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[BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] [BLANKAUDIO] Moving on to item number eight, forward plan, and I'd like to ask Moira Fraser to introduce this item.

Good evening, Chairman. Sorry, just to say, so the forward plan is as it is, the only thing is that we did describe that the annual vaping report would be coming to the March 2025 meeting and it's not currently on there, so we'll make sure it's added. And then if anything else comes up in discussion this evening, we can add it to the forward plan as well, unless members have something that they'd like to add now. Thank you. I'd like to ask members in the room, is there anything else they'd like to add? [BLANKAUDIO] Thank you. Moving on to item number nine, terms of reference, and again, I'd like to go back to Moira Fraser to introduce the report. So Chairman, and this is something that we would always include on the first meeting of the municipal year. It's the existing terms of reference so that members understand the rules of engagement for the meeting. Last year, we had some substantial changes in that we updated the membership of the meeting to have a member of the opposition from each of the authorities join the panel. There are no further proposals to change anything for this coming year. [BLANKAUDIO] I'd like to ask the members in the room if anyone would like to speak to the item. [BLANK_AUDIO] No. And as the item was information purposes, they will be no need to vote on the item. Moving on to agenda item number ten, public protection partnership service update on Q4, outrun for 2023 into 2024. I'd like to go to Sean Murphy to introduce the report. Thank you, Chairman. With your permission, I may bring in colleagues just to clarify any points that are raised in this discussion. Thank you. So it's a fairly lengthy report, but effectively what this report does is to identify, firstly, an update for the service since the committee last met in March of this year. So, you'll be familiar, those people that have been on the committee for some time will be familiar that we bring one of these reports every quarter. And effectively it builds on the last report and gives that update. The second part of this is that Appendix 8 of the report is the performance data for the service. And some narrative in that performance data as to work that the service has conducted over the last financial year. So the committee is charged with oversight of the service from the point of view of both policy but also performance. And it's also responsible from the point of view of finance and oversight of finance. So just running through some of the highlights, if I may. So starting with finance, part five, we are still running a significant deficit in relation to income. The shortfall was just shy of 100,000 pounds last year. And obviously that had to be managed within the year by holding vacancies and things and including vacancies within the licensing service. We did end up at the end of the year with an under spend of 61,000, 61.6 thousand. And that was made up primarily of I think 38,000 of that came as a result of a grant that was received I think on the 27th or 28th of March, right at the end of the financial year. That was for the last day of the financial year given that Easter was there and that grant was for the enforcement of the provisions relating to the sale of offensive weapons knives. So what is being proposed here is that that under spend is carried forward into this financial year and we have had that discussion with Bratnell and West Berkshire prior to this meeting. Moving on to further into the report, customer satisfaction, there has been a dip I think it's fair to say in the customer satisfaction rates although the problem that we've got is that the sample size is very low. And in fact we had one quarter when in fact actually we had no returns at all. I think that's correct to name already that we had no returns in one. Yeah, so that makes it very challenging. We did make a big effort at the end of the year basically to phone people up and try and get data. But we are going to have to look at, we're going to have to have a look at how we collect that data in a more substantive way basically to give us a figure. So that said, obviously it's disappointing that there has been this dip and I think part of that is to do with the fact that we've had an awful lot of vacancies and we've lost some staff from the community team. And they are the team that deal with a lot of the calls that come in to the service, particularly those ones that relate to residential matters. So just moving on further into that section as you can see basically we are still carrying a high level of FOIs at 371 for the service this year so that was an increase. But what probably is noticeable is the significant increase in the number of member inquiries and MP inquiries. Which for myself my view is that that's a good thing, basically that we're getting the message out about what the service does and what it can do. But we are seeing a steady increase and in fact since this report was written there's certainly no sign of that increase abating. I suspect it probably has increased significantly further since the report was drafted in the first part of this year as well. Just moving on to Human Resources, this has been a real success and we've struggled for a while to recruit in one or two teams particularly in the area of licensing. I'm now pleased to say that with subject to one person starting I think later this month or next month that team will be fully staffed now. Both the application side and the enforcement side and we've been able to recruit some really good, a good range of experienced officers with either sort of policing backgrounds. Or in fact actually one of the people who has been successful into the team as a licensing officer was one of our own trainees who subsequently went on to do training animal welfare enforcement. And basically successfully being appointed to the team so that's a real success story based on where we are with staffing. At 7.4 I did allude to the fact that two of our four level four apprentices have successfully completed their end point assessment. Quite a while to be exact that's now three since the report was written and it would soon be four so we're hoping to have a full house of four out of four have completed that part of their training. As I say one has moved into licensing, one of them is moving into the area of food safety and going on to do further qualification work. And we're looking at supporting the other two trainees into other areas in due course. But a bit of stuff in there about post entry training, I'll move on to ICT update. Damien and I have two or certainly two meetings since the last meeting of this committee. And I think actually we were pleased to say we have been assigned some more project support within the supplier side. And we are now basically the critical issue that we've had for some time has been the portal, we have now got a plan in place basically to get the portal online. And the first route from the point of view of licensing that we're going to use is we're going to use it for temporary event notices. And then we're going to roll it out subject to that being successful. Communications, again I think it's been a very busy time and there's a whole range of tasks there that have been undertaken in terms of getting messages out. And I know some members do follow some of our social media and things like that but you can see the range of stuff that goes out there to the public. Quite often it's picked up by the media but some of the more, it's interesting actually, we put very big stories out and then some of the more kind of obscure stuff is the stuff that gets picked up. Certainly anything to do with animals or lost dogs or anything like that is very popular. So without going too much into the body of the report, I just want to Chair, if I could just invite George to see if he wishes to add anything around the community and training some of those areas and then I'll just quickly work through the rest of the report. Thanks Sean, Chair and Councillors. The report you'll see within the Community and Training Standard Service we've amounted to around 2,000 service requests in this last quarter. The paper also covers some really important proactive projects. So to give an example, officers have delivered several presentations aimed at raising awareness in alcohol reduction, dangers of vapouring in young children, criminal exploitation and substance misuse. Those same officers have also been busy in the community promoting those key messages using local community hubs, local colleges and local radio. From what the officers have done, data would suggest that the interventions around scams and call blockers has saved 85 victims a cumulative total of around £43,000. Further work with our banks has increased this amount to around £110,000 and we're also rolling out some officer training regarding loan sharks. For those who aren't aware, we also have a community ladder in West Berkshire and that continues to run on a weekly basis. The number of users has increased and it does continue to be a well utilised resource in enabling our officers to provide face-to-face support over a number of the areas the partnerships are involved in, such as those I've just mentioned. We've also been involved in successful bids campaigns highlighting the dangers of unsafe purchasing and charging of e-bikes and e-scooters, working with colleagues in the prior service and also conducted awareness campaigns regarding dangers of the babies and young children ingesting button batteries. Quite a lot of public health work we've been getting on with. From the program business as usual side, we're also pleased to report the officers have continued to work on delivering our annual food inspection programme and sampling programme. And this is alongside the service requests. So please note that all of our high risk food standards inspections have been completed, as have our animal health and feed inspections. And the team are now working towards a new delivery model, which is in the process of being rolled out. And this has been set by the food standards agency. There's also programme inspections such as petroleum safety, again which for the officers have now completed year's programme. Regarding other areas such as under a sales or product safety, officers have also been testing many products and these include vaping products, soft toys and are destined for children's market and under sale of luxury tickets. But the one business sector that continues to be complained about is second hand car dealers and our officers are now looking to engage with the top 15 most complained about businesses to try and improve that picture of their industry. As for community officers, they've also been busy and as Shaun alluded to, the resourcing is challenging. However, three of those officers have now completed their first year of professional environmental health training, which is really exciting. And you also will have read that the officers have been involved in assisting with complaints, particularly around flooding within West Berkshire. And finally, we've completed a disease surveillance programme, which looked at mosquitoes and invasive mosquitoes in particular. And we're pleased to announce that there haven't been any mosquito invasive mosquitoes in the area, but there was there were some yellow fever mosquito discovered along the M4 corridor, which has prompted us to continue this surveillance going into next year. Thank you. Chair, if I can just pick up then I'll quickly run through the rest of the report. Just looking at the commercial section that deals with food and health and safety. You'll see that we did manage to achieve all of the high risk inspections for Category A, B and C food premises, 44% of D premises and then the very lowest rated only 15%. We still have got a number of overdue inspections. I mean, this just simply comes down to resourcing other areas that we we need to prioritise things like health and safety accidents and things like that over some of this inspection work. But we are we have developed the programme for this year. We're hoping to make inroads as we as we get into this year's programme, looking at licensing the major piece of work that is that that has been concluded really in the last 12 months from policy point of view was the adoption of the Bracknell taxi and private hire policy. We have consultations going forward on the gambling policies for both West Berkshire and Bracknell now. And we and you'll see basically there also in the report is a summary of hearing since the last meeting. We have seen an increase in hearings, but but they're still at a manageable level. Moving on to housing. We have added the information that was asked previously about what proportion of the complaints we get about service requests about housing that we get are relating to social landlords. And you can see that at table 14.1. Very quickly into environmental quality, the the two the couple of things are ready to highlight is that the new air quality Action Plan for Crowthorne was submitted and has been agreed by government and that was confirmed basically on the ninth of May. And that the in line with the decision of this committee previously that the air quality Management Areas for Newbury, Thatcham and Bracknell, Buckshot Road basically have now been revoked. So leaving us with one air quality Management Area across the two authorities and that's the Crowthorne one. And finally, I think just to point you towards 16.5 of the report, which gives a list basically of summary of cases since the last hearing. So these are criminal cases that have taken place since the last hearing as you can see there was a significant range there covering everything from fraud to unfair trading. Basically a case relating to allergens and legal vaping and even illegal storage of fireworks. So it's quite a quite a case list and perhaps again demonstrates the range of things that the service has been involved in. So I don't propose to go through every line of Appendix A. You'll see at Appendix B there are some compliments as we've been suggesting in the past it's useful to circulate these to members. We've circulated some additional ones that relates to one of those cases. And the last one on the list basically which was a case relating to a green energy firm and an Appendix C. You'll see the breakdown of the work that we do for individual authorities unless I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Thank you very much Mr Murphy. I'd like to go to Councillor Allen for the first question. Thank you Chair. Under 7.2 which is under the human resources bit, it says that there are currently three offices off on maternity leave and we're looking at how these roles can be backfilled. I'm wondering why you wait until they go and leave before thinking we need to fill this position. That's what it sounds like the way it's written given that you get quite a bit of notice generally when people are going on maternity leave. Unless there are roles that you can't train someone up in that you would get a temp on board to cover that sort of area if necessary rather than waiting until they're on maternity leave. That's a very fair point. What we're trying to do all the time, including with any vacancies that we've got is to move resource around within the service. In particular one of the areas we've been looking at is how we deploy the trainees to give them the experience and everything else. It could be that into some of these roles we may deploy a resource from trainees and use the money saved there to plow back into the service at some other critical points. For example, we've got additional resources around licensing enforcement and additional resources around housing enforcement. But at some point somewhere in the system the capacity loss that is caused by people being off long term will need to be picked up. But of course the other side of that is particularly with the use of agency staff, there's a limit to how far the money will go particularly with the premiums that are currently now being charged by agencies. Just from personal experience having daughters of working age who have had children, I don't think they don't have to give that much notice. I believe it's like one month or so beforehand. So it may be obvious but obviously it's a very complicated place. Yes, that is very true. Do you agree with that? Well, what I can say is the good news, one of them is certainly very, very recent. In fact, our colleague only had her baby at the end of last week so it's very recent. But it is correct. There are also processes as well that we're having to go through at the moment with the financial constraints on the authorities and I think that's fair to say that we do need to go through those processes as well. But, basically, there's no indication from the authorities that we can't use the money basically to backfill the post and that's what we fully intend to do one way or another. Thank you, Shaun. Thank you, Councillor. Thank you, Chair. So I just really want to compliment the team on the work which you've done. It's a really wide spectrum of consumer protection which you provide to the residents of West Berkshire and Bracknell. What I would also like to say is that, with my non-executive directorship hat, Chartered Institute of Trading Standards each year have a Heroes Award evening in House of Commons. And it would be really nice to see an award for PPP of this particular from your own team, Shaun. And if you could please, in the next few minutes, come and say a few words and discuss the conditions of the game. So, best in-depth, especially the work which you did on the green energy and seeing the testimonials, it would be really great to see if we can get the recognition to the team. It's a really great evening up at the House of Commons and if it can happen, it would be really good to, as I say, propose, see if we can get an award for the work which you're doing as a team. Thank you very much for that, Councillor Cartlidge. We'll certainly have a look at it - we're obviously very modest. Just to point out that actually the Trading Standards Service is a three authority service with colleagues from Wokingham who are on the call tonight. But I'll speak to, so we'll certainly have a look at that as an option. It is a phenomenal range of work, as you say, and it's very much in line with the model that is proposed at national level of prevention, intelligence and enforcement. Thank you. I've got a question, Mr Murphy. Section 6.6 on the FOIs that we receive. There's a massive uptake from the Councillor/MP queries and that's always a good thing, it's never a bad thing. But I just want to ask, is that draining our resources and are we able to keep up with that? Have we got enough dedicated resources to those? Because although they are a line item and we just see them as a number, there is a lot of work that goes into those type of requests and we do know they have also been used sometimes as indirect attacks on local councils when they receive a large amount of FOIs. So just wanted to make sure that we have enough dedicated resources to that and we're not spotting any trends there. So Moira manages all of the FOIs for her sins and I'm sure she would make an observation on that Chairman. On relation to the member queries, what I would say is this, we've worked hard over the last number of years now ready to raise profile of the service with members. And the realise, you know, for all sorts of reasons, but one of those reasons is actually the information we get from members is very valuable. You know, this is an intelligence-led service and basically we can't operate without people coming to us either directly or through basically elected members. So we're very pleased for the interactions that we get from members. Moira, I don't know whether you went onto anything on FOIs, I know that is a lot of work. It is a significant amount of work. We do get a number of queries. I guess when it's the press queries, the students that aren't prepared to go and do their own research and things like that. But the problem is that if it's an FOI, we're required to answer it. So yeah, it is taking a lot of work. What we're trying to do to mitigate it is to kind of have a look at our website and see where we can put more information on the website. So basically you're on to then it's just a link to that particular item, rather than having somebody going through an entire list of zoos or dog breeding licenses or whatever. So, you know, there are other ways that you can look to cover that work off. Thank you. I'd like to differ. Damien. Thank you, Chair. Just wanted to add to that, as Sean has already talked about, we welcome member queries. I think one thing that we are looking to do is mobilise members in a more effective way. Sometimes we can have members step into the space where officers might traditionally work, but actually members have the relationships with residents on the ground. So for example, we're looking at the moment on a project around registered social landlords and issues around housing. And we're looking at how members might be able to help us and support us in terms of some of our resource constraints and actually meet with registered social landlords themselves on behalf of the tenants within particular blocks. So that's an area really where we would welcome more support from members. And obviously that supports our resources as well. Thank you, Damien. I got a couple more. Mr Murphy, if that's okay for you? The next one is ICT section 8. We do know this has been ongoing from last year and I hope, or I do know the end is in sight and we can see light at the end of the tunnel. But again with this, my biggest concern throughout this whole process was in 8.3, which is the data and ensuring that we are able to preserve any legacy data and we don't lose any. And the system works with the old data. We know what systems are like and just wanted to get some more reassurance on that point, Sean. So one of the authority systems already transferred and we've done the work around legacy data. The system here at Brattnell basically is still in a transition phase. We have an ongoing dialogue basically with the ICT team and the program team that are dealing with that to make sure that we have the data that we need going forward. Thank you. Last question from me. Section 11. We've had a recent change to the law regarding e-scooters. Are we seeing a change, a big change affecting us directly or do we wait until our next meeting to raise this? So I mean we've done quite a bit of work around just I mean it's an interesting point, actually, because if you take something as simple and as narrow in a sense as one subject such as e-scooters, we've looked at this from a number of angles. So we've done work in the past about sales. We've done some joint visits with the police about the clarity of the road traffic stuff with the other points at which these things are sold. I mean obviously it doesn't necessarily stop people using them on the highway but we've also basically done more recently some work around the issues associated with e-scooters and in fact anything that contains lithium batteries. And that is something that we've done a campaign with the fire service on. We've particularly looked at storage and things like HMOs and things like that. And then looking ahead, we've been asked by the government, and this comes on really when we get onto the next item about priorities. There are lots of these things coming up to look at issues around the repairs of them and the safety of those repairs. So yeah, I mean that's one area but just three aspects. Thank you Sean. I think Damien's got to add to this as well. Thank you Chair. Just in reference to Bracknell itself, obviously we've just undertaken to have town centre ambassadors recruited which will be a visible presence within the town centre. They're paid for from government funding but we've had them now for a month, so early days, but we'll be monitoring to see what impact they have in terms of reducing anti-social behaviour, scooter and cycling in town. Thank you. Any further questions? Councillor Montgomery online. Thank you Chair. I just had a query of bytes, item 11.16, regarding petroleum inspections. My apologies if information is available elsewhere, but there doesn't seem to be too much detail on how these inspections went. Sorry that would be one for George, who's in his area. Yeah sorry Councillor. No the inspections all went well, I'm not aware of any non-compliances, but I can check and then come back to you if that's okay. No detail that is. Thank you. Thank you George. Okay moving on, if there's no further questions we'll have a proposer and a seconder and I'm happy to propose from the Chair. Can I get a seconder please? I second the report. Thank you Councillor Cottingham. And now I'll hand over to Clerk to read out the recommendations. Thank you Chairman. So yes, the recommendations are as follows the committee has asked firstly to note the Q4 and year end data for the service, which is in Appendix A, further to note the update on service delivery. The committee's then asked to agree the 61.69k of revenue funding is carried forward into this the 24-25 financial year. So if members wish to show their hands, are those in favour of that proposal? It's unanimous, thank you very much. Thank you. Agenda item 11, public protection partnership, strategic assessment 2024 through to 2027. I would like to introduce Shaw or ask Shawan to introduce the report, please. Thank you Chair. So again, if there's any detailed questions, my colleagues may be called on to assist if that's okay. So just to introduce this I won't go into it's 58 pages, a lot of detail and I don't intend to go into all of the detail, but just to say something about the background to this. First of all, it was drafted in large part before the election was called. So therefore, some of the, I suppose horizon scanning stuff, the talk of new legislation, basically obviously something that fell away at the end of this parliament. And I've no doubt some of it may well reappear in some form in the next parliament. So for example, examples would be the bill relating to tobacco and vaping is one of those that fell away. So the second thing is really about this is the idea of it is to set out all known demands on the surface. So, and those demands are changing all of the time. And, you know, so if you look just over the space of the last few weeks I talked earlier on about e scooters. But we've also had, we had announcements from the Home Office about basically the priority that we need to put around knives and sales of knives. And then, more recently, in the last few weeks as well we've also been asked to undertake a series of visits reassurance visits I think that they're described as two undertakers and funeral parlours, and that follows basically the events up in the, up in the East Riding of Yorkshire. So we've basically scheduled those and so there are new things coming online. I suppose all of the time on new priorities basically being placed on things, all of the time. So a good example right now is you'll have seen the information around the recent outbreak of E. coli. So, you know, that's something that doesn't affect us in our area, but it's something that we need to be aware of and as part of our horizon scanning. So what this document does is seek to break down the work that we do into what we call program work. So, business as usual as it were so carrying out inspections and things like that. And then into sort of priority areas or projects I suppose basically is another way of putting that. It sets out I think, hopefully clearly the breadth of responsibility the service and I think for many that are new to public protection. It's kind of fun when I was having a conversation with Damien about this earlier on and Damien was talking about the new regulations relating to chipping of cats, micro chipping of cats and and Damien said who does that and I said, well, this was. So this is the kind of stuff that's coming up all of the time. So what we're seeking to do here basically is to say to members that there is all of this work out there. That there's all of this demand on the service out there. There is this resource and as we know this year we've had to take some decisions about resourcing and vacancies to balance the budget. And what we're hoping to do basically is to use this as the as the basis of a discussion around prioritization going forward and come back basically with some thoughts on prioritization once we've gone away and consulted members and other interested parties. So just very, very quickly the way it's set out is there are some crosscutting priorities, climate change, these are the kind of things you would expect to see as authorities. We've tried to tap into the authorities own priorities. So improving health, safeguarding, protecting vulnerable people, climate change. And then we got one or two which are quite local to us like E-Crime because actually so much now of what we deal with and it's not just about the sale of counterfeit goods or scams, but also it could be anything about basically waste related, fly tipping related crime and all sorts of stuff basically which tracks back to the use of the internet. And then there were a number I suppose really of what you would call vertical. So you've had some horizontal sort of priorities. You've got these vertical priority areas, outcome areas. So building safer communities that includes things like licensing age-irofitsive products, offensive weapons, doorstep crime, improved living environment, private sector housing, nuisance, HMLs, parkhomes, pests, animal warden. Protecting consumers from fraud and that includes scams, illegal money lending, proceeds of crime, fraud, unfair trading, et cetera. Producing harm in young people, all sorts of stuff there including sales, tobacco control, vaping, knives, et cetera. Protecting the environment, air quality, contaminated land and so forth. Protecting and informing consumers and this is really about basically helping consumers to help themselves, but also include some very focused areas around product safety, fraud scams, then the housing market, animal welfare. So that includes on-farm and off-farm and license for activities, safety in the workplace and then the food chain which effectively we regulate from plough to plate. So I think really that's all I want to say, Chair. I'm happy to answer any questions. I hope it does give a flavor for the breadth of work and some of the challenges that we're facing. And we do need to perhaps come back and look at how we balance that with the resourcing issues that all councils face. Thank you very much. I'll start by opening and saying I'd like to thank the whole team in the amount of work put into this. Obviously we can build it out by data, data we have and we don't have a crystal ball and we don't know what's on the horizon and we have a very difficult task on balancing the priorities and I think that's one of the things that we discussed that we are going to work on. And having said that, I'd like to ask are there any members have any questions, Councillor Hottingham? Thank you, Chair. So Sean, just in relation to the intelligence, a lot of the work that you get are no doubt are tip-offs which we receive but I'm also then thinking about typically someone who's causing consumer detriment, committing fraud. They're likely to also be committing tax fraud. A good example would be VAT. We have a way of tipping off HMRC from a VAT perspective where we believe there could be a potential for that particular organisation, person committing VAT fraud. Obviously the powers from the VAT man are a lot more stronger than our powers. They have the strongest powers of any government agency. Typically, a fraudster, it's all about the money. Sometimes they think they'll do their own business case of going to prison but taking the money away from them will act as quite a big deterrent, especially the proceeds of crime, of recycling that money into the work which we do. There's a lot of pressure, so my question is probably in two phases. Can we get more money into the work which we do from central government and can we also tip off those agencies who do have those powers to actually deter this happening in the first place? Thank you for the question, Councillor pass it on. So just picking up on the point of kind of investigations, and really to me it's about how things have changed over the years. I mean the range of powers is now very broad that we have as investigators, particularly in the trading centers world. The issues of financial investigations have really opened up an awful lot, and quite often as a result of financial investigations we come across other associated crimes, let's put it that way, or potential crimes. Of course what this does really is it opens up some of these cases, so there was a time if you go back not that far into the past where effectively you may have identified perhaps a couple of victims of a doorstep crime type thing or a fraudster. The other thing is obviously with the information that's available to us, with the databases that we have access to today and being able to obtain information from other databases and financial investigations, those investigations can develop very, very quickly. So picking up on the resource point, that's one of the reasons basically why we have tended and successfully to draw down money from the national trading standards pot as it were. It's important to do that because we do support cross-border investigations and if you look at basically the case that was mentioned there, the recent one that we did in relation to green energy, that was basically funded in a sense that by grant funding obviously we managed to recover the costs in that case and hand that money back to the government or to national trading standards. But it would be you're right, so funding is really important and I think given our successful record around investigations and everything else, we're supported on a number of cases both at regional and national level at the moment which is really helpful. Just moving on to the second question about sharing of information. So if you take for example the one that you talked about, HMRC, we do have an information sharing protocol in place as do other trading standards services. The other big one now is of course is that we're all on the same, all the trading standards services and the number of police forces and other bodies are on the same intelligence database now as well. You'll see actually from the report, I think actually funding off in the strategic assessment you can see how many intelligence, at some point I think it goes into just how many intelligence submissions we've actually made as a service and it's a significant number over the last 12 months. Thank you, Sean. Any further questions? Thank you, you're welcome. Okay. So we're going to need a proposer and a seconder especially for the amendment and recommendations on page 69. So I will go ahead and propose and I will look for a seconder please. I'll second. Thank you, Councillor. Now I'll pass over to Clerk. Thank you, Chairman. Yes, thank you for the proposal and seconder. So the JPPC is asked to resolve that the updated strategic assessment forms the basis of the PPP privacy setting 24/25 for January 2027. Members, if I could put it in favour of that proposal please. Thank you very much. Unanimous. Thank you. Thank you. Moving on to Item 12, draft nuisance policy, and I would like to ask Suzanne McClellan to introduce the report, please. Good evening, Chair, members. Hopefully you can hear me. Okay. So before you this evening is a draft policy document to deal with both reactive and proactive nuisance areas of work within the service. The purpose of the policy is to ensure that the service continues to carry out this area of environmental health work, both consistently and provide a transparent approach to our residents and businesses. It is designed to improve their quality of life and resolve matters which are or could impact their health. Last financial year, the service received over 1000 reactive nuisance complaints. This is a significant number. We also proactively deal with nuisance via planning applications and in the licensing regime and also through the safety advisory group. We have a successful route to resolving some complaints, especially from domestic sources via our mediation service. Complaints that we receive do not have, that we don't have powers to deal with, we signpost onto the correct agency. We also offer guidance on our website and highlight issues through social media. In Appendix A of the report, you will see that the draft policy is to cover the period of 2024 to 2027. The proposal, if the committee agree, is for us to go out to public consultation via the two councils consultation hubs for six weeks. This will mean that we can then report back to the next committee in October with the findings, allowing for discussion of the final policy for formal adoption. Thank you. Thank you, Suzanne. Anybody have any questions for Suzanne? Okay. In that case, I'll move to propose it and look for a seconder, please. I'll second. Thank you, Councillor. I will now defer to the Clerk. Thank you again, Chair. Yes, the committee is asked to approve the draft nuisance policy 2024-27 as set out in the appendix for consultation. The service leave for public protection seeks to be authorised to proceed with a public consultation for the six weeks between the 8th of July through to the 19th of August this year. Finally, the committee is asked that any comments of the draft policy be brought to the October committee meeting for discussion prior to the policy being formally adopted. Members, would you in favour of that proposal, please? Thank you very much. That's approved. Thank you, Clerk. I'd like to note that all business has now been concluded and I'd like to thank everyone for attending the meeting. The next meeting will take place on October 7th 2024 in the West Berkshire County Council offices. [The meeting is adjourned.] [The meeting is adjourned.] [The meeting is adjourned.] [The meeting is adjourned.] [The meeting is adjourned.] [The meeting is adjourned.] [The meeting is adjourned.] [The meeting is adjourned.] [The meeting is adjourned.] [BLANK_AUDIO]