Transcript

this evening's meeting. This meeting is being webcast to enable those who cannot attend in person to follow proceedings. Please could I ask that all attendees turn on their microphones when they are invited to speak, and remember to turn off their microphones when they are finished. Please note that this is a council meeting being held in public and not a public meeting, and therefore all remarks should be addressed through me, as chair. Please know that we are not expecting a fire alarm test this evening, so if the alarm is tested, please follow my instructions to evacuate the building. As usual, each item will be introduced by the relevant executive member, followed by an opportunity for members to ask questions, and then members of the public to ask questions related to the item being deliberated. When those questions are completed, I will move on to a vote, and once the vote has taken place, there will be no further discussion on that item. I would like to reassure everyone that the executive members have read all of the reports and appendices supplied to them previous to this meeting. Let's move on to the item, the formal matters. Apologies for absence, I have apologies to Councillor Halleran, Councillor Safi and Gongo, Councillor health and Councillor Bell Bradford, declarations of interest, minutes of the previous meeting being held on the 23rd of May, can we agree? Item 1, the budget monitoring for 23-24 provisional and new leisure fees and charges. Councillor Ward, will you please introduce? Thank you very, very much, Chair. Chair, this has been an exceptionally difficult year financially for the Council. Frankly, it's been an exceptionally difficult decade, actually, for the Council. We've endured a decade of austerity, and the bottom line here is, we're doing okay. It's not quite a break-even position, but it's almost there. There are going to be huge challenges coming our way this coming year as well, and we've got to keep a constant eye on this. But there's been brilliant financial stewardship from our entire team, and I want to thank all of our officers for all of the stewardship over the past year, and all of those hard choices and very, very tight management which is being employed, making sure that we can get to this position at the end of the year. Other Councillors have got in really serious trouble, and we see that right across the country, but it's down to the hard work of our team that we are where we are. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Are there any questions from Councillors? Councillor Ramada? Hello, thank you. Just a quick question about complaints. I think that's one of the features of the report. It looks like, if I'm interpreting the graph correctly, they've unfortunately stayed quite high compared to the year before, so I just wanted to know whether or not we've seen any improvement more recently after the report has finished in March, and whether there's any information on the nature of what's sustaining that increased level of complaints? Thank you very much, Councillor Hamdous. The first thing I would say is that this may sound counterintuitive, but certainly in my view and I've said it at PMP as well, complaints aren't necessarily a bad thing. It means that we are hearing the issues that are happening right across the Council, and I've been personally involved in just going deep diving into that and saying, Right, what are people actually saying? On the other hand, if people actually get to the complaint process, that's our failure. It's been our failure to communicate that it's actually got to complaints, that it's actually got to that stage. As you'll know from PMP, now known as Corporate Resources and Economy, we are doing a real deep dive into resident experience, and we are hoping to get those numbers right down. As for whether numbers have gone down between March and today, I'm not entirely sure. I don't know if... I'd need to check, so I can provide that information separately outside of this meeting. Thanks. I'm not entirely sure, but we can get that information to you. Any further questions? No? In which case can we vote on that item? Agreed. Thank you. Our next item, the procurement strategy for young people supported accommodation pathways age 16 to 25. I'll be introducing this item on behalf of the Council in Gongo. This is a really important item reflecting that we need to be able to have accommodation readily available for children at risk, especially those aged 16 to 25. Based on previous estimations and the reality of children coming needing that accommodation, we have increased the capacity for this year to 200 young people. Being able to have a framework up front enables us to have greater flexibility, so we're allocating this additional framework so that we're good to go when that happens, rather than being at the mercy of, which we all know is a very unscrupulous market at the moment when it comes to placements. This actually gives us a greater flexibility and a greater hope of being able to keep young people closer to the borough. As part of the network of our continual conversations with housing associations as well, we've agreed to have a dedicated conversation with them about this as it's part of our priority of being a child-friendly borough. That being said, I move this recommended report. Is there any questions on that? Just a comment to really welcome that, because my time as Chair of Children's Services Scrutiny, we know from speaking to young people how difficult it makes it to be sent out of the borough, so I really welcome this as a way to keep our children closer to home. Thank you. Councillor Hamidash? Great, thank you. It's a slightly more general question about procurement, but I think it's really relevant in this space, partly because it's a space that quite often has quite a precarious workforce. I think the contracting has some questions and points about not working with suppliers who have blacklisted trade union workers, and there's also a section on living wage, which I think is really positive. I wonder, though, in our procurement, whether we're also looking at broader points about trade union recognition. I know, for instance, the Birmingham Council asks procurers to look at signing a social charter that it's created, so I wonder, do you think there's anything more that we could be doing to embed social value and social responsibility into our procurement processes, particularly with contracts where the work is so important, but quite often, the staff are exploited? Thank you, Councillor Hamidash. I think it's an extremely important point, and I think we must be doing all we can. I know that Councillor Bell Bradford is always looking at more and more ways we can have a progressive procurement framework, and some of the work that Jodie Pillingley is there, has led on some of the commissioning of our services around increasing the social value of our procurement frameworks has been exemplary. I don't know, Jodie, if you want to say anything on that. We are always striving to ensure that we leave the social value as best we can. It isn't always as straightforward as you think it would be, especially when you're working with national organisations who will have different terms and conditions across the country, but we do as part of our procurement, we have a significant amount of social value in there and we do encourage in our documentation good terms and conditions for people we work with. We are also about to publish our new market position statement where we make it really clear that we want to work with organisations who have strong policies that support their workforce. But certainly, it's always good for me to remind the team to have a real focus on the SOAP. Thank you. Any further questions? No, in which case is that item agreed? Thank you. We move on to the housing repairs and maintenance policy. Councillor. Before I start, there are a couple of minor errors in paragraph 3.1, chair. The word employees in line two should be replaced with the word employees, and the words and has a at the end of line four are superfluous and should be deleted. In terms of the substantive item itself, chair, the first thing I should say is that we are doing 112,000 repairs every year and that's up from 90,000 repairs in the previous year. We are one of the biggest social landlords in the country and that's why it's really important that we have really, really robust policies around all of our work. I'm really pleased to say that this set of policies has also been through a critical friend process and that's really, really important that we're always looking to improve our processes so I commend this paper. Thank you. Okay, any questions on this? Sorry. Just two, but there was one question about the annual safety checks on gas appliances. Previously, when Councillor Karen Russell had come across some casework where people were having their gas switched off during the annual check because they didn't have any credit on it, I know previously that the council had implemented a really positive policy to make sure that no one was being disconnected in the process of their annual safety checks and helping them just to put a little bit of credit on so they weren't having to pay reconnection fees. It's a really good thing that you're doing that. I just wondered should it be in the housing repair policy as a commitment because you should be proud of it. I think that's a very fair point. Councillor Hamblish, I will defer to the corporate director. J. John, comment on that? Yeah, it's a good suggestion actually. I'll take that back to colleagues. What will follow on from this though is this is a new regulatory requirement for us to have a formal adopted policy. From our perspective, the guide that currently exists was last reviewed some time ago. It's about six years old and didn't correctly reflect some of the regulatory requirements around building safety particularly, but also kind of emerging obligations that we've responded to on damper mould and other work. It does seek to capture that. It does set out some of the additional support measures that linked some of the vulnerabilities to the fair and equitable services policy, but it doesn't specifically reference the one that you've described. So I think I'll take that back to colleagues. It may well be that they would include that within the guide, which would be the kind of user friendly, easy read version of how this document will be presented for residence use and published along with the main policy. That's why you're here. You asked away, sir. Thank you. It's just there's no one else to break it up, right? It's just me. Just a follow-up question about kind of preventative works on gutters and roofs. Again, I think it's really welcome that the council have restored some of that work on inspecting roofs and clearing gutters and actually I think it's really important that potentially there's some commitment to that kind of preventative work because I'm afraid I think the period of time where we weren't doing that work was causing issues for people on leaky roofs, et cetera. So I wondered whether this report, this policy, should include any commitments about preventative work and land order responsibility on things like roofs and gutters. I know the council have done some sterling work on this in your ward, Councillor Ham. I have a personal experience of that. So I think the council is doing a really good job. The only thing I will say is this, as Jed Young says, this kind of sits on top of kind of more kind of operational stuff. So it is very specific. I wonder if that would be a top level report like this, but again I'll defer to Jed. Yeah, so for the most part this sets out a kind of policy basis and obligations rather than describing exactly how we carry those out other than those things which relate to regulated timescales. So it is geared towards those responsive timescales because that's where our core obligation is and will be assessed by regulators to say that we are kind of demonstratively meeting it. So what, again, is referenced within the document and would come through alongside the guide. I think it's referred to in here as repair stories and that will help us explain in kind of more narrative terms how some of the work is carried out and that could include things like we carry out proactive checks on roofs and gutters periodically to reduce the impacts you have. It would definitely include things like complex repairs where scaffolding is required, where multiple visits are required for, say, roofing repairs, where we see through our kind of complaints analysis that that can cause frustration for people because they'll see a surveyor come out, then somebody put up scaffolding and then somebody do some work and then we leave the scaffolding there because we want to test it when it's rained and then we remove it sometime later. And the policy doesn't sort of set this out in any detail but those kind of, the narrative form that will go along with it will help us explain those things better and hopefully kind of communicate more effectively. So I'll take that back again as a suggestion for that narrative. Thank you. Any other questions? No? In which case does that item agree? And that brings us to the end of the business. Okay. In which case have a lovely evening. Thank you. [End of Audio] [End of Audio] [End of Audio] [ Silence ]