cabinet on 16 April, but some of those value engineering discussions took place prior to that. So some of these, albeit 2.2, is a very much a simplistic overview of events in reality. Some of these are running in parallel with each other, and some have been extrapolated forward beyond dates that won't necessarily occur. I mean, I'm sure Councillor Green appreciates a lot of these are without our outside of our direct control and rely on third parties and other contractors working within their own timescale. So, for example, the mobilisation period and the commencement of the construction on site is subject to Lindham's and their other third party contractors being mobilised in the timeframe in which we want them to. That may be slightly before or slightly after that, but I hope the committee will work with us and endorses if some of these dates are slightly out of reality, but rest assured, we're all laser focused on getting this construction on site as quick as possible. Thank you. Did you want to come back? Councillor Green. Yes, just briefly. I mean, I think the original proposition, I mean, and please do correct me, was for this to cost £8 million, so I think that does imply already some element to which we've gone over that originally specified budget, and it does seem to me quite clear as well that looking at this provisional programme summary, there are things here that yes, could be occurring in parallel, but it also does seem that there are a number that do seem very clearly to be envisaged as occurring in series or in serial, as I say, the progression of stage four design. I mean, to be very specific about that, is that now going to be delayed because the value engineering period is delayed? Thank you. Mr Eilson. No. The answer is no, or you wouldn't like to come back. No, it won't be delayed. Councillor Baxter. Can I just point out that this focus on the value engineering period having ended and us going over, we're talking about two working days since we said we were going to finish it. We said we were going to finish it on the 3rd of May. We've had a bank holiday weekend, so two working days, I don't think we need to get too excited about that level of delay, especially when we compare it to delays this Council has known in the past, including getting started on building a depot in the first place. So what I'd also like to cautiously mention to Councillor Green is that a lot of this work is being done by consultants, and one of the reasons why when you inspect the expenditure of the £500, that we have a lot of expenditure on consultants is because we're doing things like building depots and repairing the mess of the St Martin's Park that was left to us back in last May. Thank you. Councillor Green. Yes, I think my very brief response to that is that feels very much like normalising failure and it just doesn't feel like a good start. Okay, I think we've discussed this at length now, and we're going to move on from this because we do have quite a lot of other things to talk about. So the second point is that the Finance and Economic Overview and Scrittany Committee is asked to request that regular reports on the construction of the new waste depot to impact close grants and are presented at each meeting. Can I have a proposal, please, for that, Councillor Sawyer, can I have a seconder, Councillor Ledinham, all those in favour, please? That's eight, four, only about—oh, okay, nine, sorry, okay, that's unanimous. Thank you, that's carried then. Okay, the next agenda item is item nine, which is St. Martin's Park. Can I just remind everybody that there is commercially sensitive details here? This is an update and just that obviously there's nothing here that needs to be discussed outside of here. So if anybody wanted anything to be discussed on the pink papers, then obviously we would have to think about going into closed session, but it is really just an update of where we're at at the present time. So over to you, Councillor Baxter, thank you. Thank you, thank you for your patience with me this afternoon. This is a deliberately—well, you have asked this chair for an open and transparent report. Consequently, it looks quite bland because some of the detail is commercially sensitive, even still. One of the things that the press picked up on as the papers went out was paragraph 3.3. The request to the government for a brownfield land release fund application. The brownfield land release fund application for some of 2.8 million pounds, we might be awarded that, we might be awarded none of that, we might be awarded some of that. We don't know yet. However, we do intend to bring a paper to a full council meeting, probably the May full council meeting, to ask for delegated authority to accept that money, because it's hopefully been given a large sum of money. It needs council approval to accept the money into the bank account, and consequently we're going to ask for delegated authority to accept that, just as if we were going to spend 2.8 million pounds, we would want council permission, that's why it will appear on the full council agenda. Hopefully, it won't be a long and protracted agenda item. I think the rest of the report pretty much speaks for itself. Not much is happening on site, for various different reasons. Negotiations go on with the prospective landowners, the actual landowners in this form of barely estates, there are other elements which have been on pink papers in the past, which are still progressing. I think that's probably the time to ask if we have any questions. Councillor WITTington. Yes, thank you, Chair. Actually, the leader must have almost preempted my question. It is on 3.3. It is on the 2.8 million pounds application for the Brownfield Land Release Fund. My question was, how mission critical is the 2.8, or any part of it, as a leader has just alluded, we could get nothing, we could get 2.8, we could get a figure anywhere between Norton 2.8. So, really, the answer is how mission critical is it, what is the level of risk that's in there? Because 2.8 is a big sum of money, and it could have a real impact on the successful outcome of what we are trying to do with the managed part. So, the question is, how mission critical is now fun, and what would happen if, I mean, I'm guessing we might have made some guess as to if we would get anything of it, but just how mission critical is the receipt of that or part of it? Thank you. Councillor BEXTON. Councillor BEXTON. Thank you. It depends, if you are talking about mission critical in terms of what will happen to St Martin's Park, will the mixed development go ahead, will the housing go ahead, will the retirement go ahead? I'm pretty confident that the retirement home, the housing, there will one day be a retirement home on that site, there will one day be some housing on that site. If you're talking about mission critical as in terms of whether or not the Council gets a revenue for the entire project or loses money on the entire project, well, the difference will be that the project will be, I think this 2.8 million pounds will only be awarded if the project would otherwise not be viable. And so it makes you wonder if the project isn't viable without a 2.8, if the project was viable without the 2.8 million quid, we wouldn't be asking for the 2.8 million quid in the first place, so it's kind of a, you can read your own prophecy into that. I'm tempted to offer the Council another history lesson about how we got to this situation with St Martin's Park, but I think those arguments are well rehearsed, so I'll shy away from that. Mr Wiles, did you want to come back on that? Yeah, it's just to say that at the February meeting of Council, when this was debated, if members recall, the application for the Brownfield site funding was one of the mitigations to offset the overall projected deficit on this particular project. So the project will still go to fruition, but this was one of the strategies that was suggested by officers and approved by Council to mitigate the overall deficit on the project. So it's not a conditional upon the success of the project, but it's a mitigation against the loss. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that, Councillor SOYE. Thank you, Chairman. Concerning the monthly electricity standing charge, I've had questions about it from residents at the sessions I hold. I called it Ask the Councillor in Stanford Library every Friday, I said it could be called a surgery. It is in the public domain, and I've explained to residents that the cost of disconnection and reconnection would be hugely more than paying the monthly standing charge. What I don't know, and I would like to, is what would the disconnection, reconnection cost be, and then I think residents would be a little happier if they have those figures. Councillor Baxter. I can only answer this question because I've got some experience in the electricity field. And that's to say that it's not just about the disconnection, reconnection fee. The grid, and locally to Stanford, the grid has got so much capacity. They were paying for the availability of energy in that area, and that's what we are continuing to pay for, because one day on that site, someone is going to need large amounts of electricity to fuel the retirement home and the houses and the other things. So that's what we're paying to retain that. If we were to disconnect and give that availability away, there would be a saving for the period between when we shut it down and when we next need of the energy, and energy prices can go up and down, and so can availability charges go up and down, but the bigger risk is that somebody else will come along and poach that availability, which in the best case would mean that energy wouldn't be available, and we would need to enable the grid to fit another high voltage supply so that there was enough energy in the locality to supply those needs and fitting a substation is very expensive, but worse still, it might be that there is no way to put that, so we're talking about someone putting a high energy user in the locality. It's probably not a very high probability, but it's a very high, if it did happen it would be very high risk, and it might mean that there just wasn't physically the capacity within the grid to supply the energy that the new tenants of that site need, and they would be scuppered because they just physically wouldn't be enough electricity. That's why it's commonplace in industry when you've got a vacant site, or when you're doing refurbishments to a factory or whatever, to hang on to that availability charge. Does that explain the... The comparable cost. I don't think it's possible to put figures on that cost, because what I've just said is, if we disconnect, to use your words, if we disconnect, it may be that we can never connect again, and so there wouldn't be a price because there wouldn't be any electricity available. The cost of building a substation would depend on how large a substation needed to be, and how complicated it was to put it out there. So if you're putting it on the wrong side of the river, or the wrong side of the railway track, it would be a lot more expensive than if there was a technically way to put it closer to the site. It's a little bit of how long is a piece of string. I don't know if offices want to add anything to my wisdom. Debbie, thank you. I think Councillor Baxter has covered it, but we are retaining the capacity for the coming side of the site, which will generate enough electricity for half. If we disconnect that, we can give that cost back to National Grid at no cost. I think I have emailed you Councillor Saw you with this, but obviously we are then giving half of that capacity back to the grid, who can then allocate it to any scheme which comes forward in the Stanford area. So by retaining the capacity, it is a serviced site. If we disconnect it, it will be un-serviced site, which will then affect the land value greatly. So I also think that at the moment it is impossible to get you a quote Councillor Saw you would have to ask National Grid for a dummy cost, and I don't think that they would be prepared to do that. So at the moment it is a serviced site, the capacity is retained, and we will continue to hold that capacity until the scheme develops. Councillor Harrison. Thank you Chair. Excuse me if I have missed it somewhere along the line, but are all options that were previously discussed still on the table to us? Councillor Baxter. I want to say yes, without making the meeting pink, it is quite difficult to do, but some of the assets that could be sold haven't yet been sold, some of the options. So there's not much ink on the paper in terms of things being signed off, and therefore roots being denied. We still pursue the same strategy as was decided by Committee and Council earlier this year, but if there was a sudden change of direction for whatever reason, that is still possible, not from Debbie. I think Debbie Council committed to option two with some caveat, so the report is to give an update on the points that it wanted us to consider, such as the submissions that Brownfield Land release fund, such as looking at some other legal options which are being progressed and all of those have been accepted by developer parties, so everything that was asked at Council to be looked at is being looked at. Thank you. Councillor Whittington. Yes, thank you, Chair, I actually think that Debbie might just have asked the question. I was going to refer to 3.6, which speaks about the legal issues that need resolving, and it concludes the Council remains positive they will all be resolved, and I was kind of guessing whatever is just said, that given the assurance that they have now will be resolved. Thank you. Councillor interjecting. Yes, there was a number of legal items that were in the full Council papers around the legalities that needed to be investigated, and we are making very good progress on all of those. I am quite happy to have a conversation with Councillor Whittington on those. Thank you. Just one minute. Okay. Councillor Ledenham, and then I am coming to you, Councillor Fijnash, is that okay? Thank you, Chair. I don't know if the leader can give us an update on this or not. When we had the briefing, we are carrying the waste management company, what was carrying out the removal of the contamination material, it failed the inspection, I know we have got the stockpiles and materials there, but I don't understand it, the site was still contaminated. Has that been resolved yet on the other contractor for filling their contract? Debbie, can you come back on that? Yes. So two of the three stockpiles that are on site, we are progressing with having those removed from site, so they are certified clean 6F2. The other one that has an issue in it is not certified. We are in legal discussions with the contractor around resolving that. It is part of their contract to ensure that all the stockpiles were certified, so obviously we are progressing that with them to ensure that that third is as well. Yes, if you would like to. Was there any penalties on the contract if they were able to carry out what they were going to do at all? It would be a form of adjudication rate that we would have to go through next, so it would be somebody independent that would look at the contract and the legalities around that. But we are at that process, we will be, unfortunately. Thank you. Can I slip you to the next thing? Thank you Madam Chairman. I've got two questions for that, but I'll start with the first one. Depending, is the possible start of seeing spade on the ground? Is it dependent on that £2.8 million grant receiving it, or do we have a forecast that did when we will see spade on the ground? Councillor Baxter? Thanks. £2.8 million, I don't think is a kind of, to use the word 'mission critical' comment. The spades will arrive even though it might make it not a financially viable project. The spades are not critical on the £2.8, but the thing that is, and Councillor Ledinham alluded to it, at the end of paragraph 3.5, it talks about the removal of all three, it says the removal of all three stockpiles is a condition of completion of the sales contracts. So I think that is the more significant hurdle which is preventing the spades, more likely the bulldozers and JCBs, but yeah, the work commencing. Is that true? Yeah, there are a number of work spenders' works that are required between exchange and completion. So the removal of the stockpiles, the power lines, obviously through national grid, and obviously the three developers need to also submit their reserve matters applications to the local planning authority and to do their joint infrastructure work. So there is obviously between exchange completion and the next few years an awful lot to do. Okay, second question, we will go to the sale, as we mentioned. It was mentioned in the local paper that there is a buyer or possible person who has been found to purchase the site. Is that true? Is that the sale of the whole site that belonged to SKDC? Okay, the site, as you know, is split into two, half of it is owned by Burley and half of it is owned by SKDC. We have people in place that are interested in buying the land. That will all be subject to all the things that we have been through already, so I have no crystal ball, but yes, someone is currently willing to buy the land, but we haven't sold it, have we? No, we haven't sold the land, someone would tell me if we were going to, and so I think some of what was written in the local press, should I say, missed out on the nuances of the situation, which is a trendy way of saying they didn't get it right. So as I wanted to follow up on your previous question, Councillor Bish, to say, yesterday I asked whether or not we would have commenced work on the site in a year, in two years, and it's very difficult to say, if we had started work, or if anyone had started work on the site, rather than tidying it up and clearing away the old and starting with the new, if we have started that this time next year, then I will be a very happy moment. If we haven't started that before the district council election, then I'll be quite disappointed but these are all issues which are beyond the control of the district council, we cannot waver one or crack a whip to get these legal niceties out of the way, we can't force barely to bring forward a reserve matters, there are many things which are beyond our control, and it is frustrating, and let's say if I was starting this project, I wouldn't have started it from here. Thank you, Councillor Sawyer. Why is a man or possibly woman than I once said prediction is difficult, especially about the future? What are the current worst and best case scenarios for this project in terms of profit or loss? I think we actually had an update on this at the last meeting and we had lots of figures, but Debbie, can you have anything to that? I think all the financial information went to the full council meeting on the 8th of February where it was agreed on a way forward with the project, so I don't think we're in a public session, Madam Chair, and I don't think we'd be comfortable to share that at this meeting in this way, thank you. I think if you go back to the minutes of the full council, Councillor Sawyer, you will see all the figures there that explained all that detail for you. Yes, I'm thinking things are changing rapidly all the time, and it's several months since that meeting. Sorry about that, Councillor Baxter? I'd also gently say that it's not all about profit or loss, we're not a profit-making organisation. One of the things that the previous administration got right about buying this site was to say if the council doesn't buy it, it will end up being high-end homes and of little use to the economy and the general wellbeing of Stanford. We cling to the purpose of it not just being more rich houses in Stanford. We want it to be more than that, we want it to generate jobs, we want it to promote a green economy, we want people to visit Stanford as a result of it, and doing that means that we won't get the absolute maximum profit out of the scheme that we could because we want what's best for the wider Stanford economy rather than just increase it. I mean, silver chairs and tables, and if it's all about profit and loss, then we're in the wrong room, really. Right, Councillor Vision Ashley, I've got one more question because then we're going to move on from this. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Just one quick one, following what the leaders just said, I would very much like to know, so ISA employment land is still within the, within the development or that hasn't been removed. I don't think that's changed from the original point of it, but Debbie, I'm sure we'll be able to update us. Yeah, so the consented scheme, the outlined consented scheme is for employment use, retirement, village and for residential homes, so it is a mixed use scheme and there is employment in there. Okay, thank you, everyone. That was a report for us to note the progress and I think we've had quite a good discussion on that. So let's move on to agenda item number 10, and this is for Councillor DILKS, I believe. Would you like to come to the front, Councillor DILKS? Yes, thank you, Madam Chairman. I'm delighted to present this update report relating to the East Midlands Building Control Consultancy, which is a partnership between South Kestervan and two neighbouring councils. Neil can show Wood and Rush Cliff with South Kestervan delivering the service on behalf of each partner. Building Control is a statutory service which aims to ensure the safety of buildings and the people who use them and set standards for construction and refurbishment work in England. The Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017 rightly prompted a review of rules and processes governing building safety. In addition, there is also, of course, the challenge of how we mitigate the climate emergency, and it's fair to say that recent and forthcoming changes to building regulations will be pivotal in reducing energy consumption and achieving net-zero carbon goals. Approximately three-quarters of the workload of the building control team is fee earning, and as the name implies, the Council is allowed to recover costs of fee earning work, but not to make a profit from them. The costs of the remainder of the workload, being non-fee earning, have to be borne by each council. The East Midlands Building Control Consultancy competes with approved inspectors for fee earning work, and currently wins an average of half of the market share. The economic climate over the last year and more has resulted in fewer applications and consequently the income is below the predicted budget, but this is offset by savings created through vacancies in the team. Appendix 1 provides you with details of the provisional accounts for 23-24. The legislative changes include a requirement for building control officers to demonstrate their competency, and I am pleased to say that a number of the East Midlands Consultancy officers have already achieved the required competency levels, and the trainees' surveyors are progressing with their training and qualifications. Chairman, I invite your committee to note the contents of the report and agree to receive an update in 12 months' time. I am happy to say that our Assistant Director of Planning Emma Whittaker and our Building Control Manager Jeremy Barlow are here to answer any questions you may have. Thank you. Thank you for that. Do you have anything to add to that, Emma, at all? Thank you, Chairman. I don't think so. It's hopefully the details in the report, but we're happy to answer any technical questions, and obviously the appendix is exempt, so if there are specific questions on that, then we'll obviously have to go into close session. Thank you. Okay, we have no show of hands, so no questions at this time. Councillor Brie, yeah. I mean, in the preamble for this, I mean, it's described that this is a highly successful endeavour, and I think when you look at the tables and it has in fair and has been acknowledged, I mean, the income we're receiving here is an all-time low as per the table. The number of applications are an all-time low, and then our market share is static, so what is our understanding of success here? How is this highly successful? Thank you. Emma, would you like to come back on that? Thank you. Thank you. So it's a service that's been in a partnership with – initially with Newer Concherard, I think it was, and then RushCliff joined, started in 2014. It's been a really stable, it's been a really positive partnership. It's over the years we'll have reduced the costs to each local authority in terms of the general fund contributions. This last year has been quite challenging, both in the construction sectors, so that's had a knock-on effect for levels of applications across planning and building control. What you'll see is that the market share has remained pretty stable, so it's not affecting just us, it's affecting the approved inspectors as well. That has got a negative impact on the predicted budget. However, it's been offset by salary savings, because we've had a number of vacancies and we've been recruiting back to the team, but we've been doing that slowly and gradually so that we can control the workload and the staffing levels that we've got. What I should also say is that we are carrying a surplus across the partnership where we've had, I suppose, bumper income in previous years. We're not meant to make profit on the trading account, so we are meant to break even. It is meant to be a three to five year rolling average of no profit, basically, and that's a zip for guidelines. You will see on the trading account, you will see a deficit, but that's actually a good thing because it means that we are doing exactly what we should be doing and we are reducing the income levels through not raising application fees, as well as managing that flow of work coming in, so I know that's a bit complicated to get your heads around, but the bit that actually really we should be aware of is the general fund contribution, which is lower than was predicted. That's the amount that it physically costs this council into the partnership and it was quite a considerably lower than was predicted and that's obviously through careful management, so hopefully that's helped explain why some of those figures are perhaps a little bit unusual in terms of what we would be talking about for a normal service in terms of the income. Thank you, Emma. Okay, so this is to note the update regarding this and agree to receive an update in 12 months, so can I have a proposal that we agree to have an update, Councillor Harrison, seconded by Councillor Sawyer? All those in favour, please? That's unanimous, thank you. Okay, agenda item 11, this is the Grantham Future High Street Fund and I think it's Councillor Baxter again to present, please. Thank you, Chair, and I should say with all these reports, thanks very much to the officers that have put the information together. I am grateful, even though I don't always mention it, but thank you, Megan White for preparing this report for us. The report is split into five bits, they are referred to as subsets, they are listed in paragraph 2.3, but if I run through them in turn, the public realm projects, market approach and station approach, believe me, the works have begun with the marketplace, the compound is being built behind the restaurant whose name escapes me, Peticoats. So, putting things in place behind Peticoats and in the coming days, we will see the barriers going up around the marketplace in the areas where the works are to take place. They are lower barriers so that people can see across so they can see what's happening if you're on one side of the marketplace, you can see that the world is still turning on the other side of the marketplace works. It will be some months of disruption for businesses, shoppers, residents for which we apologise, but we hope that the finished product will justify, the ends will justify the means in that way. We have circulated or information has been circulated to residents and business owners in the area showing where the marketplace will be closed off and the diversion routes and so on. I'm sorry, it has been a bit of a journey to get there and it's not been helped. It couldn't be helped that we had a member of staff that came and then for urgent family circumstances had to leave post quite soon in. So, many thanks to Nick Kibbridge and his economic development team for keeping the show on the road, so to speak. The second part of that public realm is station approach. We are still negotiating with the county council and they are still negotiating with potential contractors to get that started. The work has to start or we have to get a contract in place by the end of September because the works need to be done by a certain point. Second one, the Conduit Lane Public Conveniences Refurbishment. 2.12 should read the properties team at the council will manage this project. It's not our council staff who are doing the refurbishment of the public conveniences. We will have a contractor, but that contractor will be managed directly by this council rather than in the case of the marketplace by the county council as a third party relationship. The quote for the refurbishment of the public conveniences was higher than we expected and so we are looking at different ways to do it. More news on that if you want more detail other than we are committed to refurbishing and reopening these public toilets which were closed more than 10 years ago and there are people waiting for them to be reopened with their looks across. The upper floors grant program you can see that we have had three full applications. One of them is Buckminster and Buckminster have previously been the beneficiary of a number of grants from this general council but because of the size and the nature of the grants we are eager to comply with subsidy control regulations and so we are going through a third party risk accredited surveyor to make sure that everything is in order and to get a boot. The fourth one is the town team which as you know is at a number of false starts and we hope to get the right people in the right room for a soft launch. That means a launch without pasties or pastries or I think we will go as far as coffee but we have a lower profile launch because we want to get the right people in the right room talking about the right things. This is not a photo opportunity, this is an opportunity to increase footfall and expenditure in Grant from Town Centre that is the aim and we can't measure expenditure by customers in the town centre so the nearest we can get is footfall and that is how we will measure the success or otherwise of this project. Finally negotiations with Department for levelling up housing and communities are ongoing as you would expect in the last days of this administration, this national government administration, not this administration, we are here for some time to come. That is the main five points. If I have missed anything please shout out or if there is anything to add from officers please help me out. Thank you for that. Do we have any questions or anything Councillor Green? There is a lot of opposition to the marketplace development emanating from within the administration. I wonder how the leader addresses that. I dare say if we had a full Council vote on this today it wouldn't pass. Thank you. We have had many robust conversations with the Council with Richard Davies, the Conservative member who represents the board in which the market places in. He is also against the scheme even though he is responsible for delivering it. It is no surprise. As Councillor Sawer said well early on in this administration, there is nothing wrong with differences of opinion and we can resolve them through conversation and collaboration and it doesn't have to be winners and losers. The options that we had were to pursue the scheme which was agreed in 2019 and consulted on in 2020 and was, I don't know if you would call it a flagship but the previous administration had it is something that we wanted to get on with. By the time that we had it, we have the option of continuing with this scheme which is going to enhance the marketplace and enhance the downtown centre or handing back £1.5 million to government. I am surprised that you think that there would be a majority in this chamber for handing back £1.5 million of public funds to enhance the downtown centre to the government but we are not in that situation so I guess it is a moot point. Thank you. If there are no further questions, this was for us to note the report. I am accept the feedback so we will move on. The next item is Agenda 12. I have update on the development strategy. Thank you. I do apologise for being here the whole time. The Deputy Leader does have his name on a couple of these reports but I think as you probably mentioned at the start of the meeting he has one of his family has got a medical appointment that cannot be missed. I am delighted to introduce the update on the economic development strategy. I know it is close to the hearts of some of the colleagues in the room from the SK Coalition. The original first draft was presented by a former leader I think in November 2022. Since then we have changed leaders a couple of times, we have changed the head of service on economic development a couple of times but happily the progress has got now to the state that Nick Hibbard and I have been able to present this report. It has been to a member's workshop as was agreed at a previous meeting of this committee and the draft has been altered accordingly. The original agenda pack contained an out-of-date edition of the economic development strategy. It has changed since the original published agenda and the revised economic development plan is what we are consulting on with the public and it went live. I am happy to say it went live as per the report no delays of a day or two days. It went live as per the report yesterday. Just for fun I draw your attention to a couple of the things that were changed between the report going to cabinet and the report going to consultation. They are on the big map of the UK on page number one location. The original agenda pack said that employment levels are low at 2.6%. That should read and does read unemployment levels are low at 2.6%. There is another one in there somewhere about the hospital industries that should read hospitality industries which is another important but different thing. Hopefully with those typos corrected you will all encourage your residents, your businesses, your loved ones to participate in the online consultation which is being done through a system which I think is called Opus or Opus and therefore much more robust than the survey monkey consultation things that we have had in the past. We have taken on board with the feedback from Councillor Bailie and others and we now have a more robust bulletproof system of, I don't know about bulletproof, but robust system of consultation and we are out. Any questions I am happy to take? Councillor Whittington. Thank you, Chair. I read through the document and thank you very much indeed for bringing it forward. I notice as I was reading through it some key themes emerging which I believe are identified too. I am going to find my notes. What I think the report refers to is some key pillars around vision and I really appreciate that the fact is now out to public consultation who talks about the Council's role. They talk about economic goals and this is what I really want to sort of question and focus in on because obviously we are developing our South recognised even economic plan. We also know that currently the County Council together with North East Links and North Links via the Linguishia lab have got their own economic strategy and development plan. We also know that not too far down the line that is going to be a male combined authority for Lincolnshire that will then have given money around economic development and what kinds of extra things coming in, lots of extra money coming into the county. My final question is how do does all this align because we are in the Linguishia and the Linguishia does via the lab and about authority. We are not careful. We are going off in different directions trying to do different things. I am wondering what level of crossover, what level of ability to work together, the management speak word is synergies which is a word that I don't particularly think says a great deal but I use it because people understand the technical or what it means. But it is just that has always got work and blending together because we might give more leverage if we all collaborate together. Some clarity around that I think we are really useful. Thank you. Thank you for that. I think that is a really good point. Mr Hibbitt, can you answer that? I think if you refer you to the appendices there is within the appendices a review of the strategic context. Many of the strategies both nationally, regionally and locally have been reviewed and summarised and that has been taken into account and construction of the strategy document. Let's suppose it is a product of the fact that it is not a perfect world is not in the sense that we don't all align in that same moment in time. What we do do is meet with partners on a regular basis with members of different partnerships across the region, across the county, across the locality. So we continue to do that. Part of the consultation exercise will be to consult with those same stakeholders to make sure that we inform the document as we move forward to his final version of it. Councilor Baxter? Thank you for that. Draw your attention, Councillor Wissington to page 139, which talks about the regional policy, the GL let, the link to the council, the local schools, the skills improvement plans and so on. Yes, it should fit together. Quite a few of us, including you and me, are double-hutters so we can see, we should be able to see how it relates the district policy to the county policy. My fear with the mayoral combined authority is that a lot of the money that has been used to lure greater linkage into that mayoral combined authority is going to end up being spent on the south side of the Humber and we're going to have to fight to get that money. I think that what we do as a district, we need to crack on with regardless of what other money might be floating around the system. I think this document worked by itself as a district policy, but no man is an island, no district council is an island. We do need to be cognizant of what else is happening. I think with this and also with tourism, with manufacturing, with universities, we do need to be aware of what's happening around the place, but in terms of generating jobs, income, wealth, happiness in South Sea, this is a way towards that, Nirvana. Just a key question, it's probably because I've got the answer, but I'll give the answer. 97% of employment in Lincolnshire is an SMEs, where I'd employ 50 or less people. So that, for me, that is the critical. If we are talking about economic development, though that is where we should be focusing our attention. A lot of the big organizations that come in to a certain extent, they can take care of themselves. But it's about 97% of the county of SMEs, 50 or less people. That's growing, that's bulk of the employment of Lincolnshire residents. I really would like to think that when we are looking at this, we are focusing in on those companies, because those local companies, you know, there are councils in this room that we do run local businesses, and they generate jobs and they bring money into the town and all that sort of stuff, and I really do think that should be the focus. Thank you. Thank you for that. Councillor Green. Yes, thank you very much. It should obviously be noted that, in effect, five-year planners become a four-year one. Ideally, we should have been looking at an economic development strategy reading from 23 to 28, so that can't go unremart. It is good to see that devolution is referenced in here as well as it should be. It should be a great boon for our area. Now I am aware that, obviously, with the situation with some double hatters in the room, there was a vote at Lincolnshire County Council, and there was money specifically in Mark for Grantham as well. I know that certainly you, yourself, Councillor Baxter, and Councillor Dilks voted against that, and Councillor Cleaver abstains. My question is a simple one. Will you say no to that money again? Thank you. Councillor Baxter. Would you like to, is this a time for a debate about the merits or demerits of devolution? I have never taken part in a vote that was only about money for Grantham Town Centre. The votes that I think you refer to were about a consultation on devolution, which was a flawed consultation, which the responses to were to a large extent ignored by the Conservative Authority in Lincoln. The more recent vote about whether or not we go forward with devolution, yes, I am still against devolution. I still think that devolution is the wrong answer for an area of the size of greater Lincolnshire. I think that it will pull funds away from this end of the authority and take them to the south of the Humber, not saying that those areas do not deserve money, but this is the wrong mechanism for it. The whole thing about devolution is that you are reducing a population of 1 million people down to a single person, a mayor responsible for representing everybody's opinion from grimsby to Grantham, from the deepings to market the one at the top of Lindsay and Cleethorps. Frankly, yes, if we had the vote again, I would still vote against devolution again, because I think there are better ways to get money into Grantham Town Centre. This economic development strategy is one of those ways. Thank you, Councillor Lassley. Point of information. The devolution will not put all the decision-making at the hands of one person. There will be a committee made up of representatives from the district councils and from the Lincolnshire County Council and the two unitaries, so it is simply not the case that the decision-making process will be in the hands of one person. So I am afraid, unfortunately. I don't quite know what the leaders' intentions were in the statement you made. I am really trying to give a bit of clarity to that. Thank you. Thank you for that. This meeting is not about devolution, so we will not continue that conversation at this present time, but thank you for the clarity on that. Councillor SOYER. Again, thank you, Chair. Agenda, September, page 21, that is bottom-right numbering in the little blue kite. St Martin's Park is presented as a clear statement of what will happen on that site, and Stanton North's development is presented merely as an aspiration, just a point I am making there, and secondly, pages 27 to 35, when will the details be produced of how these, again, how these aspirations are going to be achieved? There is often said in this chamber, Mother of Knuckle Pie, but there is very little in the way of detail there. 28 to 35, again, bottom-right hand corner, blue kite shape. Councillor Baxter. Thank you. Just reading the detail of page 21. We are talking about Stanford's at Martin's Park outline. It is a fact that outline approval was granted in 2020, and this high-quality mixed-use development will comprise of, so that is based on the outline, so that is in the public domain. All of its subjects change, I guess, but that is the most likely outcome for that important part of Stanford's economic development. Stanford North, it has yet to receive outline permission, so that is not written in stone. Anything could happen, but likelihood is it will be a development led by a Barely House Preservation Trust, with Guma Leves, a master developer, and so on and so forth, but if you feel that the wording in there should be adapted, then please respond to the consultation or just write directly to Nick and ask him to mess about with it. The second one, so we are talking about page 28, areas of focus and the kind of motherhood and apple pies, of which there are 18, and then 10, and then 26, and then 50, so there's loads of them, obviously there's loads of them, we can't, I'm not sure what you're asking, are you asking for less specific aspirations or for more, for more definite proof that they are actually going to happen within a... I'm going to ask Nick to help me. What happens obviously, that's now reflected in the corporate plan, it's reflected in our economic development strategy, it's reflected in our development appraisal, so as we move forward each member of the economic development will be allocated a different task, that task will be worked up and delivered over that time for it, so once it's adopted, we have a plan to get on and deliver it, so we have a four-year plan, not five-year plan, but a four-year plan at the moment to deliver those outcomes and objectives of that strategy, so that's what we aim to do, so detail will follow I guess. Just one moment, Councillor Turner, sorry Councillor Green, were you coming back to the discussion about that, Councillor Bax, I'm afraid it is devolution related. Well we're not talking about devolution here, so is that... Maybe I can sneak in a question. If it's on devolution, it would be on devolution, yeah. Then I'm afraid the answer would be no, because we're not discussing this, that at this time if you don't mind. Well I think it was just simply whether or not some actually would accept the devo money that he formally rejected. Councillor Turner. Thank you very much, thank you, Nick. I broadly welcome this report as it's always good to have an economic development strategy, and it's good that we've got a baseline to work from. As Leader Baxter stated, we still have the ability to make alterations to the plan on going, but I would just like to take the opportunity to invite members of the opposition to follow their Westminster colleagues example and cross the floor if they wanted to take a greater part in the process and join the SKDC majority group and then you might have more say on what goes on at Council. Thank you. Councillor Whittington, have you got something to say? Right, okay, thank you. Can I just ask one question on the action plan? The timescale, it says ongoing, then it says one and three. I presume that's either weeks, months, so I don't want to say years, but could you just clarify that for me please? Yeah, be quite quick, but it does mean years on this occasion. Thank you. Councillor Jill. Thank you. I'd like to join everyone in welcoming this document two years. There's only been two years coming. Wow, it's felt a lot longer, so I think we should celebrate the fact that we've got a document that we've been calling for for two years now, which is good. I probably would describe it as a baseline though in terms of where we are. I think Councillor Turner had a good comment there. This is a baseline in that I would hope to see a lot more smart detail in some of this and some of those connections that Councillor Sawyer talked about, how we move from aspiration to delivery, smart beings, strategic, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely. Do you understand that connection? Like Councillor Sawyer, I've not seen that connection even with the corporate plan, and I think there are definitely gaps in there. It does talk about collaboration, but not with the devolved authority. Don't worry, I'm not going to go into a debate about devolution, but it is a reality and so that should be part of the environment. I welcome the comments about the consultation working through Opus and that thank Councillor Bailey for leading the discussion on improving our consultation process on that. I'm grateful that that's been taken into effect. So some points and some questions. First of all, how are you going to sell the document? I mean, as I say, when I led the campaign for a town council in the Community Governance Review, the consultation document, we went out and sold, we spoke to local groups, we spoke to community groups, we had to sell it, recognising that not everyone wanted a town council, and that's why the town council consultation had the record amount of feedback that there's ever been for consultation, I understand. So how are the cabinet going to sell it? I'd like to see more detail on the smart connections between the aspirations and the actual deliverables. I'd like to understand a little bit more as to where St Martin's Park fits into this. I'd like to understand more about Grand For Market. I mean, Grand For Market, again, talking, this is more a parochial interest here for Grantham Councillors, but Grand For Market is key to the economic development of our town. I'd have liked to have seen some more detail as to how that goes through. Just one or two other things going from the back yet. So Grand For Market, I've mentioned the smart deliverables I've mentioned, the inclusive growth that there's a lot about building there, is that something the Greens are fully on board with in the administration? Because there's a lot about building. There are one or two words that I would prefer simpler English. Develop a small business concordat. I'm not entirely sure people follow what that is. I think that a document like this to be consumed by the public needs to be really clear. There's been a little bit of, you know, there's a lot of corporate buzzwords floating around of which this document certainly has quite a few. The reality is though the way this document I think will be consumed is that people will read the forward, maybe they'll read the executive summary and probably nothing else. The one thing I think I would specifically change about this is that the forward talks about CO2 emissions, closed loop recycling, gender equality, sustainability, sustainability, collaboration, but it doesn't put economic growth, the aspiration for economic growth front and centre. I don't think it's visionary enough and I'd like to see more ambition in this. But as I say, I welcome the fact and I recognise the fact this is not, I'm not commenting on, not making a party political point because the last three administrations have failed to bring forward an economic development strategy. So we have an economic development strategy, that's an excellent first step, should have happened three years ago, two, three years ago. We have one, I'd like to see more ambition, I'd like to see more detail and I'd like to see a visionary detail as to where we're going. How are we going to link into London given that we are closer to the city of London here than parts of London are? How is it that we can link to Cambridge, the fastest growing city in Western Europe, which is less than an hours driver down the road? What are the bigger picture things that are going to help our small businesses? How are we going to really revive the grant for market, which is a generational question that remains unanswered by this, by this council? Thank you. Well, just one final quick point. I think Councilor Baxter did mention this, just to confirm, the only changes with the new document that we've got today are just typos, is that right? That is my belief, if the more nuanced answer than Mr Abbott would explain. Yeah, there are changes subsequent to your workshop you hosted back in March. Could you put your speak, your microphone on please? Sorry, I think Councilor Gill is asking if there are other substantive changes that have been made between the agenda pack coming out, and so at the same time as the unemployment hospital comments. Okay, so would you like me to have a run at the, yeah, would you like me to have a quite significant typos because 2.6% unemployment and 2.6% employment is quite a big jump, 2.3. Yeah, you're right, 2.3. Would you like me to take a run at the comments from Councilor Gill? Yes, please. I think he's made some really relevant points, and actually I think some of those points would need to be fed back to Nick Hibbard, if that's something you could do, Councilor Gill, which would help this. You know, it would be good if you could put that in an email, and Mr Hibbard could actually incorporate some of those things once the consultation is over. Yeah, you can come back by your means. Yes, so we will certainly be encouraging our group to respond to the consultation, thank you. Thank you. Councilor Baxter, yes, please by your means. Yeah, thank you. I guess it was a bit of a rumbling, a series of questions, and you might get a rumbling series of answers, which is very helpful in sometimes. Quite agree, we wish it had come sooner. I'm glad you appreciate that for the first year that it wasn't delivered, we were in opposition, or I was in opposition, some people hadn't even been elected, so you can hardly blame Tim or Max for the lack of progress in the previous year. So here we are, as I say, there's been quite a lot of swapping and changing of offices and also content. If you think that at Cumberland, who said about Motherhood and Apple Pie, if you think there is a lot of jargon and wordies and so on in this iteration, then Crumbs, you should have seen the previous iteration, and that was part of the comment that was made at the workshop that all members were invited to, especially members of this committee, to which none of the SK coalition were able to attend, and it's a shame that some of the comments that you've made just now weren't fed in at the workshop that I believe you asked for. If you're looking for Grantham... I mean a lot of us didn't attend because we were out there generating economic growth. Yeah, so some of us would rather be out generating economic growth right now, but you weren't... Excuse me, can we just have one person talking at once, please? Yes, you're right. So getting back to the point you're asking about how we're going to sell the document, £4.50 at WH Smith. That's a joke. You're asking about how we're going to sell the document. We are, we're doing press releases, we're promoting it through our channels, we will be promoting it to the business clubs in each of the four downs, we will be going through Nick Kibbitt's little black book of people who are interested in the local economy, and a DSA, Councillor Harrison's little black book of businesses in Grantham that want to succeed, which will include some of the market people. And if you've got a little black book of yourself of your own, then please tell your business contacts inside and outside the district to participate in this consultation. If you're looking for the Grantham market, it's on a Saturday morning from 6 o'clock in the town centre, and it's also on page 19, creating bustling markets. We haven't forgotten the whole economy of the district doesn't hang, doesn't live or die on Grantham market or born market or Stanford market, but you're right, it is a very important and a very emotive part of our economy, and it's emblematic of our wider economy. And so the success that we're pushing to with markets through a group that is being chaired by the cabinet member and attended by Councillor Harrison and others is, I think my point is we're not neglecting the markets, and if you think there should be more in here, specifically about the markets, then respond to the consultation and tell us that. I don't know if there's any other outstanding questions. Yes, it's been a long while getting here, but happily, we're out to consultation now, and the next time you see this document, hopefully, will be the post-consultation version of it ready to be bounced onto cabinet and then launched on the wider world. But don't think that we're not getting on with stuff just because we're waiting for a strategy. We certainly are. Councillor Meran. Yeah, I had to be the one to rent a new parade. I thought it was a great looking document, lovely, really nice. And I took the trouble to read the page on the deepings, because I've got to say about the deepings. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, nine typographical or grammatical errors. So then I read Stanford, got seven on there, and this is just a quick flip through while I'm listening. Grampham's the same. Born's opening sentence is the delightful Markley town of Born, six on the delightful Markley town of Born, six on the eastern side of South Coast Stephen. Sorry. There's loads of stuff where it should be a capital and it isn't a capital. There's one sentence which I've read about four times, and I still don't know what the sentence understands. I'm not about to go through the whole lot, but I think you need to appreciate it and put an amended copy out to the public as soon as possible. Sorry. Thank you for pointing that out. I think that's a really important thing, and something Nick, is that something that you could do, please? Of course, yes. Thank you. Councillor Sawyer? It's a small piece of information, Chairman. I've just done an online readability test on a randomly chosen page. It comes out at moderately challenging. In fact, the high end of moderately challenging, which is one level above plain English. So if anyone's worried about readability, it could possibly be made a little more readable to bring it down into the plain English bracket. Thank you for that comment, and I think some of that was actually discussed at the workshop. So did the feedback from the workshop get taken into account with this? Was it a cabinet member that had put this out today for the consultation, or was it SKDC as the Council, Nick? Sorry, I just needed to ask that question. It was amended to subsequent to the meeting, yes. So what was the second question? Was it? Was it? The Council as a group that's put this out, because I think Councillor Cleaver sent us out an email to say this has been sent out. So it's just that if there are so many mistakes in it, it doesn't look good on us here. And so is that something that can be rectified pretty quickly for the public start looking at this. And I do think there's a real point about the difficulty of reading this with the wording that's in it, which we did discuss at the workshop. You did, and it has been revised subsequently, but we'll have another look and look at the type of reference today, yeah, definitely. Thank you, Councillor Baxter. Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to take responsibility for the document in its entirety. I would say that it's been split into two. We've got the strategy and action plan first, and then we've got the appendices. The original document, when it arrived to me, was in a very different order, and a lot of that was further up. I have concentrated on the first part, the action plan and the content of the first part. Some of the content of the appendices explaining where the towns are and market-deeping in the Bronze Age and that kind of thing. I confess that I have not proofread as assiduously as I should have done, and certainly not as much as I did the first part of the document. And with regard to the readability and the plain English, I don't know the tears of plain English. If you're saying it's only one level above plain English, then I think we're kind of winning. I would prefer that all our documents were written in plain English, so it's really easy to understand. Okay, this is a document that is pointed at the business community, and I think it's difficult to avoid jargon here and there. Although I entirely get Councillor Jill's point about a concord out, I think that if you did a survey of the population of South Gary Stephen, they would struggle to find a consensus around what is a concord out, and it's a word that I remember from some times ago. So yeah, certainly in terms of the language, we need to mind our language in this document as ever. So yes, I apologise for the typos in the appendices. We have done our best to correct the typos in the main body of the document, which I hope is a more interesting. I'll stop there before I dig my hole any deeper. Thank you for that explanation. Councillor Green. It seems that we've unearthed a few issues with this. Would it be prudent to perhaps pause the public consultation, because anyone diligent going out and responding to it this afternoon say there might be somebody out there doing that, they might be picking up on some of these issues and we could frankly save them the time and that kind of duplication of effort. So perhaps there should be a pause. I think this speaks to the sequencing of events here. Perhaps it would have made more sense in retrospect to have the discussion around the economic development strategy in this committee here and now. Obviously, I think that was inevitable that it was going to draw out some issues and then had a breathing space and then launched the public consultation, obviously. DSA, we almost jumped the gun and we had Councillor Cleaver's email this morning saying it was out, we should respond. But we've obviously picked up on a few things there. So I won't make a formal proposal, but I'll just put that out there as a suggestion that perhaps it might be a good idea. Is there a particular reason that this was already put out to consultation before we discussed it here, Councillor Baxter? We have discussed it here. We discussed it here last time and we agreed to have a workshop which you attended and I attended and some several other members attended. It was a shame that no one from the SK Coalition attended. Should we pause the document, should we pause the consultation? No, absolutely not. We don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past where everything gets kicked down the road. The whole point of the consultation is for people to give us feedback. If they want to give us feedback on typos and there are no fundamental mistakes in here that you've come forward with, I think, that cannot be fixed during the post consultation period. So if we don't like the word Concordat or we think it's less readable, we can try and address that in the future. If there is, as has been pointed out on the page in the deepings, imagine the deepings having the typo on that page, it can be fixed. That is the whole point of a consultation. I know there's been requests from other people to reopen the local plan consultation and add that all over again. We don't want to do that. We want a consultation to mean something and we want people to participate at the time that they are invited. In this case, it's the public who have been invited to participate from yesterday onwards. In your case, Councillor Green, it was when we were discussing the document at the workshop, and also the documents were available. So if you were busy generating growth during the time of the meeting, you still have the documents available, so you still could have given feedback at the time. So no, absolutely not. My concern is, Councillor Baxter, how does that make SKDC look with the simple mistakes that are in this report? Is the consultation about spelling mistakes and extra words in the report? Or is it about the content of the report? So that's just my thought on this. But Councillor Green, did you want to come back on that? Well, I mean, would the message be, perhaps, to the public, hold your horses, check back in in a week or fortnight? Because clearly it's going to be updated where some of these very obvious errors are going to be corrected. Should we be telling that to our residents, who might be quick off the mark to respond here, give it a pause, something better is coming in amongst this consultation period? I'm just worried, as I say, that there's a lot of people who pick up on the same issues we have, et cetera or more. Do you want to come back, Councillor Baxter? Really, if the general or the mercury pick up on this meeting and the issue becomes around is this consultation fit to go out to the public because it's got some typographical errors and spelling mistakes in it, then I think that publicity will generate more response. And if more people look at the document in order to laugh at the typo on page 16, but they end up responding by saying well, actually, the most important part of the economy is the ecclesiastical history of Great Pontin, and that's the kind of feedback we want. And I welcome the feedback from wherever it comes, I welcome the correction to spelling and welcome correction to grammar, to typographical errors, but most of all, I welcome input into where this district council should be going in terms of driving economic development. Thank you for your explanation. Do we have any more comments on this at this present time, Councillor Gail? I suppose the, I mean, obviously, well, obviously, I welcome the comments that some of these typographical errors are embarrassing for the council. Let's put it that way. Can we receive at least assurances that they will be corrected with urgent haste? I take your point that, yeah, we it's out to consultation, pausing consultation is a bad precedent, and I think I think I probably agree with you that once it goes out to consultation, we should leave it out to consultation. But the reality is, as I say, some of these lack of proofreading is pretty embarrassing for this authority. We need to receive assurances that these get corrected. As I said, I'm just rereading the, or trying to reread the born page again and failing. I think that we need to receive assurances that as high as priority these get, this gets proofread and corrected as quickly as possible. Chair, that's a different question. I'm quite happy to concede on that point. As far as the Opus software allows us to, yeah, I think we should fix it. Can we just have one person talking at once, please? So, Councilor Giel, have you got something to feed back on that? Sorry. And then, Councilor Whittington, did you have anything to say? We're going to Councilor Giel first. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. As long as the software demands, I mean, this is a PDF or a word. This is, this is not some kind of weird software that's generated. This is basic software that's been opened. Sorry, I just, I just find the last comment about it. The software allows it somewhat difficult to understand. Okay, Councilor Giel, did you want to come back? But it is a fair point. We are using new software, so, so, yeah, okay, fair enough. But, yeah, as soon as humanly possible, this needs correcting, because this, this should have been proofread. I, I, I'm glad that the council base to recognise is that it should have been proofread. Thank you. Councilor Harrison, I know you want to come in, but, Emma, did you want to come back on that at the moment? Yeah, thank you. Just to give you assurances that we will proofread it. I'll get another couple of the, of the team to, to reread the, the document and correct, make any corrections. We will need to check with the software provider in terms of the consultation document. So that's not the PDF version that, that's on the committee agenda, and just see how we go about making those changes, but we will do that ASAP and get that rectified. Thank you. Councilor Harrison. Thank you, Chair. I'd just like to point out that we were all here reading this document, and there was only one person that picked up the, the, the issues at the time. The mistakes have been made. Yeah, mistakes are made. People make mistakes. There's a fantastic document there that's got a few spelling issues on it. So let's get over it. Somebody's made a mistake. They'll put it right. No issue. Thank you. Thank you for that. Do we have any other comments at all on that document? Councilor Knowles. Just a point of order. I recognised the problems on the board page and emailed Debbie about it. So I made the point of Debbie that there was a mistake and it needed rectifying. So this is a point of order. Thank you very much. And thank you to everybody who put all their effort into this document. It is an extensive document and, you know, a really good document to start this consultation period off. So I think it's thanks to the staff group that's done that. Okay. Onto the work plan. So we're looking at June. We have the council tax support scheme on there, which will go ahead for definite in June. It definitely will be on those next, the next discussion for that meeting. The provisional out-term position report, the economic development strategy adoption and the term pipe depot update with the dashboard. Is there anything else that Councilor Wittington? Yes. Thank you, Chair. I just noticed that below those four items for the June meeting, there are another list of items on there, which talks that the fallen items are subject to confirmation, the grant of high street. There are some items there that are at the top two for June. Now, obviously, I think we may have done the top one, but I'm just wondering, will they be added to June or not? Because they've got June beside them. Thank you. You took the words out of my mouth before I could continue. So, James Wellborn listed down everything there that he thought needed to be discussed at future meetings and put suggested months there. So those are the suggestions for each work plan, if we need to have them on. So, okay, that's just the explanation for those. So, does anybody else have anything that they want to be putting on any of the future meetings? Debbie. If we could just move the end of year KPIs to the July meeting, rather than the June meeting, please. Thank you. Yep. Okay. That's no problem. Okay. I just made a note of that. If there's nothing else for anybody else to put on the work program, we will close the meeting at 4.27.
Transcript
Yes, I do. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody. It's nice to see everybody again. It seems such a long time since we were here. Welcome to this finance and economic overview and scrutiny committee. I'm Councillor Bridget Lay and will be chairing the meeting today. To my right is Democratic Services Officer Amy Pride. Can I remind members that the meeting is being recorded and can also be watched as a livestream or later via the SKDC webcast. It would be appreciated if you could switch your mobile phones to silent, please. There is no scheduled prior drill today, so if we hear the alarm, please make your way to the nearest exit to the assembly point at the front of the building. If you wish to ask a question, can I ask that you please raise your hand? Thank you. We have a couple of members that are stuck on the A1 apparently as an accident. I would like to adjourn until Quarter Pass 2 to allow those members to arrive if that's okay with everybody. We will start the game at Quarter Pass 2. Thank you. Thank you all for that. We are recording now. Do we have any public speakers, Amy, please? Thank you, Madam Chairman. We haven't got any public speakers today. Thank you. Do we have apologies for absence, please? Thank you. We have received apologies from Councillors Lee Stepto, Gloria Johnson and Nick Robins. Councillor Mark Whittington is substituting for Councillor Gloria Johnson. Councillor Virginia Moran is substituting for Councillor Lee Stepto and Councillor Graham Gill is substituting for Nick Robins. Just to note that Councillor McSoy is on his way, but he's not quite here yet. Thank you. Thank you. If any members who have an interest to declare, then please do so or you can do this at any time during the meeting also. So we have the minutes from the previous meetings on the 15th of January and the 20th of February. If we can take a vote on accepting those, please? Do I have a proposal? Robert Lednam, thank you, and a seconder. Councillor Turner, thank you. All those in favour? Thank you. Thank you. Did we have anybody against? None. Anybody abstaining, please? Just two. Thank you. Do we have any announcements or updates from the Leader or we haven't got the Deputy here today, can we? Councillor Baxter, are you coming up to the front? I'll come up to the front shot. Thank you. You're going to think I've got a big announcement now. I haven't got a big announcement. Other than to say that your committee requested some more information about the Council Tax Scheme for Veterans Feasibility, that has been delayed due to a staffing issue. It's nothing sinister and we wish to get well soon. We are fully expected to be in a forthcoming meeting. The second thing is, if anybody is watching and doesn't stay to the end of this meeting online, please note that the Economic Development Strategy is now online live for consultation and we welcome all your feedback wherever you are, particularly if you're something to deal with. That's all I've got to report. Thank you. Sorry, I missed a point. The updates from the previous meetings, all actions are complete, so I'm sure everybody had a copy of all the details that you needed. Sorry about that. My mistake. Thank you. Item 7 is the maintenance strategy. Actually, are you doing the update on that? Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I'm pleased to introduce the report on the maintenance strategy. This is a new thing, a maintenance strategy for corporate property assets. One of the reasons why our properties are in such a poor, or have some of them, have been in such a poor state of repair, including leisure centres, car parks and other buildings, is because we have had no maintenance strategy in place. Following a condition survey of our properties, which is almost complete, I believe, we are now in a state to have an introductory corporate management strategy, sorry, corporate maintenance strategy, long overdue, very welcome. The bad news is it's going to tell us that our buildings are in a state, haven't been maintained for many years, and there is an amount that we need to spend on our buildings in order to keep them open, functional and fit for purpose. It's news to some people, I guess, but to those people. I've been in, I was attending meetings of the Deepings Leisure Centre Forum back as far as 2010, when it was well known that the buildings weren't being maintained properly. Since May, I'd like to say I would surprise, but we know that we have some maintenance to do. So instead of just being reactive and responding to a roof leaking here and a fence falling down over there, we're now going to be proactive, shifting the ratio of reactive to proactive maintenance, I believe the target is currently, it's about 80% reactive and 20% proactive, we want to flip that, so it's 80% proactive and 20% reactive. That's where we want to be. I don't know if we have anything else to, if Giles or Richard would like to add anything to what I've said, if I've missed any of the bullet points, I'd be grateful for your input. Just to add, because I can't resist saying anything at any items, so just to add really that in this year's budget, a million pounds has been allocated to support investment in the assets, which is very welcome. The condition survey, as has been said, will drive forward how we prioritise that, that isn't sufficient and it's going to take many years and a lot more investment to get the assets back up top to performance. What the strategy is also attempting to do is make sure that we go through a sifting process really to target that finite resource in the best way, and that's really underpinning the corporate plan and service delivery, so we'll be looking more forensically at where that money's spent and making sure it's spent wisely. And as has already been said, Leggio is probably one of the most prominent asset bases where it needs significant investment. We've got three aging centres, very resource intensive, but we also know reputationally it's quite damaging where we have downtime and we have disruption in service. So those sort of examples, car parks being another where any disruption is very outward facing, so we're very mindful of that. The strategy will also link through to the asset management strategy and the disposal strategy, because there may be examples where from a cost perspective it's not best value for the authority to continue to hold that asset anyway. It might not be the best way to deliver services and it may be that it's better disposed of and that receipt used to fund future programme works as well. So this strategy document hopefully will help clarify where that investment goes and then it's put to use. I think as we get through this year and we look to head for the 2526 budget setting, it's probably no surprise that we'll be putting forward to for members to consider further investment going into the assets as well. So the million pounds we've got this year, I can anticipate similar requests being put forward in the future. That's partly doing with the backlog, but that's partly just to stand still as well, because the levels are so significant that it's going to take many years in order for us to address the backlog of work. But as Ben said, unfortunately in the past such requests for planned maintenance investments not being granted by council and hence why we're in the position that we're in, but hopefully now we're more aware and better-sighted on it than we have been in the past. Thank you. Thank you Richard. Giles, did you have anything to add to that as well? I'd just add to that in the fact that we have also invested in a new asset management system for the corporate property team and that will house the information from the condition surveys and it will enable us to forecast our budgets more accurately going forward and that will build upon the information coming back. I just want to make sure I was aware of that. Thank you. Councillor DILTS. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Just by way of information, I think Councillor Baxter, the Leader, mentioned the Macledger Centre. I've just come from a meeting of the County Council Executive, where for information was approved, the funding of 850,000, i.e. to match the money that this Council has agreed to put in to go to the Deepings Community Leisure Centre Community Interest Company towards the costs of refurbishment and operating the Deepings Leisure Centre building as your leisure centre subject, of course, to a lot of caveats to protect the County Council's interests. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Thank you for that. That's good news for the Deepings Leisure Centre Group, where you were aware of that, Councillor. Can I just say Councillor? No. Okay. Well done. Councillor Turner. Thank you. I know that there's a few of our, I'm looking at the appendix B in the summary of all our estate, and five or six of those things that we have a claim on our, in fact, leasehold. Now, does that create some sort of differential with the repairs and maintenance that we have to take on those properties, or are we paying to rent somewhere and doing it up as well to simplify things? So, most of the properties on the report are freehold, but if you take, for example, Warth Road, multi-storey car park, it's a leasehold property. Now, is it in the Council's best interest in the future to maintain all these leasehold properties, of which there are few in the total estate, or would it be better to either buy them or dispose of them and rebuild it somewhere else? Very good point. Councillor Baxter. I think Mr Wiles might have something to add, but we have some problems with the buildings where we are renting, and part of the issue is that, like we should with our own property, we are obliged to return them in the condition that they were given to us. That's why we have spent, I think, nearly half a million on the roof of the Stanford Arts Centre, which doesn't belong to us, I think it belongs to Burley, and similarly, we've had some debates over the last year about Warth Road car park, which is attached to the Morrison's and the library, and there are other issues around that car park, but yes, we have an obligation to keep it in a state of repair, and I don't know if Mr Wiles or Mr Teesdale wants to add anything. I just say really the lease will be specific about the maintenance responsibilities, so it's down to the composition of the lease. Some of them will just be operating leases where we're in occupation, but we don't have any liabilities on building themselves, others will be full repair and insurance leases where we have got that obligation, but that's normally reflected in the rent, so you take more stories being given as an example, the rental of that is a pound, but we take full responsibility for the maintenance and upkeep of it, so it depends very much on the lease itself as to what our obligations will be. Thank you. Was there anybody else that wanted to ask any questions at the moment? Councillor SOYA, welcome to the meeting. Thank you, Chairman. I hope you've got my apologies. Rather a nasty accident on the A1, a few hundred yards short of the great puddling services. I'd just like to make a point, I think very delink to this. Given Burley's involvement in our activities, I've been trying to find out something about the finances of the Settle Family Trust. There are several trusts linked to Burley, but I can find nothing whatsoever about the Settle Family Trust, which I suspect is rather a large one. I just wonder if any members here have any information about it. I've searched the Charity Commission's website and I've searched Trust websites, but nothing comes up. Although the Burley State, or the Burley House Preservation Trust is there, it seems to have 12, 30 million in it, but as I say, Settle Family Trust, no information at all. I'd be rather interested given that we are involved with that particular trust. I don't know if anyone has any information. Thank you for your question. Would you like to just stay over the mic? Councillor BACS, do you want to come back to that? Only to say the Settle Family Trust did come up and conversation yesterday when we were talking about, I think when we were talking about St Martin's Park, but I don't think it relates to the Council's maintenance backlog, so I'll happily pick it up elsewhere after the meeting. Okay, Councillor Gail? Yeah, thank you. Certainly, welcome to this document. Chair, the Leader's Surprise of the Stockings didn't actually exist beforehand, but as I say, I think it's well written. I also had the comments about the leasehold as well. Given which it's right, obviously, that the different leases will have all sorts of different responsibilities, given that, should we make it clear that this document only relates to those freehold properties that we have? I mean, as I say, we wouldn't want officers believing that this is a license to pour money into leasehold properties where we would have all sorts of different obligations. Thanks. Yeah, I think, I mean, the dependencies is there kind of in good faith to give Councillors a fair representation of the asset base the Council has, because it is significant. Obviously, this is only, I'm sure it's sort of been referenced, but this is only general funds, so the HRA will have its own maintenance responsibilities. This is only corporate property state, but within those leasehold classifications, there are significant sums of money that are needed. As Councillor Baxter says, if we ever get to the end of the lease and we want to hand the lease back to the owner, then there'll be a massive dilapidation issue when we would have to significantly contribute towards it. So, we are very aware that under the leasehold obligations, there are issues that we need to address. And there's already been said, the Stanford Oxend have been a classic case where over £1.5 million has been spent on that asset in recent years, and that's not reflected in the value of the asset to the Council, because it's not ultimately within our ownership. And similar challenges arise with the multi-storey war throat at Grantham. So, I think it's right that they're in there purely and simply because they will put an obligation on this to fulfil the obligations of that lease, otherwise you can find ourselves into a legal process with the owner if we're not fulfilling those obligations. Thank you. Councillor Whittington. Yes, thank you very much indeed Chair. I've got two questions actually on the appendix we go in front of us, the list of properties. The first one, there is a reference on this to Grantham Library on Warth Road. Well, my understanding is that the Library service is I see County Council, so I'm not entirely sure why we, as a district council, are involved with that when the Library of County Council has the clarity around that. And also, there are quite a few Grantham assets on here. I'm thinking about things like the crematorium and a few other bits and pieces that potentially at some point, given the Grantham now as a new town council, assets that potentially provide services that may at some point, Grantham town council may decide he wants to negotiate the SKDC to take back to be run by the new town council. Now obviously, if there is a lot of backlog maintenance on some of these that potentially might be negotiated to go back, just wondering how that might complicate the process for the new town council if it's trying to potentially look to take some of these buildings and services back across, if there's a lot of backlog maintenance around that because that might almost stime with the new town council even before we started. So a bit of clarity, I think that said they're the basis of my questions. Thank you very much. Mr I'm asking. Yeah, I won't answer the library question but I'll answer the other ones. In terms of the any asset transfers, clearly that's got to be mutually agreeable between the two parties and that would be reflected in the level of negotiation. We'd expect any potential purchaser in that example to have their own condition survey and they'll be fully cited on what obligations they're taking on and that could be reflected in any financial transaction that takes place between the two parties. We've seen that in the past at Stanford town council and they recently took assets from the council. They took it at a nominal consideration but had were forced fully cited on the costs they would be incurring as a result of that through any maintenance or through any ongoing financial liabilities they're taking on. So ordinarily it will be reflected in the value but clearly that's got to be mutually agreeable transaction between the two parties. Thank you. Can we just let Giles answer the next question? Councillor Wittington and then you can come back, is that okay? So yeah, just in relation to the library, obviously, historically for some reason the council ended into a lease with the Isaac Newton centre owners and then sublet the library to LCC. So we're intermediaries in that and yeah, we are just to clarify in the process of trying to remove ourselves from that arrangement and have a direct link between LCC and the owner to a century remove our liability because we're just, yeah. Councillor, please, nice thing. Did you want to say something? Sorry, I saw your hand up earlier. No, you were just waiting. Okay, sorry. Councillor Moran. Can I just check? It's born on leisure centre on by LCC. It is, what type of lease is it that's on there? Is that a minimal or negligible rent and full repairing? Yeah. Okay, thank you. Coincidentally, we looked at it yesterday. It's a 99 year lease signed in 1990, but it's nominal rent, i.e. a pound, but full repair and insurance arrangement. Thank you. It's quite an extensive report and very welcome. Thank you very much for that. So we move on to the next item. Oh, thank you, pardon. Councillor, saw you. It may have been covered. Excuse me already if so, I apologise. There are 10 leasehold properties listed altogether. Are they all repairing leases or are they non-repairing? Are you able to help with that? We did have a question on this earlier. I think we'd feel, yeah, I'll imagine the majority are, which is why they're in the listing, but I wouldn't want to confidently say that without fully identifying it. So we could just email members after just the clarification if that's okay. Okay, thank you. Can I just ask, when is this going to be reported to the cabinet for approval? There's no date on here to say when that's going to happen, so I just wondered, please, thank you. I'd say at the earliest opportunity, subject to officers and cabinet members, availability, but soon. Okay, thanks very much for that. Oh, yeah, Councillor Landon. On the leasehold properties, normally when you deal with leasehold properties, the actual owner will carry out either yearly or fine yearly inspections. Is that being carried out on the leasehold properties? Yeah, that's an obligation on the owner of the building, not on us. Some do it and some don't do it. I'm obviously going to name names, but it's as good as the owner themselves carrying that out. We have an obligation to keep those assets in good repair, and obviously we need to be, if you like, held to account for that, but that's obligation on the owner, not on ourselves. Yeah, I just want to get to the point that obviously we are getting a condition report from those, where normally they are pretty strictly, normally give you time frames to get them up to scratch as work in progress, but like you say, obviously some of them aren't that too worried. Okay, thank you. We will move on to Agenda Item 8, which is on the West Depot. Is Ashley, are you presenting this one as well? Yes, thank you. It is my delight to present you a report on the Turnpike Close Grantham Way Steppo. Following the budget approval, the planning approval, and the conclusion of the procurement process, the report sets out the next steps required to enable the project to reach the delivery phase. I'd say there couldn't be a construction phase and then the delivery phase. As for bid currently exceeds the budget allocation, the successful bidders have been asked to review their costings, source alternative third-party suppliers, and revisit their proposals in order for the price to be reduced. That means we realise that it's slightly above budget and we are looking for ways without compromising the purpose of a function or the sustainability of the building, ways to reduce the budget so that it's within the envelope of spending agreed by the council. This activity that is loosely known as value engineering should be concluded in the next few weeks. There will be no changes to the design that will affect the planning permission because we don't want to come back around the planning permission exercise again. The administration is fully committed to sustainability and so we're not compromising on that either. But there may be parts of the design, the materials, the phasing that mean that we would pay the contractor less than they at the first opportunity said was necessary. Subject to the completion of this value engineering is expected that the contractor will begin mobilisation onto the site or they'll start work on the site with the works starting during October this year. The governance of the project has been discussed at the previous committee meetings here and I think the point of the recommendations Madam Chairman is that previously we had agreed that we would have a subgroup of this committee to discuss depot issues in order that this committee doesn't become dominated every meeting by a talk of the depot. Cabinet members and officers feel that there is no need for the depot to dominate this meeting and the work that is required of this committee meeting is adequately contained within your agendas and so in order to keep everything public it should be public or on pink papers to request recommendation number two that we have regular reports to this meeting rather than a separate batch of meetings elsewhere. As for the rest of the content of the report it is relatively brief it doesn't go into vivid detail because we're still at that value engineering stage and we wanted to avoid pink papers so what's on here is in the public domain and welcome questions. Councillor Whittington? Yes, thank you. I just want to return to the issue of the value engineering that the Councillor has just obviously outlined and it can obviously appreciate that since the original project of 8 million was agreed it subsequently has been increased as to why we're into the process of the value engineering. Will and I'll be the time to help in the cases that the value engineering phase finished on the 3rd of May but I appreciate probably overrunning slightly but will these hells of that be brought back to this committee at some point in the future because potentially obviously whilst there's a scope there for the value engineering to bring some of that cost down there may also be instances where perhaps some of the costs you know we're in a time where building materials and costs are still increasing some of those that may start to go the other way so obviously it can work both ways it can work to our benefit it can work again so I'm just wondering if details of these movements will be brought to this committee in the future or be it they may I appreciate it may have to have to be on pink papers but I'll just some clarity around that please thank you. Councillor Baxter. Thank you. I'll give item at least whilst in a moment but in paragraph 2.1 you'll see that the carbonated cabinet delegated approval to the deputy chief executive in consultation with the cabinet member for property and public engagement that's Councillor Cleaver to enter into a contract with Lindham Group and following the conclusion sorry and that's to develop a submitted design to stage 4 supported by a value engineering process in order to align the overall contract price with the approved budget and following that it's bullet point three says following the conclusion of the value engineering delegation be granted to the deputy chief executive and consultation with the cabinet member to enter into the construction contract so we don't need we don't need to get a committee approval and cabinet approval for every step of the process that would make things long winded however you have got a committee in June and I believe another one in July hopefully when we we fully intend to report progress this committee is is looking at the bigger picture I would hate to think that we were getting down to kind of the the color schemes and the and the the details of whether it's a RSJ1 or an RSJ2 because that would challenge my understanding of RSJs and so I don't know if Mr Wiles wants to continue. Yeah I think it's just to echo the point the delegations have been granted to from cabinet to keep momentum really on this project and we're in a very intent part of the process where we're trying to drive the cost down it will not compromise the the end product it will work within the parameters of the planning permissions that are being granted so I think it's a freedom that officers are working within with the support of cabinet just to make sure that we get the budget lying down to the the necessary level I mean we're happy in the future to give a committee a an overview of the value engineering activities and what they've they've led to but it will be about some of the finishes and some of the modifications internally won't be as it goes to expect particularly exciting reading but it will give members assurance if you like that the end product has not been compromised throughout this process but as council witnesses and as alluded to the market is quite volatile and the prices are changing so the way Lindham have constructed their their fee and their construction costs they've gone out to third parties and got prices so what they're having to do is revisit that supply chain and see if they can source those same materials from different providers which will change the prices so that's the kind of activity that's that's underway we are we are making good progress with it but we're not quite there yet but we met them a week last monday and and we made some some significant strides forward so we're still confident we're on track within the overall timetable that's been described what we're hoping to do for your next meeting and thereafter is produce you a project dashboard that gives you that oversight because i imagine the committee's rightly cited on the the key milestones the risks the overall budget envelope any particular cost and in particular unforeseen events and that's what we're hoping to be able to present you thereafter so that the committee can get assurance that the project is on track or if it isn't what we're doing about it too to make sure that we ultimately deliver the project thank you thank you did you have something specific and councilor wittington that you were okay because i don't think i actually when i made my initial comments refer to this committee micromanaging this contract and i think council about the leader might have misunderstood where i was coming from i've had considerable experience of managing in my professional career as an accountant the public sex and managing these large projects and can see how creep in costs can can come in i wasn't talking about micromanagement i was just talking about as part of the scrutiny but the expenditure of public money that we are made aware of the details of this engineering not that we've actually been saying oh yes we like that no we don't like that but just so for the clarity of the scrutiny of the expenditure of public money that at some point this committee is made aware of the outcome of that though engineering and as i say potentially costs go up and costs and costs comes down this isn't about others committee asking for a financial scrutiny of the depot project it's not about micromanaging it thank you thank you for that mr can i just explain mr wiles has said that he's going to do a dashboard which he also said at the time that he would do an overview of the value engineering would that be sufficient for you council wittington or is there something more specific that you wanted okay thank you council bachelor did you want to say something yeah i just want to say it sounds like we're in agreement because as you can see recommendation two is that this committee is asked to asked to request that regular reports on the construction of a new waste depot are presented at each meeting so that's exactly what we're hoping that you're going to ask us for so there's no we're all in the same sheet i think unless max has a question council so yeah thank you chairman what is the figure in terms of cost above which we will not go and second point um i did ask some time ago if i could have a list of the estimated costs reach part of the uh the proposed depot that is the office accommodation accommodation for staff the photo cells the surfacing and so on i've yet to have that so i would appreciate exactly i Richard did say he would let me have that let me say with some time ago back to my first question what is the cost above which we will not go okay well your second question then um hopefully mr wiles will be able to address that with the outside of this meeting if that's okay mr wiles is that okay and if you're able to answer the first question thank you yeah i'm just mindful we're in a public meeting and people may be watching this i think in terms of the cost what i would say is the council has set a budget on this project of 8.8 million that includes the construction of the depot but also the project management and the external consultants of some of which members have met in previous presentations so that's the overall budget envelope in which we're working to so that's that's the context in which we're having these discussions but i'm just mindful that the value engineering at the moment is in a position where we're trying to drive those costs down to the absolute minimum without compromising the quality so i don't want to suggest as a there's a figure on that that others may may hear and therefore stop at if you see what i'm saying thank you and again the dashboard will explain details yes thank you sir and i am happy to be paper does it work at any time if any of this information is not to be put in public domain okay thank you um okay so so yeah a welcome decision that that these things will be discussed in public domain i think that that's that's good please with that it's an important project we want to maintain and maintain scrutiny on this you mentioned that there'll be an update in june just looking at the timetable the value engineering was supposed to finish may the third so that's a few days late that that's fine what are we going to hear in june just want to push a little bit harder on will that be will that be finished will we what's coming back to us in june so so that i just want you to be absolutely clear about what we should expect at the next stage the next milestone is on this thanks i don't think that it can be clear because we we these are progress reports so we will be reporting progress as it is if if there is a milestone that we've we've passed then we will report on that milestone and i'm looking at the officer a bit because if the value engineering was due to be finished four or five days ago then it wouldn't have been in time for this report to to feedback and there will be more detail coming out we're going to be talking about the construction of this project for most of the next year with regular reports along the way and then hopefully we'll be we'll be celebrating how well-run it is and how fit for peppers it is and for another 30 to 50 to 70 years beyond that although i won't be here in 70 years time and so as for like what exactly are we going to report back in a month's time if i knew that i'd have put it in this report because it's it's it's unknowable council wittington yeah i again as i said i've been involved in quite a lot of these projects in the police s before and we normally well i've worked in an environment where we use projects management software such as prince to or something like that which is used to report on all these milestones and to identify when there is slippage and whatever and there are keen milestones what kind of thing is it sort of an iterative loop to go back so i'm not surprised when the leaders comments that is is that in place do we have that do we know if we're in these key milestones what methodology project plan methodology underlying all of this are we utilizing to ensure we don't go off track thank you council that step thank you our offices will remember that we have a project board consisting of the the consultants the key staff and there's a seat for cabinet representation on there as well um if you want a gun charts and and prince to reports and if you want the vivid detail i i would suggest that that's first of all could you put your microphone on please council wittington afraid you're answering a question and i've not asked you're answering your question not my question my question is does that methodology exist so i'm asking i didn't say i wanted to see the reports generated just is that methodology in place and if so what methodology are you using i'm not interested i'm not interested in micromanaging this i'm just interested in the methodology you're using i'm not you know so i think it's you're answering a question that i've not asked with due respect thank you mr wiles did you want to come back on that sorry just to give the committee the assurance i believe we went through this in quite some detail the november meeting we talked about the governance for quite a big period of that meeting just to give the assurance that there are weekly project meetings there are monthly project meetings and it comes to this meeting as well so the layers of governance around this are robust as you'd expect on a project at this size we also appoint external project management support for a company called glee's who are project managing this as well with all the other third parties and under the uh consultants who are part of this overall project so i think uh hopefully the assurance has been given that the road bus headed up by debbie's team debbie and her team we've got uh road bus project management in place which you wouldn't expect anything less because there's been made the point has been made it's taxpayers money so we need to be really mindful of that uh and and therefore it's so all the project management around it it's fit for purpose in my view thank you thank you for that is that okay uh counsellor wittington does that answer your question is there a methodology yep okay sorry counsellor giel did you want to come back i i didn't know if your hand well i think which has answered it now i mean i i think it is a valid question at this early stage i mean glee's will obviously have a methodology so so so yeah i mean as as i say we welcome what comes forward us in june i mean just to answer the question obviously looks as if we're going to get a professional services contract reported to us in june um and that in a project like this you're only as good as your next milestone not the last one so so so so yeah i look forward to the next update thank you thank you for that okay counsellor haryson thank you chair um just a quick question if we hadn't reduced our contingency form by 9.8 percent would we have had the money in place that we wouldn't have to do any value engineering mr wiles we didn't actually reduce the con the contingency the debate at the time was whether the contingency level that was put forward by the cost consultants was fit for purpose and and at the time and based on the evidence and information we had to hand it was considered it was so we had there was never a reduction overall on contingency i think it's also fair to say that both or the bidders was fully cited on the cost envelope of this project and this has been reported back at the cabinet meeting if you if you recall when the contract award was granted and the figures were given in that public document so both the bidders who came forward over shots the the cost envelope that was put in front of them uh for reasons of which obviously are known to them not to us and that's why we haven't a value engineer because they've gone over the budget envelope we've been clear with both those bidders that the budget set by council is the budget so we need to work within that hence why we're in the value engineering thank you thank you um i very much doubt richard would have a project commission i was going to answer the question that's already been answered from council wittington without following modern professional standards because that would be really not good in his role um and secondly there is a provisional program summary in 2.2 of the document that lays out the future program so we can expect certain things to happen at certain time thank you for that uh council green yes thank you i suppose you know the fact of the matter is that we are behind on the value engineering period that wasn't visaged as uh terminating in effect by the third of of may obviously a number of days ago and i'm just wondering i mean this must mean that it's already having knock on consequences because if we look at the progression of stage four design that was supposed to start immediately after the cessation of that value engineering period so i just want to understand what the what the consequences are from the delayed value engineering period and perhaps you know spell out you know what that means and where we want to be for the time of the next committee i mean it must be said that it appears that we're already late we're already over budget and there aren't even any spades in the ground yet so i certainly the chainsaws have been out for a number of trees on the site thank you well we're not capable of it because no contracts have been signed and no contracts won't be signed until they are within budget and we're not behind schedule because some of these events are running in in parallel so for example the work on the nesee for contract has been drafted as we speak uh and the value engineering period was slightly delayed because of the calling period that needed to take place following the decision by cabinet on the 16th of april but some of those own engineering discussions took place prior to that so some of these albeit 2.2 is a very much a simplistic overview of events in reality some of these are running in parallel with each other and some have been extrapolated forward beyond dates that won't necessarily occur i mean and short council agree and appreciate so lots of these are without our outside of our direct control and rely on third parties and other contractors working within their own timescales so for example the mobilization period and the commencement of the construction on site is subject to lindens and they're all the third party contractors being mobilised in the time frame in which we want them to that may be slightly before or slightly after that but i hope the committee will work with us and and indulge as if some of these dates are slightly out of reality but rest assured we're all laser focused on getting this uh construction outside as quick as possible thank you thank you did you want to come back thanks for being yes just briefly i mean i think the original proposition i mean um and please do correct me was um for this to cost £8 million so i think that does imply already um some element to which we've gone over that originally um specified budget and it does seem to me quite clear as well that you looking at this uh provisional program summary there are things here that yes could be occurring in parallel but it also does seem that there are a number that do seem very clearly to be um envisaged envisaged as occurring in series or in serial um as i say the progression of stage four design i mean to be very specific about that is that now going to be delayed because the value engineering period is delayed thank you mr wiles no like the answer's no or you wouldn't like to come back uh no it won't be delayed council daxter can i just point out that this um focus on the value engineering period having ended and us going over we're talking about two working days since we said we were going to finish it we said we're going to finish it on the third of may we've had a bank holiday weekend so two working days i don't think we need to get too excited about that level of delay especially when we compare it to delays this council has known in the past including getting started on building a depot in the first place uh so what i'd also like to cautiously mention to council green is that a lot of this work is being done by consultants and one of the reasons why when you inspect the expenditure over five hundred pounds that we have a lot of expenditure on consultants is because we're doing things like building depots and repairing the mess of the St Martin's park that was left to us back in last May thank you uh council agree yeah i think my very brief response to that is that feels very much like normalizing failure and it just doesn't feel like a good start okay i think we've uh discussed this at length now and uh we're going to move on from this because we do have quite a lot of other things to talk about so uh the second point is that the finance and economic overview and scrutiny committee is asked to request that regular reports on the construction of the new waste depot to impike those grants and are presented at each meeting can i have a proposal please for that councilor soya can i have a seconder councilor ledenham uh all those in favor please that's eight four anybody to get oh okay nine sorry okay that's unanimous thank you that's carried then okay the next agenda item is item nine which is St Martin's park can i just remind everybody that there is commercially sensitive details here this is an update and just that um obviously there's nothing here that needs to be discussed outside of here if anybody wanted to be anything to be discussed on the pink papers then obviously we would have to think about going into closed session but it is really just an update of where we're at at the present time so um over to you councilor backster thank you thank you thank you for your patience with me this afternoon um this is a deliberately uh well it's you have asked this chair for a open and transparent report consequently it looks quite bland because some of the the detail is commercially sensitive even even still and one of the things that the press picked up on as the papers went out was paragraph 3.3 um the request for to the government for a brownfield land release fund application the brownfield land release fund application for some of 2.8 million pounds we might be awarded that we might be awarded none of that we might be awarded some of that we don't know yet however we will we do intend to bring a paper to a full council meeting probably the may full council meeting to ask for delegated authority to accept that money because it's we're hopefully being given a large sum of money it needs council approval to accept the money into the bank account and consequently we we're going to ask for delegated authority to accept that just as if we were going to spend 2.8 million pound we would want council permission that's that's why it will appear on the full council agenda hopefully it won't be a long and protracted agenda item I think the rest of the report pretty much speaks for itself not much is is happening on site and for for various different reasons and negotiations go on with the prospective landowners the actual landowners in this form of barely estates there are other elements which have been on pink papers in the past which are still progressing I think that's probably the time to ask if we have any any questions councillor Whittington yes thank you chash actually my the leader must have almost preempted my question it is on 3.3 it is on the 2.8 million pounds application for the brownfield land release fund my question was how mission critical is the 2.8 or any part of it I mean as as the leaders just alluded we could get nothing we could get 2.8 we could get a figure in anywhere between north and 2.8 and so really actually is how mission critical is it what what is the level of risk that's in there if if you know because because 2.8 it's a big sum of money and you could have a real impact on the successful outcome of what we're trying to do with Samantha's part so the question is how mission critical is is now fun and what would happen if I mean I'm guessing we would be might have made some guess as to if we would get anything of it but just how mission critical is the receipt of that or part of it thank you councillor Baxter thank you it depends if you're talking about mission critical in terms of what will happen to St Martin's park will the mixed development go ahead will the housing go ahead will the retirement go home go ahead I'm pretty confident that the retirement home the housing there will one day be a retirement home on that site there will one day be a some housing on that site if you're talking about mission critical as in in terms of whether or not the the council gets a revenue for the entire project or loses money on the entire project well the the difference will be the project will be I think this 2.8 million pounds will only be awarded if the project would otherwise not be viable and so it makes you wonder if the project isn't viable without 2.8 if the project was viable without the 2.8 million quid we wouldn't be asking for the 2.8 million quid and first place so it's a kind of a you can you can read your own prophecy into that and I'm tempted to offer the council another history lesson about how we got to this situation with St Martin's park but I think those arguments are well rehearsed so I'll show away from that mr wiles did you want to come back on that yeah it's just to say that at the February meeting of council when this was debated if members recall the application for the brownfield site funding was one of the mitigations to offset the overall projected deficit on this particular project so the project will still go to fruition but this was one of the strategies that was suggested by officers and approved by council to mitigate the overall deficit on the project so it doesn't it's not a condition upon the success of the project but it's a mitigation against the loss thank you thank you for that council so yeah thank you chen concerning the monthly electricity standing charge I've had questions about it from residents at the sessions I hold I called it ask the council and Stanford library every Friday I said it could be called a surgery I think the sum is in the public domain and I've explained to residents that the cost of disconnection and reconnection would be hugely more than paying the monthly standing charge what I don't know and I would like to is what would the decrease the disconnection reconnection cost be and then I think residents would be a little happier if they have those figures I can only answer this question because I've got some experience in the electricity field and that's to say that it's not just about the disconnection reconnection fee the grid and locally to Stanford the grid has got so much capacity Cummins had an availability they were paying for the availability of energy in that area and that's what we are continuing to pay for because one day on that site someone is going to need large amounts of electricity to fuel the retirement home and the houses and the other things so that's what we're paying to we're paying to retain that if we were to disconnect and give that availability away there would be a saving for the period between when we shut it down and when we next needed the energy and energy prices can go up and down and so can availability charges go up and down but the bigger risk is that somebody else will come along and poach that availability which in the best case would mean that that energy wouldn't be available and we would need to enable the the the grid to fit another high voltage supply so that there was enough energy in the locality to supply those needs and fitting a substation is very expensive but worse still it might be that there is no way to put that so we're talking about someone putting a high energy user in the locality it's probably not a very high probability but it's a very high if it did happen it would be very high risk and it might mean that there just wasn't physically the capacity within the grid to supply the energy that the new tenants of that site need and they would be scuppered because they just physically wouldn't be enough electricity that's why it's commonplace in industry when you've got a vacant site or when you're doing refurbishments to a factory or whatever to to hang on to that availability charge does that explain the comparable cost i don't think it's possible to put figures on that cost because what i've just said is if we disconnect it to use your words if we disconnect it may be that we can never connect again and so there wouldn't be a price because there wouldn't be any electricity available the cost of building a substation would depend on how large a substation needed to be and how complicated it was to to put it out there so if you're putting it on the wrong side of the river or the wrong side of the railway track it would be a lot more expensive than if if there was a technically weighted to put it closer to the site it's it's a it's a little bit of a long as a piece of string i don't know if offices want to add anything to my wisdom i think how's the backster has covered it um but we are retaining the capacity for the the coming side of the site which will generate enough electricity for half if we disconnect that we can give that cost back to national grid at no cost i think i have emailed you council soy with this um but obviously we are we are then giving half of that capacity back to the grid who can then allocate it to any scheme which comes forward in the Stanford area so by retaining the capacity it is a serviced site if we disconnect it it will be un-service site which will then affect the land value greatly um so i i also think that at the moment um it is impossible to get you a quote council soy we would have to ask national grid for a a dummy cost and i i don't think that they they would be prepared to do that but um at the moment it's a service site the the capacity is retained and we will continue to hold that capacity until the scheme develops thank you uh counselor harrison thank you chair um excuse me if i missed it somewhere along the line but are all options that were previously discussed still on the table i want to say yes uh without going making the making meeting pink it's quite difficult to do but some of the assets that could be sold haven't yet been sold uh some of the um options so there's not much ink on the paper uh in in terms of things being signed off and therefore um roots being denied we we still pursue the same uh strategy as as was decided by committee and council earlier this year but if there was a sudden change of direction for for whatever reason that is still possible getting nods from from debbie i think the council committed to option two with some caveat so the report is to give an update on the points that it wanted us to consider such as the submissions that brown for land release fund um such as looking at some other legal options which are being progressed and all of those have been accepted by developer parties um so everything that was asked at council to be looked at is being looked at thank you uh counselor wittington yes thank you chair i actually think the delhi might just have asked the question i was good because i was going to refer to 3.6 which speaks about the legal issues that need resolving um and it concludes the council remains positive they will all be resolved and i was kind of guessing whatever is just said that given the assurance that they have now all been resolved thank you yeah there was there was a number of legal items that were in the full council papers um around um legalities that needed to be investigated and we're making very good progress on all of those i'm quite happy to have a conversation with council that wittington on those thank you so thank you um just one moment okay uh counselor ledenham and then i'm coming to you counselor bishnash thing is that okay thank you um i don't know if the leader can give us an update on this or not when we had the briefing with karen um with the waste management company what was carrying out the removal of the contamination material it failed the inspection i know we've got the stockpiles and materials there but um i don't understand it the site was still contaminated has that been resolved yet on the other contractor for filling their contract w can you come back on that yeah so two of the um three stockpiles that are on site we're progressing with having those removed from site um so they're certified uh clean six f2 um the other um one that has an issue and it is not certified we are in uh legal discussions with the contractor around resolving that it is part of their contract to ensure that all the stockpiles were certified so obviously we're progressing that with them to ensure that that third is as well uh yes if you'd like to uh was there any penalties on the contract if they failed to carry out what they were agreed to do at all at least penalties it would be a form of adjudication route that we would that we would have to go through next um so it would be somebody independent that would look at at the contract and the legalities around that um but we're at that process uh uh we will be unfortunately thank you uh counselor business thing thank you baro chairman i've got two questions uh for that but i'll start with the first one depending is the possible start of seeing spade on the ground is it dependent on that 2.8 million pounds grant we're receiving it or do we have a forecast I did when we will see spade on the ground counselor Baxter uh thanks the 2.8 million pounds i i don't think is is a kind of to use uh the words mission critical um comment the the spades will arrive um even though it might make it uh not a financially viable project the spades are not critical on the 2.8 but the thing that is uh and counselor leadinum um alluded to it at the end of paragraph 3.5 it talks about the removal of all three it says the removal of all three stockpiles is a condition of completion of the sales contracts so i think that is the the more significant hurdle which is preventing the spades more likely the bulldozers and jcb's um but yeah the the work commencing is is that true yeah there are there are a number of uh works vendors works that are required between exchange and completion so the removal of the stockpiles the uh the power lines obviously through national grid and obviously the uh the three developers need to also submit their reserve matters applications to the local planet authority and to do their joint infrastructure work so um there there is obviously between exchange completion and the next few years an awful lot to do okay second questions uh we've got to the sale as we mentioned it was mentioned in the local paper that um the there's a buyer or possible a person had been found to purchase the site is that true is that is the sale of the whole site that belonged to skdc okay the um the site as you know is split into two half of it is owned by burly and half of it is owned by skdc um we have people in place that are interested in buying the land that will all be subject to all the things that we've been through already so i have no crystal ball but yes someone someone is currently willing to buy the land but we haven't sold it have we no we we haven't sold the land uh someone would tell me if we were going to uh and so i think some of what was written in the local press um should i say missed out on the nuances of the situation which is a trendy way of saying they didn't get it right um the yeah so as we've i wanted to follow up on your previous question council a bit interesting um to say yesterday i asked whether or not we would have commenced work on the site in a year in two years and it's very difficult to say if we had started work or if anyone had started work on the site um rather than tidying it up and clearing away the the the old and starting with the new if if we've started that this time next year then i will be a very happy man um if we if we haven't started that before the next district council election then i'll be i'll be quite disappointed but these are all issues which are beyond the control of the the district council we cannot wave a wand or or crack crack a whip to get these legal niceties out of the way we can't force barely to bring forward reserve matters there are many things which are beyond our control and it it is frustrating um and like they say if if i was starting this project i wouldn't have started it from from here thank you councillor soya thank you Jim um a wiser man or possibly woman than i once said prediction is difficult especially about the future uh what are the current worst and best case scenarios for this project in terms of profit or loss i think we actually had an update on this at the last meeting and we had lots of figures but debbie can you add anything to that i think this the all the financial information went to the full council meeting on the 8th of february where it it was agreed on a way forward with the project um so i don't think we're in a public session man and chairman i don't think we'd be comfortable to to share that at this meeting in this in this way thank you i think if you go back to the minutes of the full council council so you will see all the figures there that explained all that detail for you yes i'm thinking is things are changing rapidly all the time and it's several months since since that meeting sorry about that yeah councillor backster and i'd also gently say that it's it's not all about profit or loss it's not well we're not a profit-making organization and one of the things that the previous administration got right about buying this site was to say if if the council doesn't buy it it will end up being high-end homes and of little use to the economy and the general well-being of stanford um we we cling to to the um to the purpose of it not just being more rich houses in in stanford we want it to be more than that we want it to to generate jobs we want it to promote a green economy we want we want people to visit stanford as a result of it and that doing that means that we won't get the absolute maximum profit out of the scheme that that we could because we want what's best for for the wider stanford economy rather than just increase it i mean silver chairs and tables and and if it's all about profit and loss then we're in the wrong room really right council vision actually and i've got one more question because then we're going to move on from this thank you madam chairman just one quick one following what actually the leader just said i would very much like to know so isa employment land is still within the within the development or that hasn't been removed i don't think that's changed from the original point of it but debbie i'm sure we'll be able to update us yeah so the the consented scheme the outline consented scheme is for employment use retirement village and for residential homes so it is a mixed use scheme and there is employment in that okay thank you everyone that was a report for us to note the progress and i think we've had quite a good good discussion on that so let's move on to agenda item number 10 and this is for councilor dilks i believe would you like to come to the front councilor dilks yes thank you madam chairman i'm delighted to present this update report relating to the east midlands building control consultancy which is a partnership between south kesterven and two neighboring councils new can show would and rush rush cliff with south kesterven delivering the service on behalf of each partner building control is a statutory service which aims to ensure the safety of buildings and the people who use them and set standards for construction and refurbishment work in england the grenfield tower tragedy in 2017 rightly prompted a review of rules and processes governing building safety in addition there is also of course the challenge of how we mitigate the climate emergency and it's fair to say that recent and forthcoming changes to building regulations will be pivotal pivotal in reducing energy consumption and achieving net zero carbon goals approximately three quarters of the workload of the building control team is fee earning and as the name implies the council's allowed to recover costs of fee earning work but not to make a profit from them at the cost of the remainder of the workload being non fee earning um have to be born by each council the east midlands building control control consultancy competes with approved inspectors for fee earning work and currently wins an average of half of the market share the economic climate over the last year and more has resulted in fewer applications and consequently the income is below the predicted budget but this is offset by savings created through vacancies in the team appendix one provides you with details of the provisional accounts for 23 24 the legislative changes include a requirement for building control officers to demonstrate their competency and i'm pleased to say that a number of the east midlands consultancy officers have already achieved the required competency levels and the trainees surveyors are progressing with their training and qualifications chairman i invite you i invite your committee to note the contents of the report and agree to receive an update in 12 months time i'm happy to say that our assistant director of planning emma wittaker and our building control manager jeremy barlow are here to answer any questions you may have thank you thank you for that do you have anything to add to that emma at all thank you chairman um i don't think so um it's hopefully the details in in the report but we're happy to answer any technical questions and obviously the appendix is exempt so if um there are specific questions on that then we'll obviously have to go into close session thank you okay we have no show of hands so no questions at this time oh council green yeah um i'm in the preamble for this i mean it's described that this is um a highly successful endeavor and yeah i think when you look at the tables and it has in fairness been acknowledged i mean the income we're receiving here is an all-time low as per the table the number of applications are an all-time low and then our market share is static so what is our understanding of success here um how is this highly successful thank you and i would like to come back on that thank you thank you so it's um it's a service that's been um in a partnership with uh initially with um new econchurered i think it was and then russia cliff joined um started in 2014 it's been a really stable it's been a really positive partnership it's it's over the years we'll have reduced the costs to each local authority in terms of the general fund um contributions um this last year has been quite challenging both in um in in the construction sectors so that's had an knock-on effect for levels of applications across planning and building control um what you'll see is that the market share has remained pretty stable so it's not affecting just us it's affecting the approved inspectors as well um that has got a negative impact on the predicted budget however it's been offset by salary savings because we've had a number of vacancies and we've been recruiting back to the team but we've been doing that slowly and gradually so that we can control um the workload and the staff intervals that we've we've got um what i should also say is that we are carrying a surplus um across the partnership where we've had um i suppose bumper income in previous years um we're not meant to make profit on the um trading account so we are meant to break even it is meant to be a three to five year rolling average of no profit basically um and that's a sit for guidelines so you will see on the trading account you will see a deficit but that's actually a good thing because it means that we are doing exactly what we should be doing and we are reducing those um the the income levels um through not raising application fees um as well as managing that flow of work coming in so i know that's a bit complicated to get yes around um but the bit that actually really we should be aware of is the general fund contribution which has is lower than was predicted that's the fund that's the amount that it physically costs this council um into the partnership and it was um quite a considerably lower than was predicted and that's obviously through careful management so hopefully that's that's helped explain why some of those figures are perhaps a little bit um unusual in terms of what we would be talking about for a normal service um in terms of the the income thank you Emma okay so this is to note the update um regarding this and agree to receive an update in 12 months so can i have a proposal that we agree to have an update uh council Harrison seconded by councilor soya all those in favor please that's unanimous thank you okay agenda item 11 uh this is the grant some future high street fund um and i think it's council Baxter again to present please thank you chair and um i should say with all these reports thanks very much to the officers that have put the information together i am grateful even though i don't always mention it um but um thank you Megan White for preparing this report for us um the report is split into five bits they are referred to as subsets they are listed in paragraph 2.3 but if i run through them in turn the public realm projects uh market approach and station approach um believe me the works have begun with the marketplace the compound is being built behind the restaurant is named escapes me um petticoats uh so they're putting things in place behind petticoats and in the coming days uh we will see the barriers going up around the the marketplace in the areas where the works are to take place they are lower barriers so that people can see across so they can see what's happening if you're on one side of the marketplace you can see that the world is still turning on the other side of the the marketplace works um it will be some months of disruption for businesses shoppers resident residents for which we apologize but we hope that the finished product will kind of justify the ends will justify the means uh in that way we have circulated or information has been circulated to residents and business owners in the area showing where the area the marketplace will be closed off and the diversion routes and so on um i'm sorry it has been a bit of a journey to get there and it's not been helped um it couldn't be helped that we had a member of staff that that came and then for urgent family circumstances had to do it had had to leave post quite soon in so many thanks to nick kibber and his economic development team for for keeping the show on the road so to speak um the second part of that public realm bit is station approach um we are still negotiating with the county council and they are still negotiating with um potential contractors to get that started um the work has to start or we have to get a contract in place by the end of september because the works need to need to be done by a certain point second one the conduit lane public conveniences refurbishment uh 2.12 should read the properties team at the council will manage this project um it's not our council staff who are doing the refurbishment of the public conveniences and we will have a contractor but that contractor will be managed directly by the this council uh rather than in the case of the marketplace by the county council um kind of as a third party relationship uh the the quote for the refurbishment of the public conveniences was higher than we expected and so we are looking at different ways to to do it um more news on that if if you want um more detail other than we are committed to refurbishing and reopening these public toilets which were closed more than 10 years ago and there are people waiting for them to be reopened with their looks crossed yeah um the upper floors grant program you can see that we've had three full applications um one of them is is Buckminster and Buckminster have previously been the beneficiary of a number of grants from this council this generous council um but because of the the size and the nature uh of of the grants we are eager to comply with subsidy control regulations and so we're going through a third party ricks accredited surveyor to make sure that everything is in order and tickety tickety boo uh the fourth one is the town team uh which as you know is at a number of false starts and we hope to get the right people in the right room for a soft launch uh that means a launch without without pasties or pastries or i think we'll go as far as coffee but but we we have a a lower profile launch because we want to get the right people in the right room talking about the right things this is not a photo opportunity this is an opportunity to increase um football and expenditure in grant from town center that is the aim and we can't measure expenditure by customers in the town center so the nearest we can get is footfall and that is how we will measure the success or otherwise of this project finally uh negotiations with department for leveling up housing and communities are ongoing as you would expect in the um last days of this uh administration this this national government administration not this administration we're here for some time to come um that that's for main five points if i've missed anything please shout out um or if there's anything to aren't from officers please help me out thank you for that uh do we have any questions or anything a councilor green there's a lot of opposition to the marketplace development emanating from within the administration uh i wonder how the leader addresses that i dare say if we had a full council vote on this today it wouldn't pass thank you we have had many um robust uh conversations um with county council with uh i believe that Richard Davies the conservative member who represents the the board in which the market places in he's also against the scheme even though he's he's he's uh responsible for delivering it um so it is no surprise and as councilor saw i said well early on in this administration there's nothing wrong with differences of opinion and we can resolve them uh through conversation and collaboration and it there doesn't have to be winners and losers um the old the the options that we had were to pursue a scheme which was agreed in 2019 and consulted on in 2020 and was i don't know if you'd call it a flagship but um the the previous administration had it is something that we wanted to get on with um by the time that that that we had it we do we have the option of continuing with this scheme which is going to enhance the marketplace in the enhanced ground from town center or handing back 1.5 million pounds to to government um i'm surprised what you think that there would be a majority in this chamber for handing back 1.5 million pounds of public funds to enhance ground from town center to the government but we're not in that situation so i guess it's a moot point thank you so if there are no further questions um this was for us to note the report i'm accept the feedback so we'll move on so the next item is agenda 12 update on the development of the economic development strategy uh council back to a game thank you i i do apologize for being here the whole time and the the deputy leader does his name on a couple of these reports but i think as you probably mentioned at the start of the meeting he's he's got a uh one of his family has got a medical appointment that cannot be missed the um so i am delighted to introduce the update on the development of the economic development strategy i know it's close to the hearts of some of the colleagues in in the room from the sk sk coalition um the original first draft was presented by a former leader i think in November 2022 uh since then we've we've changed leaders a couple of times we've changed the head of service on economic development a couple of times we've but the happily that the progress has got now to the state that Nick Hibbard and i have been able to present this report it has been to a members workshop as was agreed at a previous meeting of this of this committee and the draft has been altered accordingly um the original the agenda pack contained an out of date edition of the economic development strategy so it has changed since the original published agenda and the revised economic development plan is what we are consulting on with the public and it went live i'm happy to say it went live as per the report no delays of a day or two days it went live as per the report yesterday um just for fun i'd draw your attention to a couple of the things that that were changed um between the report going to cabinet and the report um going to consultation uh they are on uh the big the big map of the uk on page two or number number two i think it said oh sorry number one location the original agenda pack said that employment levels are low at 2.6 percent that should read and does now read unemployment levels are low at 2.6 percent and there's another one in there somewhere about the hospital industries which should read hospitality industries which is another important but different thing so hopefully with those typos corrected um you will all encourage your residents your businesses your loved ones to participate in the online consultation which is being done through a system which i think is called opus or opus um and therefore much more robust than the survey monkey consultation things that we've had in the past this is this is we've taken on board of the feedback from council abaley and others and we now are a more robust bulletproof system of i don't know about bulletproof but robust system of consultation and we're out so um any questions i'm happy to take councilor wittington thank you um yeah i i read through through through through the document and thank you very much indeed for you know bringing it forward um i notice as i was kind of reading through it you know some sort of key themes um emerging which which i believe or identify to is it so just be in this end i'm just going to find my notes some sort of what i think the report prefers to have some key pillars around vision and truly involved and i really appreciate that the fact is now out to public consultation he talks about the council's role but he talks about economic goals and this is why i really want to sort of question and focus in on because obviously we're developing our south kestive and economic plan we also know that currently the county council together with north east lynx and north lynx via the mission of that i've got their own economic strategy development plan we also know that not too far down the line there's going to be a male combined authority for lynx year that will then have given money around economic development and all kinds of extra things coming in you know lots of extra money coming into the county but my final question is how do does all this align because if we have a economic strategy in south kestive and then lynx year does via the lab and the amount of my authority does we're not careful we're going to all be going off in different directions trying to do different things and i'm just wondering what level of crossover what level of ability to work together to sort of you know the the management speak wordy synergies which which is a word that i don't particularly think says a great deal but i use it because people understand that tend to what somebody means but it's just that how do you has always got work and blending together because we might be more leverage if we all clap together so some clarity around that i think we really use so thank you thank you for that i think that's a really good point so uh mr hibbert can you answer that so yeah yeah i think if you if you refer you to the pandices or it's with indian pandices a review of the strategic context so many of the strategies both nationally regionally and locally have been reviewed and summarized and that has been taken to account and construction of the strategy document let's suppose it's a product of the fact it's not perfect world doesn't in the sense that we don't all align in that same moment in time but what we do do we meet with partners on a regular basis with members of different partnerships across the region across the county across the locality so we continue to do that which part of the consultation exercise will be to consult with those same stakeholders to make sure that we inform the document as we move forward to his final draft sorry final version of it thank you councilor that's done yeah thank you for that um draw your attention councilor was intended page 139 which talks about the regional policy uh the the gl let the linkage counter count silver local schools in the skills improvement plans uh and so on yes it should fit together quite a few of us including umaia double-hutters so we we can see we should be able to see how it relates um the district policy to the county policy my fear with the mayoral combined authority is that a lot of the money that is that has been used uh to uh lure greater linkage you're into that mayoral combined authority is going to end up being spent on the south side of the humber uh and we're going to have to fight to get that that money and i think that what we do is a district we need to crack on with regardless of what other money might be floating around the system um i think this document worked by itself as a district uh policy um but no no man is an island no no district council is an island and we do need to be cognizant of what else is happening i think with this and also with with tourism uh with manufacturing with with um universities yeah we we do need to be aware of what's happening around the place but in terms of generating uh jobs income wealth happiness in south geese even um this is a way towards that nirvana thank you councilor wittington just a key question um it's probably because i've got the answer but okay i'll give the answer 97 percent of employment in lincolnshire is an SMEs where they employ 50 or less people so that for me that is the critical that is if we are talking about it it can with development though that is where we should be focusing our attention you know a lot of the big organizations to become this they can large to a certain extent they can they can they can take care of themselves but it's based on 97 percent of the county of SMEs 50 or less people that that's growing the vast bulk of the employment of lincolnshire residents and so i really would like to think the way we are looking at this you know we are focusing in on those companies because those those local companies you know we've got there are councils in this room that i don't know we do run local businesses you know and they generate jobs and you know they bring money into the town all that sort of stuff and i really do think you know that should be the focus thank you thank you for that uh councilor green yeah thank you very much i mean um it should obviously be noted that in effect five-year planners become a four-year one um ideally we should have been looking at an economic development strategy reading from 23 to 28 um so that can't go on remarks and similarly i mean it is good to see that devolution is referenced in here as well it should be it should be a great boon for our area um now i am aware that obviously with the situation with with some double hatters in the room there was a vote at lincolnshire county council and there was money specifically in mark for grandpa as well i know it certainly you yourself council backster and councilor dilks voted against that and councilor cleaver abstains um my question is a simple one will you say no to that money again thank you councilor that step um would you like to is this a time for a debate about the merits or demerits of devolution i have never taken part in a vote that was only about money for grandpa and town center the votes that i think you refer to were about a consultation on devolution which were they flawed consultation uh and which the responses to were to a large extent ignored by the conservative authority in lincoln uh and the the more recent vote about whether or not we go forward with devolution yes i'm still against devolution i still think that devolution is the wrong answer for a an area of the size of greater lincolnshire i think that it will pull funds away from this end of this end of the authority and take them to the south of the humber not saying that those areas don't deserve money but this is the wrong mechanism for it and it's a and the whole thing about devolution is that you're reducing a population of a one million people down to a single person a mayor responsible for representing everybody's opinion from grimsby to grant them from the deepings to uh market the one that's right the top the uh the the top of lindsey and and cleithorps and uh frankly i still fit yes if we had the vote again i would still vote against devolution again because i think there are better ways to get money into the grant them to town center and this economic development strategy is one of those ways thank you council ashley okay sorry point of point of information it's the devolution will not put all the decision-making at hands of one person there is will be a committee made up of representatives from the district councils and and from lincolnshire county council and the two unitaries so it is simply not the case that the decision-making process will be in the hands of one person so i'm afraid unfortunately well i i don't quite know what the leaders intentions were in the in the statement he made i'm really trying to get a give a bit of clarity to that thank you thank you for that uh but this meeting is not about devolution so we will not continue that conversation at this present time but thank you for the clarity on that Councillor soya again thank you chair um agenda settlement page 21 that is bottom right numbering um in the in the little in the in the blue kite uh sonartin's park is presented as a clear statement of what will happen on that site and stanton norsey development is presented merely as an aspiration just a point of making there and secondly pages 27 to 35 when will the details be produced of how these again how these aspirations are going to be achieved they're all um as as often said in this chamber mother of napple pie that uh there's very little in the way of detail there 28 to 35 again bottom right hand corner blue kite shape Councillor Baxter thank you just reading the detail of page 21 um we're talking about stanford's martin's park outline it is a fact the outline approval was granted in 2020 and this high quality mixed use development will comprise of of so that's based on the outline so that that's in the public domain all of its subjects change i guess but that's that's the most likely outcome for that important part of stanford's economic development stanford north it has yet to receive outline planning permission so that's not written in stone anything could happen the likelihood is it will be a development led by barely house preservation trust with guma leaves master developer and so on and so forth but so if you feel that the the wording in there should be adapted then please respond to the consultation or just write directly to neck and ask him to to mess about with it um the the second one so the we're talking about page 28 areas of focus and and and the kind of mother and apple pies of which there are 18 and then 10 and then 26 and then 50 so there's loads of them obviously there's loads of them we can't i'm not sure what you're asking are you are you asking for for less specific aspirations or for more um for more definite proof that they are actually going to happen uh within a thank you i i gonna ask nik to help me yep what happens obviously we that's now reflected in the corporate plan it's reflected in our economic development strategy and it's reflected in our development appraisal so as we move forward each year whether each member of the economic development team will be allocated a different task that task will be worked up and delivered over that time for it so once it's adopted we have a plan to get on and deliver it so we have a four-year plan not five-year plan but a four-year plan at the moment to deliver those outcomes and objectives of that strategy so that's what we aim to do so detail will follow i guess just one moment councillor tener sorry councillor green were you coming back to the discussion about uh the cash accounts the back story is devolution related well we're not talking about devolution here so is that maybe i can sneak in a question i mean if it's on devolution it would be on devolution yeah then i'm afraid the answer would be no because we're not discussing this that at this time if you don't mind i think it was just simply you know whether or not so actually would accept the devo money that he formally rejected councillor tener thank you very much thank you nik i broadly welcome this report as it's always good to have an economic development strategy and it's good that we've got a baseline to work from as uh leader backster stated we still have the ability to make alterations to the plan on going but i would just like to take the opportunity to invite members of the opposition to follow the Westminster colleagues example and cross the floor if they want to take a greater part in the process and join the skdc majority group and then you might have more say on what goes on the council thank you councillor wittington have you got something to say right okay thank you can i just ask one question on the um the action plan the timescale it says ongoing then it says one and three i presume that's either weeks months so i don't want to say years but could you just clarify that it was quite quick but it does mean years in this case thank you councillor jill thank you um i'd like to join everyone in welcoming this document uh two years there's only been two years coming wow it's felt a lot longer um so so i think we should celebrate the fact that we've got a document that we've been calling for for two years now which is uh which is good um i i probably would describe it as a baseline though in terms of where we are i think councillor turner had a good comment there this is a baseline in that in that i would i would i would hope to see a lot more smart detail in some of this and some of those connections that councillor soya talked about how we move from aspiration to delivery smart beings strategic measurable achievable realistic and timely do you understand that connection like councillor soya i i i i i've not seen that connection even with the corporate plan and i think there are definitely gaps in there um it does talk about collaboration but not with the devolved authority don't worry i'm not going to go into a uh a debate about devolution but it is a reality and so that should be part of our a part of the uh of the environment um i welcome the uh the comments uh about the consultation uh working through opus um and that thank councillor bailey for for for leading the discussion on improving our consultation process on that uh great for that that's been taken uh taken into effect so so some points and some questions first of all how are you going to sell the document i mean i i as i say when when when we when i led the the uh campaign for a town council in the community governance review the consultation document we went out and sold we spoke to local groups we spoke to community groups we we had to sell it recognizing that not everyone wanted a town council and that's why the the town council consultation had the the record amount of feedback that there's ever been for consultation i understand so how are the cabinet going to sell it um i i'd like to see more detail on the uh on on the the smart connections between the aspirations and and the actual difficult deliverables i'd like to understand a little bit more as to where some martins park fits into this i'd like to understand more about grandpa market i mean grandpa market uh again talking being this is a more a parochial interest here for grandpa and councillors but grandpa market is key to the economic development of our town um i i'd have liked to have seen seen some more detail as to how that goes through um just one or two other things going from the back yet so grandpa market i've mentioned um the smart deliverables i've mentioned um the inclusive growth um that there's a lot of out building there um is that something the greens are fully on board with in in the in the administration uh because there's there's a lot about uh building there are one or two words that i i would prefer simpler english develop a small business concordat i'm not entirely sure people follow what that is i i think that a document like this to be consumed by the public needs to needs to be really clear and uh i know that we we we there's been a little bit of uh of you know uh there's a lot of corporate buzzwords floating around of which this this document certainly has quite a few the reality is though the way this document i think will be consumed is that people will read the forward maybe they'll read the executive summary and probably nothing else the one thing i think i would specifically change about this is that the the forward talks about co2 emissions closed loop recycling gender equality sustainability sustainability collaboration but it doesn't put economic growth the aspiration for economic growth front and center um i i don't think it's visionary enough and i'd like to see more ambition in this but as i say i welcome the fact and i recognize the fact this is not this i'm not commenting on and not making a party political point because the last three administrations have failed to bring forward an economic development strategy so we have an economic development strategy that's an excellent first step should have happened three years ago two three years ago we have one um i'd like to see more ambition i'd like to see more detail and i'd like to see a visionary detail as to where we're going to how are we going to link into London given that we are closer to the city of London here than parts of London are how is it that we can link to Cambridge the fastest growing city in western europe which is less than an hour's driver down down the road um what what are the bigger picture things that are going to help our small businesses how are we going to really revive the grant from market which is a generational question that remains unanswered by this uh by this council thank you well just one final quick point i think i think uh cast back said it mentioned it's just to confirm the only changes with the new document that we've got today are just typos yes that's right yeah that is my belief if if if they're the more nuanced answer then uh mr abbot would explain yeah there there are changes subsequent to your workshop you hosted back in March but the two but the two could you put your speak your microphone please sorry i i think councilor geale is asking if there are other substantive changes to that have been made between the agenda pack coming out and the so at the same time as the unemployment hospital um comments okay so um would you like me to have a run at the yeah would you like me to have a quite significant typos because 2.6 unemployment and 2 2.6 percent employment it's quite a quite a big jump 2.3 yeah you're right 2.3 well okay thank you um would you like me to take a run that um the comments from council geale yes please i think he's made some really relevant points and actually i think some of those points would needs to be fed back to nick hibbert if that's something you could do council geale which would help this uh you know it would be good if you could put that in an email and then uh mr hibbert could actually incorporate some of those things once the consultation is over uh so yeah you can come back by your means yes so i we will certainly be encouraging our group to respond to consultation thank you thank you uh council back so yes please by your means yeah thank you i guess it was a bit of a rumbling a series of questions and you might get a rumbling series of answers which is very helpful in in sometimes uh quite agree uh we wish it had come sooner um i'm glad you glad you appreciate that for the first year that it wasn't delivered it we weren't it we were in opposition uh well i was in opposition some people hadn't even been elected so you can hardly blame uh Tim or Max for the the lack of progress in the previous year um so here we are um as i say there's been quite a lot of uh um swapping and changing of of offices and also content um if you think that um come member who said about mother had an apple pie uh if you think there is a lot of jargon and and wordies and and so on in in this iteration then crumbs you should have seen the previous iteration and that was part of the comment that was made at the workshop that all members were invited to especially members of this committee uh to which none of the sk coalition uh were able to attend um and it it's a shame that some of the comments that you've made just now weren't fed in at the workshop that i believe you asked for uh if you're looking for grant them i mean a lot of us didn't attend because we're out there generating economic growth yeah so some of us would rather be out generating economic growth right now but you you're in excuse me can we just have one person talking at once please yes you're right so um getting back to to the the point you're asking about uh how we're going to sell the document £4.50 at WH Smith um that's a joke um the you're asking about how we're going to sell the document we are we're doing press releases we're promoting it to through our channels we will be promoting it to the business clubs in each of the four downs uh we will be going through Nick Nick quibber's uh little black book of of people who are interested in the local economy and a daresay uh council harrisons little black book of businesses in grant them that that want to uh succeed which will include some of the market um people so and uh if you've got a little black book of yourself of your own then please tell your business contacts uh inside and outside the district to participate in this in this consultation if you're looking for the grant for market it's on a saturday morning from six o'clock uh in the in the town center uh and it's also on page 19 creating bustling markets um we haven't forgotten the whole the whole economy of the district doesn't hang doesn't live or die on grant them market or born market or Stanford market but you're right it is a very important uh and a very emotive um part of our economy uh and uh it's emblematic of our wider economy and so the success um that we're pushing to with with markets through a group that is being uh chaired by uh the cabinet member and attended by council harrison and and others is i think my point is we're not neglecting the markets and if you think there should be more in here specifically about the markets then respond to the consultation and and tell us that um i don't know if there's any other outstanding questions um yes it's been a long while getting here but happily we're out to consultation now and the next time you see this document hopefully we'll be the post consultation version of it um ready to be bounced onto cabinet and then launched on the wider world uh but don't think that we're not getting on with stuff just because we're waiting for a strategy we certainly are council on the run yeah i hate to be the one to rent a new parade um i thought this was a great looking document lovely really nice and uh i took the trouble to read the page on the deepings because i've got to say about the deepings one two three four four six seven nine nine typographical or grammatical errors so then i heard stanford got seven on there and this is just a quick flick through while i'm listening uh grandfons are saying born's opening sentence is the delightful market tone of born six on the delightful market town of born six on the eastern side of south geese steven sorry um there's lots of stuff of where it should be a capital and it isn't a capital there's one sentence which i've read about four times and i still don't know what the sentence understands um i'm not about to go through the whole lot but i think you need to proofread it and put an amended copy out to the public as soon as possible sorry thank you for pointing that out i think that's a really important thing and uh something nick is that something that you could do please of course yes thank you uh councilor soya um small piece of information uh chairman i've just done an online readability test on a randomly chosen page it comes out at moderately challenging in fact the high end of moderately challenging uh which is one level above plain english um so if anyone's worried about read readability it is possibly um what it could possibly be made a little more readable to bring it down into the plain english bracket thank you for that comment and i think some of that was actually discussed at the workshop uh so it did the feedback from the workshop get taken into account with this and was it a cabinet member that have put this out today for the consultation or was it skdc as the council nick sorry i just needed to ask that question it was amended subsequent to the the meeting yes um so what was the second question was it was it the council as a as a group that's put this out because i think uh council cleaver centers out an email so this has been sent out so uh it's just that if there are so many mistakes in it it doesn't look good on on us here and so is that something that can be rectified pretty quickly for you know the public start looking at this and i do think there's a um a real point about the the difficulty of reading this with the the wording that's in it which we did discuss at the workshop you did and it has been revised subsequently but we'll have another look and look at the type of reference today yeah definitely thank you council of accident yeah i mean i'm happy to take responsibility for for the document in its entirety um i would say that the the it's been split into two uh we've got the strategy and action plan first and then we've got the appendices um the original document um when it arrived to me um was in a very different order and a lot of that was further up i have concentrated on the on the first part the actual the the action plan and the the content of the first part some of the content of the appendices explaining where the towns are and uh market-deeping in the bronze age and that kind of thing i i confess that i have not proofread as assiduously as i should have done and certainly not as much as i did the the the first part of the document and with regard to the readability and the plain english um i i don't know the tears of plain english if if you're saying it's only one level above uh plain english then i think we're kind of winning i i would prefer that all our documents were were written in plain english to understand okay uh this is uh a document that that is pointed at the business community and um i think it's it's difficult to avoid uh jargon here and there although i entirely get uh counselor gills point about a concord out um i think that if you did a survey of the the population of south geese they would struggle to find a consensus around what is a concord out and it's a word that i remember from some some times a time ago so so yeah that's certainly in terms of the language we we need to mind our language in in this document uh as ever um so yes i i apologize for the typos in in the appendices uh we have done our best to correct the typos in the in the main body of the document which i hope is the more interesting um if if yeah i'll stop there before i dig my hole any deeper thank you for that explanation um counsellor green um yeah it seems that we've unearthed a few issues with this um would it be prudent to perhaps pause the public consultation because anyone diligent going out and responding to it this afternoon say there might be somebody out there doing that they might be picking up on some of these issues and we could frankly save them the time and that kind of duplication of efforts so perhaps there should be a pause i mean i think this speaks to the sequencing of events here um perhaps it would have made more sense in in retrospect to have had the discussion around the economic development strategy in this committee here and now obviously i think that was inevitable that it was going to draw out some issues and then had a breathing space and then launched the public consultation obviously uh dare say we almost uh jumped the gun and we had uh counsellor cleaver's email this morning saying it was out we should respond but um yeah we've obviously picked up on a few things there so i won't make a formal proposal but i'll just put that out there as a as a suggestion that perhaps it might be a good idea is there a particular reason that this was already put out to consultation before we discussed it here counsellor that's uh we we have discussed it here we discussed it here last time and we agreed to have a workshop which you attended and i attended and some several other members attended it was a shame that no one from the sk coalition attended should we pause for documents should we pause a consultation no absolutely not um we we are we don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past where everything gets kicked down the road the whole point of the consultation is for people to give us feedback if they want to give us feedback on typos and and uh there are no fundamental mistakes in here uh that that you've come forward with i think that that cannot be fixed during the during the post-consultation period so if we don't like the word can call that or or or we think it's less readable we can try and address that in the in in the future if there is a as has been pointed out on the page in in the deepings imagine the deepings having the typo on that page it can be fixed that is the whole point of a consultation um i i know there's been requests from other people to reopen the local plan consultation and and add that all over again we don't want to do that we want a consultation to mean something and we want people to participate at the time that they are invited in this case it's the public who have been invited to participate from yesterday onwards in your case counselor green it was when we were discussing the document at the workshop and also the documents were available so if you were busy uh generating growth um during the time of the meeting you still have the documents available so you still could have given feedback at the time so no absolutely not my concern is council Baxter that how does that make skdc look with the the simple mistakes that are in this report is the consultation is about spelling mistakes and extra words in the report or is it about the content of the report so that's just my my uh thought on this but council green did you want to come back on that well i mean would the message be perhaps you know to the public you know hold your horses check back in in a week or fortnight or because clearly it's going to be updated where some of these very obvious errors are going to be corrected i mean should we be telling that to our residents you know he might be quick off the mark to respond here you know give it a pause you know something better is coming um in amongst this this consultation period um just worried as i say that there's a lot of people will pick up on the same issues we have etc or more do you want to come back councillor Baxter really really if if the if the the journal or the mercury pick up on this meeting and and uh the the the issue becomes around is this consultation fit to go out to the public because it's got some some typographical errors and spelling mistakes in it then i think that publicity will generate this more response and if more people look at the document in order to laugh at the the typo on page 16 but they end up responding by saying well actually the most important part of the the economy is the ecclesiastical history of great pontine then that's the kind of feedback we want and i i welcome the feedback from wherever it comes i welcome correction to spelling welcome correction to grammar to typographical errors but most of all i welcome input into where this uh this district council should be going in terms of driving economic development thank you for your explanation do we have any more comments on this at this present time that council's deal so okay so i suppose the i mean obviously well obviously i welcome the comments that uh but yes some of these typographical errors are um embarrassing for the council let's let's put it that way can we receive at least assurances that they will be corrected with urgent haste um i i take your point that uh that yeah we it's out to consultation pausing consultation is a bad precedent and i i think i think i probably agree with you that once it goes out to consultation we should leave it out to consultation um but the reality is as i say some of these some of these some of this lack of proofreading is pretty embarrassing for this authority we we we need to receive assurances that that these get corrected as i'm just rereading the the or trying to reread the born page again and uh failing i i think i think that we need to receive assurances that as highest priority these get this gets proofread and corrected as quickly as possible chair that's a different question i'm quite happy to to concede on that point as far as the uh opus software allows us to yeah i think we should we should fix it yeah can we just have one person talking at once please so council gl have you got something to feedback on that sorry and then councilor wittington did you have anything to say we're going to council gl first sorry sorry sorry in chairman as long as the software demands i mean this is a pdf or a word this is this is not some kind of weird software that's generated this this is basic software that's been open to but sorry i just i just find the last comments about if the software allows it's somewhat difficult to uh understand sorry okay councilor gl did you want to come back but it is a fair point we are using new software so so yeah okay fair enough but yeah as soon as humanly possible this needs correcting because this this should have been proofread i i i'm i'm glad that the council pastor recognizes that this should have been proofread thank you council house and i know you want to come in but um emma did you want to come back on that at the moment yeah thank you just to give you assurances that we will proofread it i'll get another couple of the um of the team to to reread the um the document and correct make any corrections we will need to check with the software provider in terms of the consultation document so that's not the pdf version that that's on the um committee agenda and just see how we go about making those changes but we will do that ASAP and get that rectified thank you councilor howison thank you chair i'd just like to point out that we were all here reading this document and there's only one person that picked up the the issues at the time um the mistakes been made yeah mistakes i'll make people make mistakes there's a fantastic document there that's got a few spelling issues on it so let's get over it somebody's made a mistake they'll put it right no issue thank you thank you for that do we have any other comments at all on that document council noals just a point of order i recognize the problems on the born page and email debbie about it uh so i made the point of debbie that there was a mistake and it needed rectifying so this is a point of art thank you very much and thank you to everybody who put all their effort into this document it is an extensive document um and you know a really good document to start this consultation period off so i think it's thanks to the staff group that's done that okay onto the work plan so we're looking at june uh we have the council tax support scheme on there which will go ahead for definite in june it definitely will be on those next uh the next discussion for that meeting the provisional out term position report the economic development strategy adoption and the term pipe depot update with the dashboard is there anything else that council wittington yes thank you chair i just noticed that below those four items for the june meeting there are another list of earth items on there uh which talks that the fallen items are subject to confirmation but a grant of high street did there a cook there are some items there that are um at the top two for june now obviously i think we may have done the top one but i'm just but i'm just wondering will they be added to june or or not because they've got june beside them thank you you took the words out of my mouth before i could continue so um james wall well-born listed down everything there that he thought needed to be discussed at future meetings and put suggested months there so those are the suggestions for each work plan if we uh need to have them on so okay that's just the explanation explanation for those so does anybody else have anything that they want to be putting on any of the future meetings uh Debbie um if we could just move the end of year kpi's to the june line meeting rather than the june meeting please thank you yep okay that's no problem okay i've just made a note of that if there's nothing else for anybody else to put on the work program we will close the meeting at 427
Summary
The council meeting focused on several key community and economic development issues, including the construction of a new waste depot, updates on the St. Martin's Park development, and the launch of a public consultation for the Economic Development Strategy. Various updates and strategic plans were discussed, with significant input from council members and officers.
New Waste Depot Construction:
- Decision: The committee agreed to receive regular updates on the construction progress.
- Arguments: Concerns were raised about cost overruns and project delays. Proponents argued for the necessity of the depot for efficient waste management.
- Implications: Regular updates aim to ensure transparency and allow for timely interventions if the project deviates from budget or schedule.
St. Martin's Park Development:
- Decision: The update on the project was noted, with no new decisions made.
- Arguments: Discussions centered on the financial viability and the potential need for additional funding through a Brownfield Land Release Fund.
- Implications: The development's progress remains crucial for local housing and economic activity, with ongoing legal and financial challenges impacting its timeline.
Economic Development Strategy:
- Decision: The launch of the public consultation for the strategy was confirmed.
- Arguments: There was emphasis on the need for a coherent strategy to drive economic growth, though some members criticized the document for typographical errors and lack of clarity.
- Implications: The strategy will shape the district's economic priorities and actions for the coming years, with the consultation process providing a platform for stakeholder input.
Interesting Event: During the meeting, there was a notable focus on the importance of maintaining transparency and community engagement in council projects and decisions, highlighted by the detailed discussions and the decision to make depot updates a regular agenda item. The council meeting focused on several key community and economic development issues, including the construction of a new waste depot, updates on St Martin's Park, and the development of an economic development strategy. Various reports were presented, and members discussed the implications of these projects on local governance and community welfare.
New Waste Depot Construction: The committee discussed ongoing plans for the new waste depot at Turnpike Close, Grantham. Concerns were raised about the project exceeding its budget and the process of value engineering to align costs with the budget. The decision to continue with the project as planned, despite cost overruns, was based on the necessity of the depot for community waste management needs. The implications include potential future financial pressures and the need for careful project management to avoid further overruns.
St Martin's Park Development: Updates on St Martin's Park were provided, focusing on financial viability and planning progress. Discussions included the potential receipt of a £2.8 million Brownfield Land Release Fund, which is critical for the project's financial viability. The decision to proceed with current plans, despite financial uncertainties, underscores the council's commitment to the project but highlights risks associated with funding and project delivery timelines.
Economic Development Strategy: The council reviewed and discussed the newly developed economic development strategy, which had been released for public consultation. There were criticisms regarding typographical errors and the clarity of the document, suggesting it might not be ready for public review. The decision to continue with the consultation process, despite these issues, was driven by the urgency to move forward with economic planning. This decision could affect public perception of the council's competency and thoroughness in strategic planning.
Interestingly, the meeting revealed some internal disagreements and criticisms, particularly regarding the handling and readiness of the economic development strategy document for public consultation. This highlights the challenges in balancing thoroughness with the need to progress on strategic initiatives.
Attendees
Documents
- Economic Development Strategy - Updated Appendix A1 08th-May-2024 14.00 Finance and Economic Overv
- UPDATED Appendix A1
- Minutes 20022024 Finance and Economic Overview and Scrutiny Committee
- FEOSC Covering Report
- App A Corporate Property Maintenance Strategy 2024
- Updates from previous meeting
- Agenda frontsheet 08th-May-2024 14.00 Finance and Economic Overview and Scrutiny Committee agenda
- Appendix A - Asset Register
- App B Mtce Strategy Action Plan
- Depot Update Report FEOSC
- Update on the Economic Development Strategy 2024 - 2028 FEOSC
- SMP Report
- EMBC update May 2024
- FINAL FHSF FEOSC Report - 8th May 2024
- Appendix A1
- Appendix A - DLUHC Grant Award
- Appendix B - Upper Floor Grants project progress
- Appendix A2
- FEEOSC WorkProgramme Updated
- Public reports pack 08th-May-2024 14.00 Finance and Economic Overview and Scrutiny Committee reports pack