Transcript

Good evening everybody, I'm Councillor David Osborne, Chair of the Finance, Innovation and Transformation Cabinet Advisory Board. Welcome to this evening's meeting, the first of this group. Before we start the meeting, there are a number of procedural issues to go through, for which I would be grateful for your attention. I will now pass over to the Clerk, Caroline Britt. Thank you, Chair. Good evening everybody. In the event of the fire alarm ringing continuously, you must immediately evacuate the building at walking pace. Officers will direct you via the most direct available route and no one is to use the lift. We will make our way to the fire assembly point by the entrance to the Town Hall Yard car park on Monson Way. Once outside, a check will be made to ensure everyone has safely left and no one is to re-enter the building until advised it's safe to do so. This is a public meeting and proceedings are being webcast live online. A recording will also be available for playback on the Council's website shortly afterwards. Can I remind everyone to use the microphones when speaking? The red light indicates that the microphone is on. Any comments that are not recorded for the webcast will not be included in the minutes of the meeting. It's very important that the outcomes of the meeting are clear. At the end of each substantive item, the Chairman will ask whether the matter is agreed. In the absence of a clear majority or if the Chairman decides a full vote is desirable, a vote will be taken by a show of hands. Members should raise their hand to indicate their vote when called and keep their hand up until the count has been announced. Members requesting a recorded vote must do so before the vote is taken. Thank you. As the benefit of the recording, we are going to take a roll call. The Clerk will call your name and if you are present, please introduce yourself. Oh, your mic, sorry. As the benefit of the recording, we are going to take a roll call. The Clerk will call your name and if you are present, please introduce yourself. Thank you, Chair. Councillor Martin Bryce? Here. Thank you. Councillor Tom Doolings? Present. Thank you. Councillor Matt Fox? Present. Thank you. Councillor David Heywood? Present. Thank you. Councillor Joe Parra? Present. Thank you. Councillor Victoria Jones? Present. Thank you. Councillor David Osborne? Present. Thank you. And Councillor Chris Hall is also here? Present. Thank you. And officers are Lee Collier? Present. Thank you. Paul Taylor? Present. Thank you. Claudette Valmont? Present. Thank you. Jane Fineman? Present. Thank you. And Pamela Grover-Morkin? Present. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Members of the committee should be familiar with the process, but for the benefit of any members of the public who may be watching, I would like to explain a couple of things. Committee members have had their agendas for over a week and have had the opportunity to ask any factual questions of the officers ahead of the meeting. When we come to the substantive items on the agenda this evening, members or members of the public who have registered to speak will be asked to read their statements. They will have a maximum of three minutes each. The relevant officer will then set out their report. We will then move into member discussion. At the end of discussion, I will remind members that, without prejudice to any other comments that may be raised, the committee is asked to come to one of the following positions. (A) that the recommendations to Cabinet are supported by the committee; (B) that the recommendations to Cabinet would be supported subject to a particular issue being addressed; or (C) that the recommendations to Cabinet are not supported and, if this is the case, reasons should be stated. Item 1, Apologies for Absence, is to note the apologies for absence from members of the committee. Do we have any apologies for absence? Thank you, Chair. Apologies have been received from Councillors Sankey, Summers, Burch and Johnson. Thank you. Agenda item 2 is declarations of interest, is to receive any declarations of interest in items on the agenda. Does anyone have any such declarations to make? I hear no such declarations. Agenda item 3 is to note any members of the public or visiting members of the Council who are registered to speak. Do we have any such persons? I can confirm we have had none, Chair. Thank you. Agenda item 4, we move to agenda item 4, which is to approve the minutes of the Finance and Governance Cabinet Advisory Board. The meeting was held on the 5th of March, 2024. Are there any amendments to these minutes? Are we agreed? Agreed. The motion is carried. Agenda item 5 is to consider the forward plan as at 22nd of May, 2024. Do members have any comments? Only, Chairman, I assume that these are going to be represented to reflect the revised Cabinet portfolios. So today, a new forward plan was published, which did indeed reflect the new structure of the Cabinet portfolios. Thank you. Any other comments at all? So are we agreed? Thank you. That's carried. Agenda item 6 is the Strategic Risk Register, presenting what's said to introduce Lee. Thank you, Chairman. So once a year, the Council's Strategic Risk Register comes before Cabinet to reaffirm the strategic risk items that the Council has decided to manage throughout the year. And if Cabinet are content, then responsibility for managing those strategic risks and oversight passes to Audit and Governance Committee, who will, throughout the year, receive presentations from the risk owners and members of that committee will put questions to those risk owners. So this is really just for Cabinet to set the register for the year ahead. Happy to take any questions, Chairman. Thank you, Lee. Any questions? OK. The recommendation then to go forward to Cabinet is that Cabinet considers and notes the Strategic Risk Register and the arrangements for managing strategic risk. Are we agreed? That's carried. Agenda item 7, Capital Management Report for Quarter 4, Jane to present. Thank you. Yes, this trio of reports, you've got the Capital Report, you've got the Revenue Report and the Treasury Report, they're all now reporting the unaudited actual out-turn for 23/24. So for Capital, Cabinet originally approved expenditure of $12.6 million for 23/24, but the actual unaudited out-turn increased to $15.9 million by the end of the year. The largest schemes were the Royal Victoria Place shopping centre purchase, that was $8.9 million. The local authority housing fund round one, which was $2.4 million, and disabled facilities grants, which were $1.1 million. Approvals added or increased include projects that were rescheduled from 22/23 to 23/24. There were $3.2 million of those. New schemes, including the Royal Victoria Place shopping centre and the local authority housing fund round one, and variations to existing schemes within the year, including the Weald Leisure Centre decarbonisation scheme. Projects deferred to 24/25 include a number of projects that are yet to commence or that was started in 23/24, but they'll continue into next year. These include the local authority housing fund round one, the Royal Victoria Place shopping centre, and the acquisition of sports site strategy. The report includes a new request for £21,000 for boosters to the mobile phone signal in the Royal Victoria Place shopping centre, and this should enable the take-up of Ringo to be improved, still reducing the use of pay machines, and therefore the cost of processing card payments. And finally, in quarter four, a payment for the disposal of the east side errant road of £26,000 was received, so it was a capital receipt. Thank you. Do we have any questions? I had a question. I notice that we've now allocated the expenditure for the RVP to the capital and initiative reserves. I think in the last quarter we haven't been deciding where to allocate it. Does the allocation to that reserve have any difference? I seem to remember before we were talking about it as a sort of notional loan that would be repaid over time, and obviously it came out of essentially revenue. Is that different now that the expenditure has been taken from that reserve, so effectively there's no repayment of that $9 million including costs? Yes, that's absolutely the case. As you'll hear in a little bit via the revenue report and the Treasury report, you'll see that we actually ended up with a far greater surplus this year through various different means than we anticipated at the beginning of the year. And this has enabled us to transfer more money into the capital and revenue initiatives reserve than we anticipated, and therefore we've been able to fully fund the purchase of RVP. Now you're quite right that when the initial paper was approved by Cabinet there was an element of it that was to be funded from internal borrowing, but that's no longer been necessary. And that's really important for the Council because what that means is that we don't have to pay that money back over the subsequent periods of the use of the Centre, and that therefore helps our revenue budget going forward. Thank you very much. Are there any other questions? Okay. The recommendation to go forward to Cabinet is, one, that Cabinet note that the actual gross and net expenditure for the year and the sources of finance as shown in Appendices B and D. Two, that Cabinet approve the proposed variations of the capital programme, set out in notes 4.3 to 4.16. Three, that Cabinet approve the inclusion of new scheme into the capital programme as set out in notes 4.17. And four, that Cabinet approve the proposed movement between years set out in note 4.18. Are we agreed? Motion is carried. Measure item eight, revenue management report, quarter four, Jane, again, thank you. Thank you. So the unaudited actual expenditure for the year was 12.9 million. That's 3.7 million under budget. Income was above budget by 4.7 million. 2.3 million of that was due to an increase in on-street parking income. That was mainly the result of the implementation of the public round two enforcement. But off-street parking income was half a million above budget as people are returning to in-person working and they're now buying season tickets more frequently. Rental income was 1.2 million above budget following the Council's purchase of the long leasehold of Royal Victoria Place Shopping Centre. Rental receipts from the retail tenants are now received by the Council rather than just the ground rent for the centre. The assembly hall theatre income was £705,000 above budget and costs have been well controlled bringing the total subsidy for the theatre down to just £167,000. Off-facancies have continued and by the year end costs were £1.2 million under budget and that's a very, very similar underspend to the position last year. Costs were £2.1 million above budget. Large contributors were the service charges and business rates for RVP. The Council, now as landlord, is required to pay the service charges and business rates for any properties that are vacant within the centre. So £659,000 was paid for the service charges and £262,000 for the business rates. Overall though, the Council received a £706,000 surplus from RVP in the year, which is £176,000 less than the budgeted ground rent of £882,000. And the Council is working really hard with its advisors to fill those vacant units, which will improve the financial position in this financial year that we're now in. Costs were also £0.5 million higher for building maintenance and repairs, which was a combination of additional works needed to be done and rising prices. As detailed in the Treasury Management Report, which comes in just a moment, the actual interest was £1.9 million above budget due to improved interest rates and more cash being available to invest. This has all been transferred to reserves, as we were discussing, to fund the capital programme. We also relinquished our property fund this year, and there was a surplus of £933,000 that was realised, and again, that was transferred to the Capital and Revenue Initiatives Reserve in order to fund capital. Business rates from the collection fund were also greater than budgeted by £1.6 million. The surplus comprises a combination of business rates growth, but that's since the inception of the scheme back in 2013/14, and importantly this year, the release of provisions on appeals for the 2017 ratings list. Now this is a one-off game, because there was a new process that was brought in for appeals, the new Check Challenge Appeal process, that was brought in by the Valuation Office, and we really didn't know whether it was going to be more rigorous or less rigorous than the previous appeals process had been, and actually it turns out to have been more rigorous. So we have over-provided for the appeals process, and now that the 2017 appeals have been completed, we're able to release that provision, but we won't be able to reuse that. It is a benefit that's a one-off for this year. And again, that surplus was transferred to the reserves for the capital programme too. So if you have a look at Appendix D, the Council had £28.8 million of usable reserves as at the 1st of April 2023, and by the end of the year the reserves have fallen to £26.8 million. However, the capital programme for the year has been fully funded, including the purchase of RVP, without any further internal borrowing. This also includes the £1.3 million paid this year from the Grant Volatility Reserve to fund the Council's share of the deficit held on the collection fund. So we're now forecasting that we can fully fund the capital programme to £27.28, which is a pretty amazing achievement. And finally, I'd just like to let you know that the Council published its draft annual financial report onto our website by the statutory deadline, which was the 31st of May. So we did that last Friday. So when you've got the time, please go and have a look at it. I'm sure you'll find it a very interesting document. If you don't want to read the whole thing, it is very accounting and very detailed. There's a narrative report at the very beginning, which is a simplified version, it's a summary, so that might be worth a read. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jane. Do we have any questions? Councillor Hubbard. Thank you very much for that very thorough report. Yeah, I've got one question. I appreciate that what we're doing here is we're looking at the historical and putting forward to Cabinet that that was correct. But obviously there are, and I'm not sure whether this is a Treasury issue. Obviously you're forecasting that we're going to be able to cover certain things. And at full Council last week, the Leader of the Council expressed that he was going to do all this tree planting. And I've looked through the report, and the word tree doesn't come up at all. And the word plant only comes up twice, and that's in relation to vehicles. So I was just wondering whether, I appreciate this is a budget issue, is that something that we need to look at later on, or what should it have been in the Treasury report now? Thank you. Ali. So we only had the local elections a few weeks ago. At that point, information set out in the manifestos could then, if the new administration chooses to do so, bring it through the Council's formal decision-making process. That will give officers a mandate to start to investigate and give advice on the delivery of those political aspirations that could become the Council's new plans that it wishes to do. So there's a formal process to go through before we can start planning how they need to be funded. Thank you very much. That answers my question. Any further questions? Councillor Dornan? Thank you, Chairman. I think this is really a question for Lee. Jane's touched on the vacant areas in RPP for which we now have responsibility for rates. At the investment advisory panel, we were discussing perhaps trying to get some of this back. I take it that this is something that you'll be reporting on later, and I got the impression that this was not just for the time since we'd owned RPP, but perhaps going back from previous years. And I just wonder whether you could explain that a little bit, please. If I may, I think Jane's referring to the costs that the Council bears when units are void. I think what you're referring to, Councillor Dornan, is business rates, where we are looking to get a refund for business rates, properties that we've inherited, where we think we can make a case to the valuation office agency to get some of those properties delisted. The examples are all the ones on the corner of Camden Road and Calvary Road. The previous owners of the Long Leasehold were paying for business rates on those. We believe that they should be exempt from business rates, and therefore we would be making a case to get a refund on that payment. That payment would come to the Council in full, and that would help to offset the charges that the Council's landlord faces with empty units. The two are related, but at slightly different angles. We're trying to reduce the cost to the Council. Thanks, Lee, that's really helpful. Can you then just cover also the baseline for business rates? Is that likely to be revalued, or are we going to be able to keep the same baseline for a little bit longer? The government gives this Council a business rate baseline. It calls its needs assessment £2.4 million. Full growth above that, we receive a share, but we only get the net share. If there's appeals, that comes off of our growth. If you steadily grow, the risk is though that baseline gets reviewed when the government undertakes a fair funding review, which they have failed to do so over many, many years. As I've said, it benefits this Council that that fair funding review does not take place simply because that fair funding review, that reassessment of this Council's needs is likely to be lower, given that our population growth has been static, whereas other parts of the country have seen significant errors of growth. The average for Kent was around 8%. Some parts of Kent have experienced 25% growth. If you redistribute the same amount of money across local government, but under a new basis to reflect the change in population, then many areas will need more funding. That will come from those areas which didn't grow, which we tumbled well. So that's the risk, and that risk is flagged up in the medium-term financial strategy that this Council is exposed to a reset of our minimum share of business rates. But I see that any reset, we would get at least 18 months notice because there's a significant amount of work required. It will require the government of the day to undertake a comprehensive spending review and start reallocating funding and come up with a fair mechanism to redistribute funding, of which there will be winners and losers, which will be quite political to manage. So there'd be a form of dampening, transitional relief to come into that. So we flag it up as a risk that we're exposed to, but it's always around 18 months away. Councillor Paul? Just a quick question on that topic. When was the last time that rebalancing took place? It hasn't. So the business rate system was brought in in 2013, our baseline needs were set, and the government has constantly said that there will be a fair funding review, and it's never done so. But there are those issues around winners and losers or time capacity or general actions that you need a period of stability and you need to be quite brave to reset the baseline affecting every single council in the country. May I just interject? I remember at a meeting about a year ago, Councillor Sankey asked whether it would be possible to have a note on business rates, because I think business rates are quite important. And quite complicated. I mean, the issue of how they're calculated, how it interacts with this base, how it's shared, how much of the business rate revenue that's received is taken to revenue, and how much is moved to reserve, and the basis on which it is moved to reserve. I think it might be helpful, particularly as I often get questions, particularly from traders in town, in terms of how the business rates are worked out, how much of that business rate revenue is coming through to the town, if it was possible to do a note on business rates that could be distributed to members of this committee. Very happy to do so. I give a presentation as part of the new member induction on business rates, but I simply can't cover all those areas that you refer to, so I'm in your hands whether you prefer a briefing note to this committee, or it may well be better to do an all-member briefing given we've got so many new members on business rates, which we can incorporate one Friday as part of our programme of member briefings. There is also, in the annual financial report, a separate section right at the very, very end which has a summary of the collection fund, which is our proportion of the business rates in there, so that's probably quite a good starter for 10. If you want to go and find out, have a look in the collection fund element, and if you put in business rates in a search, there are lots of sections within the report that will give you quite a lot of that information, and that's already there. Thank you, Jane. I'm a fairly simple person. I know I've found it quite confusing. I think your suggestion, Lee, of an all-members briefing on business rates, that people think that would be sensible, because, as I say, it is a question that comes up, and I think that's something that would be useful for members to be able to communicate to the residents when asked. Thank you. Any further questions? Councillor Dordans. Well, I just wanted to make a political point that, at the time of the budget being presented in February, I pointed out what the budget and the actual figures had been over the last 15 years, and I was rather horrified to read in the Liberal Democrats and some other groups and literature that this was the first balanced budget for five years. There have just been three budgets put forward, forecasting a shortfall to be covered by drawing from reserves, and all those years ended in the surplus. So I don't think the five years is the sort of thing. I just think this sort of nonsense just ought to end. Thank you, Councillor Torlings, for your political point. I think we're all very pleased with the work that's been done by the officers in managing to create a situation where we have ended up the surpluses, I think, obviously we rely on the information that comes to us, but now our work throughout the year has – and in multiple years, as you point out – has led to a succession of surpluses, which is excellent. Any further questions on the revenue management? Okay. If you have some questions, then the recommendation to go forward to cabinet is the cabinet note the unaltered actual revenue expenditure out-term and impact on reserves of the year ended 31 March 2024. Are we agreed? That is carried. Gender item 9 is the Treasury and Prudential Indicator Management Report, quarter 4, change report. Thank you. Thank you. So the unaudited actual out-term for interest from investments and bank interest for 23/24 is 3.342 million, an increase of 1.922 million from the approved budget and a further 47,000 increase from the quarter 3 position. The bank interest rate set by the Bank of England is still 5.25 per cent and the council has achieved an actual interest rate of 5 per cent. This is compared to the original budget of 3.07 per cent, showing that we've actively taken full advantage of the interest rates on offer. The average funds available for investment were budgeted to be 46.2 million for 23/24, but by the end of the year we had 66.8 million available. This is partially due to the additional funds being available from interest and revenue budget surpluses as we've discussed already. And finally, none of the prudential indicators were breached in quarter 4. Thank you. Thank you Jane. Any questions? I need to say to Jane and to Lee, I think this is a fantastic out-term for the year and thank you very much. And as we were discussing before the meeting, Jane, I think to get the accounts to the auditors and your draft report published by the end of May is fantastic. And even if the Government is giving us a bit of leeway on the audited accounts, it's nice to think that we're going to hit the sort of target that we did last year. Well done. Yeah, I think Tom speaks for all members of the committee and what an excellent job has been done in managing our reserves and achieving that number of 3.34 million, which is a huge benefit to all the residents of Tunbridge Wells. Thank you. Any further questions? Okay. The recommendation to go forward to Cabinet is, one, the Cabinet note the Treasury management and prudential indicator position for 2023/24. Two, the Cabinet note the unaltered actual for investment and bank interest is 3,342,000, an increase of 1,922,000 from the approved budget of 1,420,000. And a further 47,000 from the quarter three position. Are we agreed? Agreed. That is carried. Thank you. Item number 10 on the agenda is the performance summary, quarter four. Pamela, you are presenting officer, thank you. Thank you, Chair. This report summarizes the Council's performance on its ongoing project and 20 performance indicators during the quarter four of 2023/24. These indicators are reviewed and updated annually. Of the 20 performance indicators, 15 have targets. Of these, two indicator reports were unavailable, 11 indicators were performing, and two were underperforming and those were the number of working days lost to sickness and the percentage of parking transactions paid by Ringo. More detail as to the projects are set out in Appendix A to the report. More detail as to the indicators is set out in Appendix B to the report and recovery plans for the underperforming indicators are set out in Appendices C and D. Happy to take any questions. Do we have any questions at all? I must say I noticed that the working days lost to sickness was quite high in the fourth quarter, in fact a record over the last four years, and that the number of people engaged in healthy living services was also a record and I wonder whether there was a correlation between people living healthy lives and being sick. There was no correlation as such, so we checked the huge increase in healthy living service access and we said is this right because it's enormous, and they said yes it is, and it's down to a number of different things, I think it's sort of outreach and just sort of getting some momentum, it's hard to pin it down to just one thing. There's no correlation to the number of working days lost by the staff here to sickness that had to do with three people being on long-term sick. Thank you very much. Councillor, thank you for your report. Just one observation, I noticed that our interaction with the public through social media and visits to our outfacing website have gone down. Is there anything in place already that we're going to move forward to try and address that? Please, thank you. Thank you. I don't have that information but I can go and find out and feedback. Thank you very much. Any further questions at all? Councillor Dornan's. We discussed at the last meeting the wait times on phone calls, there does seem to be a marginal improvement in the fourth quarter. Is that because we've done something positive or is it just the way the cards have fallen pending doing something positive? Thank you, Councillor Dornan. It's because we've done something positive, so I think we recognise that performance wasn't where we wanted it to be, missed calls I think when it was reported last term, we're in the region of 20%. When I looked at the statistics for last week, the missed calls were down to 9.1%. So that's in part because we've done a very detailed forensic analysis of where calls are coming from, of where that demand is coming from, and we've tried to take some small steps to reduce that demand where we can. So an example of that would be that through Jane's team, we took the contact details for PCNs off the back of a parking ticket because you can't actually appeal via telephone, you have to do it in writing. So that had an impact, small impact, but reduced demand. So we've set out an action plan of 37 actions, we've been working through those things. The lost calls for last month was down to 11%. And as I say, for last week it was down to 9%. We've also increased the number of staff, we had an average of about 5.6 people in the calls at any given time, because we've had staff shortages and we've had increased sickness. So we're now up to establishment, which is increasing the number of people that we've actually got in the queue to answer calls. So all in all, we're seeing hopefully a continued improvement. So it's through positive action rather than just by chance, and we will keep monitoring those calls and we will try to keep those statistics moving upwards. I'd like to see us answering 92% of calls consistently. I think you have to accept you're always going to lose some calls, some people will drop off doing the conversation or waiting in a queue, but I think if we got to run 92%, we'd be pretty much where we want to be actually. So that's the target in a way that we're working towards. Councillor Dawkins. Well, I say thank you for doing that, because quite obviously from reports that I've had, people were hanging on for far too long, and I think it's a really important thing to address. It's a real outward-facing operation for the Council. Thank you. Any further questions at all? Councillor Haynes. Thank you, Chair. Yeah, I'd just like to endorse what Councillor Dawkins is saying, is that some of the front-facing Councillors, a lot of our work is people actually, as you'd expect, is people moaning. There won't be anything new, I'm sure. I just wanted to clarify, so we are moving forward, because I get asked the question, as I'm sure other Councillors do. Just to clarify, are percentages have improved, but is it of a smaller number, because you say you've taken off what I'm sure is an enormous bit of pressure from the PCNs. So is the figure, you know, I'm not trying to do a gotcha here, I'm just trying to get the math straight. So is the percentage of a much smaller number, or is it a real percentage of the total as before? That's a very good question, actually. The numbers of calls in to the call centre have remained reasonably static. One of the issues we have is they can fluctuate wildly, so for example, when reminders and summonses go out, there can be a batch of 5,000, 6,000, they hit the mat on a Monday, which means there's real peaks in demand. So it's very difficult for us to look at an average demand, because of those peaks and troughs in demand, but if you look at it across the course of a year, pretty much the number of calls have stayed static, probably increased just slightly. So in terms of the percentage improvement, it's a real percentage improvement. And hopefully you'll see that as well, because you'll get less people actually coming to you saying we can't get through to the council. And the wait times were too long, the abandon calls were too long. The staff recognised that, I recognised that, so we'll keep working on the plan to reduce it. Thank you. Any further questions at all? Okay, no further questions. The recommendation to go forward to cabinet is one, that the cabinet notes the summary of project performance over quarter 4, 2023/24 at appendix A. Two, that the cabinet notes the summary of service performance over quarter 4, 2023/24 at appendix B. That the cabinet notes the recovery plans for quarter 4, 2023/24 at appendices C and D. Are we agreed? Yes. The motion is carried. Agenda item 11 is complaint summary, quarters 3 and 4. Pamela, thank you. Thank you, Chair. The report summarises that council's performance in respect of complaints closed in the second half of 2023/24. So from October to March, October 2023 to March 2024, the council closed 91 complaints of which 77 were stage 1 complaints and 14 were stage 2 complaints. The council – sorry, I lost my place – met its target of responding to 70% of its stage 1 complaints within 15 days in period 2 and it disagreed with 61% of those complaints. It responded to 79% of its stage 2 complaints in this period within 20 days compared to its target of 80% and disagreed with 64% of those complaints. The council made one compensation payment of £200 in period 2 in recognition of time and trouble. Thank you. Thank you very much, Pamela. Any questions at all? In the recommendations to go forward to cut. Sorry, I have a question, Councillor Parra. In terms of complaints we received, do we also record complaints from councillors via members of constituencies? When I was looking, it hasn't got like it's one separate box, I was assuming perhaps maybe that Councillors via email or something. Thank you. Can you repeat your question, I didn't hear all of it, say again. So in recording complaints, do we also record complaints that come via our councillors by members of the community and if so, in what categories are reflected in? Thank you. If a councillor tells us about a complaint and it passes through our formal complaints system then yes, that would be caught, but it would need to be reported to us and put through that system, but absolutely there's nothing to stop it being counted that way. Could I just clarify, you're referring to complaints against councillors by members of the public or other councillors? Not about councillors, but more to say maybe you've knocked the door, maybe you're canvassing and a member of the public says that my bins haven't been collected for so odd weeks. I'm just trying to get an idea of how, not necessarily how accurate the data is, but if it's reflecting the full breadth of the way that complaints are communicated to the council or council members, I mean not council members, the staff. Yes, again we can only report on what comes through us, so if something is handled by a councillor and it's questioned in a constituency, maybe there's a dispute or something going on within the ward, we wouldn't get involved with that and equally we wouldn't be handling complaints against councillors either because that happened, the monitoring officer Claudette deals with that, not us, it's really complaints about the services that we deal with. Does that help? Maybe I'm not wording it right, when I say that what I mean is, so if there's a complaint say about waste management for example, my bins haven't been collected which happens from time to time and it's passed on to officers per se, maybe I've emailed Jane or something and said that this person's bin hasn't been collected and it's been dealt with at that stage. What I'm trying to warn is whether it's reflected as a complaint or if it's just treated as a query and how's that reflected in the data. Okay, understood. So with that example, it depends, if it's a question of a service request, so somebody needs a service, they need our help with something, somebody who needs their bins collected, they don't want their bins collected, they don't want to go down a formal complaint route. So we will normally treat that as a service request first of all, about a year and a half ago we changed our approach as a council towards actually solving the problem rather than putting things through a formal complaint system. Two things happened with that, one is the speed with which issues were resolved sped right up, number one, number two, there was a drop off in the number of complaints that went through the formal complaint system because we're just trying to give people what they want. But it depends on the situation and if somebody wanted to make a formal complaint and write in, of course we would treat it as such, there's nothing to stop them doing that. Does that help? It helps. Sorry, I thought that was happening today. It does help, but I think more when I'm thinking about complaints and the data itself, it's just how it sort of informs services, so even though from what I'm gathering we're treating these things that come in as informal issues and dealt with informally because it helps with getting the situation resolved, my query and my concern is how much of that information is being missed and how much is it informing decisions which are made down the line. I have all kinds of detail on this, perhaps we should take this offline, be happy to if you would like. I think it would be good to have a discussion offline, that would be helpful to get a grasp of it. Okay, any more questions? Okay. Councillor Dornan's. I mean if it helps, I don't think that when you have a conversation on the doorstep you're not following up a service failure, if there is something more substantial you take it up with the head of service and discuss it, but it would never be done in the form of a complaint, it would be done in the form of this is what people are telling me on the doorstep and actually trying to understand whether they've had any particular difficulties. Thank you. Okay, the recommendation then to go forward to cabinet is the cabinet notes the summary of complaints over period 2, 1st of October 2023 to 31st of March 2024, are we agreed? Motion is carried. Agenda item 12 is urgent business, to consider any urgent business I can confirm that there is no such business. Agenda item 13 date of next meeting, the next meeting is scheduled to take place on Monday the 8th of July 2024, we're hoping for a full house. Thank you everybody. The meeting is closed.