Ready to start, ladies and gentlemen, we are actually on live television. So it's probably a good idea to make yourselves look respectable or whatever, I don't know. Anyway, welcome to the meeting of the Climate Emergency Screwsley Panel. We have members of the public, and we have four sets of questions. We will only ask factual questions to the statements that come back from the members of the public. Welcome to Cancion, it's a lovely view here, I always like coming here, but then I live here, so I might be blessed. We have a number of substitutions, and we have Sean Hughes, who's substituting for June Player, we have Toby Simon, who's substituting for John Leach, and we have Helmut Fi, who's substituting for Alex Beaumont, and we also should give a special mention to Ian Hausle, who has done yeoman service while Anna is on maternity leave. I'm sure she's done yeoman service as well in a different sphere, and thank you for all your contributions, and we hope to see you again as a substitute in the future. So we'll move on now to the Emergency Evacuation Procedure. When the continuous and armed bell sounds, you must evacuate the building by one of the designated exits and proceed to the named assembly point. The designated exits are sign posted, arrangements are in place for the safe evacuation of disabled people. Okay, something else else, so you can only have one microphone at a time, so when you finish speaking, please turn your microphone off. Although frankly, I mean, it's not a big room. Most people have got voices enough to be able to speak without a microphone, but that's the situation, so please turn them off when you get there. Absences, apology fors, and I've done this. I think you said most of them, apart from apologies from Councillor Grant Johnson. Yeah, sorry about that. Sorry. Okay, declarations of interest, is there anything on the agenda that you feel you need to have a pecuniary interest dimension at this stage? No, okay, that's fine. There is no urgent business, so we move on to the public statements, three of which are about school streets. We are at the very beginning of our process for school streets, so I know one speaker in particular, yeah? Yeah, sorry. I don't think this is a pecuniary interest, but just to say that as a parent, I'm involved in some school transport initiatives, so have an interest in school streets. Okay, well thank you for raising it, it's always good to know. And I should note that I'm a governor, a designer for Bathwicks and Mary primarily, which may well be interested in this issue. Okay, but I don't think any of the speakers are talking about that, but thank you again for raising. Nobody else wish to raise an interest rather than a pecuniary one? Yeah. Well, I'm a parent as well, and I'm also involved in school travel initiatives. Also good to know. [BLANKAUDIO] Okay, I'm ready. As someone deeply entrenched in the study of transport policies at local, regional and national levels, it's glaringly evident that the failures of Bath and North East Somerset Council to deliver school streets extend beyond mere political leadership lapses to a fundamental absence of a robust road danger reduction strategy. Consider the debacle surrounding the failed Mount Road Livable Neighborhood Project where an ineffectual zebra crossing outside Round Hill Primary School was financed from Bain's highways budget, despite ample funding availability from West of England combined authority for a more holistic low-traffing neighborhood and school street solution. This oversight underscores the failures of the livable neighborhoods team to consult with the road safety officer crucial for determining the safest interventions for residential roads according to the UK's long-standing road classification hierarchy, the ABC and unclassified roads. By my estimation, there have been 12 opportunities to deliver or begin to deliver 11 school streets, yet have been and are repeatedly being squandered. King Edwards, Bathwick St Mary, Round Hill Primary, New Bridge Primary, Coomdown Primary, Parthhampton Primary, the Paragon, King's PrEP, St Andrews Primary, St John's Primary and Moreland Junior have all been neglected despite the clear safety benefits such measures provide. The Council disregard for the Vision Zero motion passed last November coupled with the exclusion of the road safety officer from crucial design processes further highlight the systemic shortcomings. What's more concerning is the stark absence of a comprehensive road danger reduction strategy akin to those successfully implemented elsewhere such as in Lambeth. I have provided a link to that particular strategy. Even basic commitments from political leadership such as ensuring that a school street will be required for all viable primary schools are conspicuously absent. This is also from the Safe Streets Now National Campaign that is their request on all councils. It is high time to recognise the urgent need for a cohesive road danger reduction strategy and to institute council processes that prioritise the safety of our children on our streets. Thank you very much. Thank you Adam. Comments? Questions? Factual questions? Okay, thank you very much. Move on to Talia Kelly please. Talia? Sorry about that. I think this is still on is it? Yeah. Talia Kelly and I am Parent Voice and Safeguarding Governor at Freshford Church School. We've noticed a real increase in traffic congestion, poor parking and a lot of growing confrontational situations between residents and parents, which I take it off. A number of near misses and incidents outside the school, particularly during school run times and we felt it necessary as a governing body and a school to initiate surveys, communications and multi-agency group meetings to identify and agree problem statements and address issues and provide a vision for all mental stakeholders of what safer streets look like in the vicinity of Freshford Church School. Despite ongoing work to influence and nudge family behaviour when it comes to active travel, the mode shift, which is what Baines talks about, with its mode shift styles, it has been slow and there's been quite a poor uptake. On 22nd of March 2024, we held a playing out event, which was an experimental endeavor to visualise what safer school streets look like, prioritise children's play and encourage a sort of enforced parking stride option. It was a very successful event and a post-mortem survey showed that most people felt that it did address the issues that were identified in our problem statement and noting how children could play and move around the vicinity of the school much more safely. Surveys, participants were very interested in exploring future walking bus and parking stride options and would like to see similar events in the future. We would like to move forwards with more playing out events and possibly an ETRO rather than a temporary traffic regulation order. We would like help with formalising walking buses, which are currently costly and difficult to administer from financially strapped schools. Financial support and less red tape surrounding such initiatives from the council would ensure the longevity and success and viability of walking buses. We would like some help with reclassifying walking routes as families are having to battle poor driving behaviours, especially rat running and speeding. The recent Wales and West gas works have meant that lowest stoke crolane has been closed since January, so families have been enabled to walk in through this route safely but most of them have told me anecdotally they will be stopping the minute the roads reopened and they will be driving again. So that's what we need the council's help with, reclassifying the streets, experimenting more with school streets, outside the school and helping us formalise walking buses so it doesn't impact on schools budgets. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hang on, there might be some factual questions. There are. Okay. So Saskia. Thank you for your statement. Do you think your school would be interested in trialling a school street where with the use of barriers and staff and parents to close the road for through traffic at pick up and job off times? Yes, I think that we've definitely got a group of people who are willing to support that and the school is definitely being on board with that. Hi, thank you for coming to talk to us. I'm interested in your comments about walking buses and that's something I've been involved in locally as well. What kind of support would you like from the council and what are the barriers that you've encountered so far? So I've been looking at the Bain's website because there's a sort of toolkit for walking buses and it seems to affect, if we do it from the school, it affects insurance premiums and things like that. So they have to get involved with insurance and then there's a lot of risk assessments and different things so I've tried to experiment with maybe just getting parents to do it informally rather than endorse from the school but that's been very hard with parents under a lot of time pressure and I can't advertise them through the school newsletter in a formal way to sort of encourage people to help. It's sort of got to be more of a word of mouth thing whereas if we had to do I suppose it's a less of the worrying about the insurance and that sort of thing, it might come more naturally. Okay, so it's kind of practical help with the insurance and the setup. Okay, all right, have you had any pushback from your school about that? Just that they are frightened of what pressure that will put on their budgets because we're already looking at a significant deficit heading into next year anyway in terms of budget. So I just need to really reassure everyone at school that any active travel initiatives are not going to hurt or be harmful to the school in any way. Is your parent body generally in favour of the idea? Do you know of a school street? The reason why I ask is because there's quite a lot of work required in terms of marshals and that sort of thing and do you think there would be parents that would come forward to do those sort of roles? It's something I need to push harder. I did put another entry in the school newsletter asking people to contact me. I'd say on the whole, yes, I'd say we're actually a good community that really does think about climate and sustainability in active travel. I think what some families are held back by is the infrastructure for using active travel because it's quite a wide catchment area to arrive there. So I think people just, they want to do it but they don't want it to be a high risk activity or perception of a high risk activity. I've got my brother-in-law to do a data analysis recently so he's got some interactive data images where we've looked at the routes, the clotted routes where the schools catchment area, the postcodes of all the different students and little alterations that could be made to those routes which would enable and encourage people to use active travel to get to the school. But we do need to do a firm and nudge and I do think that we've got the majority of parents with back-it. All right, John Taylor? Hello, this is a plea for joined-up thinking about school streets. I live on what could be a school street, charm a throat in Bathwell, a new bridge primary school is situated and I'm so pleased that the Council's finally beginning to consider promoting school streets but this action is very late and sadly I think it demonstrates the lack of joined-up thinking with the local authority as part of its journey to net zero. I worked with children for 40 years, 15 as a primary school head in two large schools so I feel quite qualified to comment on this. I'm also a member of our local residents group next door to new bridge primary school. We requested residents parking in 2018 being close to the hospital and the airport must stop and can be-but we had to change the approach when the Council promoted liveable neighbourhoods. We submitted the pro-former by Baines to our local Councillors. The word school was never mentioned in that pro-former nor were the words child or children. We included the school as top of the priorities in our liveable neighbourhood bid alongside residents parking. The school element of our bid disappeared without trace as Baines evaluated that bid. A golden opportunity to promote children's needs was lost. We've ended up with residents parking taking little account of the school. Fifteen months later now we've got a proposal to take away five of those RPZ places, introduce a one-way system but two-way for cyclists. This is claiming to be part of the liveable neighbourhood but in reality it's just increasing speed on a road where children walk to school. What does this demonstrate to me and my neighbours? Another opportunity lost. No joined up thinking, no overall vision, no overall planning for school children. I really hope you succeed in promoting school streets. They're sorely needed and I think they'll need some thinking outside the box to make them work. I don't think you're going to be able to take an off-the-shelf solution for each location. Too many opportunities have just slipped through the council's fingers and I think it's time you put children first, even though they don't have a vote. Thank you very much. Thank you John. Any factual questions, Saskia? Thank you for your statement. So you, well, you've said that you think local residents would be supportive of the school streets. I'm just thinking out of the box here. Would local residents maybe be happy to be involved in volunteering in a potential through traffic closure in the mornings and the afternoons? Some, but when I joined the residents parking group, which was set up, that was done by leaflets from local residents, I was the lone voice saying, but there's a school on the street. And as we've gone through the Liverpool neighbourhood, shenanigans for the better word, my wife and I, both heads, sorry, both primary school heads, two lone voices saying, but what about the school? If I'm really honest, most of my neighbours care about their parking space. That's what they tolerate the school. Some like it because it means they live on the road and their children can just walk easily to school, but there is that conflict. The thing I didn't talk about, which I suppose is the elephant in the room, is parking enforcement has insufficient resources to make any regulations work. So every day I look out of my window and I can see all the double yellow lines there to protect children and they're covered by parents who park for up to half an hour, leave their cars there, wander into school for a chance, you know, it's not a five minute drop off that people do it, which is the same issue just cropping up in the proposal that's gone forward for the one-way system. It depends on people observing regulations and not parking where they aren't meant to. And as you know, if you stand by any traffic lights in Bath and watch what happens when the lights turn red, most people won't follow those regulations. So I'm not hopeful. Jess? Thank you. I know what you said about school streets, but do you feel the interventions that have been made so far so the introduction of residence parking and the one-way system are good first steps on the way to establishing a school street? The residence parking was a one-way system. I'm a cyclist. I know that's my main means of transport and my wife because it's easier to get around Bath and try to drive. Charmerthroat has a really splayed, wide junction. It's right next to a pelican crossing on Newbridge Primary, which only went in when a child was hit and had his legs broken many years ago from a school. If people are driving out from town towards school to drop their children off and those pelican lights turn red, they just floor it and roar around the corner. Which is why so many residents are concerned about the one-way proposal that it will probably encourage that type of behaviour. You're not very visible as a cyclist coming down, you know, I can wear all the high vis in the world, but there are so many SUVs on the road, they're very high and children in particular disappear behind them. You don't need much space as a cyclist, but when you're passing a tank and there's another one being driven towards you, I don't feel it will encourage children to do it. I used to sit on active travel meetings. You're wondering now, away from factual statements. Yes, fine. So I'm going to have to cut you off. Yeah. May I say one? There's a factual statement. It is a factual statement. At the active travel meeting, which Mark Schullford used to chair over and over again, he used to say, If we can promote children walking or sighting to school, hopefully you will generate a lifelong habit. Well, there's one fellow cyclist to another, I would obviously support that. OK, thank you very much, John. And now we come to Alice. Hello everyone, thanks for having me along and to talk to you. I've included a couple of resources for you to look at, which is a UNICEF report called the Toxic School Run and School Streets to Shake Child Friendly Cities from Clean Cities. I'm a resident of Bath, a mother of two school-aged children and a GP. If you look for me on the GMC register, I use my maiden name at work, so it'll be Dr. Gardner, just in case you think I'm making it up. I'm a doctor. I'm here to urge you to view your decisions today about school streets from a child and public health perspective. As the president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health said last year, air pollution is the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK, with children being particularly vulnerable. All children deserve the opportunity for the best start for a healthy start in life. Budget to air pollutants during pregnancy and early childhood can have harmful and irreversible effects on the development of the lungs and other organs leading to potential long-term health effects well into adulthood. A study in London discussed in the UNICEF report, which I distributed to you, found that children receive 15% of their daily exposure to air pollution during travel to and from school. Children are disproportionately vulnerable to air pollution, both because of their developing lungs and because they breathe fast and are actually shorter, so they're nearer to the level of the car exhaust. These of school streets in the UK have demonstrated reductions in nitrogen dioxide levels of 23% and particulates of up to 36%. School streets could therefore have a positive impact on the health of children in Bath and North East Somerset both now and for the rest of their lives. As you know, national guidelines recommend at least one hour of physical activity each day for all children, but less than half of all children are currently achieving this. A school streets pilot in Hackney in London demonstrated a 51% increase in cycling to school and a 30% increase in walking. As GPs were currently seeing both increasing levels of obesity and far more children struggling with their mental and emotional well-being, a 2017 study demonstrated a positive association between active travel to school and psychological well-being. As a mum of children who've attended local schools in Elffield Park throughout their school lives, they used to go to Elffield Park infants and juniors and now they go to Haysfield. I've seen this at first hand. We've experienced the social and emotional benefits of walking to school. My children have grown up within their community rather than being driven through it and they now walk confidently to their secondary school and they see adults and children who they know on the way there and the way back. However, my youngest daughter has asthma and often feels wheezy and tight-chested after walking along busy roads of traffic often where drivers are speeding. In the years from 2019 to 2022, there were 211 child deaths in the UK due to road traffic accidents and over a third of serious injuries and deaths of children in road traffic collisions occur during travel to and from school. School streets could make travel to school safer by reducing road traffic and surrounding streets and actually speaking about our own street because I live opposite of the Park Junior School, just reducing speed would be a really great first step towards that and we're really struggling with that at the moment. So in conclusion, your decisions on school streets could improve the physical and mental well-being of generations of children in Bath and Northeast Somerset and you have the power to prevent potentially fatal asthma attacks, improve children's lung health, prevent future ill health, improve children's psychological well-being and prevent injuries and deaths on the roads. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Alice. Factual questions? Saskia? Thank you for your statement. Would you support the schools, I think, but school streets, a lot of people think about primary schools. What's your, would you support secondary school streets as well? Absolutely, I think that I guess the problem with secondary schools is that people come from further away, but equally children are more independent, so a lot of them travel by bus and they're able to travel independently, so it could be a much bigger impact if you think about the numbers doing secondary schools rather than just primary. Any other questions? Okay, I can just make a closing statement, you're welcome to it. I mean, I was in education for nearly 40 years, secondary education, and I absolutely agree 100% with the concept of school streets, it's not that we are, we may not have been brilliant at moving forward in this administration or earlier administrations, but it's not because we didn't want to, it's because of financial considerations or other pressures, which is not much of an excuse, because when I was on duty outside the school, which again was the secondary school, and I saw the risks and the pollution that was there, then it's certainly something we are very much focusing on now, and hopefully as we go forward there will be many school streets in the years ahead. So thank you very much for your contributions, well I enjoyed listening to them, I hope other people did too. So thank you. Right, okay, so we move on to perhaps slightly more boring topic of the minutes, oh sorry sir. Can I suggest that since we're thinking school streets, we leave minutes and cabinet member update for a bit and do the school streets item? Sadly I don't think we can because we have Amanda who's got pressures herself, but it's a nice idea, unfortunately, we haven't got to wait long because it's only, I say only cabinet update, I don't mean that in any disrespectful way, but that's not a massive, we hope not a massive journey and then we'll be on to school streets. So if you can stay for the school streets issue, we'd love you to, but obviously you may have pressures on your time as well. Okay so we will quickly go through the minutes, as quickly as we can anyway, so there are any issues on the minutes that, I know Michael you have one, it's fine, okay? Any other issues, any corrections, observations, okay, done a good job here Toby, well done, okay, so do I have a proposal for accepting the minutes, let me put the hand up, thank you, yes, seconder Michael, those in favour, okay, thank you very much. We move on to the cabinet member update and this is when I turn around and look a bit nervous for two reasons, one as the technology worked and two is Amanda looking at me. So Mandir, are you there? I am here. Do you hear me? We can hear you. Turn around. Do you hear me? Yes. Yes. Morning everybody. I've circulated my update in advance. I'm not more than happy to answer any questions. There are three things I was trying to bring your attention to. And I'll just make a comment. I think someone mentioned about Cabinet Member and talking about school streets. Just for everyone to be aware that the school streets portfolio is held by Sarah Warren. And as a Cabinet Member, I won't comment on someone else's portfolio. So any questions about your streets are my friend and colleague Sarah Warren, not me. There are three things that I'm going to draw your attention to. A slight update from what came out on Monday in the fast moving world of transport and highways. On Monday we were going to put in some extra-ballards to stop people from driving on pavement for the local neighbourhood in Sydney, Rome, Sydney Place. That work has been now completed. Just for the panels information, irrespective of where people sit on livable neighbourhoods or whether or not they think it's a good or a bad thing, when a trial is in, what we will not allow is people to subvert the evidence gathering and the data gathering of the trial by trying to do something that is illegal. And we absolutely want to allow the current behaviour that has to be witnessed in order to get round. The ballards have driven on the pavement, irrespective of the fact that school children at the time walking to school on that pavement. So that action has been taken very, very swiftly. You can probably say to my voice, I think it's a real shame that we've had to do that and feel. I was listening to one of your speakers before who was talking about how people either chose or didn't choose sometimes to abide by rules. We've got a real live example here. The second one I'm going to pick out is North Parade Bridge. The announcement actually went out in public yesterday as well that we are doing the work over the summer. There are separate diversion routes going to be publicised for cars and for cyclists. The diversion route is going to be different. This is slightly different from other bridges where we've been able to keep access for cyclists as well as pedestrians on this one. It is pedestrian-only access for the time that the work is done. We're very confident that to do the work that we have identified will take a period between six to eight weeks. We are less confident, as you would expect, like any other heritage asset. Occasionally, when you start doing things, you just go on other bits. Our commitment is to keep everyone as engaged and as informed as we can. We trust that that work will come over the summer without just finding anything else that needs to be done. Final bit, I'm just going to draw your attention to city centre security. Again, it's either just gone out or it's just about to go out with public announcements that we are moving on to what is. There was a package of activity that was agreed by a cabinet to fulfil what the anti-terrorist squad wanted in terms of city centre security and we'll be moving on to that next phase over the summer period when the current phase on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah will finish on time. That, I think, is good news. If you compare us with the other cities who've had to do this up and down the country, they've had significant, way more significant problems if that's in than us. We have a very difficult environment in the city centre to do anything because I'm sure as you all recall, I made a commitment that I would keep full access for blue badge holders at all times and that we were going to make sure that we had sufficient parking for blue badge holders when they went through. And every time you take a hole in the middle of the city centre, you come across some service or some utility that you weren't entirely expecting to be there. So I am beyond delighted at the work that the team has done. It was certainly at the start of a very, very challenging project, but is now being delivered within the budget envelope we've currently got and each phase is being done to time and very effectively. So those are the three things that I just wanted to call out because they were sort of separate from what I would class as more business as usual. It's not that business as usual is important because people, I get, you know, just as many emails about people needing WL lines or rose resurfacing or whatever. But as you can see, that program is on time, is on budget and is being delivered. So if anyone has got any questions, I would be absolutely delighted to answer them as long as they're in my portfolio. Thank you, Amanda. Are there any questions for Amanda? Jess? Hi, Amanda. Thank you for that. And I note the report includes delivery of resurfacing works. So I just wanted to say thank you for the work that's been done. Rawlins worked recently. We had really good feedback about the contractors and how they engage with residents. My question was about our level of enforcement for parking. I know that's an issue that, you know, continues to be a concern for residents whether they've got residence parking zones or not. So for example, in Rawlins Ward, as you're aware, we've got an area of significant overspill where there's a lot of parking up, parking problems outside the park. So I wanted to get some feedback from you about where we are in terms of our level of enforcement officers. Have we got all the jobs filled? Are we still looking to recruit? And whether there's any data that you could share with us? So thanks for that, Councillor DAVID. We reported at the last meeting, if you recall, Andy Dunn was there about the fact that we had more or less costs up to. I think we peaked at about 90% of Rawlins filled. But it's always a bit of a moving feast. So I don't want to give you a number as of this second because they are sadly Rawlins that sometimes people take on and they find they're not for them or they find they do well and they've got aspirations to do other things in the Council and apply and move on. What I can say is we're in a much, much better place than we were earlier on and a lot of that is thanks to working closely with HR who we went through a phase a couple of years ago where we just kept getting reports that said, oh, we haven't got enough civil enforcement officers and there's no civil enforcement officers throughout the country and that's good enough. And I said, you know, along with the team, we all said, well, actually, it isn't good enough. If that's a known problem, we can't keep saying, well, that's just a problem. So we changed the shift patterns. So people who've got children finding it more easy to be able to do the job and fit it around their HR care responsibilities. We advertised in places that we hadn't particularly directed adverts to before and got some people that way. We did a video about what the job entails. We worked with people and we put in our absolute zero tolerance to any kind of abuse policy because we had found some people were finding that the actual job was causing them stress. So as a considerate employer and as someone who was trying to attract people to that role, we did everything we could and we did absolutely see a huge increase in people applying. I get monthly figures about where we go, how many transgressions that people witness, how many of those last long enough for a ticket to be issued. And we aren't doing the best we can. It's one of those things. If we had more people, we would be in more places. But frankly, the position that we're on now, I would be surprised if we had more than 10% vacancies now, but please don't hold me to that specific figure. Position we are now is probably as good as it gets. And again, it's going back to the speaker who we heard before. A lot of this is people knowingly doing things that they shouldn't do. So part of our role, I think as a council, is to try to get to a place where enforcement is almost seen as the last resort because someone has deliberately faded the rules as opposed to thinking they're going to be able to get away with it. So I have lots of sympathy for people who say we'd like to see traffic enforcement officers more regularly in the same way as officers, for people who say we'd like to see police war regularly. They are doing the rounds that they may do and anyone who wants to get access to the world's largest spreadsheet is more than welcome within the council to see where they go and what they issue. Hi, Amanda. Thank you for the update. I've got a question on Lyme Gardens Charmith Road, so we've heard from a local resident. I believe there's been a public meeting yesterday or earlier this week. I have to agree with some local residents. I don't think this scheme will create a safe environment for walking, wheeling and cycling. And I believe it fills minimum criteria for the City Regional Sustainable Transport Settlement's funding, CRSTS, that we so desperately need. So removing parking to improve visibility and creating short sections of cycleways isn't going to achieve the modal shift that we want and need. A couple of signs to warn motorists of one coming cyclists isn't going to keep those people on cycle safe or people walking to school. I guess I would like your comment on how you think this scheme will enable a modal shift. Thank you. So I think you're probably referring to there was an open meeting last night. I haven't had all the feedback obviously from that meeting yet. I think that's the meeting you're referring to. Like every other liveable neighbourhood, this came forward as part of the – when we asked for proposals for how we spent CRSTS money on liveable neighbourhoods, this came forward from what councillors as a request. It went through the same prioritisation route as all the other liveable neighbourhood requests came through. And we are moving to an experimental traffic order whereby we will test whether or not we think what had been requested and what had been modelled will actually do what it needs to do. You're right to point out that there is a school at the top of the street, and this may be a phase one towards doing something closer to a school street, but it fits all the criteria for what a liveable neighbourhood. There are a couple of specific issues that have come up that again we wouldn't know about had we not moved to an ETRO. So, you know, in many ways teasing out the issues are a good thing. I'll see the reports from the consultation yesterday and we'll decide how when we moved to ETRO, the decision to do that has already been taken. It's just the actual details we're working on. When we move to that, what, if anything, we need to change in the light of that in terms of very minor tweaks. Of course, throughout the six to eight to ten month period, the ETRO will be in place. We will do extreme monitoring and we will be asking people for their local lived experience and we'll see if in fact it needs to stay in or come out or be replaced by something different. Thank you. The DaVinci Tunnel, I'm not sure whether it's you or Sarah, but can we have an update on what's happening on DaVinci Tunnel? It's neither me nor Sarah, so all I can do is tell you what I know from everything that the cabinet got. As I'm sure everyone's aware, DaVinci Tunnel is owned and operated now by such drowns, not by the council. However, we want to be as helpful as we humanly possibly can. It looks like some of the work that may be done to be on the term fix would need to be done on council land. Again, you're getting to the limits of my understanding about this and my exposure to it, but my understanding is this is not going to be a simple fix. So the current plan is that when it rains excessively and water comes in, there is a plan to pump the excess water out to keep it as open for as long as possible. However, that's obviously not a good long-term fix. The long-term fix has been worked on by a council, engineers and such drowns with such drowns obviously having to take the lead. Sorry, just to follow up on this, I don't know if I missed this, but who's portfolio does this sit in? I'm sorry, Saskia, I can't hear you. Sorry, who's portfolio does this sit in if it's not in yours and not in Sarah once? It's a corporate property responsibility, so that for I believe it's an exception of the landage park land. It's one of these very peculiar ones that falls between not holding both of different places. I suspect, Mark, I would like to ask that question. Oh, sorry. Council will break back because it's a corporate estate. Thank you. Okay, did I have to answer any more questions? Last one. That's one, thank you. Could I ask about physical barriers on public right-of-way? Is that your portfolio? I can't ask you. When you turn away from the microphone, I'm afraid I can't hear you. Sorry, I would like to ask. I can't hear you. Yes, I think you can hear me now because I sound very loud, don't you? Physical barriers on public right-of-way, does that sit within your portfolio? It does, yes. Is there a commitment from the council to remove all physical barriers on public right-of-way to allow access for all? So there's a program of work being done on public rights-of-way currently. We have one only public rights-of-way officer who covers the whole of the authority. So what we need to do is look at the asset overall, see which ones are still enforceable, which ones aren't still enforceable, see which need work, see which don't need work. And part of that program of work is to look at the accessibility to see which, if any, are being in any way made inaccessible in a way that we can change. So I can't give an absolute commitment that immediately we're going to put all these things right, but I can't give the commitment that we're looking at getting together a program to make sure that we address all the issues as speedily as we can. Thank you for being tolerant, Amanda. OK. If it's OK with you, Chair, I've got another meeting I need to go to, so thank you all. That's all right. You're meeting and I'll drop off now. Thank you, Amanda. Right, so we move on to Sarah. And has made the journey to Cancion. Do you want to start with a cabinet member update? Yes, that will be lovely. OK, so I've circulated it in advance, so I'll just go through some highlights. So on green heritage homes, so there's been some training delivered to our Council Conservation and Planning officers on retrofit and historic buildings. There's actually a webinar coming up that people can residents, owners of historic properties can log on to, which will be held on the 15th of May. So go to the Council website, if you'd like to know more about that. We're looking at a power purchase agreement for solar photovoltaic and the proposed ferry hill site in Compton, Dando, which is all still subject to planning approval. We are participating in the local area energy plan, which will provide evidence to underpin the strategy for 300 megawatts that we're looking to install by 2030, working closely with colleagues in Bristol and across the west of England. On that, and both sports and leisure centre will be installing a rooftop solar PV using £173,000 from the government swimming pool support fund, which should generate up to 212 kilowatt peak hour capacity, which will provide more than, I think, the electricity needed for the swimming pool. So then moving on to rural communities, climate and nature projects. We have nine parishes that have been awarded money for the West of England Rural Fund, including Farmborough, Westfield, East Harp Tree, Bishop Sutton. And in terms of climate change, we're actually working towards a pilot community conversation around climate change, which potentially could form the basis for future conversations that will inform the update of the climate emergency strategy, which I think is due next year, and might also provide a format for a new type of neighbourhood forum if they go well. On nature, we're receiving quite a bit of a claim, actually, for our biodiversity net gain programme, so we actually implemented 10% biodiversity net gain, a requirement for 10% biodiversity net gain in planning a year ahead of mandate from government, which means that we're a bit of a pathfinder, a trendsetter nationally now, and various locations are coming forward as sites where we can accept contributions from developers and use them to promote biodiversity, so that's really a positive and exciting thing to be part of. We are, we are going forward with the summer valley rediscovered project through work of funding and working closely with Bristol water to deliver phase two of the two valley recreational trail. On a transport side of things, we are working towards painted parking bays for our east scooter trial, which we hope will be forthcoming this summer, I believe, and then later in the year we're looking towards some on road spaces. Bike hangers, so we consulted fairly recently, I think, on locations that residents would like to put in back hangers, working towards installation at 20 locations later this year. We've been surveying commuters within Bath and Northeast Somerset, and we'll be progressing to the next stage of the full business case on the summer valley links, Sustainable Transport Corridor for sustainable travel routes along the 837 and 8367. We've been waiting for Wecker to release the West Wing and Combined Authority to release the consultation findings of the A4 Bristol Bath route through that scheme, and we can expect those to be released later this month now. Aside from that, then, as part of our local plan, which we are working towards, so we've recently had an options consultation, we're looking towards creating transport strategies for our towns that will set the vision for the transport system for the next 20 years, and we are compiling an active travel master plan, so of course, if anyone has thoughts on that, please do send them in, and there will be consultation on those schemes later, those plans later in the year. That's it for now, and I'll have to answer questions about those. Thank you, Sarah. Are there any questions for Saskia and then Sean? Thank you for the update. I believe there was an update on tier in your report, wasn't there? Well, I just want to ask about if there are plans to expand it to cover all of Baths, including Twitter, and I think there was mention of expanding it to South and East. There are plans to expand the tier zone, and we're waiting on both the tier and the West Wing and Combined Authority and Council officers having capacity to progress that, but that's certainly within our plans. Sean? Thank you. Hi, Sarah. A simple question to start with, is there any ends to a de-scooter trial? What was the question? Is there evidence? Is there any end to it? Will it finish the trial ever? I believe, so at the time it came in, it was a trial, which, and what it was thought likely, if I'm, or maybe, if I'm, if I'm going to answer. It's up to the government, so that they set out the terms of the trial. They have extended it three times. The current extension is until end of March 2026. The contract that we have with Wecker and Tier, through Wecker, with Tier, takes us a little bit beyond then, I think, to possibly the start of 2027. We don't know. It really depends on what the government does in terms of legalization of private e-scooters. It started out being a support mechanism for transport during COVID, and now it's moved on into gathering as much evidence as they can. I think Wecker have, in the first set of trials, published now an independent report review into the operation across the West of Encompined Authority. It's available on The Wecker's website, and that was done independently by the University of West of England. Very thorough. We will be doing more of that, but it's really about taking the opportunity to gather evidence in our area so that the consideration and decisions that the government take includes our evidence into it. So March 2026, but could be further, we're not sure. Can I remind Sean and others that I don't believe that's part of the update, so I don't think you should have asked that question. Am I wrong? But they're expanding the e-scooter trial in the updates. Mine's on e-scooters as well. I'm glad we clarified that. Just to say, I really welcome the plan to put in some parking spots and some painted in parking spots. Jessica, thank you for your engagement locally. It's been quite an issue. There are some real enthusiasts for e-scooters and e-bikes, which is great. But there are also some people who are really upset about them being parked sloppily across pavements and obviously blocking walkways and space for people with buggies is not a good thing. So my question is really about funding for putting in these parking spots. It's great that you're doing 10 and have plans to do 10 more, but obviously there's many, many e-scooters and e-bikes all across Bath. Are we looking at other mechanisms for funding them? Does it just have to come from work out? Or can we use things like still or other parts of money to pay to the parking spots when we know how well they work? I can say that we are hopeful, I think, that with the West of England combined authority that we may be moving towards a place where we, as both the North East Somerset Council, have a share of the income that tier is bringing into the West of England combined authority. So that would then give us the opportunity to, you know, in the first instance, I imagine the first call on that money will be to support the scooter scheme and then there may be more and we can spend it on other areas. Okay, Ian. Thank you. Hi Sarah, thanks for your update. Just want to go back to the retrofitting for historic buildings. You said that officers, planners and conservation officers have been subjected to some training on this. How are the officers going to overcome the legal issues of the fact we've got so many heritage assets within the city in particular? How are they going to be able to overcome issues such as building consent and what national planning policy says? It's an ongoing challenge for us, I think, in Bath in particular, but I think if we can go forward with projects like this one, the lead project from Green Heritage Homes, you know, we can be in the forefront of addressing these and taking them up with national government and trying to find a pathway through because that's a World Heritage site. If we can crack those issues in Bath or at least bring them to the forefront of the attention of national government, then, you know, we have a chance. Perhaps of, you know, leading the rest of the UK, but it's an ongoing challenge for us. Okay. Thank you, everyone, for the questions. Thank you, Sarah, for your very detailed update. So detailed, I missed a bit, so very good. And we now move on to item nine, which is School Streets, and I understand, Jessica, you're going to do a presentation. We're doing it together. Oh, yeah, so, like, the two runners, is that okay? There will be 40 minutes, and I am timing, so please keep questions brief and comments. I'm not talking necessarily to you, but I am, everybody, so we can get as much. Lovely, okay, then over to you. Yeah, so just to emphasise, of course, as you've gathered, our School Streets program is at quite an early stage, so we brought this to you as an item of policy development. So really, it's a question of telling you where we are with our thinking and getting feedback from you in terms of how we, you know, how happy you are with that, and whether there are changes you'd wish to see. So cleaner, greener, school travel is obviously a plank of the Council's Journey to Net Zero strategy and a key part of our approach to mode shift. So in terms of the school run, we know that the school run related traffic accounts for a quarter of cars on the road at school run time, and statistics show that 14% of children who are killed on Great Britain's Roads in 2018, it was during this morning school run and 23%, it was during the afternoon school run, and we know, so there's been a report from insurer admiral, which shows that there's a 43% of road collisions during the holidays at school run time of day. Engagement, when it's carried out with school children, shows a strong demand for improved road safety and preference to travel to school by active modes of transport. Specifically for school streets, it has shown that pupils are supportive of restrictions and wish for more extensive changes that reduce the dominance of motor vehicles. We also know, as we've heard from some of our speakers today, that children in the UK are amongst the most overweight in Europe, and that the Journey to School is an easy way to increase exercise. And we know that physical activity amongst five to 18 year olds has reduced over the last 30 years, so that's just some of the background of why we're looking at this policy. So, I mean, I'm very delighted really that we have been able to allocate this year through budget setting 250,000 pounds of income from the Clean Air Zone for some pilot school streets. So, school streets were first introduced in the UK in 2015 and have been expanding rapidly in recent years. It's very helpful to ask that Bristol local to us has several, so we are working closely with them and hoping to learn from their experience. So, what are the aims of a school street? I mean, the overall objective is to create a safer and more welcoming environment on roads directly outside or leading to schools. So, by reducing the dominance of motor vehicles to support parents, pupils and school staff to all travel to school by more active modes of transport. So, traditionally, they tend to involve a timed motor vehicle restriction during school drop off and pick up, which might be between 30 minutes and 2 hours in duration. And there are often exemptions for residents, for blue badge holders, for emergency services and for other statutory services. They can also be developed into wider measures supporting active travel and improving the public realm, such as improved crossings, pavement, widening, bike, parking, street, greening and so on. In terms of the policy basis that we have to do this, at government level, we've got the gear change report, which lists them as a key intervention, improving road safety and increasing activity levels. Government has set a target through its cycling and walking investment strategy to see 53% of school children walking to school by next year. Locally, many of our policies already mention school streets as a potential intervention, so it's mentioned through the Joint Local Transport Plan 4, which was the West of England's document of a few years ago. Our own Bath and North East Somerset Jenny's Net Zero Strategy, our Liveable Neighbourhood Strategy, as well as our Corporate Strategy Policies and Principles. Having a policy gives clarity to schools seeking to implement a school street and potentially provides a legal position, which could in future, permit us to require developer financial contributions forced for these streets through the planning process. Delivery for some pilot schemes now will allow us to learn what works, what works less well and to support real learning and to inform future schemes and potentially in future to bring in a school street specific policy. So it put us in a good position, of course, to bid for further funds for more at a later date. Thank you. I'm going to talk very briefly about two key concepts that are really important for modal shift or changing how we travel. That is the stepped approach and disruptor events, and you'll see by the end of my talk why I'm putting, playing out at them, really happy to hear Talia coming and speaking about playing out events in Freshford. So a stepped approach is supporting small changes, is understanding that people don't usually make a very large change in their lives around transport. So allowing and supporting those little changes, travelling to school once a week, making short journeys to your local environment, your local high street via cycle or walking, things like that, they all together create those big changes. And supporting that are a bunch of other things that we're doing around the council. The Active Travel Social Prescribing Program, we were one of 11 councils that were successful in bidding, in securing funding from Active Travel England for. It is based around the Summer Valley area, but we are already expanding a little bit our scope there to deliver adult cycle training out of the area. So that's about realising health benefits of sustainable transport, Active Travel rather, which then allows people to make those changes more generally in their life around sustainable transport. The Mode Shift Stars School Travel Plan Accreditation Scheme that we are a part of, and specifically within the council, we have moved from a position of supporting the school travel plan office opposed from grant funding, where it's always looking for the next grant coming to being a permanent position in our structure now, which gives us the longevity to provide support ongoing for schools, and also to tie over with the ongoing capital program. It's very hard to plan for big schemes several years down the future when you're not sure if you've got that officer next year or the year after. We have increased provision for bikeability. Bikeability is the national standard for cycle training within usually the school age. We have massively increased our capacity. We've just finished training up with the newest set of recruits. It takes a long time. It takes about six to nine months total to recruit and train up to get to a point where we then have instructors that are able to go out and deliver. We're now in that point and we're now doing some really aggressive, feels the wrong word, but promotion to get more schools to come on board with us. This brings us back to playing out really. It's another step approach that we see ties really well with school streets. All of these things, the mode shift stars, bikeability, playing out, their ways that schools and school communities can make a step approach, which then it may be that school streets is the next step that they do and progress on and school travel plans. We see as the method by which they are maintaining that and keeping a record, a dynamic record that they will continue going forwards with disruptor events. Those are major life changes are the most effective time for us targeting modal shift people changing how they travel. That's things like changing job, changing house. Sorry, yeah, changing job, moving house and moving schools. So that brings us back to the policy provision in terms of when we have a policy that we can then leverage against the planning process that allows us to make sure that as developments come on stream, they are doing so in a way that is in line with school streets so that when people move into those new houses and start going to those new schools, they are doing so with this at the forefront and that's the habit right from the word go. We've already got playing out. We had 11 events this year, this calendar year. We've done Brookfield Park, Linfield Park in the past and previous years as well as Courtney Grove, Prairie Close, Freshford Lane. I do note that they are all fairly bath centric and that our anticipated scope for school streets is not going to be restricted to bath. We want to move out beyond it. So these are the objectives and benefits we see school streets will give us. It will allow enable support more walking, cycling and scooting to school, not e-scooters, just the normal push scooters for kids and see hopefully in accordance with that less single car occupancy. We see there being that tie between less cars means more safety. More active travel means improved health outcomes for children and parents by embedding regular physical activity on the school run. Walking also gives better mind mapping of local areas for children so it's very important there. We've got good evidence, it gives better concentration for children when they are in school as well so it helps make use of the school day. Better independence, feelings of well being, reduces conflict between parents on the drop-off and with residents so that's with each other sometimes and with residents of the area. As the doctor mentioned earlier as well by reducing the car traffic in those areas we will be improving the pollution or reducing the pollution which has health benefits as well. And wider than that improved capacity on our road networks elsewhere which is a major financial economic consideration for us. So here's our first point of questions opening up to you the panel. Do you agree with our approach on delivery policy? What do you think of the objectives and I can put them back on screen if you want? What if anything needs changing or adding and are there any issues that school streets could address or benefits that they could bring? Does anyone wish to respond to any of those questions? Sure. I mean firstly I mean I guess we're not restricted to these questions. No, we've got another, I've got a few more slides to the show and another bunch of questions but this was, we felt that these set of questions was appropriately with what you've shown so far but if there's something burning question that you have. Well I'm just trying to get, I mean I understand the concepts and I'm disappointed that to be honest it's quite important I'm disappointed that we only receive data a day ago for this scrutiny. I think I would have expected to receive information to be able to scrutinise in advance much longer than one day before a scrutiny panel. If I could respond to that we're doing policy development today not scrutiny, this policy is at an early stage of its development and we don't have a lot of paperwork ready to go. So I apologise it's only one day ago that I sent you a number of links or perhaps two days ago I'm not sure but anyway I did send some links as background information so that you could read up about it but really the objective here today is to consider what is it we're trying to achieve and I'll be going about it in the right way. Ok, so what I'm trying to get my head round is obviously we've got low traffic neighbourhoods and we've got school streets and I'm just trying to see, at the moment they seem to be sitting separately from each other and they obviously shouldn't be, they should be part of the same project. My concern is that it's funding led so liberal neighbourhoods tend to like to get priority because they're funded whereas traffic calming measures tend not to be funded by Wecker. So I'm just wondering how we make sure that this gets a priority within the Liberal neighbourhoods projects. So I mean, so the Liberal neighbourhoods has the ability if a request for a school street comes forward through a neighbourhood, through the consultations that we've done, there is, there would have been the scope to have implemented a school street as part of the Liberal neighbourhoods program. I mean, I'm not currently leading on that program but I don't believe one has come forward at this stage, I could be wrong through that route. But in terms of funding for school streets specifically we have now allocated a pot of funding through which is, it's actually come from the income through the clean air zone route and that is allocated in this year's budget so we have a definite fund from which we can implement some pilots this coming year of school streets. Thank you. Could I go back to the objectives? I was just thinking that something about the kind of social and community aspects may be missing from this. So I think as a secondary benefit of having lower noise and lower pollution and no danger from motorised vehicles, you get a really nice and welcoming community. And this could really be a very, you know, USP unique selling point for the community especially so I think we should highlight this. Just coming back to what Sean has been saying, I think saying that no school street, I mean obviously there are no school streets within the current 15 Liberal neighbourhoods. But I guess the question is why not because if they would have been kind of presented as a really good option then they may have been so I guess we may have missed a trick there and I am concerned that we may miss a trick again. The next time. So I guess, yeah, will we be seeing school streets in the next lot of Liberal neighbourhoods because that would be a great way to get the funding. I can't say what will happen in future Liberal neighbourhoods rounds. I mean, I think the principle by which we've gone ahead with the Liberal neighbourhoods to date has been that it's been about community design. So I can't say what will happen in the future of course. But what one hopes I guess will be that if we have some pilots of school streets through the current, you know, this particular funding part that we've allocated and they go really well, then all the communities will want one. So it's really helpful to have your feedback about social and community aspects because if we can incorporate them into our objectives and prioritise them, perhaps more communities will want one. Yes, I mean, just following up on the difference in Liberal neighbourhoods and school streets. I'm thinking of Bathwick St Mary where Darlington Road is no trouble at all and is a Liberal neighbourhood except at school runtime. So the interventions required are about school run, not about the overall environment of that street. And I think it's a question of identifying which policy interventions you need, for which time, for what problem in that sort of context. Yes, and to come back on, because I think we've had some mention earlier today of is it Charmouth Road and Lime Road, which are implementing a one-way system. And actually, you know, what I'm hearing from colleagues who've implemented school streets elsewhere is that actually a one-way street is an easier street on which to implement a school street. So it's very possible that that could be a precursor to moving in this direction. It's fair to say that one does not eliminate the other one, does it? They can work in unison going forward. So we may not have missed a trick, it's just that we may be at the first stage and a second stage may follow afterwards, possibly. Yes. Thank you. Chair, if it's OK with you, I've got a comment, a question and a suggestion. That's all right. So comment, yes, the objectives and benefits I agree with. I've been involved in some initiatives at Whidcombe School where we did a car-free day and then followed that up a term later with a car-free week, which was basically like a voluntary school street. So we asked the whole school community not to drive within the immediate vicinity of the school and not to drive through the road that went between the two schools. So as part of that two points to emphasize, there was some community engagement. So working with the local business association, we sent them information beforehand, made sure they understood that they would be able to drive as normal. But this was about asking the school community to behave differently, so they should see some benefits. And several of them did report that, that it was a lot better for them because they didn't have parents slamming their doors outside their front door and parking on the double yellows and taking over the area. And then another key part of the scheme was that we worked with a couple of local businesses, a garden centre in the cricket ground to provide locations for park and stride, so that people who had to use their car to do the work or for other stuff that was going on had an option to be able to drive reasonably near to the school and still carry about their day. There wasn't a massive take up of those offers, but I think it was really important in terms of acceptability. So in terms of the objectives and benefits here, I think you could probably talk a bit more about the benefits to communities around schools. Then the question I had is really good that we've made a permanent position for the school travel officer because that wasn't the case before. When I first became a councillor, the funding was coming to an end for, I think it was called Save for Roots to School, so it's really good that that's now a permanent post. To follow up on Tanya's comments earlier on, do you think we could ask for a bit more support from that officer to help with walking buses? I know we have got some examples of walking buses in Baines that are working at the moment and people have been able to get around some of the obstacles, so if we could just share that best practice, or perhaps advocate with schools, that would really help parents to get them off the ground. And then lastly, my suggestion was about, obviously as a local council, we have a role in schooled admissions as well as in transport, and is there some messaging that we can work into the admissions process about thinking about how you travel to school, so that when you get your first child into primary school, you're already being given a message about trying to car share, trying to walk to school where you can. Here are the resources that are available to help you. Here's your walk to school map, that kind of stuff, so that from the outset, people are thinking about sustainable travel, and not assuming they have to drive to school and back every day. Thank you, there's a great suggestion, and we'll see whether we can get our school travel officer taking a look at them, and perhaps picking up on what I think was Talia, who said earlier. Maybe we can get him to look into whether there's any way in which the council can facilitate that insurance issue. I have no idea whether there is, but I can do that. I can talk to that. Thank you, Talia. So we do have, as you mentioned, the walking bus, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to not pay. So we've got the walking bus talk here that we put together, it does mention the need for schools to look at their insurance. The reason is, mostly, they will find that there is no additional premium to pay, but they need to make sure that they have gone through the process, so that it is covered. The school's insurance will be very likely to cover things like doing school trips, and it's under that provision that walking buses can be covered as well. But the school needs to do the processes, the risk assessment, and part of the toolkit is helping the school community go through those. We've provided some templates, we've provided generic risk assessments to get to understand the operation, but there need to be specific ones to cite that the school needs to take ownership of. I think there's some really good overlap between walking bus and playing out and school streets here, and demonstrators in which one can be used as a step approach to the other, but also they all three somewhat have the same issues in terms of sustainability, where they often come down to a few individual parents to provide the workforces it were of people to keep things going, and that's where the school travel plan officer, and Mochif Stars as a system, is about embedding all of those things within the school ethos so that the school is looking to replace those people, either from the school's staff itself, or canvassing new people who are coming into the school to take on those roles. Because they need to keep that going and it needs to continue, otherwise we just have this sort of jump up in terms of sustainability around schools for a while, we'll put money in, we'll support things, and then it drops off and it's gone again, and we want to avoid doing all of that. So all of that active travel social prescribing, like ability cycle training, we are working towards a position of ideally 80% of year 5 and 6 pupils across the whole of Baines, having done level one and two like ability, and that's the real driver behind why we have massively increased capacity there. Once we feel that capacity, we'll do it again, and the next step we talked earlier about secondary schools, and again the change from primary to secondary is a natural disruptor event, but it's not well secured into secondary school, that independent travel of walking and cycling. And so we were looking previously about a year ago to start doing level three bike ability at secondary schools, but active travel England have given us this priority and target of the 80% for level one and two. We want to go back and do that, we want us to see having done that mass provision of skills with year five and six kids, we want to see that embedded into secondary schools, but we have to do a stepped approach in the council as well to make sure that it's sustainable for us. So we'll definitely get in touch with you, Talia, yeah. Okay, I have a question, and I think it's to do with the objectives. I think during the conversation that we've had, another objective seems to me to be improving school partnerships. A lot of that stuff up there is about what's happening around the school, but it's been talked about cycling improvement, which is done presumably within the school, school travel plans, which you've done within the schools, and walking buses, things like that, which are linked closely to the way schools operate. So my suggestion would be that improving school partnerships with the local authority would be a good objective to include. Shall we go on to the... Yes, yes. We've got more. Oh, perfect. So, recapping what we've done, where we are and where we're going, so we have £250,000 of CAS revenue allocated to the programme. It's allocated for this financial year, but it can, as it's our money effectively and not grant funding, we can carry it forwards into next financial year. That doesn't mean that we're going to be sitting on our hands and not getting on with things. It just means that we're not in a rush to throw money at things. We want to get this right. So this is the area-wide assessment criteria we think we're going to use, and I'm going to take you a bit over how we came to that. These are the things that we think will be our prioritisation criteria. And we also want to expand out the provision not just for urban schools, which has been the tendency across the nation in the move to school streets. It has more often been provision of urban schools. We want to make sure that we're not leaving our rural schools and North East Somerset area of Baines behind. So that's where we want to widen out and think into the things like quiet lanes. The enforcement options are barriers with marshals, signage only, automatic number plate recognition. And that would be with fines along as well. We are proposing in this first phase to do the barrier option. That's not ruling out all others. It means that we see that as the best first phase for us because it is lower cost to do. It's quicker to do. It requires the buy-in from the school to operate. We aren't going to be able to bring on a load more officers to go and police these every day. So it will need school staff or school community people to come and do that. It also builds in, monitor and compliance opportunities for us. So you pop a sign up. We don't know how many people are obeying the sign. We don't know how many people are driving or not driving as part of it. But when you've got people there, they can do counts. They can also be there to first see issues as they pop up. Because if you don't have a person there, very often the issues boil up and it's only when they boil over, that we as a council realise that there is a problem we have to get involved again. So we think that is the right way. And also we think that physical barrier, not just relying on signage but that physical barrier to enforce instructions, lower the speeds, only let through those people who are allowed to be let through is important there. We also, I would say, the most effective persuasive power for modal shift comes from what everyone else is doing around you, not from a fine, not from benefits in terms of something extra. We can offer financial bonuses or whatever it may be that you can get. It comes from what is happening, that nudge or pester power. We know that is how people change what they're doing and adhere to rules as well. We talked about people jumping red lights, et cetera. People are less likely to flat rules when they think that everyone around them will judge them for it, much, much more so than when they are worried about getting a fine or something else for it. We have employed a consultant to do some very preliminary policy review for us. That's looking at our policy, looking at national policy and suggest how we move forwards. This is the qualifying criteria that they gave us, which would be, this is the scores that can or can't outright be part of it. Already, for example, we can see some issues in going with such a restrictive approach. For example, freshford school would not be able to be part of a school street because the third one on there, no bus stop within prospective restriction area means that that would disqualify them. We don't want to be that restrictive, which is why we want to do this pilot ahead of policy or merging the two together as we're moving forwards so that we can test what does and what doesn't work and where we need to be restrictive of elements and where we need to actually allow it out a little bit more. They've also given us a set of criteria for prioritization. So that's having identified whether a school can or can't outright, how do we then float those that come to us and take the ones that we can afford to within that financial year going forwards. And I'll quickly wiz through these. So another primary school within 200 metres, secondary school, again, close by whether there is a liveable neighbourhood scheme. So that's that overlap between liveable neighbourhoods. There is obvious benefit if we're doing a school streets and there's a liveable neighbourhood that the two should work in partnership. But all of these things should not be a yes/no. It should be together, they provide an opportunity for us to know that it is more likely to work and it is more likely to have a larger impact, whether there is cycle network connections already around, where they are with their mode shift stars award, are they engaged, do they have a green bronze silver or gold accreditation, how many students there are because again, larger schools mean that we are going to impact a larger number of effectively cars on the road, getting them off, whether they're a primary school aged children living nearby. So that's talking about the catchment area. Are we expecting it to be able to work because there is a large proportion of people within a short distance or is it an enormous catchment area where we could spend a lot of money putting in AMPR to do a school streets, but people are still going to keep driving into the area. Considering the safety record accidents occurring near the school, traffic levels, by which we mean if there is a high volume of traffic, it is going to be much harder, it has a lot of other knock on effects to do. So that counts against it when there's a smaller level of traffic in the area, it is going to be easier to do. And then linking with indices of multiple deprivation, and is there an air quality management zone? Because again, that is an added benefit if we're getting traffic off of the road. So again, we're coming back to you in terms of questions. None of these are set in stone. This is where we are so far what we're looking at. Our approach is going to be that we want to run a few pilots. We think I'm going to whizz on and come back to questions. This is our outline program in May. Now we will be taking expressions of interest survey to all schools in the district. We've got that survey ready to go. It's just with information governance to check that we have everything crossed and dotted as needs to be. June, we will be reviewing the responses coming back from schools and completing a single member decision. This summer, we will be creating a web page to explain our approach, to advertise what it is that we're doing, how it links with our policies and how schools can get involved. We will be looking to appoint a consultant designer and start to do initial design work. By the autumn, we'll be looking to collect monitoring data and installation of air quality monitoring, engaging with the local community and doing further design work in response to feedback with the communities themselves. And then we see, by early 2025, buying the materials that we need, such as barriers, high vis, doing the training of the marshals and the actual installation of the schemes. And we see this being the start. We don't have a definitive number of how many we think we're going to get done. We want to make the best use of the money and get as many as we can done, but we want them to be really good ones so that they stand up as exemplars for other schools to say, we want to do that. How do we get involved with that too? So is there anything else you think criteria-wise we should be considering? Do you have any ideas for changes for schools that are not suitable for a timed motor vehicle restriction? And are there any other good examples of innovative schemes in other local authorities that you're aware of that you want us to pay particular close consideration to? Can I just make an observation about your outline program? I would suggest that a good time to start this scheme would be after Easter because if it's a secondary school, there are years that are phasing out anyway and the weather's better and all that sort of stuff. I wouldn't recommend September as a start because I can imagine that would be quite difficult for fairly obvious reasons. So are there any questions? Yes, Saskia? Thank you. In terms of criteria, deprivation seems to be a clear one that we need to look at, very important because obesity levels will be potentially higher. So I think that one would be really, really good to add. In terms of the expression of interest, we've heard about schools and obviously they're under-resourced, they're under-pressure, they are worried about recruitment. I think asking schools if they are up for this is actually quite tricky if they don't know what our plans are. So I think it's important for schools to know what our ambition is and what our vision is in terms of really tell them what the number of schools will be by what year so that they know that it's not if but when. Because otherwise, if they know that there will be three school streets in Baines in the next three years, they will probably be quite hesitant because it requires resources, it requires bravery basically from the school leadership. So yeah, I would like us to go out with a clear vision that is publicly available ideally before we ask them if they're interested. That's an interesting point which we will consider and see whether we can include it in our timeline, in our communication with schools, but just to say we are in dialogue with a number of schools. So we do know that there are a number of schools who are interested and up for it, but we want to make sure that other schools who might not have previously considered have the opportunity to consider equally to, I think it would be hard to impose a scheme upon a school whose community was simply not engaged at all. I think that would be very hard so I think the first instance is we do need to work with those who are keen and we know that there are some out there so that's really positive. Firstly, just to pick up on that point and I agree that we should make the call go out as wide as possible, so directly to schools but also make sure that the parent communities are going to pick up on it as well because I think it requires a partnership between the school and you need an active group of parents who care and want to take these things forward and actually take on the work of marshalling and all of that. I mean that is quite an ask. In terms of the criteria, I really agree with the point that Jessica made about buses, so for example in Rawlins we do have a bus which we are desperately hanging onto but it's only every 40 minutes and I don't think that should preclude a school street going in if that was something that the school wants to bid for. I'm sure we could work around the timings. Likewise, I noted one of the criteria is engagement with mode shift. I get that because mode shift provides a framework for people to engage in, to create a school travel plan and then to do the initiatives. However, I am aware of schools that are doing significant initiatives that are not engaged with mode shift because it's quite administrative and it requires, again, somebody to sit down late at night and look through the things and enter onto the system. So perhaps you could have engagement with mode shift as a criteria or evidence of other significant school transport actions. So thinking again in terms of more than school for example, there's engagement going on with basketballs, gym and the local community about the private road that runs down through the park and how to dissuade parents from using that to drop off. So there is activity going on already which is school street-like even though it's not public highway. And then also another suggestion for the criteria is about nurseries as well. Often nurseries and preschools are co-varicated near schools and then you've got parents with toddlers and wheeled e toddlers on a scooter and then you really want a safe road environment to be able to help the school community so perhaps that could be another part of the criteria. Can I have a quick two? Sorry, sorry. I think really great idea about nursery and preschools. In terms of mode shift stars, just to highlight the consultant that made a suggestion in terms of how we do the prioritization. But as we're currently proposing it, I've just put it up on screen again, we're simply saying engagement with mode shift stars. So they don't have to have reached any level. But we want to see all those schools that are doing really good work around there, get it down into the plan. So we don't think at this stage we want to require that, but we want to know that they are engaging with it because that means that going back to something you said earlier about admissions, it is really important, that is a really key point and time to do it. The other side is the welcome packs that schools give. So yes, I think that's a really good idea. We will go away and look at admissions policy and if there's something that we can do there. But one of the things that we encourage schools to do with mode shift stars is to create a welcome pack so that every new family coming into the school knows that it's part of the school ethos right from the word go. Thanks. It's a combination of both secondary and primary schools. And I'm just wondering what engagement work this has been done in terms of if you want to talk to schools about a program like this, then they may get involved on a bigger level than it's individual schools. I don't know if that's a practical or not or whether it would help. That's an interesting point and we will consider that as well. I suppose thinking of a big partnership trust like the midst of a Northern schools partnership trust, I suppose that they operate across more than one unitary authority, don't they? So I suppose from their perspective what we'll just have to, we'll consider it and we can speak to our colleagues in the school's team and try to work out whether that's a helpful way to go. Thank you, yes. I just want to be aware that there's obviously quite a lot of difference between urban environments like Bath and our sort of middle and rural and semi rural environments. And the criteria is quite different. Card dependency is completely different out in places like Minnesota and Oregon. We have high card dependencies for numerous reasons whether that's public transport, whether that's just living in a rural environment where you just can't access easily. So whether you need to just be aware of that and you're qualifying criteria. Thank you. We would certainly not look to restrict the scheme to the city or to urban areas only. So rural schools are very welcome to come forward. I mean if you as a panel either now or later on go when, think about it. If you want to come back to us and tell us if you've got any other thoughts of how we could approach it in areas outside of the city that would be really helpful. [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] Right, okay, Sam. [BLANK_AUDIO] Okay, thank you for coming, Sam. I assume you're going to present the findings of the panel. And you have with you members of the panel in the group. So I assume it's going to be a sort of discussion to some extent. And I'm looking forward to what you have to say. Thanks, thanks, Chair. First of all, I'd like to thank Kerry for putting this together. And I can't be here today because he's involved in the election stuff. So I should be a double act, but I'm on my own today. And I'd also like to thank the other task group members, some of which were here, and also all the contributors. You've all had the report in the pack as to feedback. I'm just going to do a bit of a pracy of some of the overall highlights. And then I'll go through the recommendations that we came to at the end, if that's okay. So the main idea for this local food-growing security task group, if you're unaware of that's what this point is, was to explain how Baines as a local authority can contribute positively to food security. So we met on several dates and we covered issues such as local food insecurity and community involvement, allotment provision across Baines, including North East Somerset and how they differ. We talked to various groups including allotment association, transition bath, bath growers network, grow Timnesbury, and we also had an update from the planning policy team. Our terms of reference were to support the development of a new local food strategy for Baines through consideration of allotment provision, current and future within Bath and North East Somerset. Community approaches in local food-growing projects, the impact of planning policy on local food-growing, community engagement and the role of Baines in promoting local food-growing, and also local food insecurity and the opportunities to promote food security locally. So there was a local food strategy that was produced for 2014 to 2017, and that's currently being reviewed, and there will be a new strategy coming forward. So this task group review was to feed into that, but it's also coinciding with land use allocations for the new local plan and what obligations developers might have to provide space in terms of allotments and other food-growing spaces. So the first topic that was food equality and food insecurity across Baines, and data suggests that 3% of the population sometimes or often do not have enough to eat, and areas with highest food security risk are identified as white way, white way west, twerton west, twerton fox hill north and west field north. We were told that food poverty is not standalone and is shorthand for poverty generally. And that unhealthy calories lead to associated public health challenges. So if we can kind of get one thing right, then we can kind of hopefully overcome a lot of other spending in other areas. The Baines Fair Food Alliance stated that 4,200 people per week in Baines are currently in receipt from food from affordable food projects, and we looked at opportunities for addressing the insecurity and issues linked to allotment provision and food-growing across Baines. So looking into allotment provision, the parks team currently manages 160 open spaces, which include 24 allotment sites within Bath. There are also many allotments in parish areas, but they're managed by those respective parish and town councils. Bath also has private allotments and curo manages some too. Of those 1,200 plots in Bath, they're approximately 75 pound a year, but there is a reduced fee for people who are on low income. But there is also exploration about offering a diverse range of plot sizes, including starter plots, because we appreciate that a lot of allotments are very, very big. They're 125 square metres, which can be a bit off-putting if you haven't done any food growing before. The waiting list, there's currently 580 people within Bath. It's difficult to ascertain how many there are in North East Somerset because they're managed separately, but that equates to a three-year-plus waiting list. Although it is acknowledged that some of those people may have put themselves on the list during lockdown and now no longer may be interested, so it's difficult to get hold of them. There's a shift in focus now from growing only, which is what it used to be in the past, to growing in health, with well-being of physical health, for managing allotments being recognised and also being something that's prescribed and can actually be of benefit to people's mental and physical health. The fundamental challenge is identifying additional land space for new allotment provision, particularly in the city. There is Section 106 funding, but it's difficult to utilise with allotments, sometimes also generating public opposition when they are proposed. Other schemes include community gardening and allotments being managed as community space, with community space as being seen as a positive initiative, helping people on the waiting list and giving people a taste of food growing before they launch into it completely. In terms of North East Somerset allotment provision, we had someone from Radstock Town Council come along, and the charge for allotments in North East Somerset is generally a little bit lower. It's about £25 a year, so it actually is lower than what the reduced rate is in Bath. There's a lot of work that's often underestimated by people who take on allotments, and therefore in Radstock they've actually created an induction for new tenants, and they actually take on an active engagement with dealing with allotments if they've been left overgrown when they're vacated. Allotments are seen positive, is based on shared knowledge, and surplus produce is also donated to local charities such as Swallow's Charity Cafe and also the Mercy and Action Food Club in the local Radstock area. There's also a challenge here in identifying new parcels of land for additional allotments. You might not think that is in North East Somerset, but it is just as challenging in the city, and accessing water supplies is often quite a challenge in rural areas. In terms of planning, the current development plan for Baines requires provision of new food growing space, and it also protects allotments. For larger schemes there's a financial contribution as mentioned, typically via one of section 106 agreements. The Allotments Act and the Town and Country Planning Act only protect council owned sites, and demand does fluctuate for sites, so it's a bit of a challenge all round as to how many are needed and when and where. The council's green space strategy determined that planning gained for allotments needs to be spent within 20 minutes walk or within 900 metres of the development, which is quite a big ask when there's a restriction on land space. Design codes for developments in respect of local food growing. Provision of land is a balancing process with completing priorities, and the local plan could be refused by planning inspector if priority was given to food growing over housing provisions, so that's another challenge. Town and parish councils would benefit from some form of support because they don't currently really receive that, unlike in the City of Bath, to help manage allotments as voluntary councillors don't often have the experience of understanding to manage them sufficiently, and there's a feeling that they're underutilised as a result in these areas. There's a community involvement in local food growing, the role of the community in supporting local food growing, Bath allotment association, witnesses younger people and women joining in increasing numbers, but there's still that challenge around waiting lists. There's a challenge by the lack of dedicated officers within the council to engage with to discuss progressing initiatives both within Bath and in North East Somerset, and the availability of land, again, was brought up as an issue, even in terms of growing space that benefits the whole community. The last point we touched on was agricultural land. We didn't focus heavily on the role of it, but we do note that looking forward, there's an opportunity for Baines as an authority to link better with farmers, including specifically the duchy, where there's a considerable amount of land that's owned by them, and is obviously the duchy puts land forward in the local plan. The role of agriculture as a local employer and contributors to the local economy should be noted and recognised, especially when determining developments of agricultural land outside the green belts, and protected parties should be considered to safeguard this space. So in conclusion, there's a lot of enthusiasm for local growing across the area. Availability of space is limited, development opportunities and housing employment, particularly in Bath or Odds with the preservation or creation of space for growing. But we did identify a hierarchy of space to summarise the key issue, and the hierarchy consists of three layers based on enhancing, preserving, and creating space for growing. So the recommendations within the report looked to support all three tiers of this hierarchy, and the evidence gathering emerged that there is still lots of excellent work taking place across the authority around food security and food growing, but the activities are not centrally coordinated through a lead officer, coordinating group or active strategy. So we welcome the proposal in the developing strategy to initiate a corporate approach and have reflected this within the recommendations. As well as looking internally, Baines Council can build on its strong community engagement focus to take on a major coordinating role and bring together community partners to ensure that the new local food strategy is fully implemented in partnership with the community rather than imposed upon people. So our recommendations, there are eight of them. Better use of space to welcome the initiative of offering a more diverse range of allotment plots, community garden spaces, and encourage the further development of this approach to help address waiting lists. The better use of space to invite allotment holders and the allotment association to contribute to a refresh of Baines Council's allotment rules and guidance to include the consideration of provision of starter plots, introductory lessons, buddy system to help new tenants, and varying the size of plots to allow sharing and to consider groups to be tenants rather than just individuals. Preserving growing space to invite the cabinet member with responsibility for planning to ensure the developing local plan and its supporting guidance complements the aims of the developing local food growing strategy while also recognising the environmental and economic value of local grade 1 agricultural land. Creating new space to encourage the cabinet member with responsibility for planning to explore through supplementary planning documents the potential of putting more responsibility on developers, particularly through larger developments to ensure that local food growing opportunities are incorporated into submitted plans. The Council to identify an officer lead for coordinating and leading implementation of the developing local food strategy. The task group welcomes and encourages the proposal to create a new food partnership, Council led, which brings together community partners to implement the new local food strategy. The Council through its community forums to initiate a big food conversation inviting our communities to input into delivery of the local food strategy ensuring collective ownership. And the Council through its parish liaison or community area forums to facilitate support and the sharing good practice for town and parish councils requesting support with the management of their allotments. Thank you very much. Thank you, Sam. Very good. It's a huge task to actually get any sort of sense out of what food growing is in the town. You've manfully and womanfully struggled through to produce a document which is helpful and I think it can take us along the path to a better overall strategy for this area. So well done and well done to the rest of the other committee that were involved as well. So are there any questions that anyone would like to pose? Michael? Would I listen to the say that I will stand and check the group? Do you realize? Yeah, I'd echo that. I really enjoyed being part of it and hopefully it's a kind of way of working that we could take forward to other issues. I had a question which is kind of for all of us really about what do we do next? Do we invite a response from the cabinet members responsible who I think are probably spread across portfolios? It's probably planning, neighbourhood services and possibly finance as well. And could we, I suppose, seek out this advice on that. Do we request a written response for our next meeting which is in July? Or at the council meeting which is in July what would be the appropriate next step? I mean I think for my discussions it was we as a task group put it forward as a recommendation to this group and then it's up to this group to then put forward to, if they feel those recommendations are acceptable and that they are required then those should be forwarded to the cabinet and the relevant members to actually take that forward and make sure it gets embedded within that local strategy but also because it does cover that I say the local plans. There are several kind of parts to it and all of these are ongoing currently so it's actually a timely report really to actually feed into that and help officers with their work as well as the members with those portfolios. Yeah, I would echo that. I mean that's essentially what we have to do. Assuming we think this is a valid and helpful document then we just give it to the various cabinet members. Together response probably depends on which particular cabinet member you are talking about because in planning the local plan is evolving over quite a long period so I don't imagine you get a long response although planning has other issues like the local plan reviews that have been taking place in recent times and I think how may be able to help us with that. So there are other issues that we need to do and the other point I'd like to make is that you didn't mention canching very much. I understand why because I don't think there was anybody from canching on the panel so it's not a complete report because there are things that I could say happening canching that are not here but that's perfectly okay because you know as I said at the beginning it's a big report and it's a big area. You can't expect a small group of people to cover everything but so you know that I think we would all agree with the way forward. So I think there are more comments to be had. How's hovering and Toby's hovering? Can I just reply back to that? Yeah you're absolutely right I mean there wasn't enough people in the room covering everything and I think you know for my own perspective I felt like I understand a little bit about rural allocation of allotments but I don't know about all villages around so I think yeah there is that I think generally it was understood that it's a difficulty to get new allotments wherever you are in Baines. You can see more of a restriction within the city boundary because of land and that need for it to be kind of used for housing as much as anything else but there's also issues outside within Baines because of both green belt issues but also again those kind of restrictions on what's needed for providing rural housing. So there are a lot of and I think canching probably would fall into many of these issues we've got here so unless there's anything specific that needs added in and I don't think it's an inexhaustible list of things then I think there should be feedback on that and some additional consultation maybe. There's a lot of different developments for canching. There are things that go on there and the place of this etc. I'm surprised that there's no area of canching. [ Silence ] [ Silence ] Well since canchions come up I'll just carry on with a couple of points. We only really have one big set of allotments and if you look at the size of canching versus bath and you see all the areas you've got in bath something has obviously gone wrong here and we are getting more allotments but it's coming through the building developments. We have two that haven't started yet but I can take you there. It seems like people are not too interested but since we've got the chair here is allotments conditioned that they should be supplied with every development of over ten houses or something like that. I would have expected it, well I mean in general with strategic developments there is user requirements under the policy to provide areas for growing whether they're at a location or not in the site or just sort of retrofitted in I don't know. Usually we would be encouraging any developer of a large housing scheme to provide suitable accommodation for that. I could probably answer that one. It is in the report here in the large developments. It's a section 106 funding is usually required but it's not necessary required within that development itself at the moment. It needs to be, what did I say, it was something like 900 meters from the development or within 20 minutes walk. So I mean that's quite considerable. If you're growing somewhere else up there there's no way you can actually walk that. So I think that the recommendations are that we consider changing that slightly so that it requires it to be within the development and not just something which kind of is an afterthought that the council has to find the land for. So it's a case that if you've got the land and it's going to be developed then needs to be a proportion of allotments within that. So that would affect obviously tension as much as anywhere else because it would be within the general policy. I think we need to strengthen that and it's a question that we would. Obviously we've got the, we've just had the issues and options consultation. So hopefully there's something that's going to come out of that where we can start to establish a policy that can go forward to the new local plan. No, no, no, that's fine. It's good to do all the canes and stuff together. If I think it's an excellent report and I'm very happy to sign up to the proposed way forward. If I was looking at one thing that's not in there, it's commercial allotments. On the bus coming up here I went past a very vibrant commercial development in Newbridge and that works well. But my understanding is that there are allotments up at coom down that are on the threat. And I think in our request for comments from cabinet members we should ask the specific comment about what the council is doing to ensure that allotment provisioning coom down is retained. I mean, I can comment, but we did actually touch on the commercial allotments that are such as those down at Newbridge. But it's to be remembered that they're very expensive. They're not, in terms of allotments that can be provided by either council provision or parish and town councils, they're relatively inexpensive. £25 a year is relatively affordable, even if you're on low wage and in parish councils I'm assuming through the bath as well. There'd be an opportunity to pay that by instalments. Whereas I know that the commercial ones, they're in excess of like £600 a year. So they're not really something which if you're trying to encourage people to get out and help themselves, mental health, physical health. They're not really there for that kind of thing. So while we welcome them being there and they have their place for people who can afford them, they're not accessible for everybody and that's not their intention. In terms of those other privately owned allotments, that is a challenge and that was noted. But I'm not sure how much currently the council has control over that other than what the current planning system actually allows them to sort of do. But yeah, worth, worth reminding. It might be worth looking at assets of community value and other options in that context. Are there any other questions or comments? I think certainly from a town council or parish council point of view, this is quite challenging. I mean, the funding stream is critical to expanding any type of scheme. For a town council or a parish council, allotments have to be self-sustaining financially. And they can be quite expensive in terms of maintaining the communal areas. I know the allotments that we manage is quite expensive to have our warden maintain those areas. So they have to be self-sustaining because so few people actually have access to them. You can't put effectively a tax on the entire community to pay for a small amount of allotments for a small amount of people. So I think that's very important to get that figure right. Yeah, I totally agree with that. In terms of, I know that our parish council and farmer, we actually ring fenced that money that it makes sure it's only spent on allotments as well, because I know in the past that hasn't been the case, but also we are mindful that we can't increase the precepts to manage allotments on the basis that our allotments also are taken on by people outside of the parish. So therefore, we want them to be paid for and maintained. But yeah, that is an issue. Obviously, there is also within the allotments act, there's also that ability for a local community to basically demand more allotment spaces if there aren't any. And that's a real worry, I think, for a lot of town and parish councils, because they have to do that with limited, even more limited resources. Worth bearing my thanks, Sean. Right, Ian. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's just a point. I think it's an excellent idea that, you know, the existing council owned allotments that we have in Bath. I think it's great that we should look at creating more diversity in terms of the sizes, and in terms of also, you mentioned about the tendencies and the individuals, and I know so many people in my ward who, because we've got quite a large allotment site in Bloomfield, and, you know, neighbours get together, one person has it in their name, but everyone ships in, and there's almost a communal side to that. There are people who've got plots that are far too big and can't manage them, so we can then maybe consider splitting them up. There may even be an opportunity, obviously, there'd have to be a variation in the sort of rental tariffs that we charge. There may be some opportunity to increase fees on slightly smaller pots on a proportion of basis. So I think it's really good that, yeah, we can look at, yeah, not just having, like, one person being responsible for their plot, but, you know, it should be more community-led, and I think, you know, various organisations, communities, neighbours, friends, you know, try and get the students involved, maybe get them to take interest in having a, you know, a student community plot or something. So I think, yeah, it's a really good way to go forward with this. Yeah, I think a lot of that comes back down to staffing within the council as well, and having someone who's dedicated looking at allotments and how they're managed, because at the moment it falls under the General Parks team, and it's just one of the general maintenance. So I think it's a bit more like fighting fire rather than actually having a dedicated member of staff. It looks specifically at allotment provision and how each site varies in terms of its needs, because some may do very well with rather large plots and people having one, but others may benefit from them being split up, and how do you best manage that, because you've got to roll that up over time as plots become available, and making everyone aware that that's what's happening, so people don't feel like they're being disadvantaged as plots, but get a little bit smaller and how that affects waiting lists and who's on what, and it's a complex issue that somebody's got to take control of, yeah. It's with protocol, because Adam's got his hand up, and although I'm not supposed to, because he's only a mere member of the public, come and sit up here, and you're also running ahead of time. I moved to Timsprey in June 21, and by February of the next year I was given a plot, and it has been hugely valuable in connecting into that community. I have really good friends now from that, not just from my road, but also across the whole of that space. So the availability of that plot transformed what I do, as a hobby and the support that they gave and we share tools and we kind of share plants, and it really is, it's a really important thing, right. The availability of plots isn't just about people on long waiting lists, it's about people coming to a new community and then coming connected into that community. There's the Gardening Club and everybody knows me there and all this type of stuff, so it's a really powerful sort of enabler of connection into those communities for new people coming into that. Tiny comment for me. A lot of schools are involved in food growing anecdotally. I know this, so is there anything that you think could be part of the recommendations that could take that forward? I think schools are a bit of a challenge, aren't they? Was there any seven now that are within local authority control and the rest are all academies? So I think it was working as a part of the partnership working, I think, which is part of the recommendations here. Probably we need to not forget that partners are schools as well, and maybe that's an amendment to those recommendations, just to remind that partners go beyond associations and parish councils and other sort of community groups, but yes, schools as well. Thank you for reminding us of that, it's brilliant. What I would say about schools is, I think you said earlier, schools are very busy places with lots of pressure. The only way to work is if you have an enthusiast on the staff, and then it will work very well. I can think of such individuals in my own sort of sphere of influence, and they can do a fantastic job and fire up young people into getting into a sort of gardening community and getting used to the basic principles of growing stuff and the joy of growing stuff. I still get a pleasure when a little seed pops his head through, you know, because it shows life exists and all the rest of it. So yeah, really good, really good helpful comments from everybody. So thank you for your contributions. And we move on to the last item, slightly, well, we're in a bit of behind with that, but that's always because it depends on how many speakers we have from outside about that, but I'm happy with the time, which is important. So we move on to the final work plan issue, and that's essentially, there is a work plan, which is in the agenda, as you can see, and we have things for the next time. I think the circulation plan, Sarah will be overjoyed to know, is in the July meeting, and I think there's something else as well, which we will obviously look at, but does anybody have anything that they'd like? I mean, I think we should possibly bring back the food growing aspects that we've just been talking about at a future meeting, maybe in the Orson to come back to that. Jess? I agree with that. It'd be good to get a response back on the report following today. It's never straightforward because it doesn't neatly fit into one cabinet member's portfolio. So I think we should send it to anybody we think has an aspect of their work, which is part of this activity and ask for an appropriate feedback when they can do it. Yes, Sam, you want to come back. Sorry, I just meant to say on that point, I think it was mentioned with Kerry that he did suggest that if this committee was supportive, that the group would actually reconvene just for one more, once the report had been complete, you know, the strategy and everything had been done, so we could actually look through it and actually make sure that it actually covers what we actually think. You're saying when the... Well, not when it's done, but when it's almost when it's done, so we can just make sure that it does cover all the views. I think it was autumn, was it? Yeah, I think so. So I think that falls in, so, I mean, if we can ask Kerry what the timeframe is and then when the group will kind of reconvene, that task group for that one last thing, and then that will feed back into the panel following, I'd have thought. In the minutes, Makayla, at the next meeting, Kerry will give us an update as to what the progress has been and when would be a sensible time to meet. Thank you. All right, so at nine minutes past tour by that clock anyway, we will close the meeting. Thank you very much for your attendance. Thank you. [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO]

Ready to start, ladies and gentlemen, we are actually on live television. So it's probably a good idea to make yourselves look respectable or whatever, I don't know. Anyway, welcome to the meeting of the Climate Emergency Screwsley Panel. We have members of the public and we have four sets of questions. And we will only ask factual questions to the statements that come back from the members of the public. Welcome to Cancion, it's a lovely view here, I always like coming here, but then I live here, so I might be blessed. We have a number of substitutions, and we have Sean Hughes, who's substituting for June Player, we have Toby Simon, who's substituting for John Leach, and we have Helmut Fee, who's substituting for Alex Beaumont, and we also should give a special mention to Ian Houssell, who has done yeoman service while Anna is on maternity leave. I'm sure she's done yeoman service as well in a different sphere. And thank you for all your contributions, and we hope to see you again as a substitute in the future. So we'll move on now to the emergency evacuation procedure. When the continuous and arm bell sounds, you must evacuate the building by one of the designated exits and proceed to the named assembly point. The designated exits are sign posted, arrangements are in place for the safe evacuation of disabled people. Okay, something else also, you can only have one microphone at a time, so when you finish speaking, please turn your microphone off. Although, frankly, I mean, it's not a big room, most people have got voices enough to be able to speak without a microphone, but that's the situation, so please turn them off when you get there. Absences, apology fors, and I've done this. I think most of them, apart from apologies from Councillor Grant Johnson. Yeah, sorry about that. Sorry. Okay, declarations of interest, is there anything on the agenda that you feel you need to have a pecuniary interest dimension at this stage? No, okay, that's fine. There is no urgent business, so we move on to the public statements, three of which are about school streets. We are at the very beginning of our process for school streets, so I know one speaker in particular. Yeah? I don't think this is a pecuniary interest, but just to say that as a parent, I'm involved in some school transport initiatives, so have an interest in school streets. Well, thank you for raising it, it's always good to know. And I should note that I'm a Governor, a Designant for Bathwicks and Mary primarily, which may well be interested in this issue. Okay, but I don't think any of the speakers are talking about that, but thank you again for raising it. Does anybody else wish to raise an interest rather than a pecuniary one? Well, I'm a parent as well, and I'm also involved in school travel initiatives. Also good to know. [silence] Okay, I'm ready. As someone deeply entrenched in the study of transport policies at local, regional and national levels, it's glaringly evident that the failures of Bathwicks and North East Somerset Council to deliver school streets extend beyond mere political leadership lapses to a fundamental absence of a robust road danger reduction strategy. Consider the debacle surrounding the failed Mount Road Liveable Neighbourhood project where an ineffectual zebra crossing outside Round Hill Primary School was financed from Bain's Higher Waste Budget, despite ample funding availability from West of England Combined Authority for a more holistic, low-traffing neighbourhood and school street solution. This oversight underscores the failures of the Liveable Neighbourhoods team to consult with the road safety officer, crucial for determining the safest interventions for residential roads according to the UK's long-standing road classification hierarchy, the ABC and unclassified roads. By my estimation, there have been 12 opportunities to deliver or begin to deliver 11 school streets, yet have been and are repeatedly being squandered. King Edwards, Bathwicks St Mary, Round Hill Primary, New Bridge Primary, Coom down Primary, Path Hampton Primary, the Paragon, King Louis Prep, St Andrews Primary, St John's Primary and Moreland Junior have all been neglected despite the clear safety benefits such measures provide. The Council disregard for the Vision Zero motion past last November coupled with the exclusion of the road safety officer from crucial design processes further highlight the systemic shortcomings. What's more concerning is the stark absence of a comprehensive road danger reduction strategy akin to those successfully implemented elsewhere such as in Lambeth. I have provided a link to that particular strategy. Even basic commitments from political leadership such as ensuring that a school street will be required for all viable primary schools are conspicuously absent. This is also from the Safe Streets Now National Campaign that is their request on all councils. It is high time to recognise the urgent need for a cohesive road danger reduction strategy and to institute council processes that prioritise the safety of our children on our streets. Thank you very much. Thank you Adam. Comments? Questions? Factual questions? Okay, thank you very much. Move on to Talia Kelly, please. Talia? Talia? Sorry about that. It's fine. I think this is still on, is it? Yeah. So, yes, I'm Talia Kelly and I'm parent voice and safeguarding Governor at Freshford Church School. We've noticed a real increase in traffic congestion, poor parking and a lot of growing confrontational situations between residents and parents. Oh, should I take it off? A number of near misses and incidents outside the school, particularly during school run times. And we felt it necessary as a governing body and a school to initiate surveys, communications and multi-agency group meetings to identify and agree problem statements and address issues and provide a vision for all mental stakeholders of what safer streets look like in the vicinity of Freshford Church School. Despite ongoing work to influence and nudge family behaviour when it comes to active travel, the mode shift, which is what Baines talks about with its mode shift styles, it has been slow and there's been quite a poor uptake. On 22nd of March 2024, we held a playing out event, which was an experimental endeavour to visualise what safer school streets look like, prioritise children's play and encourage a sort of enforce park and stride option. It was a very successful event and a post-mortem survey showed that most people felt that it did address the issues that were identified in our problem statement and noting how children could play and move around the vicinity of the school much more safely. Surveys, participants were very interested in exploring future walking bus and park and stride options and would like to see similar events in the future. We would like to move forwards with more playing out events and possibly an ETRO rather than a temporary traffic regulation order. We'd like help with formalising walking buses, which are currently costly and difficult to administer from financially strapped schools. Financial support and lesser ed tapes surrounding such initiatives from the council would ensure the longevity and success and viability of walking buses. We would like some help with reclassifying walking routes as families are having to battle poor driving behaviours, especially rat running and speeding. The recent Wales and West gas works have meant that lower stoke crolane has been closed since January, so families have been enabled to walk in through this route safely, but most of them have told me anecdotally they will be stopping the minute the roads reopened and they'll be driving again. So that's what we need the council's help with, reclassifying the streets, experimenting more with school streets outside the school, and helping us formalise walking buses so it doesn't impact on school's budgets. Thank you. Thank you very much. Hang on, there might be some factual questions. There are. Okay, so Saskia. Thank you for your statement. Do you think your school would be interested in trialling a school street where with the use of barriers and staff and parents to close the road for through traffic at pick up and drop off times? Yes, I think that we've definitely got a group of people who are willing to support that and the school is definitely being on board with that. Hi, thank you for coming to talk to us. I'm interested in your comments about walking buses and that's something I've been involved in locally as well. What kind of support would you like for the council and what are the barriers that you've encountered so far? So I've been looking at the Bain's website because there's a sort of toolkit for walking buses and it seems to affect, if we do it from the school, it affects insurance premiums and things like that, so they have to get involved with insurance and then there's a lot of risk assessments and different things. So I've tried to experiment with maybe just getting parents to do it informally rather than endorse from the school, but that's been very hard with parents under a lot of time pressure and I can't advertise them through the school newsletter in a formal way to sort of encourage people to help. It's sort of got to be more of a word of mouth thing, whereas if we had to do, I suppose, a less of the worrying about the insurance and that sort of thing, it might come more naturally. Okay, so it's kind of practical help with the insurance and the setup. Okay, all right, have you had any pushback from your school about that? Just that they are frightened of what pressure that will put on their budgets because we're already looking at a significant deficit heading into next year anyway in terms of budget. So I just need to really reassure everyone at school that any active travel initiatives are not going to hurt or be harmful to the school in any way. Is your parent body generally in favour of the idea? Do you know of a school street? The reason why I ask is because there's quite a lot of work required in terms of marshals and that sort of thing, and would you think there would be parents that could come forward to do those sort of roles? It's something I need to push harder. I did put another entry in the school newsletter asking people to contact me. I'd say on the whole, yes, I'd say we're actually a good community that really does think about climate and sustainability in active travel. I think what some families are held back by is the infrastructure for using active travel because it's quite a wide catchment area to arrive there. So I think people just, they want to do it, but they don't want it to be a high risk activity or perception of a high risk activity. I've got my brother-in-law to do a data analysis recently, so he's got some interactive data images where we've looked at the routes, there's a lot of routes where the schools catchment area, the postcodes of all the different students, and little alterations that could be made to those routes which would enable and encourage people to use active travel to get to the school. But we do need to do a firm and nudge, and I do think that we've got the majority of parents with Baccet. All right, John Taylor? Hello, this is a plea for joined up thinking about school streets. I live on what could be a school street. I live on what could be a school street, charm a throat in Bathwell, a new bridge primary school is situated. And I'm so pleased that the Council's finally beginning to consider promoting school streets, but this action is very late, and sadly, I think it demonstrates a lack of joined up thinking with the local authority as part of the pandemic. I work with children for 40 years, 15 as a primary school head in two large schools, so I feel quite qualified to comment on this. I'm also a member of our local residence group, next door to Newbridge Primary School. We requested residence parking in 2018, being close to the hospital and the airport must stop and come here. But we had to change the approach when the Council promoted liveable neighbourhoods. We submitted the pro-former by Baines to our local Councillors. The word school was never mentioned in that pro-former, nor were the words child or children. We included the school as top of the priorities in our liveable neighbourhood bid alongside residence parking. The school element of our bid disappeared without trace as Baines evaluated that bid. A golden opportunity to promote children's needs was lost. We've ended up with residence parking taking little account of the school. 15 months later, now, we've got a proposal to take away five of those RPZ places, introduce a one-way system, but two-way for cyclists. This is claiming to be part of a liveable neighbourhood, but in reality, it's just increasing speed on a road where children walk to school. What does this demonstrate to me and my neighbours? Another opportunity lost. No joined up thinking, no overall vision, no overall planning for school children. I really hope you succeed in promoting school streets. They're sorely needed. I think they'll need some thinking outside the box to make them work. I don't think you're going to be able to take an off-the-shelf solution for each location. Too many opportunities have just slipped through the council's fingers. I think it's time you put children first, even though they don't have a vote. Thank you very much. Thank you, John. Any factual questions? Saskia? Thank you for your statement. You've said that you think local residents would be supportive of a school street. I'm just thinking out of the box here. Would local residents maybe be happy to be involved in volunteering in a potential through traffic closure in the mornings and the afternoons? Some. But when I joined the residents parking group, which was set up, that was done by leaflets from local residents. I was the lone voice saying, But there's a school on the street. And as we've gone through the Liverpool neighbourhood, Schinanigans, for one of the better words, my wife and I, both heads, sorry, both primary school heads, two lone voices saying, But what about the school? If I'm really honest, most of my neighbours care about their parking space. That's what they tolerate the school. Some like it because it means they live on the road and their children can just walk easily to school. But there is that conflict. The thing I didn't talk about, which I suppose is the elephant in the room, is parking enforcement has insufficient resources. To make any regulations work. So every day I look out of my window and I can see all the double yellow lines there to protect children. And they're covered by parents who park for up to half an hour, leave their cars there, wander into school for a chance. You know, it's not a five minute drop off that people do it. Which is the same issue just cropping up in the proposal that's gone forward for the one-way system. It depends on people observing regulations and not parking where they aren't meant to. And as you know, if you stand by any traffic lights in Bath and watch what happens when the lights turn red, most people won't follow those regulations. So I'm not hopeful. Jess? Thank you. I know what you've said about school streets. But do you feel the interventions that have been made so far? So the introduction of residence parking and the one-way system are good first steps on the way to establishing a school street? The residence parking was a one-way system. I'm a cyclist. I know that's my main means of transport and my wife because it's easier to get around Bath and try to drive. The charm of the road has a really splayed, wide junction. It's right next to a pelican crossing on Newbridge Primary, which only went in when the charm was hit and had his legs broken many years ago from the school. If people are driving out from town towards school to drop their children off and those pelican lights turn red, they just floor it and roar around the corner. Which is why so many residents are concerned about the one-way proposal that it will probably encourage that type of behaviour. You're not very visible as a cyclist coming down. You know, I can wear all the highways in the world. But there are so many SUVs on the road. They're very high. And children in particular disappear behind them. You don't need much space as a cyclist. But when you're passing a tank and there's another one being driven towards you, I don't feel it will encourage children to do it. I used to sit on active travel meetings. You're wondering now a way from factual statements. So I'm going to have to cut you off. So, may I say one? It is a factual statement. At the active travel meeting, which Mark Schulford used to chair over and over again, he used to say, if we can promote children walking or sighting to school, hopefully you will generate a lifelong habit. Well, there's one fellow cyclist to another. I would obviously support that. Okay. Thank you very much, Jim. And now we come to Alice. Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me along and talk to you. I've included a couple of resources for you to look at, which is a UNICEF report called the Toxic School Run and School Streets to Shake Child Friendly Cities from Clean Cities. I'm a resident of Bath, a mother of two school-aged children and a GP. If you look for me on the GMC register, I use my maiden name at work, so it'll be Dr. Gardner, just in case you think I'm making it up. I'm a doctor. I'm here to urge you to view your decisions today about school streets from a child and public health perspective. As the president of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health said last year, air pollution is the largest environmental risk to public health in the UK, with children being particularly vulnerable. All children deserve the opportunity for the best start for a healthy start in life. Exposure to air pollutants during pregnancy and early childhood can have harmful and irreversible effects on the development of the lungs and other organs leading to potential long-term health effects well into adulthood. A study in London discussed in the UNICEF report, which I distributed to you, found that children receive 15% of their daily exposure to air pollution during travel to and from school. Children are disproportionately vulnerable to air pollution, both because of their developing lungs and because they breathe faster and are actually shorter, so they're nearer to the level of the car exhausts. Studies of school streets in the UK have demonstrated reductions in nitrogen dioxide levels of 23% and particulates of up to 36%. School streets could therefore have a positive impact on the health of children in Bath and North East Somerset both now and for the rest of their lives. As you know, national guidelines recommend at least one hour of physical activity each day for all children, but less than half of all children are currently achieving this. A school streets pilot in Hackney in London demonstrated a 51% increase in cycling to school and a 30% increase in walking. As GPs were currently seeing both increasing levels of obesity and far more children struggling with their mental and emotional well-being. A 2017 study demonstrated a positive association between active travel to school and psychological well-being. As a mum of children who've attended local schools in Alfield Park throughout their school lives, they used to go to Alfield Park infants and juniors and now they go Taysfield. I've seen this at first hand. We've experienced the social and emotional benefits of walking to school. My children have grown up within their community rather than being driven through it and they now walk confidently to their secondary school and they see adults and children who they know on the way there and the way back. However, my youngest daughter has asthma and often feels wheezy and tight-chested after walking along busy roads of traffic often where drivers are speeding. In the years from 2019 to 2022, there were 211 child deaths in the UK due to road traffic accidents and over a third of serious injuries and deaths of children in road traffic collisions occur during travel to and from school. School streets could make travel to school safer by reducing road traffic and surrounding streets. And actually speaking about our own street because I live opposite of the Park Junior school, just reducing speed would be a really great first step towards that and we're really struggling with that at the moment. So in conclusion, your decisions on school streets could improve the physical and mental well-being of generations of children in Bath and North East Somerset and you have the power to prevent potentially fatal asthma attacks, improve children's lung health, prevent future ill health, improve children's psychological well-being and prevent injuries and deaths on the roads. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Alice. Factual questions? Saskia? Thank you for your statement. Would you support the schools? I think with school streets a lot of people think about primary schools. What's your -- would you support secondary school streets as well? Absolutely. I think that I guess the problem with secondary schools is that people come from further away, but equally children are more independent. So a lot of them travel by bus and they're able to travel independently so it could be a much bigger impact if you think about the numbers doing secondary schools rather than just primary. Any other questions? Okay. If I can just make a closing statement, you're welcome to it. I mean, I was in education for nearly 40 years, secondary education, and I absolutely agree 100% with the concept of school streets. It's not that we are -- we may not have been brilliant at moving forward in this administration or earlier administrations, but it's not because we didn't want to. It's because of financial considerations or other pressures, which is not much of an excuse because when I was on duty outside the school, which again was the secondary school, and I saw the risks and the pollution that was there, then it's certainly something we are very much focusing on now, and hopefully as we go forward, there'll be many school streets in the years ahead. So thank you very much for your contributions. Well, I enjoyed listening to them. I hope other people did too. So thank you. Right. Okay. So we move on to perhaps slightly more boring topic of the minutes. Oh, sorry, Seth. Can I suggest that since we're thinking school streets, we leave minutes and cabinet member update for a bit and do the school streets item? Sadly, I don't think we can because we have Amanda who's got pressures herself, but it's a nice idea. Unfortunately, we haven't got to wait long because it's only, I say, only cabinet update. I don't mean that in any disrespectful way. That's not a massive -- we hope not a massive job, and then we'll be on to school streets. So if you can stay for the school streets issue, we'd love you to, but obviously you may have pressures on your time as well. Okay. So we will quickly go through the minutes as quickly as we can anyway. So there are any issues on the minutes that I know Michael, you have one. It's fine. Okay. Any other issues, any corrections, observations? Okay. Done a good job here, Toby. Well done. Okay. So do I have a proposal for accepting the minutes? Let me put the hand up. Thank you. Yes. Seconder, Michael. Those in favour? Okay. Thank you very much. We move on to the cabinet member update, and this is when I turn around and look a bit nervous for two reasons. One, as the technology worked, and two, is Amanda looking at me. So, Amanda, are you there? I am here. Be and hear me. We can hear you. Turn around. Do we? Yes. Yes. Morning, everybody. I've circulated my update in advance. I'm not more than happy to answer any questions. There are three things. I was going to bring your attention to, and I'll just make a comment. I think someone mentioned about cabinet member and talking about school streets. Just for everyone to be aware that the school streets portfolio is held by Sarah Warren. As a cabinet member, I won't comment on someone else's portfolio. So any questions about your streets are my friend and colleague Sarah Warren, not me. The three things that I'm going to draw your attention to are slight updates from what came out on Monday in the fast-moving world of transport and highways. On Monday, we were going to put in some extra-bollards to stop people from driving on pavement for the local neighbourhood in Sydney Road, Sydney Place. That work has been now completed. Just for the panels' information, irrespective of where people sit on the local neighbourhoods or whether or not they think it's a good or a bad thing. When a trial is in, what we will not allow is people to subvert the evidence gathering and the data gathering of the trial by trying to do something that is illegal. We absolutely want to allow the current behaviour that has to be witnessed where cars in order to get round, the bollards have driven on the pavement, irrespective of the fact that school children at the time walking to school on that pavement. So, that action has been taken very, very swiftly. You can probably sound from my voice, I think it's a real shame that we've had to do that and feel I was listening to one of your speakers before who was talking about how people either chose or didn't choose sometimes to abide by rules. We've got a real live example here. The second one I'm going to pick out is North Parade Bridge. The announcement actually went out in public yesterday as well that we are doing the work over the summer. There are separate diversion routes going to be publicised for cars and for cyclists. The diversion route is going to be different. This is slightly different from other bridges where we've been able to keep access for cyclists as well as pedestrians on them. On this one, it is pedestrian-only access for the time that the work is done. We're very confident that to do the work that we have identified will take a period between six to eight weeks. We are less confident, as you would expect, like any other heritage asset. Occasionally, when you start doing things, you discover other bits. Our commitment is to keep everyone as engaged and as informed as we can. We trust that that work will come over the summer without just finding anything else that needs to be done. Final bit, I'm just going to draw your attention to city centre security. Again, it's either just gone out or it's just about to go out with public announcements that we are moving on to what is. There was a package of activity that was agreed by cabinets to fulfil what the anti-towerist squad wanted in terms of city centre security. We'll be moving on to that next phase over the summer period when the current phase on the global road walls will finish on time. That, I think, is good news. If you compare us with the other cities who have had to do this up and down the country, they've had significant way more significant problems, if that's in than us. We have a very difficult environment in the city centre to do anything because I'm sure as you will recall, I made a commitment that I would keep full access for blue badge holders at all times and that we were going to make sure that we had sufficient parking for blue badge holders when they went through. And every time you take a hole in the middle of the city centre, you come across some service or some utility that you weren't entirely expecting to be there. So, I am beyond delighted at the work that the team has done and what was certainly at the start a very, very challenging project, but is now being delivered within the budget envelope we've currently got and each phase is being done to time and very effectively. So, those are the three things that I just wanted to call out because they were sort of separate from what I would class as more business as usual. It's not that business was usually listened to in court because people, I get, you know, just as many emails about people needing WLL lines or rotary surfacing or whatever. But as you can see, that program is on time, is on budget and is being delivered. So, if anyone has got any questions, I would be absolutely delighted to answer them as long as they're in my portfolio. Thank you, Amanda. Are there any questions for Amanda? Jess? Hi, Amanda. Thank you for that. And I note the report includes delivery of resurfacing works. So, I just wanted to say thank you for the work that's been done in Rawlins' work recently. We had really good feedback about the contractors and how they engage with residents. My question was about level of enforcement for parking. I know that's an issue that, you know, continues to be a concern for residents, whether they've got residence parking zones or not. So, for example, in Rawlins' ward, as you're aware, we've got an area of significant overspill where there's a lot of parking up, parking problems outside the park. So, I wanted to get some feedback from you about where we are in terms of our level of enforcement officers. Have we got all the jobs filled? Are we still looking to recruit? And whether there's any data that you could share with us. So, thanks for that. Councillor DAVID, we reported at the last meeting, if you recall, Andy Dunn was there, about the fact that we had more or less costs up to, I think we peaked at about 90% of Rawlins' filled. But it's always a bit of a moving feast. So, I don't want to give you a number as of this second because they are sadly Rawlins that sometimes people take on and they find they're not for them, or they find they do well and they've got aspirations to do other things in the Council and apply and move on. What I can say is we're in a much, much better place than we were earlier on. And a lot of that is thanks to working closely with HR, who we went through a phase a couple of years ago where we just kept getting reports that said, oh, we haven't got enough civil enforcement officers and there's no civil enforcement officers throughout the country. And that's good enough. And I said, you know, along with the team, we all said, well, actually, it isn't good enough. If that's a known problem, we can't keep saying, well, that's just the problem. So, we changed the shift patterns. So, people who've got children, find it more easy to be able to do the job and fit it around their childcare responsibilities. We advertised in places that we hadn't particularly directed adverts to before and got some people that way. We did a video about what the job entails. We worked with people and we put in our absolute zero tolerance to any kind of abuse policy because we had found some people were finding that the actual job was causing them stress. So, as a considerate employer, and as someone who was trying to attract people to that role, we did everything we could and we did absolutely see a huge increase in people applying. I get monthly figures about where we go, how many transgressions that people witness, how many of those last long enough for a ticket to be issued. And we aren't doing the best we can. It's one of those things. If we had more people, we would be in more places. But frankly, the position that we're on now, I would be surprised if we had more than 10% vacancies now, but please don't hold me to that specific figure. The position we are now is probably as good as it gets and it gets going back to the speaker who we heard before. A lot of this is people knowingly doing things that they shouldn't do. So part of our role, I think as a council, is to try to get to a place where enforcement is almost seen as the last resort because someone has deliberately failed the rules as opposed to people thinking they're going to be able to get away with it. So I have lots of sympathy for people who say we'd like to see traffic enforcement officers more regularly. In the same way as a lot of people who say I'd like to see police more regularly, they are doing the rounds that they may do and anyone who wants to get access to the world's largest spreadsheet is more than welcome within the council to see where they go and what they issue. Hi, Amanda, thank you for the update. I've got a question on Lime Garden's Charmouth Road, so we've heard from a local resident. I believe there's been a public meeting yesterday or earlier this week. I have to agree with some local residents. I don't think this scheme will create a safe environment for walking, wheeling and cycling. And I believe it fails minimum criteria for the City Regional Sustainable Transport Sentiments funding, CRSTS, that we so desperately need. So removing parking to improve visibility and creating short sections of cycleways isn't going to achieve the modal shift that we want and need. A couple of signs to warn motorists of one coming cyclists isn't going to keep those people on cycle safe or people walking to school. I guess I would like your comment on how you think this scheme will enable a modal shift. Thank you. So I think you're probably referring to there was an open meeting last night. I haven't had all the feedback obviously from that meeting yet, I think that's the meeting you're referring to. Like every other Liverpool neighbourhood, this came forward as part of the – when we asked for proposals for how we spent CRSTS money on Liverpool neighbourhoods, this came forward from what councillors as a request. It went through the same prioritisation route as all the other Liverpool neighbourhood requests came through. And we are moving to an experimental traffic order whereby we will test whether or not we think what had been requested and what had been modelled will actually do what it needs to do. You're right to point out that there is a school at the top of the street and this may be a phase one towards doing something closer to a school street. But it fits all the criteria for what a Liverpool neighbourhood. There are a couple of specific issues that have come up that again we wouldn't know about had we not moved to an ETRO. So in many ways teasing acne issues are a good thing. I'll see the reports from the consultation yesterday and we'll decide how when we moved to ETRO, the decision to do that has already been taken, it's just the actual details we're working on. When we move to that what if anything we need to change in the light of that in terms of every minor tweaks and of course throughout the six to eight to eight month period, the ETRO will be in place. We will do extreme monitoring and we will be asking people for their local lived experience and we'll see if in fact it needs to stay in or come out or be replaced by something different. Thank you. The Devonshire Tunnel, I'm not sure whether it's you or Sarah but can we have an update on what's happening on Devonshire Tunnel? It's neither me nor Sarah. All I can do is tell you what I know from everything that the cabinet got. I'm sure everyone's aware that Devonshire Tunnel is owned and operated now by such drowns not by the Council. However, some, you know, we want to be as helpful as we humanly possibly can. And it looks like some of the work that may be done to be on the term fix would need to be done on Council land. Again, you're getting to the limits of my understanding about this and my exposure to it but my understanding is this is not going to be a simple fix. So the current plan is that when it rains excessively and water comes in, there is a plan to pump the excess water out to keep it as open for as long as possible. However, that's obviously not a good long term fix. The long term fix has been worked on by Council engineers and such drowns with such drowns obviously having to take the lead. Sorry, just to follow up on this, I don't know if I missed this but who's portfolio does this sit in? I'm sorry, Saskia I can't hear you. Sorry, who's portfolio does this sit in if it's not in yours and not in Sarah once? It's a corporate property responsibility so that for I believe it's an exception of the land is park land. It's one of these very peculiar ones that falls between a whole deeper of different places. I suspect Mark had a related answer. Council will break that because it's audited. Thank you. Okay, did I have to ask you any more questions? Last one. Last one, thank you. Could I ask about physical barriers on public right away? Is that your portfolio? I can't ask you when you turn away from the microphone, I'm afraid I can't hear you. Sorry, I would like to ask. I can't hear you. Yes, I think you can hear me now because I sound very loud, don't you? Physical barriers on public right away, does that sit within your portfolio? It does, yes. Is there a commitment from the Council to remove all physical barriers on public right away to allow access for all? So there's a program of work being done on public rights away currently. We have one only public rights away officer who covers the whole off the authority. So what we need to do is look at the asset overall, see which ones are still enforceable, which ones are still enforceable, see which need work, see which don't need work. And part of that program of work is to look at the accessibility to see which, if any, are being in any way made inaccessible in a way that we can change. So I can't give an absolute commitment that, you know, immediately we're going to put all these things right, but I can't give the commitment that we're looking at getting together a program to make sure that we address all the issues as speedily as we can. Actually, that does not pass, I agree. Thank you for being tolerant, Amanda. Okay. If it's okay with you, Chair, I've got another meeting I need to go to. So, thank you all very much. That's all right. You're meeting and I'll drop off now. Thank you, Amanda. Right, so we move on to Sarah who has made the journey to Kensham. Do you want to start with a cabinet member update? Yes, that will be lovely. Okay, so I've circulated it in advance, so I'll just go through some highlights. So on green heritage homes, so there's been some training delivered to our Council Conservation and Planning officers on retrofit and historic buildings. There's actually a webinar coming up that people can residents, owners of historic properties can log on to, which will be held on the 15th of May. So go to the Council website if you'd like to know more about that. We're looking at a power purchase agreement for solar photovoltaic and the proposed ferry hill site in Compton Dando, which is all still subject to planning approval. We are participating in the local area energy plan, which will provide evidence to underpin the strategy for 300 megawatts that we're looking to install by 2030. Working closely with colleagues in Bristol and across the West of England on that. And both sports and leisure centre will be installing a rooftop solar PV using £173,000 from the Government Swimming Pool Support Fund, which should generate up to 212 kilowatt-peak hour capacity, which will provide more than, I think, the electricity needed for the swimming pool. So then moving on to rural communities, climate and nature projects. We have nine parishes that have been awarded, money for the West of England Rural Fund, including Farmborough, Westfield, East Harp Tree, Bishop Sutton, Peas Dansant John, Compton Martin, Chailwood, June Magna, and they'll be doing, most of them, I think, will be doing works to their buildings to improve the energy efficiency to retrofit renewable technologies. And in terms of community conversation, we're actually working towards a pilot community conversation around climate change, which potentially could form the basis for future conversations that will inform the update of the climate emergency strategy, which I think is due next year, and might also provide a format for a new type of neighbourhood forum, if they go well. On nature, we're receiving quite a bit of a claim, actually, for our biodiversity net gain programme. So we actually implemented 10% biodiversity net gain, a requirement for 10% biodiversity net gain in planning a year ahead of mandate from Government, which means that we're a bit of a pathfinder, a trendsetter nationally now, and various locations are coming forward as sites where we can accept contributions from developers and use them to promote biodiversity, so that's really a positive and exciting thing to be part of. We are going forward with the Summer Valley rediscovered project through Weka funding and working closely with Bristol Water to deliver Phase 2 of the Two Valley Recreational Trail. On a transport side of things, we are working towards painted parking bays for our E-Scooter Trail, which we hope will be forthcoming this summer, I believe, and then later in the year we're looking towards some on-road spaces. Bike hangers, so we consulted fairly recently, I think, on locations that residents would like to put in back hangers, working towards installation at 20 locations later this year. We've been surveying commuters within Bath and Northeast Somerset, and we'll be progressing to the next stage of the full business case on the Summer Valley Links Sustainable Transport Corridor for sustainable travel routes along the 837 and 8367. We've been waiting for Weka to release the West Wing and Combined Authority to release the consultation findings of the A4 Bristol Bath route through that scheme, and we can expect those to be released later this month now. Aside from that, then, as part of our local plan, which we are working towards, so we've recently had an options consultation, we're looking towards creating transport strategies for our towns that will set the vision for the transport system for the next 20 years, and we are compiling an active travel master plan, so of course, if anyone has thoughts on that, please do send them in, and there will be consultation on those schemes later, those plans later in the year. That's it for now, and I'll have to answer questions about those. Thank you, Sarah. Are there any questions for Saskia and then Sean? Thank you for the update. I believe there was an update on Tier in your report, wasn't there? Well, I just want to ask about if there are plans to expand it to cover all of Baths, including Twitter, and I think there was mention of expanding it to South and East. There are plans to expand Tier the Tier Zone, and we're waiting on both Tier and the West Wing and Combined Authority and Council officers having capacity to progress that, but that's certainly within our plans. Sean and then Jim? Thank you. Hi, Sarah. A simple question to start with, is there any ends to a de-scooter trial? What was the question? Is there evidence? Is there any end to it? Will it finish the trial ever? I believe, so at the time it came in, it was a trial, which, and what it was thought likely if I'm, or maybe, if I'm, if I'm going to answer. It's up to the government. So they set out the terms of the trial. They have extended it three times. The current extension is until end of March 2026. The contract that we have with Wecker and Tier, through Wecker, with Tier, takes us a little bit beyond then, I think, to possibly the start of 2027. We don't know. It really depends on what the government does in terms of legalization of private e-scooters. It started out being a support mechanism for transport during COVID, and now it's moved on into gathering as much evidence as they can. We have, in the first set of trials, published now, an independent report review into the operation across the West Indian Campaign Authority. It's available on The Wecker's website, and that was done independently by the University of West of England. Very thorough. We will be doing more of that, but it's really about taking the opportunity to gather evidence in our area so that the consideration and decisions that the government take includes our evidence into it. March 2026, but could be further, we're not sure. Can I remind Sean and others that I don't believe that's part of the update, so I don't think you should have asked that question. Am I wrong? Well, they're expanding the e-scooter trial in the updates. Mine's on e-scooters as well. I'm glad we clarified that. Just to say, I really welcome the plan to put in some parking spots and some painted in parking spots. Jessica, thank you for your engagement locally. It's been quite an issue. There are some real enthusiasts for e-scooters and the e-bikes, which is great, but there are also some people who are really upset about them being parked sloppily across pavements and, obviously, blocking walkways and space for people with buggies is not a good thing. So my question is really about funding for putting in these parking spots. It's great that you're doing 10 and have plans to do 10 more, but obviously there's many, many e-scooters and e-bikes all across Bath. Are we looking at other mechanisms for funding them? Does it just have to come from work out or can we use things like still or other parts of money to pay for the parking spots when we know how well they work? Well, I can say that we are hopeful, I think, that with the West of England combined authority, that we may be moving towards a place where we, as both North East Somerset Council, have a share of the income that tier is bringing into the West of England combined authority. So that would then give us the opportunity to, you know, in the first instance, I imagine the first call on that money will be to support the scooter scheme and then there may be more and we can spend it on other areas. Okay, Ian. Thank you. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for your update. I just want to go back to the retrofitting for historic buildings. You said that officers, planners and conservation officers have been subjected to some training on this. How are the officers going to overcome the legal issues of the fact we've got so many heritage assets within the city in particular? How are they going to be able to overcome issues such as building consent and what national planning policy says? It's an ongoing challenge for us, I think, in Bath in particular, but I think if we can go forward with projects like this one, the lead project from Green Heritage Homes, you know, we can be in the forefront of addressing these and taking them up with national government and trying to find a pathway through because as a World Heritage site, if we can crack those issues in Bath or at least bring them to the forefront of the attention of national government, then, you know, we have a chance perhaps of, you know, leading the rest of the UK, but it's an ongoing challenge for us. Okay. Thank you, everyone, for the questions. Thank you, Sarah, for your very detailed update, so detailed on Mr. Bit. So, very good. And we now move on to item nine, which is School Streets, and I understand, Jessica, you're going to do a presentation. We're doing it together, are we? So, like, the two runners, is that okay? There will be 40 minutes, and I am timing, so please keep questions brief and comments. I'm not talking necessarily to you, but I am, everybody, so we can get as much. Lovely. Okay, then over to you. Yeah, so just to emphasise, of course, as you've gathered on our School Streets program, is it quite an early stage, so we brought this to you as an item of policy development. So, really, it's a question of telling you where we are with our thinking and getting feedback from you in terms of how we, you know, how happy you are with that, and whether there are changes you'd wish to see. So, cleaner, greener, school travel is obviously a plank of the Council's Journey to Net Zero strategy and a key part of our approach to mode shift. So, in terms of the school run, we know that the school run related traffic accounts for a quarter of cars on the road at school run time, and statistics show that 14% of children who are killed on Great Britain's roads in 2018, it was during this morning school run, and 23%, it was during the afternoon school run. And we know, so there's been a report from Insura Admiral, which shows that there's a 43% of road collisions during the holidays at school run time of day. Engagement, when it's carried out with school children, shows a strong demand for improved road safety and preference to travel to school by active modes of transport. Specifically for school streets, it has shown that pupils are supportive of restrictions and wish for more extensive changes that reduce the dominance of motor vehicles. We also know, as we've heard from some of our speakers today, that children in the UK are amongst the most overweight in Europe, and that the Journey to School is an easy way to increase exercise. And we know that physical activity amongst five to 18-year-olds has reduced over the last 30 years. So, that's just some of the background of why we're looking at this policy. So, I'm very delighted, really, that we have been able to allocate this year through budget setting £250,000 of income from the Clean Air Zone for some pilot school streets. So, school streets were first introduced in the UK in 2015 and have been expanding rapidly in recent years. It's very helpful to us, that Bristol Local to Us has several, so we are working closely with them and hoping to learn from their experience. So, what are the aims of a school street? I mean, the overall objective is to create a safer and more welcoming environment on roads directly outside or leading to schools. By reducing the dominance of motor vehicles to support parents, pupils and school staff to all travel to school by more active modes of transport. So, traditionally, they tend to involve a timed motor vehicle restriction during school drop-off and pick-up, which might be between 30 minutes and 2 hours in duration. And there are often exemptions for residents, for blue badge holders, for emergency services and for other statutory services. They can also be developed into wider measures supporting active travel and improving the public realm, such as improved crossings, pavement widening, bike parking, street greening and so on. So, in terms of the policy basis that we have to do this, at government level, we've got the gear change report, which lists them as a key intervention, improving road safety and increasing activity levels. Government has set a target through its cycling and walking investment strategy to see 53% of school children walking to school by next year. Locally, many of our policies already mention school streets as potential interventions. So, it's mentioned through the Joint Local Transport Plan 4, which was the West of England's document a few years ago. Our own Bath and Dorothy Somerset GenesNet Zero Strategy, our Liveable Neighbourhood Strategy, as well as our Corporate Strategy Policies and Principles. So, having a policy gives clarity to schools seeking to implement a school street and potentially provides a legal position, which could in future require a permit us to require developer financial contributions forced for these streets through the planning process. Delivery for some pilot schemes now will allow us to learn what works, what works less well and to support real learning and to inform future schemes and potentially in future to bring in a school street specific policy. So, it put us in a good position, of course, to bid for further funds for more at a later date. Thank you. I'm going to talk very briefly about two key concepts that are really important for modal shift or changing how we travel. That is the stepped approach and disruptor events, and you'll see by the end of my talk why I'm putting, playing out at them, really happy to hear Talia coming and speaking about playing out events in Freshford. So, a stepped approach is supporting small changes, is understanding that people don't usually make a very large change in their lives around transport. So, allowing and supporting those little changes, travelling to school once a week, making short journeys to your local environment, your local high street via cycle or walking, things like that. They all together create those big changes and supporting that are a bunch of other things that we're doing around the council. The Active Travel Social Prescribing Program, we were one of 11 councils that were successful in bidding, in securing funding from Active Travel England for. It is based around the Summer Valley area, but we are already expanding a little bit our scope there to deliver adult cycle training out of the area. So, that's about realising health benefits of sustainable transport, Active Travel rather, which then allows people to make those changes more generally in their life around sustainable transport. The mode shift stars, school travel plan accreditation scheme that we are a part of, and specifically within the council, we have moved from a position of supporting the school travel plan office opposed from grant funding, where it's always looking for the next grant coming to being a permanent position in our structure now, which gives us the longevity to provide support ongoing for schools, and also to tie over with the ongoing capital program. It's very hard to plan for big schemes several years down the future when you're not sure if you've got that officer next year or the year after. We have increased provision for bikeability. Bikeability is the national standard for cycle training within usually the school age. We have massively increased our capacity. We've just finished training up with the newest set of recruits. It takes a long time, it takes about six to nine months total to recruit and train up to get to a point where we then have instructors that are able to go out and deliver. So we're now in that point and we're now doing some really aggressive, feels the wrong word, but promotion to get more schools to come on board with us. And this brings us back to playing out really. It's another step approach that we see ties really well with school streets. All of these things, the mode shift stars, bikeability, playing out, their ways that schools and school communities can make a step approach, which then it may be that school streets is the next step that they do and progress on and school travel plans. We see as the method by which they are maintaining that and keeping a record, a dynamic record that they will continue going forwards with disruptor events. Those are major life changes are the most effective time for us targeting mode shift people changing how they travel. That's things like changing job, changing house. Sorry, yeah, changing job, moving house and moving schools. So that brings us back to the policy provision in terms of when we have a policy that we can then leverage against in the planning process that allows us to make sure that as developments come on stream. They are doing so in a way that is in line with school streets so that when people move into those new houses and start going to those new schools. They are doing so with this at the forefront and that's the habit right from the word go. We've already got playing out. We had 11 events this year, this calendar year. We've done Brookfield Park, Linfield Park in the past in previous years, as well as Courtney Grove, prior close, Freshford Lane. I do note that they are all fairly bath centric and that our anticipated scope for school streets is not going to be restricted to bath. We want to move out beyond it. So these are the objectives and benefits we see school streets will give us. It will allow enable support more walking, cycling and scooting to school, not e-scooters, just the normal push scooters for kids and see hopefully in accordance with that less single car occupancy. We see there being that tie between less cars means more safety. More active travel means improved health outcomes for children and parents by embedding regular physical activity on the school run. Walking also gives better mind mapping of local areas for children so it's very important there. We've got good evidence, it gives better concentration for children when they are in school as well so it helps make use of the school day. Better independence, feelings of well being, reduces conflict between parents on the drop off and with residents so that's with each other sometimes and with residents of the area. As the doctor mentioned earlier as well by reducing the car traffic in those areas we will be improving the pollution or reducing the pollution which has health benefits as well. And wider than that improved capacity on our road networks elsewhere which is a major financial economic consideration for us. So here's our first point of questions opening up to you the panel. Do you agree with our approach on delivery policy? What do you think of the objectives and I can put them back on screen if you want? What if anything needs changing or adding and are there any issues that school streets could address or benefits that they could bring? Does anyone wish to respond to any of those questions? Sure. Sure. Firstly I mean I guess we're not restricted to these questions. No we've got a few more slides to show in a bunch of questions but this was we felt that these set of questions was appropriately what you've shown so far but if there's something burning question that you have. I'm just trying to get I mean I understand the concepts and I'm disappointed that to be honest it's quite important I'm disappointed that we only receive data a day ago for this scrutiny. I think I would have expected to receive information to be able to scrutinize in advance much longer than one day before a scrutiny panel. If I could respond to that we're doing policy development today not scrutiny there aren't this policy is at an early stage of its development and we don't have a lot of paperwork ready to go so I apologize it's only one day ago that I sent you a number of links or perhaps two days ago I'm not sure. But anyway I did send some links as background information so that you could read up about it but really the objective here today is to consider you know what is it we're trying to achieve and I'll be going about it in the right way. Okay so what I'm trying to get my head round is obviously we've got low traffic neighborhoods and we've got we've got school streets and I'm just trying to see what they sit at the moment they seem to be sitting separately from each other. And they obviously shouldn't be they should be part of the same the same projects and my concern is that it's it's it's it's funding led so liberal liberal neighborhoods tend to like to get priority because they're funded whereas traffic calming measures tends not to be funded by weka so I'm just wondering how we make sure that this gets a priority within the liberal neighborhoods projects. So I mean so the liberal neighborhoods has the ability if if a request for a school street comes forward through a neighborhood through the consultations that we've done. So there is there would have been the scope to have have implemented a school street as part of the liberal neighborhoods program I don't. I mean I'm not currently leading on that program but I don't believe one has come forward at this stage I could be wrong. Through that route but in terms of funding for school streets specifically we have now allocated a pot of funding through which is it's actually come from the income through the clean air zone route. And this year's budget so we have a definite fund from which we can implement some pilots this coming year of school streets. Thank you. Could I go back to the yet objectives. I was just thinking that something about the kind of social and community aspects may be missing from this. So I think as a secondary benefit of having lower noise and lower pollution and no danger from motorized vehicles you get a really nice and welcoming community and this could really be a very you know USB and excelling point for the community especially so I think we should highlight this. And just coming back to what Sean has been saying I think saying that no school street I mean obviously there are no school street within the current 15 level neighborhoods. But I guess the question is why not because if they would have been kind of presented as a really good option then they may have been so I guess we may have missed a trick there and I am concerned that we may miss a trick again the next time so I guess. We'd be seeing school streets in the next lot of level neighborhoods because that would be a great way to get the funding. I can't say what will happen in future level neighborhoods rounds I mean I think the principle by which we've gone ahead with the level neighborhoods to date has been that it's been about community design. I can't say what will happen in the future of course but what one hopes I guess will be that if we have some pilots of school streets through the current you know this particular funding part that we've allocated and they go really well then all the communities will want one. So it's really helpful to have your feedback about social and community aspects because if we can incorporate them into our objectives and prioritize them and perhaps more communities will want one. Yes I mean just following up on the difference in liberal neighborhoods and school streets. I'm thinking of Bathwick St Mary where Darlington Road is no trouble at all and is a livable neighborhood except at school. One time so the interventions required are about school run not about the overall environment of that street. And I think it's a question of identifying which policy interventions you need out for which time for what problem in that sort of context. Yes and to come back on because I think we've had to mention earlier today of is it Charmouth Road and Lime Road which are implementing a one way system and actually you know what I'm hearing from colleagues who've implemented school streets elsewhere is that actually a one way street is an easier street on which to implement a school street so it's very possible that that could be a precursor to moving in this direction. It's fair to say that one does not eliminate the other one does it they can work in unison going forward so we may not have missed a trick it's just that we may be at the first stage and a second stage may follow afterwards. Possibly. Yes. Thank you chair if it's okay the I've got a comment a question and a suggestion that's all right so comment yes the objectives and benefits. I agree with. I've been involved in some initiatives that we can school where we did a car free day and then followed that up a term later with a car free week which was basically like a voluntary school street so we asked the whole school community not to drive with an immediate vicinity of the school and not to drive through the road that went between the two schools so as part of that two points to emphasize there was some community engagement so working with the local business association we sent them information beforehand made sure they understood that they would be able to drive you know as normal but it was about you know asking the school community to behave differently so they should see some benefits and several of them did report that that it was a lot better for them because they didn't have parents kind of slamming the doors outside their front door and you know parking on the double yellows and taking over the area. And then another key part of the scheme was that we worked with a couple of local businesses a garden center in the cricket ground to provide locations for park and stride so that people who had to use their car to work or for other stuff that was going on had an option to be able to drive reasonably near to the school and still you know carry about their day. There wasn't massive take up of those offers but I think it was really important in terms of acceptability so in terms of the objectives and benefits here I think you could probably talk a bit more about the benefits to communities around schools. Then the question I had is really good that we've made a permanent position for the school travel officer because you know that wasn't the case before you know when we when I first became a council and funding was coming to an end for I think it was called save the routes to school. So it's really good that that's now a permanent post to follow up on Tanya's comments earlier on do you think we could ask for a bit more support from that officer to help with walking buses. I know we have got some examples of walking buses in Baines that are working at the moment and people have been able to get around some of the obstacles so if we could just share that best practice or perhaps advocate with schools that would really help parents to get them off the ground. And then lastly my suggestion was about obviously as a local council we have a role in school admissions as well as in transport and is there some messaging that we can work into the admissions process about thinking about how you travel to school so that when you get your first child into primary school you're already been given a message about trying to car share trying to walk to school where you can hear the resources that are available to help you here's your walk to school map that kind of stuff so that from the outset people are thinking about sustainable travel and not assuming they have to drive to school and back every day. Thank you those are great suggestions and we'll see whether we can get our school travel officer taking a look at them and perhaps picking up on what I think was Talia who said earlier. Maybe we can get him to look into whether there's any any way in which the council can facilitate that insurance issue. I have no idea whether there is. I can talk to that. Thank you Talia so we do have as you mentioned the walking bus I'm sorry I'm going to have to. So we've got the walking bus talk here that we put together it does mention the need for schools to look at their insurance. The reason is mostly they will find that there is no additional premium to pay but they need to make sure that they have gone through the process so that it is covered. The schools insurance will will be very likely to cover things like doing school trips and it's under that provision the walking buses can be covered as well. But the school needs to do the the processes the risk assessment and part of the toolkit is helping the school community go through those. We've provided some templates we've provided generic risk assessments for to get to get to understand the operation but there need to be specific ones to cite that the school needs to take ownership of. And I think there's some really good overlap between walking bus and playing out and school streets here and demonstrators in which one can be used as a step approach to the other but also they all three somewhat have the same issues in terms of sustainability where they often comes down to a few individual parents to provide the workforces of people to keep things going. And that's where the school travel plan officer and motif stars as a system is about embedding all of those things within the school ethos so that the school is looking to replace those people either from the school's staff itself or canvassing new people who are coming into the school to take on those roles because they need to keep that going and it needs to continue. Otherwise we just have this sort of jump up in terms of sustainability around schools for a while, we'll put money in, we'll support things and then it drops off and it's gone again and we want to avoid doing all of that. So all of that active travel social prescribing, bike ability, cycle training, we are working towards a position of ideally 80% of year five and six pupils across the whole of Baines having done level one and two like ability. And that's the real driver behind why we have massively increased capacity there. And once we feel that capacity, we'll do it again. And the next step we talked earlier about secondary schools. And again, the change from primary to secondary is a natural disruptor event, but it's not well secured into secondary school, the independent travel of walking and cycling. And so we were looking previously about a year ago to start doing level three bike ability at secondary schools, but active travel England have given us this priority and target of the 80% for level one and two. We want to go back and do that. We want to see having done that mass provision of skills with level five year five and six kids, we want to see that embedded into secondary schools. But we have to do a stepped approach in the council as well to make sure that it's sustainable for us. So we'll definitely get in touch with you. Okay, I have a question. And I think it's to do with the objectives. I think during the conversation that we've had, another objective seems to me to be improving school partnerships. A lot of that stuff up there is about what's happening around the school. But it's been talked about cycling improvement, which is done presumably within the school, school travel plans, which is done within the schools and walking buses, things like that, which are linked closely to the way schools operate. So my suggestion would be that improving school partnerships with the local authority would be a good objective to include. Should we go on to the... Yes, yes. We've got more. Oh, perfect. So, recapping what we've done, where we are and where we're going. So we have £250,000 of CAS revenue allocated to the program. It's allocated for this financial year, but it can, as it's our money effectively and not grant funding, we can carry it forwards into next financial year. That doesn't mean that we're going to be sitting on our hands and not getting on with things. It just means that we're not in a rush to throw money at things. We want to get this right. So this is the area-wide assessment criteria we think we're going to use, and I'm going to take you a bit over how we came to that. These are the things that we think will be our prioritization criteria. And we also want to expand out the provision not just for urban schools, which has been the tendency across the nation in the move to school streets. It has more often been provision of urban schools. We want to make sure that we're not leaving our rural schools and North East Somerset area of Baines behind. So that's where we want to widen out and think into the things like quiet lanes. The enforcement options are barriers with marshals, signage only, automatic number plate recognition, and that would be with fines along as well. We are proposing in this first phase to do the barrier option. That's not ruling out all others. It means that we see that as the best first phase for us because it is lower cost to do. It's quicker to do. It requires the buy-in from the school to operate. We aren't going to be able to bring on a load more officers to go and police these every day. So it will need school staff or school community people to come and do that. It also builds in, monitor and compliance opportunities for us. So you pop a sign up. We don't know how many people are obeying the sign. We don't know how many people are driving or not driving as part of it. But when you've got people there, they can do counts. They can also be there to first see issues as they pop up. Because if you don't have a person there, very often the issues boil up and it's only when they boil over. That we as a council realise that there is a problem we have to get involved again. So we think that that is the right way and also we think that physical barrier, not just relying on signage, but that physical barrier to enforce instructions, restrictions, lower the speeds. Only let through those people who are allowed to be let through is important there. We also, I would say, the most effective persuasive power for modal shift comes from what everyone else is doing around you. Not from a fine, not from benefits in terms of something extra. We can offer financial bonuses or whatever it may be that you can get. It comes from what is happening, that nudge or pester power. We know that is how people change what they're doing and adhere to rules as well. We talked about people jumping red lights, et cetera. People are less likely to flat rules when they think that everyone around them will judge them for it. Much, much more so than when they are worried about getting a fine or something else for it. We have employed a consultant to do some very preliminary policy review for us. That's looking at our policy, looking at national policy and suggest how we move forwards. This is the qualifying criteria that they gave us, which would be, this is the scores that can or can't outright be part of it. And already, for example, we can see some issues in going with such a restrictive approach. For example, Freshford School would not be able to be part of a school streets because the third one on there, no bus stop within prospective restriction area means that that would disqualify them. We don't want to be that restrictive, which is why we want to do this pilot ahead of policy or merging the two together as we're moving forwards so that we can test what does and what doesn't work and where we need to be restrictive of elements and where we need to actually allow it out a little bit more. They've also given us a set of criteria for prioritization. So that's having identified whether a school can or can't outright. How do we then float those that come to us and take the ones that we can afford to within that financial year going forwards? And I'll quickly wiz through these. So another primary school within 200 metres, secondary school, again close by whether there is a livable neighbourhood scheme. So that's that overlap between livable neighbourhoods. There is obvious benefit if we're doing a school streets and there's a livable neighbourhood that the two should work in partnership. But all of these things should not be a yes/no. It should be together, they provide an opportunity for us to know that it is more likely to work and it is more likely to have a larger impact. Whether there is cycle network connections already around, where they are with their mode shift stars award, are they engaged? Do they have a green bronze silver or a gold accreditation? How many students there are because again, larger schools mean that we are going to impact a larger number of effectively cars on the road, getting them off. Whether they're a primary school aged children living nearby, so that's talking about the catchment area. Are we expecting it to be able to work because there is a large portion of people within a short distance? Or is it an enormous catchment area where we could spend a lot of money putting in AMPR to do a school streets, but people are still going to keep driving into the area? Considering the safety record accidents occurring near the school, traffic levels, by which we mean if there is a high volume of traffic, it is going to be much harder. It has a lot of other not hard effects to do, so that counts against it when there is a smaller level of traffic in the area, it is going to be easier to do. And then linking with indices of multiple deprivation, and is there an air quality management zone? Because again, that is an added benefit if we are getting traffic off the road. So, again, we're coming back to you in terms of questions. None of these are set in stone. This is where we are so far what we're looking at. Our approach is going to be that we want to run a few pilots. We think, I'm going to whizz on and come back to questions. This is our outline program in May. Now, we will be taking expressions of interest survey to all schools in the district. We've got that survey ready to go. It's just with information governance to check that we have everything crossed and dotted as needs to be. June, we will be reviewing the responses coming back from schools and completing a single member decision. This summer, we will be creating a webpage to explain our approach, to advertise what it is that we are doing, how it links with our policies and how schools can get involved. We will be looking to appoint a consultant designer and start to do initial design work. By the autumn, we'll be looking to collect monitoring data and installation of air quality monitoring, engaging with the local community and doing further design work in response to feedback with the communities themselves. Then we see, by early 2025, buying the materials that we need such as barriers, high vis, doing the training of the marshals and the actual installation of the schemes. We see this being the start. We don't have a definitive number of how many we think we're going to get done. We want to make the best use of the money and get as many as we can, but we want them to be really good ones so that they stand up as exemplars for other schools to say, We want to do that. How do we get involved with that too? So, is there anything else you think criteria-wise we should be considering? Do you have any ideas for changes for schools that are not suitable for a timed motor vehicle restriction? And are there any other good examples of innovative schemes in other local authorities that you're aware of that you want us to pay particular close consideration to? Can I just make an observation about your outline program? I would suggest that a good time to start this scheme would be after Easter because if it's a secondary school, there are years that are phasing out anyway and the weather's better and all that sort of stuff. I wouldn't recommend September as a start because I can imagine that would be quite difficult for fairly obvious reasons. So, are there any questions? Yes, Saskia? Thank you. In terms of criteria, deprivation seems to be a clear one that we need to look at very important because obesity levels will be potentially higher. So, I think that one would be really, really good to add. In terms of the expression of interest, we've heard about schools and obviously they're under-resourced, they're under-pressure, they are worried about recruitment. I think asking schools if they are up for this is actually quite tricky if they don't know what our plans are. So, I think it's important for schools to know what our ambition is and what our vision is in terms of like really tell them what the number of schools will be by what year so that they know that it's not if but when. Because otherwise, if they know that there will be three school streets in Baines in the next three years, they will probably be quite hesitant because it requires resources, it requires bravery basically from the school leadership. So, yeah, I would like us to go out with a clear vision that is publicly available, ideally, before we ask them if they're interested. That's an interesting point which we will consider and see whether we can include it in our timeline, in our communication with schools. But just to say, we are in dialogue with a number of schools. So, we do know that there are a number of schools who are interested and up for it, but we want to make sure that other schools who might not have previously considered have the opportunity to consider equally. I think it would be hard to impose a scheme upon a school whose community was simply not engaged at all. I think that would be very hard. So, I think that in first instance, we do need to work with those who are keen. And we know that there are some out there, so that's really positive. Firstly, just to pick up on that point, I agree that we should make the call go out as wide as possible. So, directly to schools, but also make sure that the parent communities are going to pick up on it as well. Because I think it requires a partnership between the school and you need an active group of parents who care and want to take these things forward and actually take on the work of marshalling and all of that. I mean, that is quite an ask. In terms of the criteria, I really agree with the point that Jessica made about buses. So, for example, in Morelands, we do have a bus which we're desperately hanging onto, but it's only every 40 minutes. And I don't think that should preclude a school street going in if that was something that the school wants to bid for. I'm sure we could work around the timings. Likewise, I noted one of the criteria is engagement with mode shift. I get that because mode shift provides a framework for people to engage in, to create a school travel plan and then to do the initiatives. However, I am aware of schools that are doing significant initiatives that are not engaged with mode shift because it's quite administrative. And it requires, again, somebody to sit down late at night and look through the things and enter onto the system. So, perhaps you could have engagement with mode shift as a criteria or evidence of other significant school transport actions. So, thinking, again, in terms of Moreland school, for example, there's engagement going on with basketballs, gym and the local community about the private road that runs down through the park and how to dissuade parents from using that to drop off. So, there is activity going on already, which is school street-like, even though it's not public highway. And then also another suggestion for the criteria is about nurseries as well. Often nurseries and preschools are co-vocated near schools and then you've got parents with toddlers and wheeled toddlers on a scooter. And then you really want a safe road environment to be able to help the school community so perhaps that could be another part of the criteria. Can I have a quick two? Sorry. Sorry. I think really great idea about nursery and preschools. In terms of mode shift stars, just to highlight the consultant that made a suggestion in terms of how we do the prioritization. But as we're currently proposing it, I've just put it up on screen again, we're simply saying engagement with mode shift stars. So, they don't have to have reached any level. But we want to see all those schools that are doing really good work around there, get it down into the plan. So, we don't think at this stage we want to require that, but we want to know that they are engaging with it. Because that means that going back to something you said earlier about admissions, it is really important. That is a really key point and time to do it. The other side is the welcome packs that schools give. So, yes, I think that's a really good idea. We will go away and look at admissions policy and if there's something that we can do there. But one of the things that we encourage schools to do with mode shift stars is to create a welcome pack so that every new family coming into the school knows that it's part of the school ethos right from the word go. Thanks. It's a combination of both secondary and primary schools and I'm just wondering what engagement work this has been done in terms of if you want to talk to schools about a program like this that then they may get involved on a bigger level than it's individual schools. I don't know if that's a practical or not or whether it would help. That's an interesting point and we will consider that as well. I suppose thinking of a big partnership trust like the midst of a Northern schools partnership trust. I suppose they will break across more than one unitary authority, don't they? So, I suppose from their perspective, we'll just have to, we'll consider it and we can speak to our colleagues in the schools team and try to work out whether that's a helpful way to go. Thank you, yes, I just want to be aware that there's obviously quite a lot of difference between urban environments like Bath and our sort of mid some Northern rural and semi rural environments and the criteria is quite different. Card dependency is completely different out in place like mid some Northern, we have high card dependencies for numerous reasons whether that's public transport, whether that's just living in a rural environment where you just can't access easily. So, whether you need to just be aware of that and you're qualifying criteria. Thank you, we would certainly not look to restrict the scheme to the city or to urban areas only so rural schools are very welcome to come forward. I mean if you as a panel either now or later on go and think about it if you want to come back to us and tell us if you've got any other thoughts of how we could approach it in areas outside of the city that would be really helpful. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. At the moment but I'm strong. Right, okay, Sam. Okay, thank you for coming Sam. I assume you're going to present the findings of the panel and you have with you members of the panel in the group so I assume it's going to be a sort of discussion to some extent. And I'm looking forward to what you have to say. Thanks, thanks Chair. First of all I'd like to thank Kerry for putting this together and I can't be here today because he's involved in the election stuff so I should be a double act but I'm on my own today. And I'd also like to thank the other task group members, some of which were here and also all the contributors. You've all had the report in the pack as to feedback. I'm just going to do a bit of a pracy of some of the overall highlights and then I'll go through the recommendations that we came to at the end if that's okay. So the main idea for this local food-growing security task group if you're unaware of that's what this point is, was to explain how Baines as a local authority can contribute positively to food security. So we met on several dates and we covered issues such as local food insecurity and community involvement, allotment provision across Baines including North East Somerset and how they differ. We talked to various groups including allotment association, transition bath, bath growers network, grow Timnesbury and we also had an update from the planning policy team. Our terms of reference were to support the development of a new local food strategy for Baines through consideration of allotment provision, current and future within Bath and North East Somerset. Community approaches in local food-growing projects, the impact of planning policy on local food-growing, community engagement and the role of Baines in promoting local food-growing and also local food insecurity and the opportunities to promote food security locally. So there was a local food strategy that was produced for 2014 to 2017 and that's currently being reviewed and there'll be a new strategy coming forward. So this task group review was to feed into that but it's also coinciding with land use allocations for the new local plan and what obligations developers might have to provide space in terms of allotments. Another food growing spaces. So the first topic that was food equality and food insecurity across Baines and data suggests that 3% of the population sometimes often do not have enough to eat and areas with highest food security risk are identified as white way, white way west, twerton west, twerton, fox hill north and west field north. We were told that food poverty is not standalone and is shorthand for poverty generally and that unhealthy calories lead to associated public health challenges. So if we can kind of get one thing right then we can kind of hopefully overcome a lot of other spending in other areas. The Baines Fair Food Alliance stated that 4,200 people per week in Baines are currently in receipt from food from affordable food projects. And we looked at opportunities for addressing the insecurity and issues linked to allotment provision and food growing across Baines. So looking into allotment provision the parks team currently manages 160 open spaces which include 24 allotment sites within Bath. There are also many allotments in parish areas but they're managed by those respective parish and town councils. Bath also has private allotments and curo manages some too. Of those 1200 plots in Bath they're approximately 75 pound a year but there is a reduced fee for people who are on low income. But there is also exploration about offering a diverse range of plot sizes including starter plots because we appreciate the law of allotments are very big 125 square metres which can be a bit of putting if you haven't done any food growing before. The waiting list there's currently 580 people within Bath. It's difficult to ascertain how many there are in North East Somerset because they're managed separately but that equates to a three year plus waiting list. Although it is acknowledged that some of those people may have put themselves on the list during lockdown and now no longer may be interested so it's difficult to get hold of them. There's a shift in focus now from growing only which is what it used to be in the past to growing in health with well-being and physical health for managing allotments being recognised and also being something that's prescribed and can actually be of benefit to people's mental and physical health. The fundamental challenge is identifying additional land space for new allotment provision particularly in the city. There is Section 106 funding but it's difficult to utilise with allotments sometimes also generating public opposition when they are proposed. Other schemes include community gardening and allotments being managed as community space with communal spaces being seen as a positive initiative helping people on the waiting list and giving people a taste of food growing before they launch into it completely. In terms of North East Somerset allotment provision we had some of from Radstock Town Council come along and the charge for allotments in North East Somerset is generally a little bit lower. It's about £25 a year so it actually is lower than what the reduced rate is in Bath. There's a lot of work that's often underestimated by people who take on allotments and therefore in Radstock they've actually created an induction for new tenants and they actually take on an active engagement with dealing with allotments if they've been left over grown when they're vacated. Allotments are seen positive as spaces share knowledge and surplus produce is also donated to local charities such as Swallow's Charity Cafe and also the Mercy and Action Food Club in the local Radstock area. There's also a challenge here in identifying new parcels of land for additional allotments you might not think that is in North East Somerset but it is just as challenging in the city and accessing water supplies is often quite a challenge in rural areas. In terms of planning the current development plan for Baines requires provision of new food growing space and it also protects allotments. For larger schemes there's a financial contribution as mentioned typically via one section 106 agreements. The allotments act and the Town and Country Planning Act only protect council owned sites and demand does fluctuate for sites so it's a bit of a challenge around as to how many are needed and when and where. The council's green space strategy determined that planning gain for allotments needs to be spent within 20 minutes walk or within 900 metres of the development which is quite a big ask when there's a restriction on land space. Design codes for developments in respect of local food growing provision of land is a balancing process with completing priorities and the local plan could be refused by planning inspector if priority was given to food growing over housing provisions so that's another challenge. Town and parish councils would benefit from some form of support because they don't currently really receive that unlike in the city of Bath to help manage allotments as voluntary Councillors don't often have the experience of understanding to manage them sufficiently and there's a feeling that they're under utilised as a result in these areas. There's a community involved in local food growing, the role of the community in supporting local food growing, Bath allotment association witnesses younger people and women joining in increasing numbers but there's still that challenge around waiting lists. There's a challenge by the lack of dedicated officers within the council to engage with to discuss progressing initiatives both within Bay Bath and in North East Somerset and the availability of land again was brought up as an issue even in terms of growing space that benefits the whole community. The last point we touched on was agricultural land, we didn't focus heavily on the role of it but we do note that looking forward there's an opportunity for Baynes as an authority to link better with farmers including specifically the duchy where there's a considerable amount of land that's owned by them and is obviously the duchy puts land forward in the local plan. The role of agriculture as a local employer and contributors the local economy should be noted and recognised especially when determining developments of agricultural land outside the green belts and protected parties should be considered to safeguard this space. So in conclusion there's a lot of enthusiasm for local growing across the area, availability of space is limited to develop opportunities and housing employment particularly in Bath or odds with the preservation or creation of space for growing. But we did identify a hierarchy of space to summarise the key issue and the hierarchy consists of three layers based on enhancing preserving and creating space for growing. So the recommendations within the report look to support all three tiers of this hierarchy and the evidence gathering emerged that there is still lots of excellent work taking place across the authority around food security and food growing but the activities are not centrally coordinated through a lead officer coordinating group or active strategy. So we welcome the proposal in the developing strategy to initiate a corporate approach and have reflected this within the recommendations. As well as looking internally Baines Council can build on its strong community engagement focus to take on a major coordinating role and bring together community partners to ensure that the new local food strategy is fully implemented in partnership with the community rather than imposed upon people. So our recommendations, there are eight of them, better use of space to welcome the initiative of offering a more diverse range of allotment plots, community garden spaces and encourage the further development of this approach to help address waiting lists. The better use of space to invite allotment holders and the allotment association to contribute to a refresh of Baines Council's allotment rules and guidance to include the consideration of provision of starter plots, introductory lessons, buddy system to help new tenants and varying the size of plots to allow sharing and to consider groups to be tenants rather than just individuals. Preserving growing space to invite the cabinet member with responsibility for planning to ensure the developing local plan and its supporting guidance complements the aims of the developing local food growing strategy, while also recognizing the environmental and economic value of local grade one agricultural land. Creating new space to encourage the cabinet member with responsibility for planning to explore through supplementary planning documents, the potential of putting more responsibility on developers, particularly through larger developments to ensure that local food growing opportunities are incorporated into submitted plans. The Council to identify an officer lead for coordinating and leading implementation of the developing local food strategy. The task group welcomes and encourages the proposal to create a new food partnership, Council led, which brings together community partners to implement the new local food strategy. The Council through its community forums to initiate a big food conversation, inviting our communities to input into delivery of the local food strategy, ensuring collective ownership. And the Council through its parish liaison or community area forums to facilitate support and the sharing good practice for town and parish councils requesting support with the management of their allotments. Thank you very much. Thank you, Sam. Very good. It's a huge task to actually get any sort of sense out of what food growing is in the town. You've manfully and womanfully struggled through to produce a document which is helpful and I think it can take us along the path to a better overall strategy for this area. So well done and well done to the rest of the other committees that were involved as well. So are there any questions that anyone would like to pose? Michael? Would I listen to the say that I will send a check to the group to be honest? Yeah, I'd echo that. I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed being part of it and hopefully it's a kind of way of working that we could take forward to other issues. I had a question which is kind of for all of us really about what do we do next? Do we invite a response from the cabinet members responsible who I think are probably spread across portfolios? It's probably planning, neighbourhood services and possibly finance as well. And could we seek out this advice on that? Do we request a written response for our next meeting which is in July or the council meeting which is in July? What would be the appropriate next step? I think from our discussions it was we as a task group put it forward as a recommendation to this group and then it's up to this group to then put forward to if they feel those recommendations are acceptable and that they are required then those should be forwarded to the cabinet and the relevant members to actually take that forward and make sure it gets embedded within that local strategy but also because it does cover the local plans, there are several parts to it and all of these are ongoing currently so it's actually a timely report really to actually feed into that and help officers with their work as well as the members with those portfolios. Yeah I would echo that. I mean that's essentially what we have to do. Assuming we think this is a valid and helpful document then we just give it to the various cabinet members. Together response probably depends on which particular cabinet member you're talking about because in planning the local plan is evolving over quite a long period so I don't imagine you get a long response although planning has other issues like the local plan reviews that have been taking place in recent times and I think how may be able to help us with that so there are other issues that we need to do but and the other point I'd like to make is that you didn't mention canching very much. I understand why because I don't think there was anybody from canching on the panel so it's not a complete report because there are things that I could say that happen in canching that are not here but that's perfectly okay because you know as I said at the beginning it's a big report and it's a big area. You can't expect a small group of people to cover everything but so you know that I think we would all agree with the way forward so I think there are more comments to be had. Can I just reply back to that? I think you're absolutely right. There wasn't enough people in the room covering everything and I think for my own perspective I felt like I understand a little bit about rural allocation of allotments but I don't know about all villages around so I think there is that I think generally it was understood that it's a difficulty to get new allotments wherever you are in Baines. It's obviously more of a restriction within the city boundary because of land and that need for it to be kind of used for housing as much as anything else but there's also issues outside within Baines because of both green belt issues but also again those kind of restrictions on what's needed for providing rural housing. So there are a lot of and I think canching probably would fall into many of these issues that we've got here so unless there's anything specific that needs added in and I don't think it's an inexhaustible list of things that I think there should be feedback on that and some additional consultation maybe. Yeah, we presume that there's nothing about open to canching for various things that go there and twice a year, etc. I'm surprised that there's no area of canching. [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] Well, since canchions come up, I'll just carry on with a couple of points. We only really have one big set of allotments and if you look at the size of canching versus bath and you see all the areas you've got in bath, something has obviously gone wrong here and we are getting more allotments but it's coming through the building developments. We have two that haven't started yet but I can take you there. It seems like people are not too interested but since we've got the chair here is allotments conditioned that they should be supplied with every development of over ten houses or something like that. I would have expected it. Well, I mean, in general with strategic developments, there is user requirements under the policy to provide areas for growing, whether they're at a location or not in the site or just sort of retrofitted in, I don't know. But yeah, usually we be encouraging any developer of a large housing scheme to provide suitable accommodation for her. I could probably answer that one. It is in the report here in the large developments. It's a section 106 funding is usually required but it's not necessarily required within that development itself at the moment. It needs to be, which I said was something like 900 meters from the development or within 20 minutes walk. So I mean, that's quite considerable. I mean, I used to have an allotment, which was 10 minutes walk away and that was quite challenging. If you're trying to get plants, you've grown somewhere else up there. There's no way you can actually walk that. So I think that the recommendations are that we consider changing that slightly so that it requires it to be within the development and not just something which kind of is an afterthought that the Council has to find the land for. So it's a case of if you've got the land and it's going to be developed, then needs to be a proportion of allotments within that. So that would affect, obviously, tension as much as anywhere else because it would be within the general policy. I think we need to strengthen that, and it's a question that we would. Obviously, we've got the, we've just had the issues and options consultation. So hopefully there's something that's going to come out of that where we can start to establish a policy that can go forward to the local plan. No, no, no, that's fine. It's good to do all the canes and stuff together. If I think it's an excellent report and I'm very happy to sign up to the proposed way forward, if I was looking at one thing that's not in there, it's commercial allotments. On the bus coming up here, I went past a very vibrant commercial development in Newbridge, and that works well. But my understanding is that there were allotments up at Coom Down that are on the threat. And I think in our request for comments from cabinet members, we should ask a specific comment about what the Council's doing to ensure that allotment provisioning Coom Down is retained. I mean, I can comment, but we did actually touch on the commercial allotments that are such as those down at Newbridge. But it's to be remembered that they're very expensive. They're not, in terms of allotments that can be provided by either Council provision or parish and town councils, they're relatively inexpensive, 25 pound a year. It's relatively affordable, even if you're like on low wage and then parish council, I'm assuming through the Bath as well, there'd be an opportunity to pay that by instalments. Whereas I know that the commercial ones, they're in excess of like 600 pound a year. So they're not really something, which if you're trying to encourage people to get out and help themselves, mental health, physical health, they're not really there for that kind of thing. So while we welcome them being there and they have their place for people who can afford them, they're not accessible for everybody and that's not their intention. In terms of those other privately owned allotments, that is a challenge and that was noted, but I'm not sure how much currently the Council has control over that, other than what the current planning system actually allows them to do. But yeah, worth reminding. It might be worth looking at assets of community value and other options in that context. Are there any other questions or comments anyone who should next shown? Yeah, I think certainly from a town council or parish council point of view, this is quite challenging. I mean, the funding stream is critical to expanding any type of scheme. For town council or parish council, allotments have to be self-sustaining financially and they can be quite expensive in terms of maintaining the communal areas. I know the allotments that we manage is quite expensive to have our warden maintain those areas. So if you're going to, they have to be self-sustaining because so few people actually have access to them. You can't put effectively a tax on the entire community to pay for a small amount of allotments for a small amount of people. So I think that's very important to get that figure right. Yeah, I totally agree with that. In terms of, I know that our parish council and farmer, we actually ring fenced that money. That it makes sure it's only spent on allotments as well because I know in the past that hasn't been the case. But also we are mindful that we can't increase the precepts to manage allotments on the basis that our allotments also are taken on by people outside of the parish. So therefore we want them to be paid for and maintained. But yeah, that is an issue. Obviously there is also within the allotments act, there's also that ability for a local community to basically demand more allotment spaces if there aren't any. And that's a real worry, I think, for a lot of town and parish councils because they have to do that with limited, even more limited resources. Worth bearing my thanks, Sean. Right, Ian. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it's just a point. I think it's an excellent idea that the existing council owned allotments that we have in Bath. I think it's great that we should look at creating more diversity in terms of the sizes and in terms of also, you mentioned about the tendencies and the individuals. I know so many people in my ward, because we've got quite a large allotment site in Bloomfield. And neighbours get together and one person has it in their name, but everyone ships in, and there's almost a communal site to that. There are people who've got plots that are far too big and can't manage them, so we can then maybe consider splitting them up. They may even be an opportunity, obviously, they'd have to be a variation in the sort of rental tariffs that we charge. They may be so opportunity to increase fees on slightly smaller pots on a proportion of basis. So I think it's really good that we can look at not just having one person being responsible for their plot, but it should be more community-led. And I think various organisations, communities, neighbours, friends, try and get the students involved and maybe get them to take interest in having a, you know, a student community plot or something. So I think it's a really good way to go forward with this. Yeah, I think a lot of that comes back down to staffing within the council as well, and having someone who's dedicated looking at allotments and how they're managed, because at the moment it falls under the General Parks team and it's just one of the general maintenance. So I think it's a bit more like fighting fire rather than actually having a dedicated member of staff. It looks specifically allotment provision and how each site varies in terms of its needs because some may do very well with rather large plots and people having one, but others may benefit from them being split up and how do you best manage that? Because you've got to roll that up over time as plots become available and making everyone aware that that's what's happening. So people don't feel like they're being disadvantaged as plots get a little bit smaller and how that affects waiting lists and who's on what. It's a complex issue that somebody's got to take control of, yeah. Break with protocol because Adam's got his hand up and although I'm not supposed to because he's only a mere member of the public. Come and sit up here and you're also running ahead of time. Right. I moved to Timsprey in June 21 and by February of the next year I was given a plot and it has been hugely valuable in connecting into that community. I have really good friends now from that, not just from my road but also across the whole of that space. So the availability of that plot transformed what I do as a hobby and the support that they gave and we share tools and we kind of share plants and it really is. It's a really important thing. The availability of plots isn't just about people on long waiting lists, it's about people coming to a new community and then becoming connected into that community. There's the gardening club and everybody knows me there and all this type of stuff. So it's a really powerful sort of enabler of connection into those communities for new people coming into that. Tiny comment for me. A lot of schools are involved in food growing anecdotally. I know this. So is there anything that you think could be part of the recommendations that could take that forward? I think schools are a bit of a challenge, aren't they? Because there was only seven now that are within local authority control and the rest are all academies. So I think it was working as a part of the partnership working, I think, which is part of the recommendations here. It probably needs to not forget that partners are schools as well. Maybe that's an amendment to those recommendations. Just to remind that partners go beyond associations and parish councils and other sort of community groups, but yes, schools as well. Thank you for reminding us of that. It's brilliant. What I would say about schools is I think you said earlier, schools are very busy places with lots of pressure. The only way to work is if you have an enthusiast on the staff and then it will work very well. I can think of such individuals in my own sort of sphere of influence and they can do a fantastic job and fire up young people into getting into a sort of gardening community and getting used to the basic principles of growing stuff and the joy of growing stuff. I still get a pleasure when a little seed pops his head through, you know, because it shows life exists and all the rest of it. So yeah, really good, really good helpful comments from everybody. So thank you for your contributions. And we move on to the last item slightly. Well, we're a bit of behind with that, but that's always because it depends on how many speakers we have from outside about that, but I'm happy with the time. Which is important. So we move on to the final work plan issue. And that's essentially there is a work plan, which is in the agenda, as you can see, and we have things for the next time. I think the circulation plan Sarah will be overjoyed to know is in the July meeting and I think there's something else as well, which we will obviously look at. But does anybody have anything that they'd like? I mean, I think we should possibly bring back the food growing aspects that we've just been talking about at a future meeting, maybe in the awesome to come back to that. Jess? I agree with that would be good to get a response back on the report following today. It's never straightforward because it doesn't neatly fit into one cabinet member's portfolio. So I think we should send it to anybody we think has an aspect of their work, which is part of this activity and ask for an appropriate feedback when they can do it. Yes, Sam, you want to come back to you? Okay. Sorry, yeah, I just meant to say on that point, I think it was mentioned with Kerry that he did suggest that if this committee was supportive, that the group would actually reconvene just for one more once the report had been complete, you know, the strategy and everything had been done so we could actually look through it and actually make sure that it's actually covers what we actually think. So, you're saying when the, well, not when it's probably not it's done, but when it's kind of like almost when it's done so we can just make sure that it does cover all the views. I think it was autumn, was it? Yeah, I think so. Okay. So I think that falls in. So, I mean, if we can ask Kerry what the timeframe is and then when the group will kind of reconvene that task group for that one last thing and then that will feed back into the panel following. In the minutes, Michael, at the next meeting, Kerry will give us an update as to what the progress has been and when would be a sensible time to me. Thank you. Right, so nine minutes past tour by that clock anyway, we will close the meeting. Thank you very much for your attendance. [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO]