Transcript

Thank you. May I have your attention please? Thank you everyone. Good evening. As-salamu alaikum. Good evening and welcome to this O'Brien's Community Committee meeting. Can I have your attention please? I'll start again. Good evening and welcome to this O'Brien's Community Committee meeting. My name is Councilor Jai Choudry and I'll be sharing this session. This evening we are considering the Council Recycling Performance, Strategic Asset Management Plan and the Council New Target Operating Model. Can I remind everyone that this meeting is being aimed for the Council App site, for public viewing. Those participating in the meeting will be included in the footage. If there are any technical issues, I'll decide if and how the meeting should continue after taking your advice from the officers. So before we start, I just want to ask every member, when you ask a question, please make sure you ask the question only. Don't make a statement for two or three minutes because otherwise we have to...other member may not be able to ask their question. So I'm requesting everyone to make sure you ask your question only when the session is open. Thank you. Thomas, is there any apology? Good evening Chair. alanir slama is on her way and is running late so will be joining us shortly and cancer ally is joining us online. Thank you. Can members declare whether they have any disclosing peculiar interest and indicate which aspect the interest relates to? State whether their interest is a person or a prejudiced nature. I guess there is no interest. Thank you. The meeting from our meeting on 18 June has been circulated. Can the members who are present confirm this as a true and accurate record? I think it is. Thank you very much. The action log has been circulated. Do the members have any comments? Your silence means you don't have any comments. Thank you. So we have changed the published agenda. We will consider item 9.1, strategic asset management plans 2024-29, first document availability of the lead member. For this item I can welcome and call upon Councillor Sahib Ahmed, cabinet member for regeneration and resource, Paul Patterson, corporate director housing and regeneration and David Hughes, divisional director of property and measures program. Can Councillor Sahib Ahmed start us off and perhaps forward David can add to the member's comment. You will have a maximum of 10 minutes to provide. Ask a higher level of overview and then we will move to member questions. I will let you know when you are nearing your last minute. Please start, Councillor. Thank you, chair, and good evening to the committee. We have a paper here which is the strategic asset management plan which fulfils one of the outstanding actions which was pointed out by the LGA corporate challenge review. This plan here, it reviews the property needs of services for the next five years and explains how we expect our assets to support our financial strategy. So aligning our assets in terms of income and also in terms of other responsibilities we have as a council. So looking ahead, it provides a framework for a rolling program to review our non-residential assets, allowing us to better utilise our buildings or release them for other priorities such as new housing developments. So it touches a bit of capital and other areas as well. Finally, it enables us to fulfil our best value duty by ensuring all of our buildings are used efficiently and by optimising revenue for our income generating assets. And also giving us a tool as a policy for us to start reviewing our assets for commercial uses where it benefits communities at the same time and looking at areas where there is rent reductions in place, especially peppercorn rent to ensure that it is all aligned with our council strategy and aligned with our financial targets for the year. That's pretty short but I think this summarises what we have here as a paper as a plan for the asset management. I've got David here if you have any questions as well. Thank you. Do you want to add anything? The members covered the summary of the plan. What I would point out though is a portfolio in Tower Hamlets of non-housing assets includes over 1100 separate properties and land assets which is a book value of 1.3 billion. So as a borough we're well off for corporate assets and it's important that we have a strategy to direct how we're going to use, develop and promote that portfolio. It's also important to point out that this is the first strategic asset management plan we've had for five years now. So with all the changing trends in terms of external economic sustainability as well as our own operational needs, it's important now that we review that, as was pointed out by the peer review. So this is a strategy in front of you. It's from this strategy individual action plans around the priorities for the plan will be developed. So obviously bear that in mind when you're looking at the details in the plan. It's strategic at this stage. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Councillors, Saeed Ahmed, Paul and David for your overview. Do members have any questions? Let me make a note. Thanks, Chair. Sorry, could I just ask you to repeat your name? Sorry, through the Chair, my name is David Hughes. I'm the interim director for a regeneration asset. Apologies from Paul Patterson, the corporate director, is on leave this week. Thank you, David. And thank you for the lead members for coming as well. So I have a question around the assessment criteria. I can't remember which page it's on in the plan. There are different assessment criteria that are kind of listed there and some categories of how I guess each asset or each organisation that wants to use the asset or each use of the asset is then graded. Could you give a bit of an overview about how you envision those different assessment criteria to be weighted against each other, if at all? And then also, how will they be weighted against where there are organisations already using the assets? How will those assessment criteria be used to assess what value is already in the assets that we have in the Tower Hamlets? And how will the council then make a decision based on their strategic plan to either kick those organisations out and put in something else or use it in a different way? Yeah, a bit of an overview. Thank you, Councillor. There's three types of assets. We have operational assets like the building we are in. We have commercial assets where we actually derive an income and then we have community assets and I think you are referring to the community assets. In terms of a criteria, the strategic asset management plan is influenced and directed by service plans, so within neighbourhoods and community they are actually identifying the organisations that are adding to our corporate priorities. So we are very much led by the strategies and the plans and the action plans that those directors have. So say for example within the VCS, the certain organisations that we know are contributing to our corporate objectives, they would obviously have priority over community organisations that maybe aren't contributing to our corporate priorities. They might be doing good works and they might be doing admirable projects but we are very much focused on what our corporate priorities are so it is very much led by the service directors. We also look though at the performance of voluntary community organisations in our property and we would expect them to work to service level agreements. If unfortunately they are not performing to service level agreements or maybe they are deviating away from those, we would have to take those into account when it comes to lettings or lease renewals or even just letting policy in terms of a sessional basis. So we very much would expect the organisations to be working to those service level agreements for the service directors. So not a specific 'here is a list of criteria', it is more driven by what the strategies of the service departments, particularly around community and voluntary sector are going to be. Hope that answers the question. Thank you chair. I just have a follow-up about that. One of the concerns that I have come across in working with organisations that are in council assets is that the council is not good at communicating with them about the future of their lease. There are concerns about the lack of involvement from the council in their relationship to the building that they are in. This is obviously a strategic asset management plan which is focused on how we can get the most money out of the assets that we have, which is right. There is also a really important relationship management thing that could potentially be part of this. I wonder if there is something you can add there. Through the chair, thank you. I think that is across the whole portfolio. Elsewhere in the asset management plan we talk about the need for more regular rent renewals and reviews, that is something I think we are improving on and we need to improve on. When it comes to community organisations though, I would just reiterate the explanation that the services that are encouraging those community and voluntary organisations to be active in the borough. It is very much for them to have a dialogue about what they are contributing. Most of those organisations, as well as being in our property, also receive grant aid and other levels of support. So we very much see the service level agreements directing those voluntary and community organisations. At the end of the day as a landlord we need to be just diligent and professional about saying, this is your lease terms, this is your renewal date, and this is what we expect of you to keep up on that very good footing in terms of being precise about what their property performances are. Very much leaving the actual service agreements with the directors. Thank you. Thank you Chair. Thank you for this presentation. I just wanted to dig a little bit more on things that are already mentioned in the report. The first one is about reviewing the conditions of the assets that we do have. When do you think we will be in a place where we will be able to get through the entire list of all the assets that we have and the conditions that they are in? Because the report that you present in front of us is a really good start. But it does look like we need to be in a place where this is a strategy, but there are other strategies that come after this, aren't correct. So for instance, we definitely need a net zero strategy. We can't do that without knowing the condition of the assets. The commercial properties - how that is strategised, because at the moment we just put them in boxes and we saw last week at the full council about one asset in particular, the launderette, and how it's actually in a commercial street. It's priced at a commercial rent but it's a community asset, so it's about looking, revisiting and reviewing some of our assets in that sense. And lastly, the report rightly talks about opportunities, but opportunities that can come out of our assets also. Actually, then we have to talk about weaknesses in our assets as well, where it's being money that perhaps shouldn't be, and that again goes back to the condition of the properties and where it lies, and the fact that we haven't done this in a very long time. So if you can just speak about those things, that would be great. Thank you, Councillor, good question. So apologies, I wasn't here for the cabinet, was it cabinet of full council? Sorry, the launderette. However, I am personally involved with that and I meet with the launderette. We have agreed the 12-month zoning by Dover to let them sort out how they're constituted and how they can actually be seen as a community asset that warrants a level of community support for the actual rent that they pay. We all know that a good launderette in a public sector housing stock is important for the tenants in terms of their own health, being able to dry the clothes efficiently, etc. So we see there's wider housing benefits from having that launderette in that location, so I'm personally working with the group on that. In terms of our priorities, priority number one is to do all our rent reviews by the end of this financial year. We're right behind with our rent reviews, so we're getting those under way to complete them this year. In terms of the actual stock and the quality of it, it's fundamental in managing any property portfolio that you know the quality of stock. There's a whole range of assurance, health and safety and fire issues, so the priority is to make sure that we're investing in looking and investigating health and safety and fire issues to make sure they're safe. In terms of the condition of the stock, yes, a lot of the stock needs to be surveyed so we can actually weigh up where it's best to invest. As a council, we don't need to sell property and it's our policy direction to use our property to achieve other corporate objectives in use of property. Some councils who are going through 114 find themselves having to sell property to make the book stack up. We're fortunate we're not in that position. However, there will be some properties where the cost of refurbishment or repair will be way in excess of what we'll ever get back in terms of its use in the future and there might be a driver where the optimum decision is to actually sell a property rather than have to invest and bring it up to current standards. But I see that very much being an exception rather than something that's common because we do want to use our property wherever possible to achieve wider corporate objectives. One supplemental question which is to Councillor Ahmed. The report talks a lot about opportunities within assets and as an administration you talk a lot about income maximisation for the budget. How do you ensure that while you have that in mind, that's a goal and a priority, that you're making sure buildings that have heritage are maintained, that the community that are near these assets or near these sites are actually benefiting from what you want to do. Lastly, because that's why I talked about the asset stock condition is really important, because if you're planning to make more money out of certain assets, maintenance for those buildings is also important. I'm sure you've thought about this, but it would be good to hear from you from a political view. Thanks for your question, Councillor. I believe, looking at it from a strategic point of view, a) obviously we do want to increase our income target, but at the same time there needs to be that dialogue, we need to sort of understand from the organisations in place of what the needs of those premises are. Especially with community centres, which is a whole section on its own, where there's peppercorn rents in place, to understand the benefit of it and to understand how much of the assets being utilised. Where we think that, wherever we can bring up to a community discounted rate, that should be applied overall, this is one of the main things that should be applied, because it's only fair that we treat all organisations the same way, rather than some getting peppercorn and others not. That's one issue. Another issue is, when you're looking at the conditions and how we want to monitor that going forward, I think that's going to be an ongoing case by case sort of review, as we see the conditions it's in, and how we can improve to decide what investments we can put in there. And whichever organisations are within those centres, it's up to them as well to maintain it to a standard that's acceptable. Thank you. Thank you, chair. Good evening, councillor. My question to you and David. Thank you. Obviously, my colleague here on my right asked about the community assets, as you just mentioned, and councillor Asma raised it as well. I've got a community asset, they were paying rent, for an example, maybe $10,000 some years ago. All of a sudden, that has gone up to about $30,000. So what do you have in place to help these people who are doing great work in our communities? So I would like to hear something from your side. How would you help them? Because the rent has gone over the roof. And are you going to sit with them or take consultations or bring them in here or get their views somewhere along the line? Because they are struggling to cope with the rent increase. It's gone up to about $25,000-$30,000. Thank you. Sorry, councillor. If you give me the name of the organisation, I'm more than happy to contact them with a relevant officer. But as a driving principle, it's important to note that what we are trying to do is to not charge full commercial rent for property, but certainly to make sure that community organisations are paying rent. However, if they are achieving wider corporate objectives, there's other grant supports and other investments that get given to them. It shouldn't always be seen that property is the only route to actually give support to an organisation. Because if you do that, you set up this perpetual system where everyone just thinks they get free property or cheap property. And that doesn't lead to good business planning within those organisations. I obviously can't comment about the organisation that you referred to, and I'll deal with on a case by case basis. But more than happy to pick that up with the organisation. Thank you chair. I'll come back to you on that one. Thank you. Thank you councillor. Councillor James King. Thank you. My question is that in 2014, an independent best value inspection report which was commissioned by the Ministry for Communities and Local Government, criticised the council, led under the current mayor as it was, that the council was failing to conduct its best value duties in disposing of assets. And it included four quite significant and worrying cases. So what assurances can you give, bearing in mind that there's not really much about disposals and how they'll be conducted in the presentation, what assurances can you give that the disposals will be done under best value and in an open and fair market process? Thank you for your question councillor. So I believe, which Dave touched on before, in terms of disposals, we sort of made a sort of agreement that we do not want to do disposals going forward. Unless, like Dave said, where there's an absolute necessity. But again, our main priority when it comes to assets is housing. Wherever there is an asset that we have that's not being used or cannot be utilised, the first thing the mayor and I we talk about is how do we convert that into temporary housing accommodation or whatever it is for housing facilities, for the interim use. So disposals isn't something that we're looking at to do at all. And if there is, it will be exceptional, as Dave mentioned, and we'll look at it then properly, but at the moment there isn't any plans for that. A follow up, then. Thank you for that answer. That's a very illuminating answer. I suppose then I could rephrase the question, but around conversion into housing, or even on a temporary basis, what choices can you give that that would be done in a way that, especially if assets have a community value or historic non-housing community use, that that would be taken into consideration and also dealt with in terms of our asset management programme. Because our asset management programme, as has been alluded to by others, has been for a long time rubbish. We talk about sweating assets, there are local organisations in our council owned buildings who don't hear anything or have struggled to communicate dealing with their lease, and there are plenty of other partners and operators and charities out there who are desperate to use spaces. So how are we going to make sure the asset management is going to be working to do better and get into our properties before we look at selling them off under necessity. And then similarly, how are we going to make an assessment of what is appropriate for housing and the processes that that would take to get there. Thank you Councillor. I've developed a number of asset management plans, but just as importantly it's the action plans derived from that, that are for usually the service areas whether it's education or adults or housing. And it's at that point that you weigh up the choice of do we keep it as an asset that maybe is being used for this community use, or would it be better with the current housing crisis to put that site forward for housing. So we very much would be weighing up on the business case, there might be a site maybe that had previously been used for communities that wasn't now required or was redundant, then obviously we'd want to prioritise that for a new corporate priority which is obviously housing and housing crisis. When it comes to a disposal strategy the council have alluded to the fact that we're not a disposing authority. That said we will have a disposal strategy that shows best value considerations. So any disposal that we do take will very much be driven by best value and we will look at that business case about why a disposal was the best route and then have standing orders to explain how we go through disposal through competitive process or the negotiated process if appropriate. But any asset management plan will lead to a disposal strategy. But I'll hasten to add we're not a disposing authority so it's important to have in place but not a priority because we haven't got a large programme of disposals per se. And the housing developments we do are developments that we're doing for affordable housing for ourselves so it's not like we're disposing to private sector developers. Thank you on null. Thank you everybody. My question is a simple question. Are there any risks associated with our asset? If so, have you identified assets and mitigated these? Question 1. Can I call up the second question please? Yes so risks covers a wide area. I've mentioned already assurances around health and safety and fire, obviously that's the highest priority. Those assurances. So whilst there was a risk there it's something which we're putting resource and always have put resource in to make sure that we comply and give good assurance as a corporate landlord. Other risks are around things like EPC rating so buildings have to perform to modern standards under EPC and building regs and the current health and safety, fire and safety requirements. Particularly on residential stock so although this isn't about residential the driver there is to make sure that we're investing in all our properties so they're in line with sustainability standards as well as building reg standards. And the risk there is obviously the high cost associated with that. So it's important once again that we get a good income from our assets to reinvest back into them to make sure that they comply with current regulations. Those are my risks, thank you Councillor. Thank you. First of all, I've got part one of the risk associated with like example town and home is in-house and therefore the risk must asset those stocks are within our capture but you know the Greenfield Towers, the risk associated with the cladding, have we have anything like that at all outstanding on this? Then second one is what my second question, when will the stock condition be known? Can we request to look at this as a committee when it's ready? So that's my follow up question. Thank you. Okay so apologies that I was drifting on to the housing stock, this is about commercial and operational and community stock not housing. Obviously housing colleagues will give the full explanation of where we're giving assurance around Greenfield type issues of health and safety and fire. When it comes to the quality of the operational, community and commercial stock it's the same principles, obviously not residential but it's the same principles of providing assurance through as corporate landlord that we are measuring and investigating any potential risks associated with the property. So that's a generalised answer. I'm not saying there aren't properties in our portfolio that we haven't got being surveyed and making sure that they are compliant, but overarching I can provide that assurance that we are actually on top of our risk associated with our properties outside of housing. Thank you, Councillor Amelie. Thank you. My question is about retrofit and net zero targets. So there's an acknowledgement in the report that the council owns a number of buildings of significant age with obsolete systems and what drain that is of resource. And also that the ability to get something up to standard is obviously one of the criteria for, or inability is criteria for disposal. Obviously with the acknowledgement that you've said that isn't the aim but how realistic are our ambitions on retrofit because I think we're all of the understanding that it's an unbelievably expensive difficult task to do such a thing and I don't think anybody's shying away from that. But how realistic are our aims on this because there is a danger that if we don't meet those targets then we will lose our assets because of that as time goes on. And if we are in a situation where the funding is an issue, what support would you need to see from government or even the GLA in this case to support our aims in terms of retrofit? Through the chair thank you. So obviously retrofit is very important in terms of an option to look at and it's an option that always needs to be considered when you put in a business case. So on a site by site basis your asset management plan says this is what we need in this location. You then do a business case which looks at the costs of retrofit, the cost of demolition and new build and the cost of obviously do nothing. And what you have to do is weigh up each of those. We know the cost of new build, we know the cost of refurbishment which is very high. You are probably aware that as a lobby the industry has been asking for some time that it removes VAT from refurbishment contracts as opposed to new builds because that weights towards new builds. That's the obvious one but as a local government organization in the industry we are party to those lobbying on to national government which are hopefully going to produce improvements to encourage retrofit which obviously is a more sustainable solution. So I just wanted to come back to the stock condition and I wanted to ask is it appropriate to request a Yes. So I'm trying to see what is the question, are you working on a list of our assets and the stock condition and then looking at how to, I'm assuming that this plan is leading on to a work program in which you're going to then make decisions about how you're going to use each of our assets going forward. And I'm wondering about the level of detail which realistically is possible to ask for a committee but I think some of the questions here have eluded to really wanting to get down into the detail of how we're making those decisions as a council. And having some kind of report coming back to this committee would be really helpful to understand how the plan is being put into practice and get a bit more insight on the day to day of how you're making the decisions. Thank you. Yes the stage where you get to see the details of the estimated costs, repair, refurbishment really comes in the action plans for operational, commercial and community buildings under this. We're prioritizing certain properties that we know have not had repairs for some time so they are coming first but really when the action plans for each of those sectors comes out that's when you see the extent of the investment that's needed. And that is where rent reviews that were trying to finish this year I don't think will be in a position for at least 12 months until we know the extent of the cost of the actual refurbishment and repairs that are needed by each of those sectors. Before we wrap it up, I just want to mention one more point because some of my council and colleagues members they have mentioned it already. I think the council they haven't done the rent review for quite a long time. Some of the local business and community organizations they're facing threefold, fourfold charge. So as a councilor we received a lot of complaint from the business and residents of when I did my members in Korea I was told the rent review hasn't been done for 20 years, 15 to 20 years. I don't think this is a good practice for the public authorities. If any business has done it, they will face legal action I think. So do you have any sort of plan or feature that wouldn't be done? And you have a regular rent review or how do you think these people will meet up the cost now? The rent has been changed to fourfold in some of these. Because I had an inquiry from a business they were paying £7000 rent, but now their rent review they were just £25000 and was a shock to them. Okay so as I said before, comment on the case by case but we have just been talking about the cost of repairs and looking after our state and the fact that for so many years we have not reviewed rents, so many years we have unfortunately made a neglected investment in our property. We are now having to deal with those decisions and rectify them and there are some tough choices that we do need to get a good rent in to be able to invest and recycle back into this stock to make sure that we don't end up with our stock getting worse and worse and more expensive with limited income. So this is the start of actually turning that process around to make sure we are a good corporate landlord who are investing in our property and raising reasonable rents. As I say it's a lot for the services to consider what grant support they could give to organisations if organisations are delivering good corporate priorities. It doesn't have to be through just giving subsidised rents all the time, because in turn that means you don't have the investment to actually put back into the portfolio. Thank you, thank you very much and my point is that communication gave it. That is the main problem because it should have done the laundry before every five years or four years like all the business has done, but it hasn't done anything for twenty years and that's causing the problem to local businesses. Thank you Councillor Saitama and I can thank you very much David for your time. Thank you. Are you going to come back when you have more information? Ok, thank you very much, thank you, I will move to the next presentation. So our next item in the agenda is recycling. Our first item which you will consider this evening, it was the first item actually so now we will consider the second. The recycling spot light, this item is a cabinet agenda item. We received apology from Simon Baxter, Corporate Director for Communities but can I welcome Councillor Shafi Ahmed, Chairman of the Cabinet for Environment and Climate Emergency, Aashef Ali, Director for Public substances and Richard William, Head of Corporate Services. Can Councillor Shafi Ahmed start off and Aashef and Richard feel free to add to the members comments? You will have maximum of ten minutes to provide us with a high level of overview and I will let you know when your time is finished. We will then open it up for member questions. You may start, thank you. Good afternoon Councillors, colleagues, thank you for having us at this scrutiny session. We are pleased to be able to set out details of our recycling improvement plans for 2024 and 2025. Our reduction and recycling plan sets out a detailed action to achieve a recycling rate of 23 percent by March of 2025. The plan is focused on service improvements, improving recycling facilities in states and new communication engagement and outreach plans with mosques, schools and other community groups. This will include a targeted state by state approach to incentivise recycling and reducing contamination. We look forward to discussing these plans in more details. Thank you and now we will hand over to Richard. Thank you Richard. I'm just going to add a few things from lead member Councillor Shafi. Richard and the team can go through the detailed presentation outlining our strategic plan for the recycling rate to improve. It brings me to the number of meetings that we have brought this recycling plan that the borough is in great shape at the moment currently. We are on 16 percent but we have a plan to reach 23 percent target by end of March 23 and the plan sets out which is going to elude in terms of how we are going to achieve that. One thing I just wanted to bring to your attention in this meeting is the number of challenges that we are facing and I've always said that for the councils there is this three way process. There is a council itself that has a responsibility and statutory duty in terms of how we improve but there are also other key players. One of them is the RSLs and the state management who has a great responsibility to work with the council and the third party is the resident itself. So there are numbers and challenges amongst those three so it's a triangular sort of shape in terms of a three way process that we need to work with these key players for us to work together in these challenges that we face in terms of improving recycling. We are already starting to make improvements so we have actually really looked at our service we designed in terms of operationally and there is a great strive that we've made along with the communication strategy that we've put in place. There are already a number of communications and behavioural change that we are working with schools, the mosques as the councillor has eluded to as well as some of the residents so there is already lots of work in pipeline but there are a lot more that we haven't planned to do over the next months and Richard is going to go through a bit more details on those. Ok, so I'm going to take you through some of the problems, a bit of context for London and what we are going to do about improving recycling. Let's see if this works. Ok, so what have we got to do to get to 23% recycling? Well the good news is it is possible but it just requires people to put more recycling in their recycling bins and bags. You know that might sound simple, you might say to yourself, why is it so hard? But the reality is it's complex because it involves a change in people's behaviour. Can you see that all right on the screen? So when you look at this in the context of London, this graph is showing recycling performance for London, on the left you can see us as the worst performing authority in London for recycling last year. On the right you can sort of see us around taking into consideration garden waste. Now it's quite interesting when you take away the significant impact that garden waste and food waste makes to recycling which for some authorities with lots of houses and gardens is a significant contribution. You can see on the right hand side that most local authorities in London are struggling to actually get recycling levels for dry recycling above 23%. When you look at that, the majority of London borrowers are struggling to improve dry recycling rates and when you look at that in a bit more detail, it is possible... This slide shows information on the composition of a typical recycling bin in flats and so studies for London show that it's possible to get significant amounts of recycling out of a recycling bin. But the problem is that whilst good recycling is possible, it's not if the majority of people are putting more recycling in their residual bin. And this data shows that for London, and it's a particular issue for Tower Hamlets, one of the biggest challenges we've got is that there's over half of recyclable waste going in people's residual bins. And when you look at that, it's a behaviour change problem, so a lot of the work that we're looking at is about what do we do to tackle this behaviour change problem. So when you ask people about recycling in the boa, they say it's just not convenient to separate waste from recycling, it's less convenient for people living in flats. Well, we know about this, but it's really about what we're going to do about it and what we're trying to do is we're trying to create the right conditions for behaviour change. We've looked at this in a lot of detail in terms of improving capability for people, opportunity and motivation. And there's been further work done, ReLondon did some work, this is probably not an easy slide to see in detail, but this is really just to show that work was done to look at those recycling levels across the whole country and map it to census data. And it's understood that there are problems impacting recycling. So levels of deprivation… And what this slide is showing is that in London, there are issues like deprivation, high levels of people in rented accommodation, we've got a relatively young population, all of these things have an impact on generating high levels of recycling. Particularly for town hamlets, the high percentage of flats and the population growth, we've had significantly more population growth, but whilst we understand these things, we can't afford to let these things stop us from making a change and for us to take a different approach. So there are, when you look at this slide, it's trying to highlight that there are hundreds of things that impact on recycling, good or bad, but not all of these things are equal in terms of impact and we are focused on those things that can have the biggest impact on driving recycling improvements. Within the RRP, it sets out 20, our top 20 things that are going to help deliver change, to help people waste less, reuse and recycle more, and that's set out in the report, you've seen that in your packs. Richard, you have one more minute. Okay, and there's three areas of focus. There's focus on improving infrastructure, improving tonnage and driving behaviour change, and I'll skip ahead. I feel as though one of the most significant things in this borough is the high population density and the fact that we've got so many people living in our communities is a route to driving collaborative behaviour change and we are looking to target actions in areas of the borough to test new approaches. We're looking at three areas, particularly initially, to try and drive a new change in a way we try and motivate the community, get community leverage and community involvement, and that includes looking at incentives, we're working with mosques, we're looking to work with schools, and we're looking to work with all community groups that want to help. So we've a call to action to look at creating more champions to help with this approach, and all of our work at the moment is focused on getting this leverage from the community, and we will be carrying on with our plans to test that approach in these target areas, and we're looking to make sure that we can create a buzz of interest particularly in the BAME media on a regular basis to talk about what we're doing, our plans, and how that's going to make a difference, and we're looking to make sure, as well, that we start delivering more single-use access to people that need them, because that's a significant area for improvement, and we have a whole range of planned activities set out in the report, and that's it in a nutshell. Any questions? Happy to answer. Thank you. Thank you Councilor Shafia, Madam Shafia, and Richard for providing the overview. Do members have any questions? Just one minute, let me write down. James, you were asking us, were you? Thank you. Just give me a minute, please. I'm asking you. I will give you last, because it's your party for this, so you will have the last say. When I started as a counselor, six years ago now, the recycling rate was in the low 20s, and now, six years later, it's decreased, and we're still sort of scrabbling around, trying to think of ways to increase it. Neighbouring Newham, which was worse than us six years ago, is now ahead of us, and has got a recycling rate close to our target, and they've not only employed communication methods, but increased bin collections, investment in infrastructure, which we are doing, and more enforcement, and reading and looking at the report, I think it's mainly focusing on communications, which can only ever be like one strand of what we want to do to tackle this particular issue. So, with that in mind, what is being done? Are there any plans to introduce further bin collections? Because I live on an estate, and I think the worst culprit for cross-contamination is that the recycling and the non-recyclable waste is next to each other. It often overflows, and gets contaminated with each other, especially if one is empty, then people will contaminate to resist putting it on the floor. What enforcement is being considered, if any, and similarly, what metrics are being used to measure the come success? Because it's all well and good saying we've gone out and said these things, but we want to hear, you know, when you do a communications campaign in most sectors, you want to not only measure what you do, but measure the feedback that we get. Has there been any feedback and measurable outcomes to the communications that have been done? I think that's enough questions. So, Richard, are you going to answer? I can answer that. So, it's interesting, you talk about Newham, you know, we're aware of the differences. I mean, probably for Townhamlets, we've had significantly more property growth than any London buy at that, and whilst we've looked to improve infrastructure, you know, we've seen waste growth increase, more people working and living at home, particularly in recent years, so it's fair to say that infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth in the population. But we are, you know, when you look at 10 rounds, you know, we've got rounds that have got capacity to collect more recycling, so, you know, we will be looking at optimising routes and investing in collections, but actually our big investment at the moment is making sure there's enough bins for the people, you know, our focus is on a bang on service, enough bins for the people and good communication. But on the enforcement, it is our plan to target landlords who are not taking responsibility for managing waste as they should, and we have said that we will look to use the full regulatory powers of this authority to tackle rogue landlords, but what we've got coming later in the year is a policy that sets out what we will deliver as a service and what is expected from others in terms of residents and landlords, and we're looking to get a sign up to sort of a voluntary code of practice of standards for landlords in particular. But at the end of that process, we've looked to take action where things like persistent contamination get in the way, and, you know, we do have powers to enforce poor waste management practice, and often poor waste management practice gets in the way of our recycling, so it is an issue that we do intend to target with our enforcement resources. Can I just add, in terms of the service design, Councillor, we have actually made commercial and recycling routes separation, so there are already sort of in terms of route implementation that's already been carried out. You've touched on the communication. Communication, you're right, is just only one strand of three different areas that we've mentioned. So the route operation is done, but there is a lot more work that we need to do with the RSL and the residents themselves. When I was in the Walkabout in Lincoln State a couple of days ago, and a few other states, we have a number of bins in the states, in the high-rise blocks, but to my surprise, when you actually see directly, in terms of the recycling bin, there's normal black bins and sort of household waste is full of it. That's the biggest challenge for us. When the bins are so accessible for people to just throw in normal rubbish, the whole bin with the recycling, unfortunately, regrettably, is contaminated, and that would directly go to waste, residual waste, instead of recycling, and that's the biggest challenge for us. So we do really need to, in terms of strategising it, in terms of comms, it's a big work we're asked to do with the residents and the RSL. So the hard work goes in, in terms of people giving them the bags, but they actually use it for the wrong reason and they put it in the wrong bag, and then the whole recycling gets wasted, and we can actually recycle that. So that's a big, big, big challenge for us, and this is what we try to actually turn around. Sorry, Councillor King, of course. On measures, we are looking to make sure that we can measure the impact of these interventions. So we're currently measuring recycling levels by crew. We've identified on the back of that our worst performing areas, and the estates that we're targeting are some of the lowest performing areas, and we're looking to trial these new tactics of community engagement and change, particularly looking to see if we can influence people for our schools, mosques, incentives. But we're very keen to make sure that we can measure the impact in the bin store and we're putting mechanisms in place to be able to show that interventions are actually having the right result. I come back just with a request for the committee to put some things into the action log. Do you have a follow-up question? I think there's a request for the action log, Chair. Oh, thank you. I've got an echo, that's nice. There's a request for the action log. As a follow-up, it would be nice if the cabinet member wanted to shed light on any of the points I've made, particularly if it was a priority to increase the amount of collections in the future. But I think we've noted there's a £5 million investment of which £2 million is infrastructure, so I'd like more of a detailed breakdown of what has been spent on infrastructure and where, bearing in mind that still half of that is to be spent within the timeline, and a breakdown of what has been spent on communications, because I can't believe that the rest of the funding that's been allocated to this is purely in communications, so I want to know what exactly has been gone into communications and where and on who it's been spent on, in terms of what sub contracts are we putting out and that sort of thing, because it's a big old… Yeah, I think a lot of advertising agencies would kill for a large communication contract, so we seem to be… Thank you Councillor Jims, I will just ask Daniel to include your election log in next awareness meeting in September. Councillor S 1977 Thank you, Chair. We will have similar questions, because especially those living in the borough are victims of the same thing. My question is, apart from, you mentioned several times, we're working with the most local schools and other communities, apart from working with those organisations, what councils personal commitment to improve the service, apart from just going to the community? I know it's a good idea to educate schools, children, etc., but what we are doing as a council, as an individual? Yeah, well there's quite a lot of things in the plan, but some of the most significant things are the flats recycling improvement projects. So you know as a council we have identified that there's lots of flats in the borough that don't have adequate recycling bins, and we've got a programme to spend two million pounds, or we would have spent just over two million pounds, in increasing the quality of those bin storage areas, extra bins, signage. We've got officers on the ground working with the majority of our registered social landlords, in a programme of work, to survey sites, identify where bin storage areas are not good enough, and put improvements in place, so that's ongoing. We've a team of officers on the ground that are out there in the community trying to encourage the right level of behaviour and activity, and we've got our frontline teams who are delivering frontline services, and there's a big focus on improving the quality of frontline service delivery, and improving the level of engagement from frontline staff. We've got 20,000 properties that we now manage as a housing provider, and so we're working with colleagues from town, it's what was Town is Housing, to make sure that we've got good working relationships with our caretaking staff, we're joined up on the way bins and recycling bins have been managed, and we're trying to encourage that type of activity with all of the other RSLs, so some of the major ones like Poplar Harker. So we're working with lots of organisations, but, you know, as well as community leverage, collaboration is massive for us, like who are these groups in the community that we can work with to get leverage, and we're very keen to understand views of scrutiny of the members as to how they can support that collaborative working, because there's probably many groups, people like the Women's Environment Network, so we have a relatively small team, but we're looking to how do we lever more community involvement through our officers, so we're taking a different approach to work smarter to identify those groups and try and lever, but our core focus is on service design, delivery, enough bins for the people, good communications. Thank you. My follow-up question would be, as your colleague just mentioned, and I know that for just the fact that we are disposing a lot of recycle with the general staff, with the food, mixing together, and what Council is doing to minimise those issues and to sort of provide residents that they could easily, I mean, I know some Council eyewitnesses they do some difficult work, but easiest way that people can separate the bins, because mostly what I believe is, I don't have a specific passing date, but most of it is recycle, household, dispose. So just thank you, if I can. One of the biggest things that we need to do is engagement with our residents, and one of the things we did two weeks ago was, many of these will come up within the summer holidays, the TRAs and the local estates where we're going to have events, and our recycling team will be there to engage with the residents, and recently we had one in the boundary estate I think two weekends ago, where we engaged with residents to educate them and to give them examples of what is recycle, working with the younger children, younger families, because the stats show that 18 to 34 year olds, the younger population, are not recycling. We need to work on that cohort of people to make sure that we are driving that message across. I don't know if colleagues have realised, as coming into the town hall today, we have new bins along Whitechapel Road, and where they are solar powered belly bins that have been put across the whole borough. Today is the first day where we've installed them in Whitechapel, and the scheme will continue to continue. So we have more information, once the bins are full, they will give a signal to the office where they can come and empty out those bins. This is one of the ways we are trying to engage, and they have got advertisements on them to keep Tower Hamlets clean, to keep Whitechapel clean, Roman Road etc. Thank you. Cem, just one more question here please. Later, if I've got time. I think Councillor, Ask Meyslam andID, so of the place of your time. Thank you. We swapped amongst ourselves. So I just want to help the committee, I think it's helpful to understand that there is, it's been a struggle, it's been a struggle for years, but the struggle that we had prior to 2022 was, like Councillor King said, we were stuck between the early twenties, our recycling rate. So what's happened between that and where we are now, which is a drop of about 6% if I'm not mistaken, around that. That 6% is actually equivalent to the operational failures that we are having. So I think it's difficult for us as a committee to sit here and not have operational representation here. I think Simon Baxter should have been here and Ashraf, I know there's been a bit of a destruction, it's a bit unfair to put this all on you, but actually Simon Baxter should have been here, we should have had head of service for the depot, the service to come here so we can have that wholesome conversation. Because actually, I think it's really unfair for us to put our offices in this position where we're talking about these rates and there's so many factors that have impacted it to get it here. So let's start thinking as a committee about being smart is, if we really want to deep dig and you want answers and you want solutions and you want to support the offices and vice versa, then we've got to start making sure in these meetings we're actually doing the right thing and making sure the right people are here to answer the questions that we need. Simon Baxter, when he was first in the interim job, I asked him lots of questions and I did hold his feet to fire and I held the cabinet member at the time his feet to fire whenever he does turn up, that was very rare, but the thing is we do need to be able to keep that going because I feel like every time this comes back to the committee we're back to the start, we're talking about basics. I have no doubt our offices absolutely have the knowledge of what the problems are and they've spoken about it, I have full faith in that, but operations actually need to back that up with the knowledge you have and let's be honest about the fact that in the last two years there's been political reasons why there's been delays. Our flat's recycling programme, there's a delay. We're talking about smart bins, smart bins were already introduced, then there was a delay in the rolling out and now you're talking about it again. So I don't want to pretend like I've got amnesia, let's talk about the knowledge and the work this council has done and let's try and get us back on track and the way to do that is actually be honest about the truth. So the things that I'm talking about is green waste and the recycling. Operationally, because they miss our collections, your recycling bin is at the top, residence bin is at the top and then you miss it, it means it goes through another week where they can't fill that bin in. Where do you think that recycling goes? It goes into the general waste. So these are operational matters that I'm talking about that really needs to catch up with the knowledge that you guys have. Contamination, we know it needs community engagement but actually even with the contamination that we had, we were at 21%, so you can't say contamination is the reason why it's now at 14 and a half or 15%, you can't say that because it's actually operationally contamination. When you don't pick up a bin, contamination is another reason. If you leave it, you know that evidence shows that, so let's talk about that. How we report, how quick are we responding to recycling. You talk about green waste, well I have a garden, my green waste doesn't get picked up, my neighbours do not put their green waste out any more, they've stopped. It's disengaged residence. It's going to your collection, Councillor, please. It's really important points. Give me enough time, please. I'll be really quick now. So green waste, yes, we don't have a lot of green spaces and there's not a lot of green waste, but the ones that we have, they're not being collected. And then lastly, staff also are still making these mistakes. When they miss it, they come back to pick recycling, they mix it with general waste. So it's not just residents, it's also our operationally, we are making those mistakes. And I just want to be really honest about that so we can tackle this issue. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Islam. We have got right officers obviously here. Richard is the head of the service, myself and Fiona is also the group manager for the recycling team. So I think the right people are here. Simon's on leave, so obviously unable to attend on this. [inaudible] Let me answer some of these statistics figures, obviously they report to me directly, myself, and like I said, Richard is one of the head of services. In terms of collection, from the five million collection that we do yearly, we actually have a 96.6% collection rate, so our rate is actually really good. That 0.4%, that's missed collection for a number of reasons, and I think we have actually in the report and various meetings has reported in terms of various operational issues. So in terms of missed collection, there's a misconception about what is a missed collection. There are a number of recent issues in terms of why it's been reported as missed collection, but when we are actually operating operationally, we've alluded, we have made significant changes to route and how we operate. Previously there was shift in terms of operation, we actually operate in now 24-hour service, so when residents actually report missed collection, they actually collect it within 24 hours. So there are subtle and significant changes that have been made operationally, as also alluded in terms of route, how the recycling and waste is collected, we have actually separated that, whereas before it was collected together. So now there's a dedicated recycling team, so there's an ongoing discussion with the crews who actually collect the recycling rate, as well as a separate team who collect the household waste. So there are separations in terms of operationally. So we have actually made significant strides. If you haven't come across in the report, apologies, we will actually look at that, but these changes, and we are confident that those changes operationally that's been made, along with other plans that's been put in place, that we will actually see significant improvement and achieve to 23% target by March.

• Yeah, just to say, Councillor, I'm 20 years Waste Management and a lot at Frontline Operations, but I'm working very closely, as is Fiona, with John Wheatley at the current head of operations, and it is true that we have had issues that have impacted significantly on performance. You can see that when we had the strike, figures dropped off, we had significant issues with our underground refuge service. That had an impact on figures, and we are very aware of those operational issues, the impact of non-delivery on performance. But we're committed through this plan. When we talk about service improvement and service quality, that's the focus we've got weekly with John and the Frontline team to improve operational Frontline service delivery, because we won't achieve the target if we're missing people's bins. The things you talk about in terms of missed organic collections have happened, because of staff shortages, vehicle shortages, and we're trying to make sure that that is not happening going forward. John has got a very good and improved relationship with the Frontline and the unions. He would tell you that himself, he was here, but we've got weekly meetings with him to get focused on those things that need to improve, and we're monitoring the impact of those things. Just to add to the pace we are going to, Councillor, we will see very good questions on some of the changes. Over the last few years, in terms of the housing developments are growing. Service hasn't been kept up with it, so we have actually taken in terms of consideration of the pace of the development, the housing that's growing, the population that's growing, we have actually factored that into our route optimization, and hopefully that will be embedded over the coming months. Like Richard said, with the operation team and Richard's strategy team who are doing the recycling, it's been really looked at, and we re-optimized the route to take into account of the growth of the population that's going and the recycling that we need to actually collect. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Asobišan. Can I ask Halima Islam, please? Thank you, Chair. So, we understand that the food contamination is a big issue here. What is the Council doing about the food waste bins? So, if you can kind of explain a bit more around that. And the other was that I wanted to kind of touch on what James was talking about earlier, about the comm side of things. Have the Council considered doing things like visual posters, because not everyone can read? And sometimes I find that in engagement, when you see something visually as to what can be put into what and posted through, physically posted through every door, or also, again, around the schools and all these other places that you're engaging with, have you considered doing these sort of things? Thank you. Thank you, Councillor. If I can come back on your point about what's happening with food waste. So, we've set up a working group now to start preparing our plans for rolling out food waste service, borough wide. This is going to be a big, new service change for the Council, and it is going to take a little bit of planning before we can start implementing. But we are now in those early stages of preparing for that. And we've received funding from government to help towards the capital cost of implementing this new service. In the meantime, we're still looking to expand the number of pilots that we're running at blocks of flats so we can continue our learning while we're preparing that borough wide roll out plan. Later on this year, hopefully just the other side of the summer holidays, what we're also looking to do is to re-promote the low-rise food waste collection service. We are aware that a number, a good number of residents have stopped putting out food waste and they have access to the service, so there's going to be a big push from us in the coming weeks to get people to re-engage. Likewise with the schools, we've already been out to survey a good number of the schools in the borough who, again, had stopped separating their food waste for separate collection. We've already put a good number of those schools back onto the service, and once the summer holidays come to an end, there'll be another tranche of schools that will have new food waste bins delivered to them. So we're working very hard to make sure that in the coming couple of years, we will have a borough-wide food waste collection service.
• Yeah. I'm just on comms, Councillor. We are currently looking to review all of our comms assets. So this is a cross-section of materials from our Let's Rethink It campaign, but we're looking at reviewing all of these, and we will make changes, and it'd be good to get people's feedback on whether or not they think they can improve further, but that's a work in progress to review these and improve them.
• Can I just say... - Do you want to follow up?
• Yeah, sure. So in terms of--so I work in the borough of Westminster, and the food waste works amazing. I've been on estates, and we have communal bins. Now, you know, in terms of-- so this council is rolling out bins for properties. Is that correct? Is that the plan?
• Yes. The four flats, the service is going to be based on communal food bins, and each household having its own kitchen caddy.
• Thank you. I just wanted to mention about the comms. Also, we're trying to use multilingual language. We're assuming we're going to have some with the BAME media. We're trying to do a couple of adverts and a couple of shorts to be introduced in Seleti and Bangla language so that we can engage with communities who are bilingual in making sure that the message goes across. The message goes across contamination. This is one of the biggest things that-- so, for example, if somebody has a plastic food item, and they rinse it, and they put it in a recycle, it's recycled. But if they don't rinse it, then it becomes contaminated. So that's where, when they go to the depot, it becomes, you know, you have to separate it out. So it just takes a longer time. We need to just change people's habits, and that's what we're working on at the moment. Thank you. I'd like to encourage everyone to read briefly, because I've got so many cameras and want to ask questions as well. I've got your name down, Councillor. So I'll give you a chance. Just give me a minute. Councillor Badruchadro. Thank you, Chair. Thank you to the lead member and the officers for your updates. How effective have the communication campaigns and community engagement, as you said earlier, efforts in improving recycling behaviours and what are you using, what sort of metrics or whatever, to evaluate the success of this story? And one more thing I'd like to highlight. You keep saying... I've heard it before in a lot of the committees I sit on. You're engaging with schools and mosques. You never mention churches, gurdwaras, synagogues, which is hard to take in some time. Thank you. I mean, in terms of how we're measuring the success, we're looking at collected tonnage. We basically need to get double what we're collecting at the moment, so we're measuring success at the bin store. In terms of reach of comms, we are looking to... Can you mute your computer, please? Yes, so we are measuring tonnage captured weekly. We're trying to look at how we can measure tonnage by extent by state. We've got other measures, input measures, so things like number of bins delivered. We'll be looking at number of sacks delivered as a measure. Some of these, what we call input measures, that are high impact, we're looking to be able to understand that we're hitting those targets, so number of messages out in the community. We're looking to work with comms to make sure we can show more information on our reach through communication messages on the website, that sort of thing. So it is an area we're trying to focus more on being able to show that these things are impacting. Just on the mosques, obviously, we talk about faith in the environment, but we're working with the Interfaith Forum, so as officers, we're trying to engage with all faith groups, community groups, not just mosques, all faith groups, it's just, you know, there's been quite a focus on mosques. We had the event with the East London Mosque recently, 6,000 people turned up, I think that's great, but what have you got to do to make sure that every one of those 6,000 people is putting their recycling in the bin? So we're looking to introduce a system where we can get pledges made and people can demonstrate that they've actually followed up on their pledge, so we're looking to put in place this infrastructure to be able to effectively track whether a pledge is being made and delivered and look at how we might incentivise that. That's something we're working on just now and we'll be able to show pledges versus actual actions, people showing that they've taken photographs and they're recycling, that sort of thing. So it's a bit of a work in progress to try and improve the metrics. Thank you. Sorry. You want one follow? Just a quick one. Sorry. Thank you. As I said earlier, obviously you're working with multi-faith groups, but it's always the school and the mosque. We don't see any other faith group on the website of the pages we look into. But yes, I think there's a shortage of bin bags, recycling bags. I think I had someone going to the Idea Store, Poplar, and there was no bins to - sorry - recycle to have. And if - sorry, Chair - if I could get that noted, that churches, Goduaras, and other faith groups are highlighted regarding this, I'd be grateful. Thank you. Recycling? Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yes, engagement. Yes, very important. Engagement. Yes. Thank you. That's noted, Councillor. In regards to the recycling bags, they are available through the Idea Stores. I know, we know there's been a number of months ago, there's been challenges in terms of people accessing on that, so we've improved with that with the Idea Stores. We've worked very closely with the Idea Store managers, so people, residents who go to Idea Store get that, so they should have availability. From August, we're also reintroducing distribution to residential households. So again, it was paused for some time, but we can actually distribute to houses recycling bags, single recycling bags, because over the period of time, for whatever reason, prior to my time, it was stopped, halted, in terms of recycling bags, but having feedback through various events that we've heard over the last few months, there was an appetite people would actually recycle by having recycling bags. And we know there's been some challenges in terms of misusing those bags as well, but I think with having more bags available, people will actually use, so there's been a lot of positive feedback, so based on the feedback that we've had, we're actually, from August, reintroducing to the households, posting the recycling bags, Thank you, very milly. Thank you. I just want to actually just reiterate that point, because that's exactly what I was going to say, is that we talked about this two weeks ago, that it is absolutely awful and good to run a comms campaign, but if you don't have bags to recycle, you're not going to get anywhere. My residents are saying the same, that they can't get hold of them either, and it's just, surely that's a no-brainer, that if they don't have the bags, they're not going to do it, and it's the same with the missed collections, their bin is full, they can't recycle. I think unless you're getting the basics right, it is completely pointless to spend five million pounds at a comms campaign, to be very honest with you, I think that's a waste of money. But my question is an operational question, it's about all of this stuff on route optimisation, and team engagement, etc. You mentioned the strike, I think you mentioned the unions as well, how can you assure us that teams, crews, staff, whatever are being brought on this journey, because they should never have been put in a position where they were forced to take industrial action, and residents should never have been put in a position like the one that they were, you know, the front page of the Evening Standard piled high outside this town hall, it was an utter disgrace, and it was a disgrace that they were forced to take that action, so how can you give us an assurance that they've been brought on this journey with all these changes that you're planning to make? Thank you. We have a regular meeting with the union, monthly meetings, and in the depot, and the full wider teams, they're fully on board, they've done a lot of listening exercise over the several months, in terms of some of the plans that come through, it was actually having a dialogue and discussion with the union, so they're really fully on board. I can't speak what happened in the strike last year, what's happened in the past, but I think that's more to do with operational and other aspects of it as opposed to recycling, but fully on board on the recycling plan that we have in place, we've fully segregated the residual waste collection and recycling collection, there's a different dedicated team, and we're constantly taking feedback from the routes themselves, the issues they face, and how we can actually improve their collection, in terms of route as well, so there's constant dialogue and discussion with the team at the depot. And there's obviously this new head of service entry there, and a few other managers have been changed in the depot to support the crew at the same time. Councilor Abdur-Mannan. Thank you chair, finally I've got a chance. I've got a few questions from the lead members, I know you've been new to the position, but I've got a few questions regarding updates on URS, please it would be nice to hear that, because how long is the principle stream? I'm talking on behalf of the Bromley North, Bromley South, Llanbury, Lansbury, and Marlene, they are very much a URS system, and I'm consistently hearing that the bin collectors constantly gain breakdown, but that's an excuse, one after another, when are we getting new ones, so make sure the bin doesn't get missed out. Some are consistently the overflowing, you know, picking it up. And you mentioned 96% collection, I very much doubt that if you ask, if the survey in those four areas, they probably say 50%. The reality is not reflect your survey, so can I have some concrete answer on this please? Appreciate. I can update on the situation with the URS vehicles, so obviously we have problems with the URS fleet, we've got new vehicles are being procured, but operationally there's been a lot of work done to make sure that the impact of those vehicles going out of service is minimised, we've done more work to train operators on the use of the cranes, we've identified sites that are particularly difficult for those cranes to operate with, so we've got cranes that are lifting bins quite long distances, but they say that it's still an area of concern, but a lot of action has been taken to sort of reduce the impact, I think the impact has been reduced through the work that John Wheatley and his team have done, to double shift, triple shift those vehicles where necessary, train extra staff, and to put in measures to collect recycling in other ways and waste in other ways using other vehicles, but it is a major priority whilst we're looking to get these new vehicles purchased, and it's probably the one thing every day that we look to make sure we understand is are those vehicles running, what have we got to do to be proactive to keep them on the road and reduce the chance of them breaking down. Just on the URS, I know you probably are eager to know our timeline, they are unique vehicles, they are bespoke, they need to be actually, and there's only limited, in fact really one company in the country that actually makes them, that's Dennis Eagle company, so we're actually going through, like Richard said, through procurement process and procurement has started, it takes about 12 months to actually build, bespoke, to make them, so we are actually looking at how we can accelerate that timeline, and then we've got four in place, four already we have, but obviously not four operate at the same time, a couple of them are old dated, so they're not fully functional, but we have got within the next 12 months we'll see four new vehicles cancelled. I just wanted to come back to your question in regards to the 99.60 collection, there's about 4 million collections done in one year, even when I went into this role and I thought 99, it didn't make sense, but I was in a meeting this morning even, and we talked about that, and we are looking at areas that are missed, the areas that are one of the reasons why consistently being missed, yesterday we had a watchable safety meeting, residence meeting, and one of the buildings that were being missed was on a regular occasion, so the idea is why is it being missed, we need to go back to the cause of why it's happening, so going into a deep dive it came out that some of the bins that were holding onto the clip couldn't clip, so when it was going on or falling off, so there's things like that, little things like that, the other one was on Poplar High Street, they couldn't collect it because the parking of a vehicle was parked in such a way that the bins wouldn't be able to, so there's reasons for those missed collections, so what we're trying to do is identify them, fix them and then move on, rather than just miss a collection and continuously become a cycle where every day or every week we have to pick up from there, so we're trying to make those small improvements. Councillor, can you be brief, please? Thank you. Brief, Councillor, please. The fact is the east of the borough is a high population, and the west of the borough, and if you look at those four states I mentioned, they mainly are 80% under URS systems, so if you are saying they are picking up, fine, but it's a four vehicles, I know there's only one operational, one is half broken leg and two is discontinuous fit space, so basically out of four URS you have only one operation. For that reason, six months ago, the West Simon gave this statement on the awareness, so if you have more than one vehicle up and running, which is maybe one and a half, you go two or three obstacles, so you go equalling for more. Mark the fact is when they go in collection, are the officers or are we sending somebody behind to make sure they're doing collection or not, or is it just somebody sitting in the office typing computers or the collection's done or not? Because I can see, we as a Councillor practically see that the east of the borough is misleading the Councillors, misleading the Councillors by the officers and people in charge that collection is not happening on time, and this is not first time it's happening, it's three times or four times in the awareness race, and this is both for Asma and myself, Chair, His Ward, Councillor Butler Ward as well. We are, as a Councillor, we get stigmatised from the resident and I'm sure that you can make it in place to make sure you can ease that problem. Thank you, Chair. Can you briefly consider, please? Yes, obviously I sympathise with the residents, I understand what the situation is. Myself, yourself, you called me a couple of times where I made sure that those collections were done. I think we were sold a dream of having underground wastage many years ago, and we bought into that dream, but unfortunately we didn't realise the consequences of if the vehicle breaks down, what we're going to do, and if we weren't going on with the viola back in the days, what is our contingency? And I think that's where we undermined ourselves in making sure that the contingency wasn't there. So we have bought into a broken system and we're trying to fix that, and hopefully the new vehicles will be the answer to this problem, but we are there slowly but surely we will be there. That's all I can assure you. Thank you. Chancellor Aminali. Thank you, Chair. I won't be long because many of the questions I wanted to ask have already been asked, but I just wanted to ask a little bit if I could speak a little bit around behaviour change. I think we did mention earlier – give me a second, sorry. I'll just turn this forward. We can't hear you, I think you muted yourself. Sorry, I've been muted myself, yeah. No, I just wanted to talk about behaviour change. The reason is because obviously, I'm not going to go into too much detail, but people's behaviour is very important and I still don't feel there's a grip on how the councils try to change people's behaviour, and that goes back to the communication. So my question is, in terms of communication and behaviour change, what has the council done to not just go through traditional communication channels to try and change people's behaviour, but what are they doing to look at wider communication channels like TikTok, like Instagram, these ones? Because the traditional way we're doing it means we only concentrate, as Bajal said, on traditional ways of doing things through the mosque or through community groups, but there are wider groups who may not be reached. That's the first thing. And then secondly, what we're also doing about behaviour change, about the staff and the actual bin people and the recycling bin men, their actual behaviour, if they're missing, as has already been highlighted, certain estates or certain blocks, what are we doing to train them properly? What behaviour change do we need to see on them as well from their behaviour? Because obviously, it seems to be a bit of a cultural thing here that's quite difficult to move. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Ali. I'm glad you've mentioned some of the media outlets that we're talking. We're actually trying to engage with Youth Council and they actually have a TikTok page which we are trying to hopefully create something together with the Youth Council to engage the younger generation and to send our message across through TikTok and through other social media, Instagram, et cetera, to generate that younger cohort of people to actually let's think about recycling and let's think about to help that behavioural change. Richard, if you want to add something? Yeah, we're looking to bring on board this summer school leavers, if any apply to our adverts, but we're hoping to use those school leavers or students to get out in the community and help test those channels and look at what we can do. So here's very much the case that I'm in my 50s, I like TikTok, I'd love to have videos that go viral, but you've just got to get people of the right generation helping produce that content. So there is a big focus on that from our COMS colleagues and we recognise it's an area that we want to see more vials, we want to see more videos going viral about interesting things, so yeah, that is something that we're working on as part of our revised communication campaign. Thank you and if I may just add, Councillor, you made a very good point about what we are doing ourselves as an organisation, so myself and some of my team are starting to work much more closely now with our internal COMS team to look at how we can leverage better recycling through the staff in the council, because a lot of the staff that work for the council also live in the borough, so they are a key stakeholder group for us, so we are working on that. And you mentioned also again about the crews, my team are now working very closely with John Wheatley and the operations team to provide them with regular information so that they can see progress and that we can help them to better understand how important what they do is in terms of us getting residents to change their behaviour, so we are looking at that holistic way of getting all of the operational crew on board and understanding our challenges and how they can help us overcome those challenges. Thank you. Just on the training, so John Wheatley at the moment has put in place plans to directly train staff on new standards or old standards that need reminding on, so we recently did exercises to ensure that all staff understand our cleansing standards, but John is looking to basically really re-engage his team on the basic standards. We are doing a piece of work to actually publish our standards, so we will have a document that says this is the standard for cleansing waste, people can hold us to account. As part that would be doing more training to make sure that people understand those standards and that's happening and it's working well on cleansing and I think it's going to work well on recycling and waste in terms of better understanding and training. Thank you. Councillor, you've touched on a quite important element in terms of behaviour which are a cultural element of it and I think that's really really important that we actually look at why that sort of piece, how we actually tackle that. Can you be very brief, we will have to move on? One of the ways is through the school engagement, through working with people within the school, reaching out to the parents and how we can actually do the whole sort of family-oriented issue. I think that's a piece of work and we opened up to any suggestions and ideas how we can do further work on that, making it a cultural change. So it's a really important piece of work. Thank you. Finally, the final question goes to Natalie Bianca. Thank you Natalie, very briefly. Chair, I wasn't allowed to have a follow up question, everyone else did. We have a follow up question. All right, I'll give you... Can you be very brief, please? Really, really briefly, I will be. Thank you panel, that's really good answers that you gave me. That's really good. One thing I just wondered, when people walk around the borough and then we see some of the rubbish that's around our borough that isn't being collected properly, be they businesses or whatever, do you think then that's building any confidence in our residents to then want to do recycling in their own blocks? What I'm trying to say is don't you think it's a whole picture that we need to really clean up as well, if we want our business to go out there and learn about recycling, recycle properly, then we need to give them a borough that they should be proud of, not walking around and seeing how rubbish is piling up. And I think that's a piece of work that you really need to look at, because if I'm seeing my street up the road, and all these streets full of rubbish, why then should I take pride in my block and my recycling? Mary, can you answer it very briefly please? It's a fair comment. I'd say that we're looking at those areas of hot spots problems. I'm a waste manager, so for me it's all about helping people manage their waste less, reuse and recycle more, and also look after their area. So it is about the total package for me. And actually when you look at issues around fly tipping and other problems, you often got other things that need to be dealt with. So as a service, we're hitting areas to try and deal with a total problem, the root causes, and that's what we're trying to do, where we look at data to try and identify these hot spots. We listen to people, and we say to people with the 'Find It, Fix It', you tell us what the problem is, and we'll fix it within 24 hours, and we're trying to see where those hot spots and repeating issues are. And we need more people to tell us where there's a problem, because our commitment is to fix it within 24 hours, and we're looking to get better at that, and I think that people will see that their local area is improving. But we also need to make sure that other people are responsible for those fly tips that you see on lots of estates that are not always our problem, and getting dealt with by the landlords responsible. So that's also an issue, and that clouds people's view of what the council will do. It's not always our responsibility, but I'd say we are very proactive at dealing with things, even though they're not our responsibility. But we are trying to deliver a cleaner borough, and a greener borough for everybody, everywhere, all the time, clean within 24 hours. Thank you Richard. Finally, finally I came to you. Okay, great. So I have a few questions. How many people? We'll try and get through them quickly. I hope there'll just be yes or no questions, some of them at least, there was something in the report about dog poo, dog mess being an issue in parks. I know that dog mess bins, specific dog mess bins, have been discontinued. Is it time to bring them back? What we're looking at at the moment actually is to implement separate recycling bins in parks, and so we're about to launch a pilot of that process. Yes, it is true that dog poo being put in the general litter bins has become an issue, and so I think as an alternative to going back to dog poo, having recycling on-the-go bins in parks. Fantastic, thank you. So the next question is around the flats recycling project, which is maybe a bit more complex. I know that progress, I'm not sure what the progress is on, we've had a bit of progress in the reports about how well we're doing at getting around to look at all of the flats recycling, but there's no progress reports on how many signs have been implemented, how many improvements have been implemented into the bin areas, so I wonder if we could maybe, if you don't have a quick answer on how we're progressing on that, whether we could put it into a future action plan to look at that progress over the coming 12 months. Yeah, we've got a dashboard we can share that shows progress, where we've been, where we've got to go, so we've got our data to share. OK, brilliant, brilliant. OK, so it'll be, maybe it can be... That data, dashboard data, would you say? Fantastic. So, another hopefully quick question on the recycling sacks. There are quite a few street level properties in the borough that don't have wheelie bins, and the new recycling sack distribution system assumes that street level properties have wheelie bins. Are you ready for a significant increase in requests for wheelie bins, or a lot of confusion with residents not knowing how to put their recycling onto the street? I think we're gearing up for that. We know at the moment, when we deliver bags, if they've got a bin, we won't deliver them sacks, we've got a bin, but our focus is to get enough bins out, enough bags out there where they're needed, so we will be gearing up to deliver more sacks where they're needed, and to deal with more requests. And we're trying to improve our web forms and our reporting, our flash to bang time from request to delivery, that we're trying to improve that offer. OK, thank you. So actually contrary to some of the other comments that I think my colleagues have made, I think in the very recent past, the missed collections, the reports that I've had of missed collections have reduced. So I'm hopeful that over the next few months, that the improvements that you've been making can continue to improve that situation. However, I do have residents coming to me and saying that they've stopped reporting missed collections officially, because they don't see any impact, the communication from the council when they've reported it, is maybe that the report that they've made is marked as closed and they haven't seen that their waste has been collected. So I think you mentioned something before about improving the communication with residents. Maybe could you just expand on that and be very specific on how we're telling residents that we are acting on, especially acting within a 24-hour period, are we communicating that anywhere? Thank you, counsel, I can just comment. One of the biggest improvements is that we now have a 24-hour operation, the collection, and that's where the improvement has been, and the new service head in John is really working with all groups across the cruise, and we've seen a lot of significant improvement. What we need to do is find it, fix it up. Last month there were 900 inquiries or complaints made as of this morning. So there are people engaging in using that, but the only problem we're finding as a resident and as many of your constituents, is the feedback of 'has it been done'. So what we're doing now is, on the 6th of August, is re-launching that app again to reassure residents that from now on, when they report it, there will be a message sent to them to say that we've received your complaint or action that we're going to do, a timeline hopefully. That's the first hurdle that we're going to cross. And eventually, within that improvement there are plans where the person that will collect the rubbish or the furniture, or whatever it may be, it will be picture taken and sent to the resident to say that this has been done. So that's what we're working on, to reassure our residents that we are doing something. Thank you. Fantastic, thank you. Can I just make a final point on comms? So, something that I know from being a politician is that people don't read leaflets that come through their door until the 7th leaflet. There's a phrase that we use called 'effective frequency', and I wonder, some of the comments that colleagues have made today are about actually putting the information in front of people's faces on a regular basis in a way that will actually go in and show them what good behaviour looks like, not just looking at behaviour change. So I wonder, are you thinking about effective frequency in your comms? Yes. Some of the posters and the campaign that drives good comms is about local people and showing them exactly what good behaviour could look like. So some of those campaigns have come through over the coming months. Thank you very much. Thank you, councilor. Before I wrap it up, I just want to make one point. I think if you update us on next, why not, that would be fine. During the last strike period, due to the miscallection of dustbin, especially, I don't know about other words, in my state, a lot of rats are infected. I mean, the dustbin area is infected by rats, mice, stuff like that. Are you doing anything to tackle this problem? I have a problem in my state with the rats and mice in the first place. That has happened during the last strike period. Well, what we're trying to do is make sure that we clear people's waste regularly on time. Where we get accumulations for every problem, that does get looked at. We get people complaining about rats all the time in the borough. So it is a concern if we've got accumulations of waste. Often, some of the problems we look at, and it happens every day, we get cases where we've got accumulations of waste. It's often because of other factors. For us, it's a high priority, but often it's the responsibility of the landlord, as much as anything else, to deal with cleansing of those bin areas, make sure we can get access to some of the work. The work that we're doing to come up with this list of standards is about what we'll do, what the landlord has to do, and what the resident has to do. So I think that in delivering that new approach of standards, we will be better at dealing with those rat issues. But they happen every day, and all I'd say is it would be easier for people to report to us those problems using the Find It, Fix It app, and if it's reported, we'll deal with it. Because all of these waste management issues lead to rat infestations at the end of the day, if it's not dealt with. One of the amazing points is our town hall has a rat problem as well. I remember when I was speaker last year, my speaker's car was damaged twice by a rat. And I have a residence in Manchester, recently. His very expensive car was damaged by a rat. He had to spend about £1500 to fix his car. So thank you very much. Thank you, Councillor, for you coming. I have to move to the next agenda. Thank you for coming. We're going to miss you. Thank you. Our next for this committee consideration is the proposed target operating model for the council. For this item, can I welcome Ayesha Hakim, Head of corporate strategy and transformation, and Oni Egechi. Sorry if I mispronounce your name. You will have a maximum of 10 minutes to provide us with a high level of overview, and then we'll move to member questions. I'll let you know when your time is finished. Can you please start now? Thank you very much, Chair. So this update, and I'll take the cover note and the slides as read, but ultimately it relates to our target operating model, which I suppose in itself thinking about the language target operating model is not particularly accessible for our communities, residents, et cetera. So there is something about what do we call it. But what it sets out to do is think about what is important for the culture of this organisation. And when we get there, it's going to help inform our longer-term decisions relating to any structures, restructures, redesigns, et cetera. So in the slide pack, we set out our previous target operating model. I think it was from 2019 to 2022 and '23. So there was also a blueprint linked in, and you'll notice that there was a real internal focus with the old model, a real focus on structures, and it was quite process heavy, so followed the Mackenzie 7S system, structures, those kinds of elements. And when you look at the blueprint, which is the diagram with the hexagons, it might look quite snazzy, I suppose, but is it engaging in terms of what is it doing, does it really make sense? The work was led by consultants, and from experience it was clear that staff were not particularly engaged with what it was actually trying to say. So when you move across to our new target operating model, so this is ultimately the high level model, and we're hoping to have a blueprint beneath that which all the feedback that we've developed should lead into. The new target operating model has all been developed in-house. I think that was really important to us as staff, not to invest lots and lots of money, but actually invest our time and resource to do adequate engagement. You'll see there are six design principles, and I think that was really core to making sure that it's very clear in terms of how we're going to move towards our vision. There's a reference there to empowered communities, and I think that is probably the most important thing about the new model. It moves us away from constantly thinking about our processes and our structures, and much more about our relationship with the community itself, and how can we start putting them back to being front and centre of decisions that impact on their lives. You'll see empowered directorates there, which means directorates are given the tools and the resources to help them build those relationships with the communities, and that is only possible with a smaller but stronger corporate centre, and you might have had this referenced in past meetings, but ultimately it means the resource is less, but actually it has more focus in terms of what it's doing, so it's easier to navigate. There's a reference there to stronger leadership. This looks at a leadership that is more accountable, and owns and has clear allocation and responsibility on what they oversee, and I think one of the important points there is that we will move to being more outward focused. I think generally with Tahamlet's Council, there are some really good pieces of work that we do, and we can do better in terms of building those kind of stories to go outside rather than just hold it all in house to kind of shift some of that perception that, you know, we're quite a close knit council that just stays within our confinements, and that links to how we also engage with our partners more at an equal level than the council always having to be the lead and maybe that impacting potentially on trust. So there's an engagement plan at the end of this, and what you'll note is we have actively worked to build in a year to do this properly, you know. We didn't want it to be a really quick model that we draw. We sign off in a few weeks, and then before it goes to cabinet, I think it was really important that we do undertake the right level of consultation and engagement with our members, targeted residents, groups, partners, youth council, staff, et cetera. And just to add, in addition to this overview and scrutiny session, we held two open sessions for all members. It was actually really positive across the two sessions. We had 15 members attend and actually provide some really valuable feedback that we'll continue to build in. So I'll stop there and take any questions. Thank you. Thank you, Rimaath. Thank you, Ayesha, for the overview and proposed target of working model. Do members have any questions? That's a new type of question I want. Okay. One minute. Let me make a note first. Any more? I was going to suggest that for this committee, this is a good piece of work. It would be a good idea to hear -- So the engagement part's coming next, which is the staff. But it will be better for us to then feed in at that point once we have the full -- So we've seen the plan. We hear what the staff have to say if you feed that back, and then we respond. I think this might be slightly too premature for us, but I'll leave that to the committee. Thank you. Have we noted this addition? Yeah, we've noted this. The staff session actually took place earlier this week, but appreciate we haven't built up all the feedback and brought it back. So that is absolutely possible, and that's all the engagement across the piece, actually. We can link that back. Great. So thank you for this. I was at one of the engagement sessions, and I think it's the -- I just have a very simple question, actually. It's come from a resident who's seen that this was on the meeting agenda, for this evening, and was concerned to see that no charities or organizations specifically looking -- advocating for disabled people were not going to get consulted as part of the external consultation prior to this stage. Is it possible to go out and look -- and speak to some disabled people through people's organizations? I think there are some suggestions that the residents made, so I can pass those on if that's helpful. And I don't -- that's probably not an exhaustive list. Maybe there's some people within the partnership team, within the council, who can advise on who else -- which other organizations might also be relevant. We've engaged with the Equality Hub as well, which also has the disabled group network in that group as well, as part of our engagement. So we have done some engagements, including people with disabilities, and one of our engagement sessions, we had also a person who was also from -- and representing blind people. We've covered the inequalities, which generally incorporates people with disabilities in there. I would just add, if there's specific recommendations, we'd be really keen to have that information. If you could either email me directly or through Daniel, that would be brilliant. So I think the concerns that the resident had, who raised it with me, is around how the council enables people with disabilities to contact the council, and how the council then responds in terms of allowing reasonable adjustments and giving people -- this is part of a common strategy, but I think it's also relevant for a target operating model and how we seek to engage as a council with the external community. So, yeah, I don't know if there's something that could be included in the plan around that. Yeah, I think it's a really fair point, and actually just bringing it all together as Equality Hub probably isn't doing justice to that group specifically, so we'll definitely look further into that before it goes live. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you to both of you for the presentation. Can you share any data that you have that you've done consultations within the borough, if there's some data that you can share with us? Thank you. Just to check, in terms of data, do you mean numbers or feedback that we've had? I don't know exactly what you mean, I don't know what you mean by numbers, but I'm not sure what you mean by feedback that we've had. Feedback and numbers would be nice, thank you. In terms of engagement, do you mean to refer to the numbers of people we've engaged with? So in terms of engagement with, we've done so far, we've engaged with over 120-something members of staff, 15 members, we've engaged with VCS, we've attended a VCS summit, which engaged with a wide range of voluntary sector organisation representatives, the numbers, the multiple members in there. We've engaged with lead members in certain voluntary committee sector organisations, as well as held sessions, joint sessions with the Equalities Hub, Conestal panel members, which were ranging about over 12 attendees at the session. So altogether, we've tried to engage with a good range of people and making sure each group is equally represented, and altogether I would say at least over, maybe at least about 200 people so far, we've engaged with, that is externally, not necessarily, but internally in terms of staff, including our directorates and SLT and so forth, the engagement we've done. I think in terms of feedback, some of the things that we've had is much more around moving back to genuine engagement where it's not just tick-box, where we put things online and say, yes, we've done the consultation, but a lot more about actively trying to connect back with organisations where we know our most vulnerable residents go, such as schools, such as children's centres, libraries, so being a bit more proactive with the engagement. The transparency side, I think being quite honest that we don't always get it right but not being afraid to say that, and also things like performance, how can we just be more transparent by putting all our performance data online rather than thinking it only goes through members, etc., but that side of things. There was a reference in one of the member engagements about actually working with you all to hear what's happening on the ground. Yes, we get a lot of feedback, but it's service-specific or lead-specific, but actually just proactively having sessions. The Youth Council made a really nice suggestion on annual assembly where residents get an opportunity or young people get an opportunity to come in and present any ideas where they think this council can do better in terms of building relationships, but also social media engagement, especially for young people, and really using that differently in a way that actually engages them and connects them to the council itself. So it does vary. Obviously, we've also engaged with partners and targeted groups, etc., and what I'm happy to do is actually come back in the way, Councillor Islam, you've presented with the feedback itself and what it means and how we're going to frame that to inform our way forward. Thank you. Thank you very much. I don't think anyone has any questions. Amy? Aminale? Thank you. I have one. I think Morris, I think the officers may have already answered the question I had, but in terms of the engagement, how have you avoided not engaging with the same kind of community groups that you always engage with, so a very specific example. So you've engaged with the Somali community, so you're going to engage with them for this piece of work, but sometimes it's always the same kind of groups that you go to, and what creativity have you done to make it wider so you actually capture a wider group of people from those communities or a wider group of people from other communities, because sometimes what councils can do, and I'm not saying these councils like that, but sometimes what councils can do is get quite lazy and rely on the same kind of community leaders or community activists or community organizations for every kind of piece of work they're doing to engage the communities, and that just gives you the kind of stale, same old, same outpour and responses. So with this exciting piece of work that you're wanting to do to kind of change things, what are you really doing to really go out there and meet different people within those different community groups that you've mentioned? So we've been engaging with a lot of our current stakeholders as well as staff who lead on external engagement and volunteers and representatives, and we're trying to get a lot of new people on board that we engage with. So for example, there was a newly established group called the Cornerstone Project, which we were referred to. That was newly established with some fresh ideas and residents on board, so we went to that group. So we were engaging with a lot of representatives in the council to get their ideas on what new and upcoming organizations that we could go to and groups that were set up. So that was our approach, and in terms of, obviously, there are certain elements that we had to capture in terms of our partners and obviously policy networks that we still went to, but we tried to be creative in how we go about it, offering a wide range of ways we could access people by obviously doing it in person, virtually attending the VCS summit, just to try to get access to a lot of people who necessarily wouldn't do usually. I'd just add, we definitely did try to make a proactive effort to engage with as many groups as possible, but at the same time, to an extent, we have linked in with the contacts available. So if there is any assumption that maybe we haven't necessarily done justice to doing more in terms of engagement, we're actually really happy if we can have any suggestions for any specific groups or links in. Actually, the feedback sessions have been our most helpful thing in informing Next Steps, so we'd be only more too keen to continue that. Just with the caveat at the moment, there is a go-live date of October this year for this to come to Cabinet, so I suppose it's a case of is it better we continue with further engagement and maybe hold on that timeline, or is it better we move forward with the timeline and try to build any engagement that we can up until then, because it probably allows us a space of two to three weeks if we're still to meet the October timeline and the schedule up to it. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Ayesha, and thank you, Onikechi, again. This has been a very useful award, we want to help to set some of the context on how the Council would use the target operating model in our transit work outcomes, so thank you again for your time. Thank you very much. So we'll move to the next agenda item, is the Scrutiny Reads update. So does any Scrutiny Reads member wish to highlight any key activities, activity from their work in the last month? I know each of our subcommittees have met and leads have been meeting with officers also. Is there anything to report back? So I'll start with the Scrutiny Reads, can you just update it? Natalie, go on. Thank you, Chair. I've had a busy few weeks, it's a new role to me as well, so I've been taking a bit of time to get my head around it, and I've been meeting with officers from the strategy and improvement team, and then I've met with the key heads of the departments that are within my portfolio, so I've met with Karen Swift and Abdul Khan for the net zero side, and I've met with Simon Baxter and Ashraf Ali who was here presenting this evening about the other parts of the public realm portfolio which are in my portfolio, and that's been really, really helpful, and I think it's been really interesting. So part of the meetings that I've had have been looking at conducting a scrutiny review this year, so I'm currently consulting on what the topic will be, but I'm hoping that I'll be communicating with you all so that if you want to get involved in the sessions that I'll be holding, you're all extremely welcome, and also the subcommittee members are welcome, so I hope we can have a good review of a topic this year. And also last week I attended a meeting of the London Scrutiny Network and we were discussing the public participation in scrutiny, and that was a really good, stimulating meeting, so I would encourage members to attend meetings if they're able to. I think that it was during working hours, though. Thank you, Robyn Mananias. Thank you, Chair, for giving me the opportunity. I discussed with my lead members and other members of the offices, this year we're going to do the free school meals, we're going to report on that, see how well it's been taken, how effective it is. That's hopefully end of this year's reports, that's one of the focuses to see, we're spending money from the council and how that affects the schools and how they're taking as well children's. On that, thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chair. Yes, obviously we're all new to our post. Yes, I've had a discussion with a lead member briefly with Karen Swift, and I'm trying to arrange hopefully the next couple of weeks, Tom Patterson, is it? Sorry, Paul Patterson, sorry! Yes, so hopefully have some more updates, and I would like to focus and obviously rent, not just private rent, rent that has been increased and homelessness in the borough, hopefully in time I'll update you, thank you. Aunty Rosalinda. Do you have any updates? Sorry, Chair, because this role for me is new, so I'm just arranging the meetings with the officers, and hopefully next meeting I'll give you the update. No problem, thank you very much. I'm waiting for the officers meeting with the officers and they're updating me on the resource and finance. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. As my routine duty and every cabinet meeting, I have updated cabinets about the OAS decision as well. Other than that I have the meeting with you, that's it. I don't have any other session. And I think we will be, we'll discuss, we will arrange, meet in a, visiting another borough to see if they are overcoming scrutiny. This probably is coming up. Another council, say, probably doing new research next season, something like that, probably. So, now we are on pre-decision scrutiny for cabinet items. Do members have any suggestions or questions or recommendations they would like me to raise at the next cabinet? Councilor James King? Because you have your hand raised first. And me? And me. Oh yeah, after he moved in. I see we're gone here. I want to raise the quarterly report and just how the targets are being moved to stretch targets and we are not looking at what, the only things being recorded as stretch targets going forward. So, again, we just totally, as a council, losing sight of what our real targets are and providing the proper explanation for not being able to hit those targets. Yeah. Go to Emily. Yeah, thank you. I can't remember the actual name of the item, but essentially it's the one about the dogs. I'm sure you will all have had an abundance of incredibly angry emails about this issue and the plans and the plans do seem incredibly ill thought out on this. I've got a particular question that could be asked on this and I think a particular question that needs to be asked in the justification for this, basically PSPO for dog walkers is how is it going to be enforced and why should enforcement resources go to dogs and dog walkers rather than all the other forms of antisocial behaviour which are more widespread and suffer and we have much more data as to why much more priorities from residents are telling us that they want it to be enforced. So that's the main question I think needs to be raised in the cabinet tomorrow. That's a very bad question. If I could just add to that, Chair, as well. What people probably will have seen from the messages from residents is that the stuff contained in this proposal goes directly against everything that's sort of leading charities but also just it goes against everything that these charities say is the way that this stuff should be handled. So my question essentially is where did this come from? Because it doesn't seem to stack up with anything that anybody else says. It's very old. Thank you, Councillor Notary. Yes, so just my question was also going to be about the dog's PSPO. So I think there was a bit of benchmarking done with other councils. I don't want to defend what officers have done but I have similar concerns about -- so maybe we could kind of think about how best to phrase the question to include all of the concerns. Maybe something about balancing how Theos are, maybe looking at how Theos are going to prioritize it and whether they're going to have more funding or have more people because this is always -- like fowling enforcement there's always been a problem. In my word and especially in my history I have a massive problem with dog food, dog fowling. There's a lot of complaint because people are walking there down the footpath. The most people walk and they leave their dog fowling there and I have seen it especially on people's doorstep as well as other people's doorstep. They have the dog food. Well, I've raised Emmy on that, yes. I've raised Emmy because my residency complaining is not one or two. I have a few complaints on my surgery so I've raised Emmy on that, yes. It's not a question to the cabinet, sorry. Just want to get some updates. Obviously Leisure has come in house recently and I'm grateful to the mayor and the team and the cabinet for rolling out free swimming sessions for girls and ladies in our borough. And men's book. Sorry? No, over 55 is free. Sorry man, I was coming to that, yes. So I'm getting to that point, so not yet. It was a pleasure because this was one of the items that the chair of the Education Committee raised from day one. So I'm grateful to the committee members and everyone just to get some figures since it has been rolled out. The membership and everything else, has it gone up? Maybe in the future, not now, obviously. It's just taken off. Get some figures. It's an award program, maybe November, December. All right, so we can get some figures on that. Thank you, thank you. Thank you Abdulman. Thank you chair. Finally, at last. I gave you full time, so be careful. Doppu is the issue. Obviously we know that because I raised on the last year's scrutiny twice. Also Theo, I've seen Theo going around in a car and sitting in the ideal in the car doing nothing. I wonder what their role and responsibility is because last week I saw the youngsters were taking canister gas in front of them, literally 50 yards from them. And they are sitting there in the car outlet, the logo in the car. What's the point of being there when in front of them the canister gas is illegal in our substance? So my question is, to the cabinet, what monitoring are they doing when Theo goes out? Who's monitoring them? What purpose they're serving? Because we are constantly spending a lot of money on Theo. And if we are not getting productivity out of it and things like that happen, it sends a different signal to the youngsters that they can get away with those sort of things. And I'm dismayed when I saw that happen in my struggling walk the night ago. Thank you, Kansila. Kansila Asmaetem. I want to raise a concern regarding the performance report. I think over time we've all raised concerns when we've seen targets not being met and some issues and officers come and they report and they give us context. Knowing how many concerns we've raised and we want to improve services in this council, then if you want to improve service, one of the journeys to that is make sure the KPIs are correct. You do not change KPIs to suit yourself to say, Hey, we're passing all our KPIs so we're great." You don't tell yourself that. People tell us that. Our residents tell us that. I think before this had happened, they should have come to overview and scrutiny with this so we could have had a conversation. Some things make sense and some things are premature in the sense like KPI, I want to give you an example. KPI 023, it talks about number of children supported by early hope children and family services. They predicted, officers have predicted, that this is going to go down because of the youth service. Well, hold on. Let the data show you that and then change the way that you record the data on this. They've already said that. How is any of this making sense? So this is a big concern for me. The stretch targets should have come here first for a discussion and this should be raised as your chair. I think you should raise this because it's not one question that you can put forward. You need to put the rationale forward as to why we feel the way we do as a committee. [inaudible conversation] So it was on Agenda item 6.1, 3.6, so I've asked about, can you explain the difference between the new RAG rating and the previous RAG rating? Secondly, can you clarify, will this use of the new RAG rating create a more positive perception of performance? It's very similar. And then, number two, is the vast majority of the indicators and targets are solely focused on outputs? For example, and I gave 001, 002. How will we know if these interventions are having an impact on our residents and if they are delivering the best value for the council? Number three was, does the executive consider the targets that are being proposed for all the indicators are truly stretching targets that will deliver year-on-year improvements? And how has the community been involved in setting these targets? Thank you. Thank you very much. Anybody else? Thank you, guys. Now you made me, I have to come tomorrow. I was thinking of giving it a miss. So you want to raise this for us? Of course, now I have to, I have to come. That's part of this challenge. Yes, it's been a very, very busy week for me. I have some personal function as well. We're really sorry for the extra work we've given you. Thank you very much. I can share with you happiness, because my daughter got married this week. So I was very busy with the function as well. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'll invite you with the main function. I'll invite you. Councilor Monan, we have been finished here. Councilor Monan, and Councilor Rudin, if we are finished here, please. Finally, is there any other urgent business to discuss? No. I'll give you the good news. Councilor, I wanted to mention it, but Councilor Azmaiyat-doors mentioned it. I want to give you the good news. We have a call-in coming up. So we haven't set up the meeting date yet. I'll let you know very soon when we'll be listening. So this call-in meeting is to review the homeless accommodation placement strategy. So I'll discuss with the officers, and I'll let you know very soon when we can arrange the next meeting. I'll come to you in a minute, please. So our next OSC meeting will be on 10 September. I hope you all have a good summer break and come back with the questions, with any business. So before I finish... So the call-in is not the usual focus. I can't say no, but I have to discuss with the officers, and I'll come back with you very soon. I know there is some... I know this is already the period you already mentioned. Some members will be unavailable, and I think officers as well are unavailable. Also, we'll look into these issues when members and officers... and then we'll come back to you in the later. Thank you. So with no other business to discuss, I call this meeting to a close. Thank you very much, everyone, for coming. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [ Silence ]