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Good evening, everybody, and welcome to this meeting of Chilternham Borough Council's cabinet. My name is Councillor Rowena Hay, I'm the leader of the council. We don't have any members of the public actually here with us today, but for those that may be watching on the livestream of the meeting on the council's YouTube. So the recording of that meeting will be kept for four years. Just to note that there are no fire alarms expected, so if the alarm does sound, we should all immediately make our way to the nearest fire exits. The only apologies I've got for tonight are from Councillor Kluckus, and that takes us on to the minutes of the last meeting. Has anybody got any comments on the minutes of the last meeting that they wish to make? No? If I could see a show of hands, please, to approve those minutes. And I'm guessing, Councillor Telford, you'll be abstaining as you were not here at that point in time. Actually, we do have a member of the public here. Is it Mr Thomas? Hello. So, declarations of interest. Does anybody have any declarations of interest they wish to declare? No? That then takes us on. We have no petitions and we have no member questions received. We do have some public questions. We had two public questions from Mr David Regwell, who was due to be with us, but unfortunately he's not able to be. So his questions and answers will be taken as read. And there's no opportunity for a supplementary because you have to be in attendance for that supplementary to be made. Obviously, Mr Regwell, if he wishes to make a supplementary comment, can do so or ask another question either at full council in July or at cabinet meeting in July. We have a second. The third question is from Mr Stephen Thomas. And that question is to the cabinet member for climate emergency, who is now Councillor Ian Dobie. Councillor Thomas, can we take your question? Sorry. Sorry. Oh, Councillor Thomas. Well, there you go. You know, I've elevated you. But could we take your question as read and your answer as given? Do you have a supplementary? I do. Yes. Thank you. Yep. Thank you for your response. I just kind of continued where you left off really on answering my question. So you know that subject is geoengineering and cloud seeding are still at government controlled research only levels. However, the link that I provided for market wide research and proves that at least 10 companies are actively engaging in cloud seeding activities across the UK. Spraying dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere to manipulate the weather and causing excessive amounts of rainfall. Independent laboratory analysis samples have shown that high amounts of aluminium barium and strontium, amongst others, are being sprayed into our skies, causing pollution and ill health on the population, as well as causing manipulation of the weather. Mr. Mr. Thomas, could you put your question, please, rather than a statement? Yeah, I'm just preamble. So all the time, the blame for this is being put on the public and the emissions that we allegedly produce when the real elephant in the room concerning manmade climate change is being ignored. Cheltenham Borough Council, as a competent authority, has a duty to protect us from harm and is meant to be independent of the government. Mr. Thomas, I'll remind you once more, please could you put your question rather than quite the length of preamble because what you're doing currently is making a statement. So if you would be kind enough, please, to just put your supplementary question to the cabinet member. Okay, so I ask you, why is the continuous pollution of our skies not being taken into account in Cheltenham's Clean Air Policy? And why are you, as cabinet member for climate emergency, not addressing this in your climate change policy as the real cause of manmade climate change? Thank you. Councillor Dobie. Thank you for your supplementary, Mr. Thomas. I repeat, I reiterate that the points you have made are not within scope of our Cheltenham Borough Council Clean Air Policy. They're at the national level. We are not concerned with those issues. We are concerned with NOx and PM pollutants. So therefore, I think your question is not to be directed to me and to this council, but it's to be directed elsewhere. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Thomas, for your question and you've had your supplementary question, so thank you very much. We have, so that takes us on to section 2. We have nothing referred from the council and we have nothing referred from Overview and Scrutiny Committee or any other committee. And that moves us on to the reports section. The first report of the evening is Food Safety and Service Plan and that's the report of the cabinet member, Councillor Atherstone. Thank you. I thought you were doing a runner. Thank you, leader, and apologies for that. Good evening, everybody. The council is required to produce a food safety service plan outlining the activities and resources needed to enable the delivery of a service here in Cheltenham. In accordance with the official code of practice framework agreement and control regulations, which the Food Standards Agency uses for audit and monitoring purposes. This service plan is key to ensuring that national priorities are addressed and delivered locally and provides an essential link between corporate and financial planning. The authority is bound by the regulators code, which provides a principle based framework for engaging with those we regulate. I'd like to thank all the officers responsible for creating this detailed food safety service plan, ensuring the well-being of residents and visitors to our town with food fit for human consumption, while supporting the success of our local businesses. 41% of businesses in Cheltenham are restaurants and cafes. All new businesses involved in food handling must register at least 28 days before they intend to operate. 158 new food business inspections were carried out between the first of April 2023 and the 31st of March 2024. This includes existing food businesses, which have changed food business operators. There is no charge for registration and it cannot be refused. On the 1st of April this year, we were responsible for regulating 1,102 registered food businesses here in Cheltenham. As you will see from the report, there has been a huge amount of work compiling this plan and shows just how buoyant our food businesses in Cheltenham are from food production, processing and distribution. We have a statutory duty to monitor, verify and enforce the requirements of food law and ensure we have sufficient resources to do so with suitably trained authorised officers. I'd like to ask you all here tonight to please approve this year's food safety service plan. Thank you. Thank you Councillor Atheston. Any member wish to comment? I thought that was a very good introduction to what a lot of people will find not particularly interesting but absolutely it's vitally important that we have all those policies in place. So thank you to the officers as well for the work that they do on that. The words for me is a lot of people will find this as dull as ditch water but they are critically important to the safety of our residents. So could I see a show of hands please to approve that? Thank you, that's a unanimous decision. The next report is the energy efficiency proposals for Leisure Act and that's the report of Councillor Dobie. Colleagues, I commend this decision to you. It's absolutely in line with our net zero action plan, is funded by the council approved green investment fund and the detailed business case has already been approved by the green investment board. Both investments will reduce energy use and hence costs. Notably the purchase of pool covers will generate a return on investment of 16.4%. You're invited to ratify the decision made by the green investment board set out in detail within the paper before you. At a time of rapidly increasing energy costs and noting that almost half of CBC's energy bill is spent on Leisure Act, this is a wise spend to save decision. So it makes sense financially and moreover it delivers significant carbon savings and hence is on track towards our declared net zero ambitions. I trust the cabinet will endorse. Any member wish to comment? Councillor Lewis. Just because I feel it would be remiss of me not to comment because I was on the green investment board that approved that side of this spending policy. I think it's a really exciting little bit of spending. It's not a massive expense but I was really surprised especially when I sat on the board just how much money it could save and how many councils across the country had already done it. It's a real win and thank you to the team who have gone out on the really interesting competitive tender. It's apparently surprisingly difficult to get a swimming pool cover for our pools. So great work is being done in the office of team. So if I had no other member could I see a show of hands please? Again I think thank you, that's unanimous. The next agenda item is the housing and tenancy for policy which is actually the report of Councillor Klukas. But in her absence I will be just introducing that report. So again the housing tenancy for all policy needed to be updated because of the decision that we made to bring Chotland Borough homes back in house. And it's the recommendations again, there's lots of detail in it but it is an update to an existing policy of ours but now updated to include the housing and tenancy for all policy because of it coming back in house as I said. The recommendations are very clear as they're set out. Is there any member who wants to comment on those on that report? No, then if I could move directly then to say all those in favour please show. Thank you, that's unanimous. The next report of the evening is to Councillor Lewis and it's about the grant funding for the English Sports Council. Councillor Lewis. Thank you Lida and there is a surprising sort of pool theme to tonight's cabinet meeting which is a shame because the weather is terrible. But I am very excited to be able to bring forward to this cabinet meeting a fantastic bit of funding we've been able to secure with the team at the Lido. Many of us, of course, know how wonderful Samford Park Lido is. It's a spectacular site right in the heart of our town. And it, like every other swimming pool in the country, is facing significant budgetary pressures because the cost of everything is going up, particularly energy. So we're really excited in this report to be accepting some money from the swimming pool support fund. It's £306,000 to support some exciting retrofit and clean energy projects on site. It's absolutely essential that this money is pumped into the Lido at this point in time because it is what's going to be able to keep their doors open and keep the building running. And it is a spectacular heritage building. I don't think it's, we have to make sure that we're really clear that retrofit can be done on spectacular heritage buildings like this. And I'm particularly excited to be supporting that element because it's a beautiful building for anybody who hasn't been. The fact that we are accepting this money and that we are making these changes and that we are keen to support this kind of work sets a real precedent for other heritage buildings across Cheltenham. We can retrofit. We can achieve our net zero aspirations. So I am going to encourage you all to support it, especially because it's free money from the government and no one likes to turn down free money from the government. Thank you, Councillor Lewis. Any member wish to comment? No? I think Councillor Lewis actually said it all and the importance of that building and that facility to our town and anything that we can do to help support its continued use and success and sustainability into the future is really important. So if I could see a show of hands, please, to prove this. Thank you. That's unanimous. The next report is on housing transition governance arrangements. And again, that's the report of Councillor Lucas, which I will present to you or introduce to you tonight. So you will all recall that the central central to the proposals to wind up Cheltenham by Holmes was a clear pledge to place the voice and tenants and leaseholders at the heart of our housing services, ensuring that our tenants, leaseholders and shared ownership owners can have oversight of and influence the service they receive. It will not only meet the test of the regulator, but also underlines our earlier commitment to put residents at the centre of our housing offer. So the paper that you've got before you tonight sets out the proposals for the new governance arrangements to reflect the return of housing management back into the council. And as you all know, that will take effect from the 1st of July this year. Whilst the details of those proposals, it's vital to establishing effective and robust governance, it does have wider importance in setting a framework that will help to facilitate and create ways in which, again, our residents can play an essential part in helping to shape our housing services or their housing services, I should say. The structure looks to ensure the effective engagement with those tenants, the leaseholders and the shared ownership owners, and provide members with the required level of oversight that's needed. So the detail of that revised structure is set out in the report. However, by way of summary, includes the establishment of a new housing cabinet committee made up of five elected members, one of whom will be the cabinet member for housing with two tenant representatives, one leaseholder representative and one shared ownership representative. And the main role of that committee will be to monitor the performance and delivery of the consumer standards, including the new tenancy satisfaction measures, to monitor the impacts of investment in ensuring the council maintains our decent homes, particularly around fire and building safety and customer satisfaction. It will also be looking at receiving and considering complaints data to inform that service delivery. And it will also have oversight of the risk register for housing services, and it most of all, it will provide strong and effective connectivity between the council and the tenant panel. And in addition to this, to reflect the need for this council to hear the voices of their tenants and to hear those voices loudly, it is essential that tenant involvement engagement is one of those fundamental principles within this new government governance arrangement. And therefore, alongside that committee, we will establish a tenant panel and a separate leaseholder and shared ownership panel. And those panels will create a space where tenants and leaseholders can act as our scrutiny and critical friends, working with the council to develop our plans, priorities and policies. At present, Tottenham Borough Homes do operate a tenant scrutiny panel called TSIP, which enables tenants to scrutinise and improve the way their housing services run. This has been really successful in its journey. So we're keen to build on and develop and let it evolve even further by ensuring that those strong links are forged between the tenants and the housing cabinet committee. And I'm really pleased that the current members of TSIP are keen to continue their work under the newly named tenant panel, and the creation of a new leaseholder and shared ownership panel will also facilitate those higher levels of engagement with our leaseholders and our shared ownership customers and owners, enabling us to address some of the issues that were raised by our leaseholders in that whole recent consultation that we did, which was really helpful to us in informing us on the way forward. And I really truly hope and believe that they really appreciated the lengths that we've gone to, to be inclusive and to really listen to their requirements. I know that was quite a long introduction, but it's quite a major step in our journey of bringing the transition back in house. And I just wanted to be able to take that opportunity to express all of that. Any member got any comments? Councillor Jeffries. Thank you, Lida. I was just looking at the report and looking back to when we were looking at making the decision. I was just actually reading there, if you look at where it says where, why did we take this decision? This was to protect our services for our residents, but also to improve them. So I think the governance arrangements are vital in that. I can remember when I had the Government for Housing hat at one point, you get a different viewpoint or a different way of discussing or seeing things when you actually listen to those tenants close up. As you say, TSIP was a perfect example of that. I had the pleasure of talking to many TSIP members during my tenure. So I think these governance arrangements are right and I'm so pleased we managed to get to this point. It's been a little while. I'm just putting on record my thanks, like I know you will, Lida, to all those officers putting the hours in to get us to this point. Thank you very much. Thank you, Councillor Jeffries. Councillor Alston. Thank you, Lida. Also, in my previous role as Cabinet Member for Housing, I know that when we did the consultation with such a really great response rate, so thanks again to all the tenants and leaseholders that responded, we now have listened and the creation of this new sort of governments format will be able to provide a much greater voice. And the fact that we have read from the survey responses that the challenges and requirements are completely different between tenants and leaseholders and shared ownership owners. Plus, as we're developing and building more and more shared ownership homes, we need to make sure we've got the right platform to have that engagement. So I think this is a really, really positive step forward and has my full support, so thank you. Thank you, Councillor Alston. Any other member wish to comment? Could I see a show of hands to approve this? Thank you, everybody. The next report is on the property compliance at Agenda Item 10. And again, that is Councillor Clukas. And again, I will introduce that report. I promise I won't make that introduction as long as I did the first one. But obviously, property compliance policies are important. And again, the transition of housing back into us on the 1st of July does bring to the forefront our duties to comply with a number of regulations that relate to the big six areas of health and safety, and those being asbestos, electrical safety, fire safety, gas safety, lifts and water hygiene, plus the damper mould and condensation policies. So what this report is asking is that the Cabinet to approve the adoption of those six property compliance policies, which will take effect from the 1st of July this year, as I said. So these policies form part of the Council's wider organisational commitment that we hold throughout, and that's to drive through across the whole organisation, a health and safety culture amongst all of our staff and all of our contractors. So there is a summary of each of the policies, setting out the detail, and the responsibilities that we will have as the new landlords, as a Council. Any member wish to comment on that? No? Can I see a show of hands to approve them, please? Thank you very much. That's unanimous. That moves us on to section six, is the briefing session. So I'll just move around the room. Councillor Jeffries, do you have anything? Nothing to this time. Councillor Hallward? Nothing. Councillor Telford? Nothing. Councillor Doby? Nothing. Councillor Collins? Nothing from me. Councillor Lewis? Nothing from you this time. Councillor Atherston? Hello, leader. I have two updates. First of all, I would like to promote for anyone that's watching online, Party in the Park on the 2nd of August. It's going to be a fantastic event for families and children all across Cheltenham and any visitors that are in the town on that particular day, all over Pitville Park. So right across to the Prince of Wales Stadium, down to the garden. And so a very, very exciting activity that you'll be probably finding out about a lot in the months to come. Also, I'd just like to say that I've really enjoyed chairing my first No Child Left Behind board meeting this week. And it was great to meet the committee members and to really see the enormous amount of work they do on behalf of our children and young people here in Cheltenham. So I'm really looking forward to supporting the ambitions of that group this next year. So thank you. Thank you, Councillor Atherston. I would like to just say congratulations to Cheltenham Festivals on another successful science festival. It's always great when you see school children marching through the town, chattering away first thing in the morning, making lots and lots of noise, obviously very excited about where they're going. And the interactive zone for them is amazing. So I did want to say congratulations to the Cheltenham Festivals for that. That then leads us on to decisions of cabinet members, rather like there was no briefings and updates from any of you, except Councillor Atherston tonight. We took no decisions since the 29th of May. Was it 28th of May? I haven't got any other items that I require to be as urgent. therefore at six twenty.