Transcript

Thank you very much. Good evening everyone and welcome to this over being scrutiny committee meeting. My name is Councillor Dajeet-Cherzi and I will be chairing this meeting. Can I remind everyone that this meeting is being filmed for the Council website for public being. Those participating in the meeting will be included in the footage. If there are any technical issues I will decide if and how the meeting should continue after taking advice from the officers. Members should only speak at my direction and ensure to speak clearly under the microphone. Thomas is there any apology? Can you advise on this apology? Good evening chair. We have an apology from Councillor Ali and also our two co-optees with Thomas joining us online. Anybody else? Can members declare that they have any disclosable visionary interest, DPI? Indicate which aspect in the interest relates to and state whether their interest is of a personnel of religious nature. The minutes from our meeting on 23rd July 2024 have been circulated and the members who were present confirmed this is a true and accurate record. We have two action logs, one on funding for recycling and the other on feedback which are published in the action log. Do members have any comments? Have you got any comments on action logs? No? Before we comment on the agenda items I wanted to let members know that our meeting today might be slightly longer than our usual time to ensure we give the appropriate time for each agenda item. As all of you know our meeting never finished on time and I have to remind all the members that we are still in the Pardha period so please refrain from making any political comment or any other comment. So we are going to move to our agenda now. Our first item is the quarter one budget monitoring report. Our budget for 2024-25 was agreed at full council and so this is our first opportunity to review and scrutinize the budget. It would be helpful to understand what our overall projection was for quarter one and if there are any anomalies of under spent or overspent and reason for this and are there any forecasts of saving to be made if you can highlight this to the committee. I understand we have an apology for Councillor Saeed Ahmad, it is very unwell and Councillor Shafi Ahmad will be stepping in as a cover. I would also like to welcome Julie Lauren, the Director for Resources and section 151 of the Deputy Chief Executive and Arsan Khan, Head of Strategic Finance and Chief Accountant and also Chris Leslie. So welcome all. Can I thank Julie? Can you start? You have 10 minutes and then I'll be reminding you when your time is finished. You may start and I'll let you know when you're nearing your last minute. Thank you Julie, you can start now. In answering the questions, I will try not to use all the 10 minutes because I'd really like to give as much time as I can to you to ask questions that you've got. This is your first report for the Financial Year Q1 report, so we're looking backwards to the period April to the end of June and the focus of the report is a forecast position. It may seem I'm stating the obvious but this is, as at the end of June the budget holders looking forward 9 months and guessing to the best of their ability what they think the end of year position will be. So what we have is a forecast position at Q1 early in the year of an overspend on our general fund. There are particular areas of overspend and those areas are set out for you. Homelessness, particularly temporary accommodation costs, adult social care and special education needs. I think what's important is none of these will come as a surprise to any of us, partly because we all read the news, watch the news every day and we know that these issues are national issues. Not only are they national issues but in an area like Town Hamlets some of those national issues are amplified because of the cost and scarcity of things like private sector properties or affordable housing in Town Hamlets. So they are national pressures amplified at a local level because we knew about them and I can recall sitting here presenting to this group, actually the budget knew asking me rightly what were the risks and I think at the time I said they were homelessness, adult social care and special education needs and that's because they are demand led pressures and those demands are increasing exponentially in two ways. The numbers of people presented as homeless or in need of adult social care or special support for education and the costs associated, the two things are both increasing. You see that the most in homelessness and temporary accommodation where the numbers have increased but the costs of accommodating people have increased at an even higher rate. So they're the big drivers we have had and within the report you'll see the detail we've set out for you, the particular areas of overspend. So we have had some unexpected costs in here, £800,000 for a BVI inspection wasn't something that any of us budgeted for but it's been accommodated in here. We did take action at setting the budget, we recognised those demand led services were a risk so we increased our risk reserve to a total of £18 million at the time. What this report is telling you certainly on the general fund is three key messages, we've got forecasting and overspend, it's a forecast, a look into the future. Typically at Tower Hamlets and any other council your quarter one forecast is the most pessimistic because people are having to guess forward quite a long time. And you can see previously that typically we end up coming in better than forecast at Q1. That doesn't sound much comfort and it shouldn't be, that's like saying cross your fingers and hope for the best because a forecast can be wrong one way, they could be wrong another way. So for me one of the two other things that I can give you assurance on, one particular question the chair asked, are we taking action now to either mitigate the issues in these three areas or find compensatory areas of underspend in the council? The answer to that is categorically yes, that's something I'm engaged with on a weekly basis with cabinet members and key budget holders. And the last thing, why else don't I look terrified at the moment? It's because we did set aside a risk, we set aside it for a reason because we knew there was a risk. That will not solve the problem, that will buy us time in order that we can solve the problem. And the last thing is we set the budget and these national problems are there, we had a different government in place with different policies and again I think it's fair to say that the new government has come in and we've yet to see, but they seem very committed to addressing particularly issues around homelessness. So we've yet to see and take account of any of those changes to government policy, particularly perhaps on the rent cap. So I've focused on the overspend and the forecast, I've focused on the general fund, on capital, the message you're receiving in this report is the opposite and that might seem like good news because it looks like we're forecast to underspend on capital. That's not good news because when you don't spend capital it means you haven't delivered something and yes it can slip forward to a future year, but particularly we're concerned around our housing, safety investment and I know you're going to be looking at that, housing issues later on. We're particularly concerned about those so the action on slippage when capital is forecast to underspend is not to celebrate and think we can put that in the bank, it's to crack the whip, put your foot in the accelerator and say actually there was a reason members voted for a budget that had all this capital expenditure and we want you to focus on delivery and portfolio holders are very very focused on savings on the revenue side, deliver on the capital side. The message in here about the DSG is a message that's not new, the deficit on the DSG is a legacy issue, it affects all councils and I've seen something recently that I do think the current government are going to extend the protection that prevents us having to account for paying it back and I believe that's going to happen. And the last thing that's covered in here is the HRA, so you all know general fund is separate to the HRA. Our HRA is in good health, it overspent last year on the cost of things like repairs and maintenance and there's a direct correlation isn't there. If you're not replacing things because your capital programme is slipping then things break more often and you have to repair them more often and the cost of repairs and maintenance go up so very much again the focus is on delivering the capital programme particularly on the HRA, mitigating the risks that are in there. We did build a safety net in so the issue with our HRA is not one of a shortage of funds, we need to fast track the delivery of that capital programme and all members are cited on that. So I'll pause there and hope that covers your request but we're here to answer your questions. Thank you. Thank you Juli and Anasan for your overview. Do members have any questions? Let me make a note. Councillor Khan, Councillor Madhu Khan. Thank you Chair. Good evening. Lauren, thank you very much for your reports. I've got a few questions for you. In your report you referred that council needing to take action to deliver a downwards movement in directorate spend position in order to cover 13.3 million predicting overspend paragraph 3.2. What sort of action are you expecting in order to achieve this and do you think this will mean reducing or cutting the service to the residents? Are likely to order and getting directed to reduce their spending enough. Second question is, last year in quarter one budget monitoring homeless was forecast to spend 3.6 million, adult and social care 3.3 million. In this report you describe them as a nationally recognised demand driven pressure with so much known both nationally and locally about the challenges these areas face. Why are the resource allocated to deal with these homeless and social care being constantly undermined as this year our social care is again predicting to overspend 3 million while housing options overspend 8.1 million. And also can you tell me that are the council doing better prediction for future demand? Thank you. Good questions and I will take each of them in turn. So what are the particular issues that are driving the homelessness pressure here? Is it something that we are not doing? And the answer is no, there are three main drivers and they are national. One is why are more people presenting as homeless? Partly because changes to the tax will mean a number of private landlords are choosing to sell the property. And it's about supply and demand. If the availability of private properties for rent reduces then we watched what happened, the cost of the rent goes up and it becomes unaffordable. Interest rate rises applied pressure to those same landlords, they put the rents up, tenants can't afford to pay it. So there are a number of reasons driving an increase in homelessness and the cost of the accommodation is phenomenal. One thing that the council has been doing incredibly successfully is focusing on where are the highest costs and the least suitable accommodation and undoubtedly that's the use of commercial hotels where you'll recall at one point we were competing with the government. We're all competing against each other and driving the price of those hotels up. I can tell you that as of Friday in Tower Hamlets there was only one family housed in a commercial hotel. The service have managed to reduce that down to one family as of last Friday. I am really hoping by this Friday it will be none, but it did go to one last week. So they are the sort of things that the service is doing. Remember this was a forecast as at June. So none of these successes to date have been built in. The next time you see this, the mitigating actions that have been taken will influence that forecast. It will change the forecast position. The amount we spend on commercial hotels will have a big impact on that because it's the most expensive. In terms of adult social care, one of the things we need to do is really revise that forecast and make sure it's based on actual data. Their forecast was based on last year. Unlike homelessness where you saw a report come in April where we knew in the last quarter of last year the number of homelessness people increased by 9% in one quarter compared to the year before. So the data is real time and accurate. In adult social care they were using the forecast based on last year's trends. And actually what we've asked the service to do, and they are, Georgia, the new corporate director of adult social care is busy really looking at that forecast and the demographics. You know we've got plans to bring on board some changes to both home care providers and to the home care packages themselves. And they've yet to be built into this forecast. In terms of special educational needs, two things are happening. One of the reasons why it's overspending is volume and the fact that we can't get educational psychologists, we pay high rates for agency staff. So two things have happened. One in terms of educational psychologists, we've asked Hayes to market rate for us the relevant market based salary for that post so we can advertise, attract and recruit our own team of educational psychologists. And Steve Reddy is busy working on that. The second thing he's doing is that sometimes we can't change the thing in the service but we can change something around it. And the underlying driver of overspends is in personal transport. It's the transport costs of taxis for people with special needs. We've just commissioned and Steve Reddy is leading and I'm sure he'd be happy to update you if you ask him a review into that special needs transport so we can use more personal budgets, give parents much more freedom to have choice and independence about the transport arrangements for their children. So there are three examples of what's being done around the specific pressures. Other examples are that we're looking at areas right across the council to make compensatory savings but hopefully that answers your specific question. Thanks for your presentation. Thanks for coming. Thanks for stepping in Councilor Ahmed. I have some questions mostly because I'm not an expert on budgets. I have a few questions. I'm lead for environment and climate emergency so I'm particularly interested in some of the things within the communities department. So there's a forecast overspend of 3.2 million within the communities directorate and there's a lot of detail about that. But there's a phrase, so in the first paragraph, paragraph 4.26 in the report, it's mentioned that a zero based budgeting approach will be adopted as part of the budget setting. Is that related to the future budget? Yes, so that's related to the future budget and it applies to communities particularly because communities was born out of two previous directors, place divided into two communities and housing and region and the right budgets aren't in the right places and to be fair it's very difficult for the service to manage and understand its true cost. So zero based budgeting simply means, let's take a blank piece of paper and look at what you need for each area. It will reallocate resources from underspending codes to overspending codes because the reality is that's what they're using it for. Councilor Badrul Choudry. Thank you Chair, thank you, good evening, thank you. My question is appendix 6, budget monitoring, community directorate performance, it states that $23.9 million was underspent. How has that money been relocated to other departments and how are you using that money? It's a big amount of money so if you could give us some insights into that I'd be grateful. Thank you Chair. I've just got an appendix 6, budget monitoring, communities, directorate performance. I don't have the page number, sorry. Is that appendix 6 Councillor did you say? display with me, appendix 6 yes, community directorate performance, budget monitoring, appendix 6 yes. Can we just relate to this report? $23.9 million underspent. A denon that's related to this particular report, I think appendix 6 for this particular report is a capital report. I'll go for another one, thank you, thank you Chair. The revenue and benefits service has a significant income budget of $151.4 million but shows a net budget of only $3.9 million after accounting for expenditure, account expenditure. If you could give us some insights into that, thank you. Okay so this applies differently on both sides but on benefits. They've got significant income from the DWP but they pay it out to claimants so the net is the amount we're given by the DWP to process each claim. We don't get to keep any, obviously our job is to passport through money. Council tax and business rate slightly different, you will hear a bit more. In council tax every pound the council collects it keeps 72%, 72 pence in the pound and it pays across to the GLA 28 pence in the pound. On business rates every pound we collect we keep 30 pence in the pound and we pay to the GLA 70 pence in the pound. So what you're seeing on the net budget is the contributions we get for collecting, processing and payment of those benefits. Less the amount that's not ours, the amount we give to claimants, the amount we pay back to the GLA so it's not that they spend that phenomenal amount of money, we just act as a passport through which that money passes through. Does that make it clear? Can I just come in on the previous question just to kind of elaborate and clarify. So appendix 6 from what I'm seeing here is the capital monitor. So that's effectively the general fund programme in terms of budget, how much we spent today, forecast slippage, forecast under overspend which ultimately results in your variation. So it's something that Julie picked up in terms of how we'll be performing on the capital programme as a whole. So effectively when we look at the appendix it details out that 39.8 million is the anticipated slippage across the board and the general fund and that will include all directorates including communities which is probably the number that you've honed in on. There's some specific schemes that are feeding into that number in terms of slippage, Institute of Academic Excellence being one, St Georges Leisure Centre being another one and that's the key one that relates to communities. So we're anticipating slippage on that rather substantive programme that we've got or capital project. So just to give you a bit of context appendix is the capital programme and in the communities area the key project that is slippage is St Georges Leisure Centre. I hope that explains or answers your question a little bit further. Before I ask my question can I ask what is cherry tree? Cherry tree? One of the projects that's got has a slippage. Cherry tree, what is it so I can ask a question? Yeah, I will need to get specific details on it. It's not one that immediately comes into mind in terms of the scope of it. We can definitely get you to cancel out. Just tell me what it is. I believe it's relating to a care home facility but I can get you further details. That's my understanding but I don't have anything further than that. So my questions are just to help me understand the report a bit better. So on the slippages there's several projects that is mentioned. Cherry tree being one of them, the Academy of Excellence. I'm going to take the Academy of Excellence as an example so I can understand what the patterns are in the budget. So there seems to be an 8.5 million slippage but originally this was budgeted for 15 million which means it's an addition. That takes us to about 23 and a half. I just want to understand, is the issue that the original budget was incorrect so you've underestimated how much the costing is? And also, at what point in the budget are you going to re-evaluate an initiative or a project? Because this is a selective six form education in the context of a year where actually A levels and GCSEs have taken a dip this year against national levels. Is this the time to put this much money into a selective schools when we should be supporting our six forms on our secondary schools? And also, please evidence some of what the projects are doing, evidence it because we have to look at the best value of some of these initiatives. And that's why it's also good to be able to see this and the KPIs at the same time so we can talk about this in a full context. So I wanted to understand the rationale behind that. There's a dedicated resource fund for mayors, accelerating the mayor's priority. We understand it's already been budgeted, like the mayor's priorities, initiatives, but is this money specifically to help speed up the project so it can be delivered at a certain time? Say for example, maybe before an election, is that what this funding is and what does that look like? And how quick, so is it because there's a need or is it because the mayor would like to finish all his promises before the election comes? I just want to get a bit more of an understanding of that. Savings target, so I just don't quite understand the language. So you say specifically the 9.3 million pounds that have some risk attached to it for achieving, but then there's high confidence, the word high confidence. Could you just talk me through that so I can understand where that high confidence comes from? If I pick up the first bit and I'll leave the political questions to the expert in the room, which is me, Councillor. So first of all, in relation to the Institute of Academic Excellence, just to make it clear, this is not an additional 8.5 million originally. The cost was estimated at 15 million because it was assumed that the place was going to be demolished. It's now saying we don't need to demolish it, we've revisited that. And actually we can refurbish the existing building, so the total cost instead of being 15 million is now only 9. And what we're saying is, of that 9 million, in this year it's likely we're only going to spend 500,000. Now I know the reason behind that is because the DFE are party to, we need to get agreement from the DFE to be able to operate the sixth form college. And I know Steve Reddy, the corporate director, is the expert in that and is probably the person that will give you most of the answers. But I just want to be very clear, this isn't an increase in budget, it's a decrease in the budget. And the amount that is being allocated to slip forward is because of an approval process that's outside the council's control. But that actually shortens, because we're going to refurbish it instead of knocking it down, shortens the whole process. In terms of the political response to the need for sixth forms and education, I will ask Shafi to answer that. Thank you. Politically, the manifesto is there for everyone to see and for everyone to vote for that. And we'd like to see all the pledges being fulfilled and this cabinet and this administration is in favour of making sure that we deliver on the promises that we pledged in our election campaign. And we are working towards that, whether it's 2026 or 2027, it's going to happen. Thank you. In terms of the specific savings and whether we've got confidence or not, the definition is, if it's green it's because it's being delivered or financed or not easily to police. Getting something past these guys isn't a case of 'yeah I'm going to deliver it' because we have to sit here at the end of the year and face you. So we have a high threshold for convincing us. The ones that are green are on track, two times scale. We made an assumption of the month that something would be delivered and that's on track. We remain completely satisfied that they will be delivered in the financial year but not at the specific month that perhaps was originally profiled. And the ones that are red are ones we're saying we're not convinced that they're going to be delivered in this year. So that nine and a half million, the impact on that is a cash flow impact. It just means that if we assumed it was going to be in place by the half year, and it's not in place until three months later, we'll only get half as much as we expected in this financial year. But its impact on the three year position is relatively low. So green to timescale and delivery, orange, delivery perhaps slightly later but still this year, red, we're not convinced it's going to be this year. Thank you. I'll allow one more question from Amy Lee before we finish this. Thank you, Chair. I'm just curious about this section on the Chief Executive Office. And if I get anything wrong, please do correct me. It's 4.47, it starts that. So as I understand it, it's saying you're forecasting an overspend of 0.5 after 2.2 million drawdown. So I've got two points on this. My understanding is that a lot of what is currently under the Chief Executive Office directorate that should be removed from that directorate and placed around the council, probably mostly with you Julie, so what impact is that having on these figures? And then also I have to say I'm quite alarmed to read that apparently the pressure on our legal services in this council is so high that we think it's going to cost 0.5 million pounds. So what on earth is going on in legal services? Actually I say that, I mean that's the overspend forecasted. So what on earth is going on there that the workload is so high that they're under that much pressure that it's going to cost this council that much money? That's quite alarming, don't you think? So in relation to the impact of proposals to move services anywhere, absolutely none. What this is doing is it's not taking any assumptions over and above what was there at budget time. It's sticking to that budget, it's not changing it. So where these sit have no implications as far as this quarter one report as at the end of June. Looking forward to the end of the financial year. In terms of the forecast overspend, half a million pounds is a lot of money but in context of the budget as a whole it's just under 10%. So if you think of a 10% overspend and yet they're telling us, what's driving that overspend is our inability to attract high qualified permanent lawyers so we're paying premiums on agency costs. This was considered two weeks ago by cabinet members and what we agreed to do was put forward, similarly there was two, actually I've mentioned one of them, educational psychologists and difficult to fill legal posts out to a benchmarking market based salary so that we can absolutely see what salary package should we be paying because it's a false economy, not to pay it and pay a premium on agency staff. So I'm not making light of it, you're absolutely right, half a million pounds is a lot of money but it is 10% overspend and if we bear in mind that agency staff often attract at least 15% premium then actually the service is in context, managing that quite well is still a pressure but they are managing it. James. I was going to ask something else, I just want to follow up on the first question that Councillor Lilly asked, I don't think we've got an answer to it. Two questions, essentially can you clarify from my reading that the 2.2 million pounds has been allocated from the reserves into the chief executive's office and then similarly there's a 0.5 million pound overspend. Where is the 0.5 million pound overspend coming from and additionally if reserve money has already gone into that where's the 2.2 million pounds come from? So I will let our expert pick up the detail but it was always budgeted when we set the budget. We set the budget assuming that ENSIL would be a source of funding for that activity so it's not, we've added it additionally, it's the source of funding that's contributing to it, it's not the general fund that's contributing to it. It's earmarked and it's for that purpose so it's meeting the purpose for which it's being applied, it was budgeted to do that, it's not on top. The second thing to say is in terms of the forecast overspend, so we didn't, it's not 2.2 million plus 500,000, it's 500,000 and we're obliged to say this is a service that it's a general fund report, not all it's funding is coming from the general fund and 2.2 million of it isn't. So that's what we're trying to explain to you, the uncontrolled overspend is the 500k. My question is what's necessitating the overspend, what are the drivers of it, you've been able to say in other directorates where there's specific pressures, what are the specific pressures within the chief executive's directorate which means we're having to spend reserves and have an overspend forecast. Okay so the reserves isn't a pressure, the reserves is we always look and are obliged to look at how can we apply the best source of funding, that was done at budget time so it wasn't a pressure. The 500k in legal is specifically around the fact that we are retaining interims and agency staff on day rate where the budget assumes we're going to employ permanent members of staff. Now the answer I just gave the Councillor made it clear the way for us to address this is to pay the right level of salary and we need to know what that is, it's still going to be higher than it is today, it's just not going to be 500k higher if we get it right. And if your question is what specific area is the 2.2 million ENSIL funding, what was it budgeted to fund, Chris are you able to pick that one up? Yes it was the voluntary community sector grants programmes that were agreed to be funded through ENSIL. Thank you, can I ask my original question? I'll keep it brief. So 9.2 and 9.3 of the report about business rates and there's another report going to cabinet about outstanding appeals of business rates which at the headline if those appeals are unsuccessful will mean that townhouses missing out on in excess of 22.4 million pounds worth of income from business risks, are there around that? The next item Councillor will be music to your ears because the detail behind that business rate pressure is a presentation but the answer is those business rate pressures have been accommodated in here because we had a reserve specifically for it. I'll move on to the next item then you can ask the question. Thank you Julie and thank you Hasan for your, our next item is business rate risk. Our next substantial item is the spotlight on business rate risk. This is a key to the council income stream, and we know the impact it had on our collection rates during the pandemic. Can Julie start us off? And if you want to follow on from when the cabinet member concludes. Can you, can you Julie you can have because cabinet member is not here so can you just give us your overview please. We will have 10 minutes to provide that with an overview then I'll move on to member's question please take the paper. Okay so I'm only going to take 30 seconds of that 10 minutes, because I think that you should see the presentation that was prepared for cabinet members about the specific pressures on business rates so you can see, understand, question exactly what's been driving that pressure. Chris has got the presentation for you. Just want to check Do you have the slides in your pack. Thank you. It should be page 79 I believe in the pack for yourselves. 79 I believe looking at this print from your side. What I'll do is run through it very briefly, appreciating time, and I will share the slides as I go on the screen there, just so everyone has the opportunity to catch up. I suppose from a very basic point, business rates, what are business rates, all properties, generally speaking have taxation applied to them. If they're residential properties, it's council tax. If they're not residential properties, it's business rates. And we in Tamar Hamlets we collect business rates that are charged on non domestic properties, and crucially we retain 30% of all the rates that we collect. 37 goes to GLA and 33 to government, but the crucial thing is we retain some of the rates ourselves. Therefore, the more business rates that we collect, the more money we have, and vice versa, the less we collect, the less money we have, and that's the sort of risk around this presentation and why this is coming. So the council's budget for business rates income is 173 million, so we're talking a large amount of money, and also just to note we're in a business rates pool with seven other councils, and that provides us with about 2 million pounds of savings. One of the key risks is business rates appeals. Business rates are based on the value of a property as calculated by government and the valuation office agency, and businesses can appeal their valuations, and they may do this years after they've had their valuation. So we don't know when they're going to do it, or if they're going to do it, but they could put in an appeal, they could be successful, and they could have their payments refunded for prior years. Not just a year, it was successful, but could go back several years, so we don't know if it's coming in, when it's coming in, or if they would be successful. Now they can't go back forever, they can't go back 30 years of business rates, we have things that are called rating lists where a new valuation comes out each time, and we've just had one in April 2023, and they're looking at having two year valuations. Because of COVID and other things, prior to 2023, the last revaluation was in 2017, so a period of six years between valuations. So if you had a business who appealed, right at the end, successful, they could have business rates refunded for the last six years, which adds up to a sizable amount of money. Now it's unlikely that they have the whole lot refunded, there had to be revalued and it would be a reduction in their rates, but nevertheless, over six years, that amounts to a lot. I've provided a chart as well to look at the historic levels. Now if you go back a few years, it's fairly steady, the amount of reductions relating to past years that came in, and then suddenly a huge spike, three times higher than previous years came in, right at the end of the rating list, the 2017 rating list. And you will have a lot of people who it's in their interest to do so, for example, agencies could assist and look to act on businesses' behalf to reduce rates, and they will be paid for that and may get a share of that, so there's a big incentive for that to happen. And you can see this big spike, about £40 million more in past reductions to business rates, and remember we retained 30% of that, so a big spike. And if we look a bit more at the profiles, from '23, '24, the appeals profiles, it's actually happened right at the end of the year. No problems, pretty much trend up until November, then December, January, February, March, a huge uptick when the valuation office cleared some appeals, so very little warning of this. And just to look at some of the top appeals for the last, the big successful appeals for the last '23, '24, hopefully you can see that on your presentations, but you can see these five ones total just 22.4 million alone. One big business, one big building has a huge impact on the amount of money we have. And of course these are big sums, the highest one, five million there, bear in mind this will be going back six years, could be going back up to six years, so it's not just one year's worth of refunds, it's a cumulative impact, which is the issue. And we don't know if they're going to do it, when they're going to do it, or if they'll be successful. So how do we cope with that sheer size of unknowns? Well we collect data on it, we base our data on what we know, so some people will have appealed, and we can look at what's in the system, and I've got pie charts that sort of break that down within there. And we use a company to help us with that analyze local, help us try and understand those matrix, and you can see that there's, in these pie charts for example, 37 million pounds worth, they estimate, if everyone was successful. So big numbers, and that's just an idea of how we try and deal with this. Of course what we don't know is what's not in the system, and again we use analyze local to try and predict what appeals may come in. But there are a number of risks, and just the last couple of slides here. We may find that the actual reductions in rates are higher than we estimate. The value of the appeals, of course we don't know. Properties can be removed from the valuation list completely, for example if they're going through full refurbishment. Conversion of offices to residential, and declining values, and obviously we've had to use a lot of our reserves, which were put aside for collection fund smoothing purposes, it was foreseen some of these issues. So we have reserves, but the issue is how this carries on going forward. We're looking at our intelligence as well, for example Barclays Building, their potential to be refurbished, 7 million pounds in rates, and I think you can all see in the news Canary Wolf, HSBC and things like that around that. So we're looking at horizon scanning and trying to brace our predictions on that. I think that covers some of our planned actions as well, because it's a far more volatile area than it was in the past. So we really need to up some of the analysis we use in response to this unpredictability that we're seeing at the moment. Thank you. Thank you Chris. Thank you Julian, thank you Chris for your overview. Do members have any questions on this subject? I think you can begin answering Councillor James King's question on something Julian. Do you remember the question? James do you want to ask your question again? Quite simply, how is this being assessed as a risk, and how has it been factored in, how has any potential risk been factored into future planning? So it was already factored in, we held a smoothing reserve and we were questioned quite closely at budget setting time around why you're hiding 20 million pounds Julian, a smoothing reserve. And we explained at the time that smoothing reserves are built up because some years you collect more than 100%, you collect more than you assumed you would, some years less. So you hold a reserve, you put the change, the stuff you did in budget, in a reserve in good years, and it's there to protect you in bad years. And we fought our auditor's heart who felt that our hamlets had too high a smoothing reserve. Clearly that was a battle, we chose to fight on the right battle because that 20.2 million that hit us, 20 million pounds of it we already had protected and set aside. So in this year Councillor, no issue. You're absolutely right, going forward you've seen how we collect the data, we will be factoring into our medium term financial plan how we build back up that reserve. And you will see, and I think there's probably going to be a scrutiny spotlight on income collection because it's all about collection rates, we can build up that reserve from council tax and from business rates, it's a smoothing reserve. So you will see, A, this year the reserve funded it, that reserve is now depleted, we need to build it back. How do we build it back? We need to make sure that our collection rates are higher than the assumptions we make in our budget, and that is what will build back the reserve. So you will see a big focus on how we improve collection rates, and I think that's going to be a dedicated spotlight session. So my question is around, just trying to understand how the appeals work, so we've got the top five examples given and they're all in Canary Wharf, they're all from the financial district. I just wanted to know what the grounds are for these successful appeals, because obviously the change of use in Canary Wharf is changing and it's going to carry on changing, so it would be good to know what the future looks like there. But also, if you can tell me, putting that Canary Wharf aside and looking at the rest of our helmets, what's the normal trend? What does the successful appeal look like? What are some of the grounds and can they be mitigated? And lastly, do we handle the appeals ourselves? Let me take the last one first, no. The appeal process is entirely independent of us, we have no influence, it's the valuation of us. And it's a spiral, it's a bit like PPI of the modern world. So how do you win a business rate appeal? It's a lot easier if somebody else has won one. So it's a bit like dominoes, once a principle has been established, and it can be anything, it can be change of footprint, it can be size of building, change of use of building. You can demonstrate, well actually this was unfair for six years because Imnextdoor's got a building that's almost identical to this and they're on a lower band. And the minute one wins, everybody jumps in because all you need is a president. So the local authority doesn't even get an option to submit their view or evidence, it's totally outside of our control. But yeah, it's a bit of a merry-go-round, wouldn't you? If you were one of those businesses in Canary Wharf and your next door neighbour won, what would you do? Anybody else? No more questions? That's pretty good. Do you have a question? Yeah, go on then. Thank you, thank you, thank you chair. Obviously with the decline in office values, obviously a lot of people are working from home, with those empty spaces you have, what do you have in place to use those as in the future? Could it be turned into obviously residential or any other? If you could share with us, thank you. So if you're talking about the council's buildings, then the council's asset strategy, which I think is about to come forward to you, will set out clearly our approach to those buildings. And a lot of them have been identified as sites for potential future housing. The reclassification of commercial buildings that affect business rates is totally outside of our control, but it's our future, Councillor. I think, likely, what's going to happen, I don't think we'll see as much conversion to residential in the big places in Canary Wharf, but we will see smaller units. So the same building, but perhaps more occupants in that building. So the total business rates won't go down, but if they close to refurbish, for as long as they're closed, we don't get any income. So I think that you're right to think about the future. How might our borough look in the future? That really is part of that strategic vision that we need to build up. What might that Canary Wharf look like in ten years? Because this is a significant source of funding to Tower Hamlet, so we need to understand. And that research is currently being undertaken, and we'll come back to you. But at the moment, we look at a three year horizon on our medium-term financial plan. We need to be looking to ten to answer those big strategic questions that you've put. I'm just trying to figure out, there's two points here. On the risks page, where it says properties could be removed from the rating list completely. What it means, and the second question is, conversion of offices to residential, how likely that's to happen, and is there a new pipeline? I'll answer the second question. Conversion to residential, we have one big advantage with the planning authority. So the earliest indication of a proposed change of use of one of our big properties to residential actually comes into this building. What we've got to get really good at is getting that data at the earliest possible moment into our financial modelling system. So you'll see us become much more joined up with data. So we get early sight of an application. It doesn't mean it's going to be granted, but it means that that's a risk. In terms of coming off the ratings list completely, there are a number of mechanisms, and I'll let Chris pick that up, because he's been looking at this carefully. Yes, so obviously conversions are residential. We've got ones where they're demolished. For example, if they're demolished, they will go off the ratings list. People do that to avoid business rates. We've also got examples where ones may go on a national infrastructure list, and they're more rare. We also have some where they're undergoing refurbishment. So, for example, the HSBC building will probably undergo some form of larger refurbishment as well. And that won't be liable for rates for a period of time. And then we've also got an element of charities sometimes, although they'll still be on the list as such. They can receive mandatory relief, and they will have such up to 80% mandatory relief on their rates, which if we're occupying empty space, it's great. But if they're getting on a relief status of 80%, that obviously isn't so good from an income perspective. Thank you, Chris, and thank you, Julie. Our next item on the agenda is the new transport strategy. It is important to understand how well this strategy promotes sustainability, mobility, improves accessibility, reduces traffic congestion, enhances public safety, supports economic growth, promotes public health, and is feature-proofing, and enhances environmental protection. So, I would like to welcome Councillor Shafi Ahmed, cabinet member for Environment and Climate Emergency. I believe Simon Baxter is not here, so can I welcome Ashraf Ali, Director of Public Health, and Wilson. Can Councillor Shafi Ahmed start us off, please, and Paris? Ashraf can take over from where Councillor Ahmed concludes. You will have ten minutes to provide the award. Please take the papers and see it. I'll let you know when you're nearing your last minute. Thank you, Chair, and good evening, everybody. Since the strategy was published in 2019, there has been a number of local, national and political changes impacting upon the strategic decision of transportation and funding opportunities, as well as travel patterns and the physical travel network and policy direction. The refresh is an opportunity to identify how the strategy will integrate with key policy areas, including the strategic plan and the local plan, and growth agendas. Road safety, walking and cycling, street scene guides, and parking enforcement plan, ensuring the future schemes and work programs are informed. This presentation highlights the action to be taken. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. I won't take ten minutes of time. I think it will be an opportunity to get questions from yourself and the councillors. I've got two colleagues on my side, Matt on the right and Vincent on the left. There is a presentation attached to it, so just go through key summary on the presentation and we'll take questions and answers, if that's right. Vincent, we'll go through the key summary. Just so you can highlight the key points in your presentation. Yes, that's true actually. Have you read the paper? I don't think you don't have to do the presentation. You can take the question here because... The goal of increasing number of electric vehicle charging points, with the timeline for implementing and how will you ensure that those charging points are accessible to the all residents, including those in lower income areas. Also, one of the other things, currently you are implementing a lot of lamp posts and charging points, but they're not marked as an EE charging point. So anybody who's got a normal car, they're parking, therefore it's not allowing the electric vehicle to park there, so it's not marked as an electric point. So other vehicles can park there as well, so the two questions, one is how you implement that and the current situation, are you aware of it? Thank you. Thank you, Councillor. I'll ask the second part of the question first and then the first part, Vincent, in terms of the current process. So the existing EV charging points that are already there, they're not dedicated EV bays, so the residents can actually park. So there's specifically traffic orders there to actually, though no traffic order in place, so the people who actually park there, they could actually charge, but also at the same time residents can actually park because they did not go through the traffic order to actually have a dedicated bay for EV. And with the current programme where we plan to actually implement 2,300 roll out of the EV charging point, we actually at the moment going through the procurement process and I'll just get Vincent to just highlight where we are currently. Thank you, Councillor, for the question. So picking up on the three work streams that we're working on, there are three separate work streams that we're working on in relation to EV. One is the 30 rapid charging points, so if people aren't okay with kilowatts, it's one of the fastest ways that you can charge your vehicle and there will be 35 being introduced throughout the borough. The second one that you mentioned was the electricity, which is the lamp column charging, which is considered a slow method of charging, which is usually your overnight charging and facilitates people that might come back in the late in the evening. By the time they leave the next morning, they have a full charge depending on the car they have. The third one would be your fast charges, which there will be 200 throughout various areas throughout the borough. So there are three distinct different charging models depending on what people's needs are across the borough. Just expanding on what Ashraf said there about the non-dedicated bays, and the reason why we've gone through that route is to make sure that there is still parking immunity for residents throughout the borough. We are prepared to obviously look at dedicated bays, but we need to achieve that balance of making sure that there's still parking immunity for everyone along that street, not just EV owners. So on a fast charger, if there's another fast rapid charger that's about 30 minutes an hour, is there going to be a time limit when somebody will basically come in and plug in and go away for a few hours? How are you going to tackle that, so make sure that other people get chances to charge? Are you going to put some sort of ruling into it? Yes, absolutely. The traffic order will stipulate in terms of the hours that they could actually do, and obviously there will be tariff behind the number of hours they park. So in terms of, as Vincent alluded, three different mechanisms of EV charging, the fast will be limited with time, so it will be really fast like for example four hours, whereas the slow charge will be longer, eight hours. So to answer your question, there will be a dedicated time slot for fast charging. Thank you, Chue. I want to focus a little bit on cycling, walking for pedestrians, and then accessibility, so I'll take accessibility first. So one thing that I get quite regularly is residents with mobility issues on wheelchairs, just how far we've come, but how far we need to go as well. So our pavements, the accessibility around the community and the area that we live in, so my question is how are we going to work with experts, so charities, with residents, Hear the Views, and being fluid with this strategy is not only consulting and involving experts just before this is adopted, but actually continuously being able to feed in and change as we go along, because this is a long period of time and it's the right strategy and the right move, but we need to be fluid on certain bits, especially when I know funding is a big thing for local government, but as soon as funding is available for projects, we should be able to be fluid and move that around. And that relates to the second part with cycling and pedestrians. One of the things I'm sure lots of counsellors get is they'll tell you about nooks and crannies across the borough where it's dangerous, it's unsafe, especially for women in the dark. How do we make, how are we able to open up a sort of a tool or a format, maybe in our website, maybe in the way we use the residence hub, about how residents can carry on feeding into the council, about where the changes need to happen, where the accessibility needs to happen in order to make their journey easier, safer. And lastly, there are areas in the borough which belong to third party, which we have no control over. This question is inspired by an incident last week while I was out campaigning a very senior activist who was with me. We were walking down a land that's owned by a clarion and he had a massive fall to the head, which was very dangerous, very unsafe. He ended up having eight or nine stitches that night, but the pavement was uneven and they had left residue from a tree that they had taken out which he tripped over. How can we help support those residents that have issues with land that don't belong to us, but there must be ways to influence that? And how does this strategy help to make sure that we don't forget about those little parts of lands in the borough that don't belong to us? If I may? Coming in the first one, Councillor, on the accessibility programme and how that feeds into the strategy. There's been some work done last year in terms of assessing most of our roads and footways and we have got a whole detail of where the streets don't have, for example, drop curbs. And you're quite right where we're looking at the capital funding to roll those out. One way we're tackling that is through our existing capital programme. We can't do all in one go, so when we develop or deliver the current capital programme, we embed some of the findings that we've had. But we've also got, going forward, putting out a roll out programme for three, five years programme in terms of how we're going to actually tackle through putting in bids through seal, section 106 and so forth. So there is a plan to do that. That's only tackling accessibility in a particular area. For the rest of the borough, we're trying to, through developing the strategy, we're going to do consultation to members as well as residents. We will actually get more feedback from residents and we will try to reach out to as much residents as possible so that they could incorporate some of their ideas and thinking where accessibility issues are. So officers might not actually pick up in all the areas, so we will actually try to reach out and this is a plan, a consultation plan that will go out and will incorporate some of the findings from the residents. Vincent will touch on cycling. I just want to touch on a third party. The council is not responsible directly, as you know, on the third party land. However, we are closely working with the RSLs. In fact, last week we just had one event with the RSLs, but 16 RSLs took part. Predominantly it was focused around cycling, but other aspects of it came about. So we are trying to work with the RSLs in terms of supporting infrastructure improvement within the state's joint approach, collaboration working. Not that we can actually, as a council, directly invest or do capital improvement because this is non-public highway, but we could certainly give our expertise and help to alleviate some of the defects in terms of within the state. And how they could use our system or our sort of knowledge from our engineers' highways to help improve the infrastructure within the RSLs. So there is ongoing dialogue with RSLs, we are supporting them, but there is a lot more work that we could actually do within the third sector. Do you want to touch on the recycling? Thanks, Councillor, for the excellent question. I'll just expand very quickly on what Ashraf said about the third party land. We do recognise it does present challenges throughout the borough. Just next door to the town hall we have East Mount Street, which as we know is not adopted, it's stopped up, which means that it's no longer a highway and that presents its own issues with the pub and the corner. So we're well aware of the different issues and challenges and thank you, we will make sure that we do include that within the stakeholder sessions that we have as officers and locally with members too. On the point about cycling, absolutely, that will form a really big part of the strategy going forward. I think we recognise the challenges that we've had and the more increases that we've had in cycling in the last half a decade. I think we need to balance the needs over walking and the fact that the resource that we have into our amulets, the footway and road is very different to neighbours in Hackney and perhaps Wolfram Forest. So we need to strike that balance of making sure that our most important asset is available for all road users and we just need to try and balance how that's going to take place. We don't have the silver bullet, so like Ashraf said, we will be engaging in stakeholder sessions internally as officers and we've also got some member consultation planned as well with obviously our cabinet member, our lead member and making sure that's the case too. Thank you Councillor Emily. Thank you. I was going to ask a question a bit to you Val but just off the back of that and just because I think there's only one mention of it so I just wonder if you can give me some more information. I've got dockless bikes and scooters. I'm sure everyone gets the emails about they're all strewn across the street, we all know what the issue is and I'm just wondering if we've actually got any plans on that because I think these are good schemes that people use. But there is an issue and if you look at councils across London, some of them are actually taking sort of fairly bold action on this now because they're basic, I think Brent is the most recent one to basically just say well we've had enough of this. And when I've asked about this previously I've been told well there's no legislation and that's it so what are we actually going to, can we follow the examples of these other councils and actually start thinking about some bold action to take on this. Because what we don't want is to get to a situation in the future where like some other councils have where they've gone right we've had enough of this, we don't want you in this borough because actually it's very useful in this borough particularly because of the amount of tourists we have. But we need to tackle the issue of accessibility where people can't walk down a pavement with a buggy or in a wheelchair because there's a bike in front of you. So I'm just wondering if we've got any plans on that one. I'll come in for a few seconds. So we have a quarterly meeting, GLA, in regards to its traffic strategy for the capital. Tower Hamlets we have signed up to an understanding or MOU within the 32 boroughs where we want to make sure that it comes as a whole item rather than just a borough wide thing, it should be in cooperation. TfL are running a sort of pilot scheme at the moment. We have signed up to it but to be honest there were going to be 20 but only 15 signed up so whether it will go forward or not we don't know. We want to encourage people to use electric bikes, use electric scooters which is a good thing and believe it or not the numbers of fatalities on scooters are less than bikes. Which is unbelievable, I was a bit shocked as well. Hopefully there's a meeting tomorrow and we might get an update as to how far we are going with that but there is no legislation which is correct. We want to make sure that there is a legislation and there is a MOU between the understanding of the other councils that we can deliver the service. Currently, in Tower Hamlets, Canary Wharf is the only point where they allow the electric scooters but we can roll that but we need docking stations or we need a place where it's actually a thing. But we as Tower Hamlets borough we cannot provide that to be honest because we have got enough issues with regards to parking etc. TfL are looking at their roads to do that and the other thing that I want to talk about in terms of safety with council Asma was the pavement less bus stops. This is also an area of concern but unfortunately we don't have powers to that. We have a lot of complaints from presidents who keep saying that we get off the bus, some wheelchair users and it's very difficult for them but unfortunately we don't have anything at the moment. With regards to creating car spaces, over four years we said that we are going to allocate about 1000 car spaces or extra parking spaces for residents. The good news is that we have already allocated 750, by the end of this municipal year we will have 750 spaces available extra for residents. Thank you. A lot of it has already been covered, it is a case of a lack of legislation, makes it very difficult to be able to enforce. Colleagues in the transport team are in regular conversation with other London boroughs and TfL in relation to how we bring that forward and lobby support to develop and actually adopt some legislation that will give local authorities power. We have made reference to some of the work that we are undertaking in terms of walking and cycling plans and trying to encourage and enable more walking and cycling across our borough. For that to be successful we do need to be able to address and manage issues such as bikes and scooters being left in places that then prevent and make it difficult for people to walk and cycle if that's what they are trying to do. So I think it is the whole package of our transport strategy and these suite of documents which is about road safety is one of them as well, safety on our network for all users and then our walk and cycling plan. All of that coming together will put us in a much stronger position to be able to lobby for additional support legislation to address the problems that we have. Thank you chair, thank you councillor Shafi for the presentation of the offices. The plan emphasises community consultations for the traffic reduction measures. What specific methods will be employed to ensure that the voices of all community members specially those who are marginalised, sorry marginalised groups are heard in taking into account the decision that you will be making for the future. Hopefully they have been heard in that process, thank you. Thank you councillor, it is in work in progress in terms of consultation and we will learn a lesson from previously the consultation we have done on a number of papers and projects that we have done within the highway services. We will actually engage as wide as possible through online, digital, also workshops going through local communities, hard to reach communities and engage as wide as possible. Like we are doing with the parking consultation that is going out and we have seen a number of feedback coming through online but they have also actually gone out to idea stores, they are doing sort of store information at Moss. So we are reaching out, so we will actually replicate some of the good things that are working and also take feedback from members, lead members and those that reach out to constituents within the local community. So we are quite open, still at the development stage in terms of how we actually roll this out. Thank you. I have two more councillors on my list. Before I move on to councillor Sulu-Kahmat, do any members online have any questions? I'll move on to councillor Sulu-Kahmat and the last one will be councillor Natali Bienke. Thank you Chair. I just want to ask a question in perspective of regards to the safe for walking and cycling both. Do councillors have any program in progress for future to target some of the points in town homeless which is danger to both cyclists and pedestrians? I know a few are reported a few which is people just walk on the pavement and there is a cycling lane which is not even visible and people get confused with pushchairs and prongs and wheelchairs and cyclists together. So do you have anything in progress that you could identify those danger points and you can perhaps highlight the street with different colours or a barrier or something? I can name a few if you want to but it's everywhere in town homeless. So just to give you the safety of where the pedestrians and cyclists merge together, these are the points that I'm worried about. Thank you. The way we will actually, councillor, thank you for your questions on that is a challenge question. There's two ways we will actually look at addressing. One is looking at infrastructure, how we can actually make changes like the colour coding or signage even when it's a maintenance issue when something is worn out so we can actually repair or actually make it a lot more visible so that people can actually see it. The other is obviously the education element through engaging and educating the programs, road safety education, going through schools, parents and community as wide. So that's the two strands we can actually look at so within this strategy we will develop further how we can actually implement some of those. So these are the two ways we can actually address the concerns that you've raised. Thanks, Councillor, for the question. The only thing I'll add to that, councillor, is we recognise that sometimes shared surfaces present their own issues. We're visually impaired and those that aren't familiar with the surfaces being shared between cyclists and walking, for example. What the strategy will seek to achieve is just making sure that one, the education piece is there and that we have perhaps an approach that makes it clear where this sort of infrastructure will be introduced. So we're not going to perhaps suggest or promote this sort of infrastructure in areas where the conflict might be more high but we'll look at the areas to make sure that interventions are appropriate for that particular area. So that reduces the conflict overall. But no, thank you very much for your question. Just in one word, this is a very serious issue. Councillor, please do send it through to Ashraf and we're more than happy to look into those specifics as well, so thank you. Before I move it to Natalie, Councillor, very briefly please. Thank you, Chair, very kindly, thank you. Sorry if you could answer this. Does the council have any plans to deal with illegal bike batteries that are being sold within the borough which obviously causes fire, life could be lost and so on? If you have any plans in the pipeline, thank you. Thank you, Chair, very kindly, thank you. Thank you. It's very important that residents are kept safe and this is our priority. We know, unfortunately, last year there was a fatality within the borough and life was lost and we feel for the family because gentleman arrived in the UK for a very short time leaving his family behind and this incident happened. One of the things the council has worked harder, a few weeks ago we went to a launch of the animation of how to buy e-batteries. Most of the enforcement around Tower Hamlets has been making sure that we don't sell the ones that are not approved. This animation will help residents or people who watch this and it's going to be launched nationally as well. We did a workshop with Deliveroo and London Fire Brigade in Shoreditch Fire Station where they came and took the advice and they were given a link to see the animation. This is to create awareness to our residents to make sure that e-bikes, even in keeping them in passages in the lobby, we know people live in lots of flats and make sure that they don't charge while they're sleeping. Just this morning, I can give you an update, our dustbin truck was in Barnet Grove and there were batteries left within the waste and it actually caught fire. So we had to get all the dump on Barnet Grove and then have another dustbin pick it up. These are things that we need to work on. We are at the beginning stage of making residents aware of how it's important to make sure that we charge right. We're encouraging our workforce that many of our residents work for Deliveroo, for UberEats and many other platforms and we want to make sure that we work with those platforms and we show that it's important for them to be safe. That's our first priority. Thank you. Thank you, chair. Thanks for coming here. It's really great that we're talking about this because I think in the context, as you mentioned, there's been quite a few changes since this strategy was first published in 2019. I have a few questions, chair, if that's all right. One of them is around mode shift, so one of the key objectives of the original strategy and I assume, actually, can we just go back quickly because we didn't have the presentation. Can I just clarify that the changes to the 2019 strategy are adding the points, I think, on our page 99 of the agenda. And then, so there is like some key changes listed out on page 99 so emphasis on EV charging, increased parking, tree planting, suds, accessibility. And then the next page down. So those bullet points on the next page down are items I think from the strategic plan. Will those items from the strategic plan be put into the new refreshed transport strategy? To answer this question, yes. So copy pasted into the... Okay, okay. So... Not exactly, sorry, not exactly copy and paste but obviously work with the details and flush out how we can actually implement some of those. So I'm just, okay, so that's, I think that's, so for example the commitment to monitor the effectiveness of cycle lanes, for example, and reopening the roads. Will those points be in the new strategy? Yeah, I mean these are part of the consultation, when we do the consultation we will actually feed those consultation and look at what we can actually implement or put into the new strategy. I see, so there's going to be a consultation after this meeting before this new strategy is implemented. Okay, okay. Sorry, just clarifying the points here. So is it, but generally the updates will be taken from the manifesto that the mayor was elected on and I'm assuming cabinet members here, that's the programme that you want to deliver. The principal point is, as the councillor alluded earlier, we had a number of changes, two changes in London election and obviously we've had new mayor of London, so we've just got new policy and new changes, so that will reflect from TFO, we'll have changes in terms of their transport plan and priorities. We've had our own transport planning local plan changes, so there are a number of policies that's been changed and our existing transport strategy is not reflective of that, so we need to actually realign and revisit and refresh our transport strategy in line with the government's policies and changes that's been made. Could I just come back on that, so the London mayor, so obviously there's been an election, but his policies haven't changed as far as I know. Are there any updates from... Yes, TFO is going through the LIP process, local implementation plan changes, so that is coming in effect very soon, within the next three to four weeks and the local authorities will be putting in a plan and that will feed into the transport strategy of London as well as local transport strategy as to be refreshed. Okay, so let's carry on with the questions. As you know, with the new Blackwall tunnel and Silvertown tunnels, that's also under consultation at the moment and we've been asked to give feedback on that and one of the things that we have commented on that, it's a three year plan to reduce the usage of Blackwall tunnel to half for residents of Tower Hamlets, but we as a council, we've put in our arguments across to say that we want to make sure that when the congestion charge happened, those residents that were living within the congestion charge were significantly price was reduced for them indefinitely, so we want to make sure that working with the boroughs and the TFO to make sure that if we can argue across to say that we want to make sure that this is not a three year strategy rather than it should be an indefinite period. So that's what we're working on. So there are some changes that will be coming along, so we are still working on those changes. Thank you. I'm a little bit not sure because if we've, I'm just questioning about the stage at which, what kind of feedback you want from us at this stage because if we've not consulted yet, what are you looking for from us as a committee? Thank you, Councillor. I think it's a very valid question. The purpose of this is to give the committee an opportunity to have pre insight as before we do engage with stakeholders. I should make the point that this is a refresh as opposed to a rewrite. So I don't want us thinking that we're ripping up what was ratified in 2019 to 2014, because it was fit for purpose. And as our lead member expressed, it's more for us to take stock of where we are at as an authority. The world has changed since 2020. I think some of your colleagues made a good point that things have changed in terms of going to the office. It's great to see everyone here in a room as opposed to online. So we just wanted to make sure that we're capturing all of the necessary elements as an authority. And in terms of what we're asking from the committee today is just to give you the insight so that you can engage with us going forward. And if there are things that you feel that will actually issues with third party issues with the conflict between shared spaces has always been an issue and you don't think in the last five years or so that's been correctly addressed is an opportunity in the next three months before this refreshes is ratified for you to engage with us again. I think one thing I'll say as well that Ashraf has asked us to do is going forward is for us to give a new update reports on the strategy. I think that's what's missing here as well. I think this has been five years since we've had a discussion with you. A lot has changed in those five years. So I think it's incumbent on us to make sure to say look, if we have to go to O&S again in a year. This is where we're at. Here's a dashboard. We're meeting this objective. We've dealt with third party issues. We've dealt with all of those particular matters and it gives you an opportunity to say well okay you're on track or you need to pivot and so on. So yeah, I just wanted to make clear that this is a refresh of the strategy to make sure that the desired outcomes from that ratified strategy were on track for that and we need your help to make sure that we get that. I just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page about why we're discussing it but I think you've given a really comprehensive answer so thank you so much. I thought could we just discuss mode shift. So we are on track on a number of key indicators as you mentioned. An increase in cycling and a decrease in car ownership. We're on track to meet the objectives of the original strategy. How do you see that being implemented in the future given that some of the politically there are differences between the manifesto that the executive mayor was elected on and some of the objectives and some of the policies within the transport strategy as it was ratified. I'm not sure how we can further influence mode shift without implementing some of the policies which were explicitly opposed in the manifesto. I'll leave obviously as an element of a political question in terms of how that's addressed so I'll sort of leave that with Councillor Shafi to address that but obviously what we're trying to refresh is trying to find a balance. Like you rightly said the model shift in terms of car usage at the time is one of the lowest so we're there and the trajectory is looking in that direction. We're doing a lot on school cycle training, adult cycle training so active travel package how we actually look at that so through the consultation what else can we actually do and what else can we add. How actually can we penetrate the sort of other communities we might not actually sort of understand or fully grasp the active travel elements of it so what more can we actually do to engage the wider community on our active travel. So there's a host of works that we can actually do, putting in our strategy and an action plan to address some of those so it's again finding the balance. Some of our infrastructure elements of projects we can actually look at again putting in an action plan of how we actually deliver those. We've talked earlier about accessibility, it's not in the plan so how do we actually address those accessibility and other groups that might need help and support on transport, transport fares, bus fares and train fares. How can we actually support the low income and again that needs to be sort of rushed out and we need ideas and suggestions and input in terms of how we roll that out. So there's elements of that we can actually do so I don't know if the Councillor wants to add. Thank you, you've covered most of it. What I really want to say is that the Mayor's plan or this administration's plan is to make sure that we deliver on what we have been challenged to deliver. One of the things that we can talk about is hopefully the Liverpool Street schemes is delayed now, it's going to take some time until we get a JD on that. That's a major setback, we want to make sure that we can open up these roads and make it more accessible to all the community who live in Tower Hamlets. Creating trees, making sure we're putting down trees. There was allocated 1,000 trees, we have already made sure that there will be 1,400 trees by this year rather than the fourth year round so we have some extra funding for that made available. Basically moving in the right way of making sure that our policy is carbon incentive, we're making sure that we're encouraging people, it's difficult for many of our residents of the borough who work and use cars as a means of work. So we need to make sure that these incentives that are coming out are encouraging people to take their vehicles. I have to finish this item. Thank you, I'm happy to finish, Chair. You have to limit yourself to one more question, I'm sorry. Just wanted to talk about the potential for the change in the LTNs in Bethnal Green. Part of the transport strategy is that all of the decisions need to be evidence led. I wonder if we as a committee could request that any changes around removal of those schemes are monitored for traffic levels, for pollution levels. And that reports come back and are included in those annual reports for the transport strategy because I think that kind of granular detail is really important to understand how small changes that we make cumulatively could add to how people get around and air quality and how accessible it is. Thanks, Councillor. I think it wouldn't be appropriate to obviously comment on the live judicial review. However, as I've said, in front of your esteemed colleagues, we will be providing updates on an annual basis. And if in consultation with our lead member, that is one of the metrics. I don't think that's an unreasonable ask. However, I think we need to be conscious of the fact that you made a really good point there, and I'm referring to my notes, it's gone up from 17% to 27% in terms of cycling. My car has gone from 39 to 31. I think they're the kind of big ticket items that you as a committee and as our lead member would like to track. So again, that can be subject to further discussion, but we'll discuss it with lead members. And also the parking surveys and continuing. So I think there's a whole host of different metrics that we can look at. And like Ashraf said, we will be reviewing that with members to see what that actually looks like going forward. Thank you very much. Our next item for this evening, and there's local government. Before I go, thank you, Councilor Safi Ahmed, and thank you, Ashraf, and thank you to the offices to attend. So I'll move into our next item. Our next item for this evening, again, there's local government and social care ombudsman, final decision and service action plan response. Agenda papers are attached, and for context, this engagement with OSC is also recommended by the local government ombudsman. I would like to welcome Councilor Abdul Wahid, Committee Member for Customer Service, Equality and Social Inclusion, Leah Sykes, Director of Customer Services, Usman Zia, Head of Information Government. If Councilor Wahid wants to introduce the item, and perhaps the officers in attendance can take over for the remainder of the presentation on the item. You will have five minutes, and I'll let you know when you are nearing your last minute. You may start now. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Good evening, everyone. I'll be very brief. Before I start, I just want to suggest, I think we have only one item on the agenda, and if in future, if you can consider those who have one item, if you can go first, so that we don't have to wait for the whole meeting, so that'll be really kind of you. Anyway, back to the agenda. Local government and social care ombudsman has a statutory duty, power to investigate complaints, support by residents, about the Council. As part of the ombudsman's role, they identify faults in how the Council has made the decision, and can make recommendations to remedy those faults and learn from them. We are here today to deliver a recommendation of an ombudsman's decision. The complaint is primarily about a Blue Badge renewal process, but the ombudsman felt that there was specific fault that was beyond the Blue Badge process. That fault was that the complainant, Mr. X, suffered avoidable distress and occurred time and trouble in having to repeat his request for a reasonable adjustment. The ombudsman made a few recommendations to remedy and for us to learn from this fault around the handling of the reasonable adjustment. I have here with me our Director of Customer Service, Leah Sykes. Online we have our Head of Information Governance, Ousman Zia, and they will go through the details of the learning that we've taken and the recommendation. Thank you. Great, thank you very much. So the purpose of what we're here today for is that the ombudsman asks us to create an action plan that covers corporately, so it's outside of the service issue. And it's about how do we make reasonable adjustments across the council for our service users. And some of that was around how we actually record in reasonable adjustments, how are we assessing them, how are we making those decisions, and ultimately how do we make sure that we are compliant to all of those things. So that's why we're here. Ousman took a very initial glance at this and we realised straight away we didn't have a reasonable adjustment policy for our service users, so we've got that to go through as well. So I think before Ousman moves into the detail, it is worth noting that we have done a lot of work on this in the background and we've got some real pockets of excellence across different services. I guess where we're lacking corporately is that we don't have that overarching policy and equally we're not consistent in our delivery, so there's lots of different ways that we can deliver services but it's not consistent across all of those services. So that's what we're really trying to address. So I'm going to hand over to Ousman and go through the detail in a bit more detail and then we'll open up for questions. Ousman? Thank you very much, Leah, and thanks, Councillor Waheed. So just following on from that, I think Leah just addressed a very important point. We do obviously have an equality strategy, I believe, for 23 to 27, and it does mention in there very briefly the Council's duty to make reasonable adjustments, so it is obviously mentioned within the equality strategy itself. But we get such a different range of customers with a range of different needs through many of the different front doors and methods to contact our customer-facing services, so we felt, even though the Ombudsman did not ask us specifically as a recommendation to go aside and make a specific policy around this, we felt it would be helpful. Not just there as a published piece of information for our residents to be able to view and understand our legal obligations under the Equality Act, but also for our staff to understand and have a document that does summarize some examples of what can be seen as quite common reasonable adjustments, but also understand it's a case-by-case basis depending on an individual's needs as well. What we decided is the Ombudsman – and we have to remember, the Ombudsman has only looked at one particular case, so looked at how reasonable adjustments were looked at within a blue-badge renewal process for one particular individual. The Ombudsman did identify fault because they felt we didn't consistently – it didn't say we didn't at all, but nonetheless, the Ombudsman felt we didn't consistently apply this individual's reasonable adjustments, so for example, you may have seen in the decision we sent emails when we were just meant to speak on the telephone, which may be an example of not fully understanding or not properly recording the reasonable adjustments for this individual. But nonetheless, we do know that services, they use different systems, they have different mechanisms of speaking to our residents and helping them as well. So we wanted a plan that could go facing forward to help us, one, understand how the different services across the council from a customer-facing perspective, what is their understanding of reasonable adjustments, are their systems able to keep a permanent or visible record of what that reasonable adjustment is. Because for example, if someone is using a system where there's a case note from three months ago and that case note is not obviously visible to the next advisor or officer who may be helping that customer, then obviously that's a gap that needs to be addressed as well. So one of the elements we put in there is that we put a survey that we are intending to take forward with services. We did decide, you may have seen the action plan at the time, which I wrote back in July, we were planning to do that initially in August, but because we knew we were going to be coming to ONS in early September today, we thought it might be best to get the feedback of the committee and any views going forward and then begin to implement the work in case there's anything additional we can do. So the actual intent behind the work is, one, to get a fuller understanding of how our customer-facing services, what their understanding and their full knowledge and their ability to implement reasonable adjustments are, then we can take that information and help implement that corporately. Because the council doesn't have a single system that every single service uses, they have different mechanisms, different systems, and obviously different ways of speaking to our residents as well. So that was the main intention behind the piece of work and happy to take any questions.

Thank you, Councillor Warhead, and thank you, Diane, for your advice. Do members have any questions? Councillor Wood? Councillor Harris? Just one minute. Councillor Asma, you can begin. Thank you. So I can -- thank you. This seems -- you'd think this is something we've worked on for ages, but I can understand how it's come about and why it's so urgently needed. I'm just shocked that it's taken this long for us to really take this seriously. I can see loads of good institutions' names here with resources like Scope Mind, Citizens' Advice, but the resources have been added, I guess that's for us, but how much involvement do they have in this? How are they working and are they going to carry on help supporting the council with how we transition into a place where we're making these adjustments? Firstly, secondly, you talked about where we were as a council, where other councils might be, so is there a benchmarking, what other councils -- maybe what a really good council looks like when it comes to this subject, so we can make a comparison of how far we need to go, and it will also help us as a committee of what we should be monitoring going forward. And lastly, this is mostly about face-to-face. I wanted to know, would this be a consideration for those that will sometimes or all the time struggle to have that face-to-face contact, how we make our service more accessible for those? Thank you, so I'll take each one as we go through. So first of all, we do take this really seriously, and we have done. I think that in terms of the face-to-face element, we actually deliver, this isn't just for face-to-face, this is over any contact method, so whether it be digital, whether it be email, phone calls, face-to-face, it has to come down to customer's choice, and we've got to make sure they're all available for our customers to access our services in a way that suits their needs. So we're trying to be much more consistent across the Council, so it's not just face-to-face. So at this stage, it's only an early draft of the policy, the plan is after today, we will then move on and take it to our advice agencies and the partners that we work with to get their feedback, because they work with a lot of more vulnerable communities than what we do necessarily have those relationships really closely with. And then the last bit about the benchmarking, absolutely, we've tried to do some already, so we haven't found anyone who's had a reasonable adjustment policy, but we can't sit here and say that we are the first to have one, but we are still continuing to understand what does great look like, so then we will share that. How does the Council balance the cost and resources required to do, or whatever it takes to implement those reasonable adjustments you're talking about, against the need to provide equitable access to services, the needs of our residents? What criteria are used to determine whether a requested adjustment is considered reasonable, if you could give us some insight into that. Thank you, Chair. Thank you. Okay, so I'll pick up the first one, and then I'll ask this one to pick up the second part to that. So the first part around the costing, so we have got our overarching customer experience strategy, that went live last year, so it fits under that because we've got some funding, but ultimately this is around making sure this is continuous improvement, which links in with everything we were trying to do corporately, and making sure that, I shouldn't imagine anything that's going to have huge costs to it, it's more around making sure we're getting out into the services and we're making sure that we understand what we can do as services. So I'm going to hand over to Usman to discuss actually more around the needs and kind of what those reasonable adjustments are. Thank you. That's a very good question. If you actually look at Section 4 of the draft policy itself, it makes reference to the Equality Act's Code of Practice, and what they don't do, they don't give specifics, because like I mentioned, reasonable adjustments, the adjustments themselves when they initially come in from, you know, a resident or an individual, can be very varying in nature, and you're meant to look at them on a case-by-case basis. But it does mention certain factors, such as looking at the resource currently available and the systems we already have in place. So for the most part, the adjustments that are normally asked of the organization, we should already have facilities in place. It's about having the staff awareness to know that those facilities are there. So, for example, that could be, you know, adjusting, you know, the font of a letter. There's some very basic ones. In this case, like I mentioned, we were simply using the wrong contact method, and we didn't have the correct method of recording the individual's reasonable adjustments. So we have systems in place for that. A lot of the time, it's more about the implementation than not having the systems in the first place, which is what our understanding of it is. So we shouldn't anticipate a huge amount of cost or bringing in new systems. It's more about working with what we have and ensuring that the knowledge, the guidance and the know-how is actually there, which is the point behind the survey as well. Thank you. So I'm really pleased that we are acknowledging that this is basically a council-wide issue, because obviously, as you say, this is one example. I could give you a hundred examples of where this has happened, just from my case work alone, where people's individual needs have been either ignored or, in the worst cases, disregarded in an utterly disgraceful manner. I could give you some of the worst examples that I've ever seen, but I won't, otherwise I will talk forever. But I think you've hit the nail on the head, because what we keep saying is this is case by case. How are you going to actually enforce this? How are we going to actually make sure that this is being stuck to and being followed by our officers and this council? Because I have to say at the moment, in a lot of cases, I will say, particularly in housing, nowhere near anything like this is happening. I'd say the opposite is happening, to be honest. So how are you actually going to ensure that people are sticking to this, especially when it's saying if people aren't happy with how it's been handled, they can make a complaint? Part of this that's been investigated is that the complaint wasn't handled properly. I know from sitting in various of the committees on this council that there is a problem in this council with accepting feedback, with acting on and learning from feedback. It's a problem across this council. So you're sort of putting people in a position where if they're not happy, they've got a complaint, but the complaints process is also part of the problem. So how are we actually going to make sure that people are sticking to this internally? Okay, great questions and comments. So actually information governance, that includes complaints, and that sits under mine and businessmen's remit. So we have been doing a lot of work in the background because we equally recognise that it's not where it needs to be. So we've got Power BI coming out very soon with dashboards, obviously we've been meeting with senior managers and CMT to go through that in more detail. That is rolling out from next week, so that's going down to services, so there's much more focus on making sure services are responsible. And that's kind of been our real push in the background to make sure that we're responding to things in time and then we're doing a real quality response to those. So picking up on the other part of that, so how are we going to make sure it happens, so partly about the complaints process and making sure we're following through with that. But really it's all the things that has been said, it's about making sure that we've got trackers, we know who's gone on training, which that was highlighted as one of our gaps in there. So it's all of those things, and really it's about compliance to what we say we're going to do, we're going to make sure we're done, so we're getting there. We're not perfect yet, but we've certainly made lots of improvements in the background. Thank you, Councillor Natterly. Thanks, Chair. I'd like to ask about the council-wide system. It doesn't seem to be part of the policy that we will get a council-wide, consistent system that we will use. And that means that residents contacting the council will have to tell different teams about their reasonable adjustments, that seems to be defeating the object. I think I remember something about a new telephone system being purchased. Is there any way of, I don't know, what's your answer about? How do we procure a system, or what kind of system can we use to make sure that this actually is consistent? And I think just leading on from Councillor Lee's question, do we have a programme of maybe training sessions or onboarding sessions with staff in all of the frontline areas of the council? And do we also have a plan to make all of the resources, like forms, like complaint forms, like rehousing on health ground forms, for example, do we have a plan to make sure that they are accessible in all of the formats that might be needed? And then maybe there's a plan to be more flexible in the future, but is there a plan to systematise that? Yes, so thank you. So with regards to a corporate system that does everything, no, but what we will be looking at is bringing in technology that joins those systems in the background. So it's not one new system, but it will be something that joins it, because you're absolutely right. We don't want a service user to tell us in one service that they need a reasonable adjustment, and then we don't implement it anywhere else. That's the whole purpose of this, really. So first point is that we do the survey with the services so we understand where we are, and then we can start building the correct solution to fix that issue. But technology will generally be the way that we're going to do that in terms of joining those systems up. So yes, we do have training sessions for frontline services, and part of that is around how they're delivering their services, and we have got some reasonable adjustment training. That's a gap for us, that we've not got that overarching and can't see at an instant where we are with it, so we recognise that already. And also the onboarding process, which again we've been doing lots of work on in the background with our HR and our training development team, is really to understand what does that look like? What sectioning people are, so if you work in a frontline service, what is it that you absolutely need to have outside of the normal mandatory training? And then working through that in sections so we're making it very service specific in terms of what sort of role you have. And that goes all the way up to managers, you know, what's the expectations when you join the organisation as a line manager of people? So all of those things are in train, we do recognise that we've got some gaps, and there is some bits that we do really well as well. So there's lots going on, and I think your comment around accessibility, absolutely, we do have, we measure all our accessibility in terms of the forms that we do put live onto the system, and that's measured by our IT and digital colleagues. So that is a measure that we can do, and we can give you some metrics around that. So of the forms, so our digital, so online, you can actually go on and we can run reports to tell us how accessible at least our website is, and then we've got programme of works in terms of some of those forms. What if someone can't use an online form and then needs a different format, do we have a way of making sure that it's available in a different format? Yes, so languages we cover off already, different formats, we've got, you can have the service delivered over the phone, you could also come in face to face, so there is different methods and channels that we can deliver that over. Thank you, I'm going to move on from this now. Thank you, Councillor O'Brien, thank you Leah and Osman for attending. Thank you, Judy, for staying as well that long. I really commend your patience here, thank you. So our next item for tonight is the final version of this year's ONS Work Programme, which is agenda effect. It will note that in June we carried out a cross-party, including co-opties, work programme development activity and followed up with a draft at the committee meeting for members' comments. It's also worth remembering that whilst we do have set times in place, we do have capacity to be flexible so there has been an argument offered in an item that needs to come to OSC. Do members have any comment or questions on the work programme for this year? Anybody? Can I just confirm that this is correct, there is one, for the rest of this term, one Mayor's Spotlight at this committee, at the Overview and Scrutiny Committee, there's one opportunity to scrutinise the Mayor for the entire year, is that correct? No, so the Mayor also attends and presents the strategic performance, so he attends those quarterly ones, that's scheduled for him, but there is only one scheduled Spotlight for the Mayor. And that is where basically we're able to ask him any question that we need to, right? Sure, yes. So there's only one opportunity to do that for the rest of the year, I just want to put on record that I think that's completely wild, this is an Overview and Scrutiny Committee, he's the Mayor, I think that's not okay, to be honest. Can you find out that? We're doing the make. Yes, I would fully support requesting more Spotlights for the Mayor, I think it's a mayoral authority, being able to ask him questions, I would be supportive of that and I hope you would be supportive of that as well. Anyway, so my question was, I had a meeting with the team responsible for Net Zero recently and together with Councillor Shafi Ahmed, the Cabinet Lead, they let me know that there's a chance that the Net Zero targets will come to Cabinet before the end of this calendar year. And we are due to look at the targets in January, in the January meeting, but I just wanted to let you know, Chair, that it's possible that it will be on the Cabinet agenda before then and I'd quite like to get an opportunity to do some pre-Cabinet scrutiny when it comes to Cabinet. I don't know, I think they're targeting the November meeting, but it could be December as well, we'll keep an eye on it, but I just wanted to let you know about that. Thank you Councillor, I'll ask the Officer to make a note on it and if it's possible to include it on the November. I don't think anybody has any other questions, so can we all agree the World Programme for this year and move it to the next item? Thank you, thank you Julie. Okay, so our next item is merely for noting. Each year, we undertake an overview and scrutiny annual report outlining the work and commitment that we have taken with the support from our scrutiny officer. This highlights the work that has been undertaken for 2020-24 and will be tabled at the next full Council. Do members have any comments or feedback on this scrutiny annual report for 2020-24? Any comment? No? Thank you members. You would have also received this scrutiny executive protocol offline, which we will be bringing to OST next month, next month for a fuller discussion. Do members have any initial comments or thoughts? No? If not, we'll move to your next item. Our next item is pre-decisions scrutiny. Do members have any pre-decisions scrutiny questions that would like me to share in relation to the cabinet agenda items? Do you have any comments? Yes, Councillor Naturale. Thanks chair. I wanted to ask a question on the item relating to time banded collections waste collections in the cabinet agenda for tomorrow. I couldn't see anywhere in the report any kind of information about whether residents will be told about the changes and when they'll be told about the changes to their waste collections, which I think is a significant oversight. Did anyone else see anything different? Because if they did, then we don't need to ask the question, but I just think that's really important to ask. Thanks. I'm sorry everyone, I know everyone wants to go. I just wanted to say that we were promised by the chief executive that we would get a good array of corporate directors. We've got Julie Lorraine here, which I'm really grateful for, but we did have an item that we should have had Simon Baxter here for this evening and I don't know if he sent apologies. I checked with the officers and I don't think he did send apologies and we also don't have any of the other corporate directors. I don't know if you want to add anything, Julie? I think the chief executive did give a commitment that a corporate director would be here for the full meeting. I was here with a number of agenda items anyway tonight and I simply offered to my colleague, Simon, that I would happily support if a corporate director was needed. So it wasn't that Simon didn't want to attend and I think Steve's promise was, from my understanding, that there would be a corporate director present. We're corporate directors, so our responsibility actually crosses boundaries and that's the capacity in which I attended this evening. So, hopefully, that reassures you. It was quite a big item. It would have been nice to have Simon here and he would have been polite to send a note. So, thank you very much, Julie, and thank you sir, confidentially. The next OSC meeting will be on 15th of October, so with no other business, I call the meeting to a close. Thank you for attending. Thank you everyone. Enjoy. 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