Transcript

Good evening and welcome to this housing and regeneration scrutiny subcommittee meeting tonight. My name is Councillor Bodru Choudry. I will be chairing this meeting. This meeting has been held in person with the housing and regeneration scrutiny subcommittee members, along with key participants present in the meeting room and joining remotely. Only the subcommittee members present in the meeting room can vote. Should a technical error occur that prevents remote attendees from participating, I will decide if and how the meeting should proceed after taking advice from officers. This meeting has been filmed on the Council website for public viewing. Those participating in the meeting will be included in the footage. I will remind members at the meeting to only speak on my direction and to engage and speak clearly into the microphones to ensure that the contributions can be properly recorded. Those in public - sorry, physical attendance must use their microphones and turn them off when not speaking. Please have your mobile phone on silent mode. Keep microphones on mute, those who are joining us virtually, and speak when I have given you the direction to do so. Committee members are encouraged to keep video cameras turned on and if members and officers joining remotely wish to speak, please use the raised hand function. Please do not use remote meeting chart functions as it will not be seen by those of us in the physical meeting. We will now go on to the apologies. Justina, if you have any apologies, please, thank you. Thank you, chair. Yes, I have two apologies. First is from Councillor Anamia, and second is Councillor Mohamed Chowdhury, but Councillor Amina Ali is substituting in his place. Thank you, Justina. Can members introduce yourself followed by any declaration whether you have any DPI interest indicating which aspect the interest relates to of personal rituals nature? Can I also remind members that a guidance note on declaration of interest is included on page 7 and 8 of the agenda pack, so if you are in any doubt, please refer to this guidance note. And give an explanation for each declaration. Thank you. We will move on to the minutes of sorry, any DPIs to declare, anyone? No? Thank you. Very kind. Yes, Councillor? Yes, Councillor. I'm in Raman. Just to let you know, I sit on the THCH board. Do you want to introduce yourself? Yes, please. Yes. My name is Susanna, and I'm the resident co-opty for the scrutiny housing and regeneration. Thank you. I've got no sorry, interest to declare. Hi. My name is Councillor Ahmad Al-Kabriya, I don't have anything to declare. Thank you. Councillor Ismael Slaam for Weavers Ward and no DPIs. Councillor James King, Lion House Ward, nothing to declare except maybe I'm a leaseholder of the council home. Sorry, Councillor, I'm a council tenant but not for this housing association. Yeah? I'm a tenant co-opty. Nothing to declare. Thank you very much. The next item is to approve the minutes of the previous meeting. Do members have any comments? Chair, excuse me. I do apologise for interrupting. I have possibly have to give apologies. It's Mo Hussain here, interim director of housing options and homelessness. I've received a message just a few minutes ago, a computer message saying my computer will restart or update to 1847. I don't have an option to cancel or delay the process so I'm concerned I may find myself removed from the meeting for an undefined period of time. Thank you very much for the information and thank you. We'll move on. Anyone? We'll move on to the -- >> Sorry, can I just clarify that the minutes of the previous meeting were correct and -- thank you. Thank you, Justina. Sorry, the microphone. First item this evening to review the actions log of outstanding actions. Can I now welcome Paul Burgess, strategy and policy officer who provides support to this subcommittee to provide an update. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Chair. Yes, I have been chasing any outstanding actions for this subcommittee. The list of actions has been circulated. It is up to date. So I have nothing to add to that but happy to respond to any questions. Anyone? Any questions to Paul, anyone? Yes, Councillor, thank you. I think looking at the work plan, we've got to sort of amend this as things change. But I think bringing in the homeless priorities and the strategies, especially with the changes, I think should be put somewhere in our work plan at least in the next quarter. I think there's some confusion. I'm dealing with the outstanding actions log, but the next item will be the -- Sorry, just note it for the next agenda, then. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. You know, for the action number 2, so the routine request by the Mayor to the Minister for Housing and kind of the regulators, could we get a response from the Mayor's office? I appreciate Paul. I'm assuming you take someone who haven't had a response, but at least perhaps for the next committee, we get a response. So what we can do is I can maybe draft something for you, Chair, to sign to take to the Mayor as we haven't had a response just from my request. Thank you, Robin, we'll do that. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. So our first item this evening is to note the work programme for the HRSSC, which is included in the pack, our final version of the overall scrutiny work programme was agreed in our September meeting I will see. Can I now welcome Paul again to provide support -- sorry, who supports the scrutiny to give us an overview on the HRSSC programme. Over to you, Paul. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. The only thing that I would like to comment on is that since that draft programme went to OSC, there was a change to this meeting, and it had a knock-on effect for the next one, which I just wanted to go through. So because of requirement from the Ombudsman that the Ombudsman reports were presented at this meeting, we added those to this agenda, and having discussed it with the Chair, because of the length of the meeting, the quarter 4 monitoring reports for RPs have been moved to the December meeting. So that was the change, and we also added the Tenant's Voice panel to this meeting. So they were the only changes to the draft programme that went to OSC to be looked at. Thank you, Paul. And as for homelessness, we will -- there is some scope within the programme for extra items. So maybe, Chair, you will want to consider that, if you -- we can implement that. Thank you. That has been added. If that could be noted, please. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. And now we will move on to -- sorry, okay. Just a request on the work programme, going forward, obviously, the main overview of the committee met to hear a call-in last Monday, I think it was last Monday, about the Council's homelessness strategy, which has subsequently been suspended by the Mayor, pending review. So I think it would be good to include in our strategy -- in our plan, going forward, to hear the outcome of that review, and to find out what will be going forward with the homelessness accommodation policy, as well. Yeah, Paul, if you -- yeah, I think what I will do is liaise with my colleagues that are coordinating the OSC meeting, and make sure that we are looped into any conversations that go on for that. Thank you. Anyone else? Thank you. The next item is to receive offices from Tower Hamlet's community housing. This is in response to the feedback to the subcommittee received from Tower Hamlet community housing residents in May. I would like to welcome Mandeep Bogle, Director of Operations from THCH. You will have a maximum of five minutes to make an opening statement to highlight any key areas that the subcommittee needs to be aware of, and when, then we will move to questions from the members. Are you -- can you hear me, Sandeep? Thank you, Chair. Yeah. Mandeep, thank you. Over to you. Thank you. Similarly to Mo, who is saying my laptop has been upgraded, so apologies, but my Teams isn't currently compatible, so you're not seeing me, but I'm just needing to confirm you can hear me okay? Yes. We can hear you. Thank you. Great. I would just like to address the comments made at the last meeting by a number of our residents and respond to some of those and have those minuted, so one of the areas raised by Mr. Gazraman was a claim that a resident had died, passed away because THCH had not completed some repairs. I just wanted to confirm that this claim was entirely false, and sadly, a resident had passed away at 7 Velaski House, but he didn't pass away due to any indication, any links to unfinished repairs. The resident passed away. He was 89 years old and receiving, unfortunately, palliative care for a terminal illness, but the claim that Mr. Raman stated at the meeting saying people are dying and bodies are piling up was entirely untrue, so I just wanted to clarify that and note that the correction is made on the minutes, please. Secondly, Mr. Raman shared his experience of leaks at Velaski House. Investigations into the roof, pipe work, and the water system of the scheme were already underway when Mr. Raman shared his experience, and since a full remediation program to the roof has been completed, this has been, I think, about 10 days ago, this roof was finally completed and this has been remediated at no additional expense to our leaseholders, and I think finally, if I can just share that we acknowledge that there's some general concerns raised about performance, which we continue to work on and improve. However, I think the committee, the last committee, recognized the reason THCH is seeking a merger partner.

• Sorry, Mandeep, can I just stop you there for a minute, please?
• Yeah.
• Can you not get into too much personalizing someone or using their addresses or name?
• Sure.
• Yeah, please. Thank you.
• Sure. So we are seeking a merger partner, and this is due to our limited capacity to be able to deliver improvements to the standards that we would like and our customers should receive. Over time, this has reduced, I think, well, since the stock transfer, THCH has sold off about one third of its portfolio, which means, well, through right-to-buy schemes, and therefore it's reduced our rental income, and coupled with the high cost of fire remediation works, which are approximately for us about 50 million pounds, this has made THCH financially unviable and unable to invest in the services like I mentioned as we would like. So seeking a merger partner will help to accelerate our commitment to our customers and invest in our stock as we would like. I'll open up to the committee for any questions or any information that you'd like me to come back to you on.
• Thank you, Mandeep. Thank you for your presentation. Now we will move to the floor for the members to question. Councillor Asma, your question, please. Thank you.
• So thank you, Mandeep, for that update. I think it's good to have someone here that we have someone to speak to, although like it would have been nice if you were here in person, but I assume you had some difficulties. I want to start off with firstly, the first thing that strikes to me about your update is language. I think language is really, really important about how we speak to our residents and how we speak about our residents. When you took some specific incidents and you wanted to clarify what happened at the last committee and when residents obviously spoke about their experiences, you took some names, you took some addresses. And I think why that's not helpful is you create a picture of us and them, and I don't believe that should ever be the case. It's an us. We're here like councillors are, like officers, council officers and yourselves, we're all here to serve the public, we're all here to serve our residents, our tenants. And so that kind of language, I would say, maybe it's worth being mindful about going in the future. You talked about some of the updates about the fire safety, leaseholders, and I agree, that is a national picture, definitely a national picture, and lots of RSLs are struggling with that, and I have a lot of sympathy and understanding for that situation. However, lots of residents at least that come to councillors, at least that come to me from different, actually I get residents from different wards that aren't part of Weaver's Ward where I'm a councillor, that come and talk about the frustration they have with the service. And one big theme is the delay in the communication, because a lot of the frustration residents have is purely because they're not in the know, they don't know what's going on. They feel the lack of openness and transparency, they don't feel like the RSL is their RSL anymore, because going back to why this organisation was started in the first place was so that we can have a community-based resident-led housing provider, and they just don't feel they are heard, they are seeing that their concerns are taken on board. Yes, you are financially struggling, but there are things that don't cost more than what it will cost you to run the organisation at its bare minimum, which is be able to provide that communication, be honest and transparent, and I got a glimpse of a little bit of the language today, and I'll be honest with you, I'm quite disappointed in that, so I'd really like it if you would respond. Thank you, councillor. Mandi, do you want to respond to that, please? Thank you. Just to say that what I shared was mentioned in the previous committee in May, so I just wanted to set the record straight. You already set the record straight when you sent us a note. This is a public meeting, residents have come, loads of residents are watching online. This is my point. Language is really important. We need to create an environment that we're all in here together in order to find a solution. It's not about creating differences of you're on this side and we're on this side, and that's the point, and I hope you can at least acknowledge that. You didn't need to take names, you didn't need to take addresses. That wasn't my intention, but I note your point. Thank you. What about the rest of my points? I wanted to talk about how residents felt and the lack of communication, which I think is the running theme, and the fact that they feel that this organisation is no longer a community organisation and it's not transparent and accountable. We're still a local and community organisation and we've sought a merger partner who remains committed to keeping THCH local, so that we've heard very loud and clear is at the core of what our customers want for us to remain local, and what we've done is seek a merger partner that delivers on that. Thank you. We'll move to Susannah, your question please. Thank you. Yeah, so I think the question was, at the last meeting it was very specific, residents came to this meeting with very specific examples, one of which was about service charge overpayments. So what have you done with regards to that, have you refunded the service charge overpayments? I think yes, there was a particular case and we've worked with that individual and the access to five years' worth of invoices has been extended, so the particular resident who raised that now has access, which has been extended, so she has access to all of the invoices. We did do a deep dive into that entire block's service charges and can share that the process was followed and each year our residents within the scheme had paid less than what it had cost us to provide the services, so we did do that deep dive review. We extended the access to the invoices and the end of year accounts to that particular resident and we completed a review exercise which enabled us to see what had been paid by our residents every year over an aggregated five year period. Thank you. Sorry, just bear with us, please. Thank you. Susana, did you have a follow-up? Well, obviously I think the resident disagreed with that, so I guess at some point are you able to show us evidence that you've acted on some of these overpayments? I could do a summary sheet and submit that to the committee. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Councillor James, your question, please. Thank you. Thanks. My question is more broad. I echo what Councillor Islam said about the individual cases you've raised, but my question is more broad. How is the partnership with Hyde going forward? Could you explain how it will be community focused and indeed how a service is being scheduled to improve, what improvement plans do they have, especially if, you know, frankly the management and the structures and the board members are still in place into our Hamlet's community housing? Are we? Yeah. Tell me about that. Sure. There's quite a lot in there, so I'll try and cover it all off quickly. We have recently appointed two new senior independent directors to our board because there was a recognition that the skill set was needing to be grown there. And then additionally over the last three months, we've appointed a further three new board members and they took over from other members where their terms had come to an end. So there's been a lot of work done to strengthen the board's skill set and assurance piece. And just to touch on the Hyde merger, so we've secured, we're in the process of due diligence at the moment with Hyde and the organization has made a commitment to keeping THCH local and invest in community benefits with social value ads. So if I can bring that to life a little bit, their commitment is to, we heard very clearly that our residents and customers like to have a local office. So Hyde's commitment is to keep the locality, keep the office where it is and not to remove any of those front facing engagement opportunities we have with our customers. And I think there was another point you made around what are they investing in? They've accelerated some support to us around their commitment to invest in our programs such as we're now able to bring forward programs to lift upgrades at Luke House and various other schemes. So it feels like their commitment to do the right thing with investment into our stock and also into our seven community centers and to keep the local office feels like a direct response to what the customers have been feeding back to us through our consultation exercises previously. Kota, do you want to follow up? Thanks. I mean, yeah, I think the proof in the pudding will be an uptick in, you know, the main issues, you know, repairs, charges, communication and more. And I think, I mean, my concern is that this is a, I mean, I think, I think it's positive that there might be movement forward, but it's, I'm unclear as to whether a merger is on the table yet or whether Hyde is just taking over managing the services to our humblets community housing and seeing how viable it is. And that could be a long term solution, but simply there is a risk involved with Hyde to turn around and say, look, there's too many issues in town humblets to make it viable for them to take it forward. So could you tell us what improvement plans have been put in place already and if there were any outcomes of that already? And I know you might be, you might not be in a position to comment, but what the future of, what a merger would look like, because from my reading, it's still very early stages and looking at how things could be managed before a merger actually takes place. Sure. So yes, we are still in the very sort of early stages, we're in the process of due diligence at the moment. And that's exactly where you mentioned earlier around where we're looking at into each other's organisations and understanding any commercial, any financial, any risks and what the appetites are. So far, I can share and pleased to share that our board is progressing with the Hyde merger as well as Hyde's board, and iteratively, I'm sure you understand there's a process that you've step by step, we work through introductions and a process of discussing our plans with the regulator, and then we move to board approval and then due diligence. And so we're currently in the due diligence stage. But what I can say is that with some of Hyde's investment already, it demonstrates that their commitment to bring forward some of the things that our residents have been asking for for some time, such as lift upgrades, which brings a better quality of life to our residents who are using the schemes where we haven't been able to invest over the last 10, 15 years in some large scale components. So with some of the commitment already demonstrated by Hyde, we're able to bring that investment programme forward. We're also able to bring kitchens, bathrooms, roof upgrades forward so that our stock is much better, better quality, and our residents' satisfactions improve within their homes. And I think the telling sign in response to one of your earlier points will be our tenant satisfaction measures, which all of us will be keeping a close eye on. And for me, that's going to be a clear metric that will show which way the improvements have swung. Thank you. Mabu, your question please. Thank you. Hi, Mandeep. Thank you for coming along today. So we had the residents speaking on the May Scrutiny Committee, and I think one of the themes that for me, that struck me was the lack of engagement, response and the delay. So residents raised a whole host of issues, whether it's service charges, repairs, heating issues, lift breakdowns and so on. And I think the frustration for them was more around the lack of engagement, the lack of response. And I think, so my question is around kind of a reflection for the organisation in terms of what is the mechanism of engaging and responding to residents with the concerns and issues that they've raised and how are you ensuring that you're listening to them rather than talking to them. Because I think for residents to come along to the Scrutiny Committee, unfortunately it shows a breakdown in relationship and a breakdown in trust, and therefore instead of going to their landlord and reporting those issues, they're coming to the council and raising those issues. And I think that shows the kind of the breakdown in relationship and breakdown in trust. And I think, again, reading your response today, it seems a bit defensive. So I think my question would be is kind of going forward, how do you ensure both individually and collectively when residents raise concerns, issues that they have, how are you ensuring that you're listening to them and actually trying to proactively resolve those issues? Yes. No, that's a great point. We continue to engage with our residents positively through our formal committees, which is our resident voice panel. We also have two resident customer board members and we have an open office drop in. So on average, we see about 15 or so residents drop into our office per day, and these queries are responded to in real time. We also, our ongoing engagement model of being more present on our estates is something that our customers have fed back to us regularly. So our new neighborhood model is that our frontline colleagues, our housing officers, our fire risk support officers, our estate officers are out on our estates a lot more and we remain committed to improving the service for as long as it takes whilst we are securing a merger partner. And I'm open to the feedback that's been shared today. We are looking at very, very creative ways as well as the more preferred engagement that some of our customers, so our customers prefer that we speak to them out on our estates and face-to-face and within scheme meetings, almost like a large sort of committee meetings per se. But we're also doing things like text messaging. We are using digital notice boards within our schemes for instant feedback. All of that information then comes back to us and we're learning from that. We have to demonstrate that learning as part of our consumer standards action plans and improvement plans. And also because we were downgraded, we have to share that learning with the regulator as well. Our TSM scores will demonstrate how much we're improving with the learning that we're putting into place. But I can share also that we learn from the complaints that we receive. What I am pleased to share is for all the complaints that we do receive, they are being responded to within timescales, but the bit around triangulating the learning is what we're doing at the moment to better serve and transact with our residents. So a quick follow up on this. So I mean you mentioned kind of hierarchical structure, you've got committees and various mechanisms in place. I think the question here is, one, it's not about having them in place, but it's actually making sure you listen to the concerns of the residents because clearly if residents had been listened to, they wouldn't be here and they wouldn't have felt the fact that they weren't being listened to. And I think the second thing is kind of that post-May scrutiny committee, there should be a reflection from the organisation that whatever we're doing isn't working and I think going forward we need to actively work with the residents to see how do we take those concerns and issues that they've raised forward. So I think that reflection needs to happen as well because clearly there's a breakdown relationship and residents don't feel they're being heard and hence why they've come across to here. Mandy, do you want to respond? I welcome that feedback and it's noted and just to assure you, we do take all of that feedback and learn and embed that learning from it. We operate a number of TRAs across our portfolio, so it's not just formal panels such as committees or resident voice panels, but we also hold community-based meetings where we hold them in community centres, we have open surgeries, I operate an open door policy, again we have our office which welcomes many several residents per day, but yes I note your point, we need to be doing more with the learning and we continue to do that. Thank you, Councillor Amina, your question please, thank you. Thank you for coming. But let's be real, it's not working, is it? It's not working. And what you're telling us tonight is basically not what residents are feeling and not what residents believe is actually happening. So it's not working. And you got downgraded for a reason because it's not working. And I'm going to keep saying it's not working because that's what's going on here. And so I need you to basically define to me what you understand by community focus and communication, because I don't think you understand what communicating with residents really looks like, because residents, you know, you mentioned quality of life, their quality of life is not good. If their quality of life was good, they wouldn't have come to this committee and complained about the failures that you've had in terms of the housing quality that you've given them. So I don't think you're interested really in their quality of life. I honestly don't think you understand about communication, and I don't think you understand about community. So you need to be clear to this committee what you think is not working, because at the moment you're telling us all the things that you are doing, which residents don't seem to be seeing, what do you understand about not working and how realistically are you going to improve it? So we do not have residents coming back into this committee with a bad quality of life and bad quality of housing, because in the 21st century, that is not on. I acknowledge the concerns raised about performance, and like I mentioned, we use that learning to improve, so we've stood up an internal team, we've got dedicated housing and neighbourhood officers now, so our neighbourhood model has been changed, so for specifics, whereas before it was generic, we've changed to a more specialised frontline colleague operating a more communicative, estate-based reactive engagement model, because that's what our residents are telling us. They don't want to transact with us on email or via an app, they want us knocking on doors, they want us on their estates listening to them. So that's how we've changed the actual model, and you mentioned about the investment. The investment into the properties, yes, it has been delayed, it has been delayed for many years, and now seeking a merger partner will be able to deliver on those services, such as bathroom upgrades, kitchen upgrades, lift upgrades, which does add an improvement to the quality of life, this is important to our residents, and we haven't been able to deliver that, but with a merger partner, we will be. Councillor, do you have a follow up? Yeah, just briefly, thank you, I mean, earlier on you mentioned that you actually meet and talk to residents, can you give me an example of when you last met with a resident and spoke to a resident? I was out last week, I'm also out next week over at Adam, I don't know if I can show you, another scheme, so I talk to residents all the time, I was in a leaseholder meeting with 24 leaseholders a week ago, I spoke to a resident this morning, I, like I mentioned, the, I'm out next week, our entire organisation, including back office functions, are out on a here to hear campaign, so when I say we get out on our estates, from HR to finance to operations to repairs, we're all door knocking over the period of two weeks, going out and listening to our residents, and under the here to hear campaign, and then we draw all of that feedback and that goes to serve our improvement plans, so all of the organisation, including our board members, are out door knocking over the next two weeks, including myself. Well thank you for that, if you were doing that, and I think you are, then you can't be downgraded, you'd be outstanding. We were downgraded on governance and viability. You were downgraded by your residents who were here, so they downgraded you too. Noted. Sorry, sorry, sorry, just bear with us please, sorry, just bear with us, we are, we will take more questions from the members here. Councillor, come here, your questions please. Yeah. No, no, sorry, come here, you're after, okay, yeah fine. Okay, so I wanted to ask a few questions, I want to, for one question I want to go a step back, Manjit, if that's alright, so I understand a bit about the financial viability, and because we haven't had this sort of communication with yourselves, it would be good to know if you can provide details about what options were sort of explored by the board and senior staff around viability, financial viability without the merger, and with the merger, if other options were explored. With that I will also want to look at, talk about partnership with the council, so what has the relationship been with the mayor and officers in the council, what help and support, have you asked for any, are you able to get any, because it is in our interest to make sure that there is a really good relationship between the council and THCH as it is now, and if it does eventually merge into a different organisation, which looks like it has to be a bigger organisation, in order to have the local access, the council has a big hand in helping you with that, so what does that partnership look like, and does it need more improvement, and I'll come back depending on the answer. Yeah, great point actually, whilst I'm not able to divulge too much around the viability, what I can share is, if we don't merge, it would be difficult to deliver any improvements or any long term stability for our residents, so we've always had the plan to merge, well since I think three months into when I started two years ago, it was apparent that the organisation was simply surviving and not thriving, and therefore in order to deliver on what we need to, financially, we needed to seek a merger partner, if that doesn't happen, I think there'd be further conversations with the regulator around what that would look like, our internal business planning means that we're okay to, financially we're okay to survive, if I use the same term, for a period of 12 to 18 months, but after then, Councillor O'Strom, it gets very very difficult to even deliver core services, and that's why a merger is the only way in which we can ensure long term financial stability, and to your second point about our relationship with the mayor and local members and councillors, it's been a very positive one, I meet with the mayor quarterly, our next meeting is on, if I'm not mistaken, the 10th of October, and we discuss anything the mayor wishes to put on the agenda, but also any escalated concerns from residents that have reached either him or our elected members, we also have really good relationships with our councillors, one of which is on the committee meeting, Councillor Amin Rahman, also Councillor Mushtaq Ahmed as well, is someone that we regularly work with to improve the experience that they then have to champion on the residents behalf, so Councillor Kabir, Hussain and I meet regularly almost every month to improve and understand why is it that our residents often go to the councillors to raise their concerns and not directly to THCH, and that learning we take to then try and improve, if I can bring one of those examples to life, one of our residents doesn't feel comfortable speaking to our customer service centre, and doesn't speak English, and this is why she'll call our elected member who then calls me directly on my mobile and then we manage her queries outside of our usual channels, and that's okay, what we're saying is this is basically how we would usually interact with our residents, but if you have a preferred way of interacting, then that's fine too. So the reason why I was asking the questions that I did is because there is obviously a moment you're in a halfway house, so you don't have an organisation that you've merged with that's able to give you that financial viability, but at the same time you're not able to provide the adequate service that residents deserve, so the reason why I talked about the partnership and you kind of took the conversation in a different direction was where you can perhaps have shared services or lead on the council and council will help give you that support just to get you through this phase until we know what's going on. I also asked the questions about financial viability because income, and I'm sure you've done this, and I'm sure you've done this in depth, and I can understand you not being able to give me specific details, but at least give me some assurance, like what kind of work has been done around looking at exploring income generation, looking at how assets are managed, if there is ways to generate more income so that you're able to provide the service, because a lot of things that I see where you're not, like the whole situation this time last year with Voloske House, a lot of it was finances, pushing back repairs, pushing back repairs, because they are major works that needs done, and I just think surely we don't know when this merger is going to come to an end. Poplar, Harker, and your merger didn't end up going through, it's just making sure having a backup so that you're able to provide the service that people deserve. Yeah, I fully take those points on board, and the reason why we're seeking a merger is so that we can do those remediation programmes and have that financial backing already hide have secured a loan to THCH. So with that loan, we're able to bring forward a lot of the investment works that I mentioned already. So whilst we are still very much in the due diligence phase, they are entirely committed and both our boards have approved this to go ahead. You raised a point about, hopefully I've captured this correctly, but yes, we did go through a very long exercise about thinking outside of what, if a merger isn't deliverable, what would be our options then, and our board reviewed items such as selling off some land because we have some land banked. We also looked at some options around potentially asset disposal, but before we consider those types of options, the merger is the priority at the moment. Thank you, Councillor Kabir. Thank you, Chair. I don't know where to start. There are many issues that already came here already, and one of the issues, the CCTV camera is not working for the last five years, and you guys asking to pay service charge and the communal area, many things, and as you mentioned many times, you are learning. I would like to know how long does it going to take to learn? Please. Specifically on the service charges task? Sorry, can you... The CCTV camera has not been working for the last five years and it was asking for the service charge and the areas, you know, communal areas is not doing many things, many issues, and specifically, you mentioned many times you are learning, learning, and how long does it going to take to learn these kind of issues and solving this problem? So I think when I say we're learning, we take feedback back to improve the way in which we communicate because our residents are saying they want quicker communication, slicker communication. So that's what I mean when I say we're taking the learning to improve the way we communicate. If there are specifics about service charges, other than the example that I'd spoken about earlier over at a scheme where the resident was at committee last in May, if there's any further instances, please do share those with me and I will investigate those. We did do a deep dive into that scheme and it was noted that our service charges were in line. They're also audited internally and externally. So where we may have, in the past, historical legacy issues, that takes a number of positive interactions to change that experience for our customers. Thank you. Have a follow up or you're done, thank you. Suzanne, your question, please. Yeah, I've got two questions. The first one is, we understand and we hear you that you are very limited by resources. Therefore there must be a list of prioritisation you need to do, like you need to give up on certain things and you need to focus on certain things. So the first question is how is this prioritisation involving residents where they can come together and make those decisions with you to say that okay, if there are a list of ten repairs, the first five is really crucial to us and then you go away and you build an action plan and a prioritisation based on really engaging with the residents. So that's the first question. The second question is, do you have any scrutiny within your own housing association, like peer scrutiny, where you get housing associations or even council representatives and residents to have scrutiny sessions, to have meetings? I've attended another housing association where, as a resident, I was invited to participate in scrutiny in the past. So these are the two questions. So the first one is, how are you prioritising with residents the things to be done? The second is, do you have in place a scrutiny where you involve residents and also peer housing association or the council? Thanks. Yes, we currently have a resident voice committee which operates with leaseholders and general needs residents. It's a very good mix of diversity that reflects our customer portfolio. That panel, along with two of our formalised tenant and resident associations, one over at Leopold's and another one over at Minerva, we use all of their involvement. We have quarterly meetings which are chaired, they're monitored, the plans are discussed around improvements and prioritisation of the improvements at those meetings with the residents. They decide what on our prioritisation list they're going to support us to do better in and what's going to be first or second. At the moment, we're focusing very much on building safety and very closely followed behind that is repairs and remediation work. That's where the residents have focused our resources. At the moment, we're not in a position where we're having to say or make a decision around what repairs we will do and what repairs we won't do. At the moment, we can carry on delivering on our landlord obligations around what we can remediate. We're not in a place, I just want to make that clear, that we're having to pick and choose what repairs we can and cannot do, that's not the situation. And finally, peer review. We are regulated, our residents also, like I mentioned, scrutinise our services and then report up to board as well and the regulator also regulates the services that we operate and with the introduction of consumer standards, there's an additional area now that the regulator will scrutinise and inspect us on, which is all about the customer. I hope I've captured the questions, please do come back to me if I've missed the second one there. Just bear with us. Thank you. I guess the only comment is that, again, it seems like you are doing a lot of things, but it seems like residents are not feeling the impact of this. So I wonder if it's a matter of communicating exactly to the residents and to the bodies that are scrutinising you, what exactly you have performed. So I think it's quite vital, otherwise if you're doing this behind the scenes, it's obviously not felt. Sure, I'll take that back, and we do circulate a monthly newsletter and maybe through this feedback, what I'll do is share that prioritisation of improvements that we're doing via the newsletter. Again, we're all out on our Hear to Hear campaign and we can surely highlight and talk about the improvements that we're trying to make and hope that our residents feel. Thank you, Councillor James. Your question, please. Just a quick one. We heard all the ways in which you say you're improving resident consultation and discussion and engagement. My question is about the merger process. Now, I can see there's an online form where people can give their thoughts in the consultation on the process. My question is how, as the merger goes forward, will residents and stakeholders be consulted with? Will it be more than just an online form, particularly I want to know how you're going to target underrepresented groups to get their views as well, and similarly, will you be meeting with the campaigners who have been campaigning for a better service from town as community housing? Yep. So we have a customer consultation communications plan, and within that plan is a number of a -- it's a multichannel approach, so we're using an online form which has been opened by over 2,000 residents currently to date. We have a text message consultation process. We have surveys being completed within our reception area. We have the Hear to Hear campaign which we're targeting those seldom heard voices, so to your point around those residents who you don't get to interact to, we're actively going out and door knocking on those residents' homes, on their doors, over the next two weeks to gather their sentiment and their feedback. Through our stakeholder consultation plan, we've met -- we are meeting with the Mayor, as I mentioned, on the 10th of October. Our councillors we meet with regularly through board and general meetings, and if there's any further opportunity where council members wish to meet with either myself or anyone else of the exec team, then we are here to meet with them. Thank you. James, you're happy? If I could just further -- sorry, we're all done on this. I think we've taken some good questions here and some answers we're happy with. Mandeep, if we've got some audience in the chambers, I will urge you or ask you to, if you have any questions, please, if you could see the email here, email address, send it to us, and I hope Mandeep will be happy to answer those questions. We will work in the middle for the greatness of the residents of Tarahamlet. Please email us and we will get in touch. Mandeep, can you hear me? If you're willing to work with us, we're very happy to do so, the committee here, and solve the problems that we have. It's been ongoing for many, many, many years. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We will move on to our next item tonight. Substantive item on the agenda is to receive an update on the tenant voice panel. I'd like to welcome Councillor Kabir Ahmed, cabinet member for regeneration inclusive development and house building, and Paul Patterson, director of housing and regeneration, to present this item. So Ahmed, can you introduce the item, and if, Paul, if you do want to add something, you may do so. You have five minutes to provide us with an overview of this item. Members consider the slides as taken as read. So, by the subcommittee, sorry, I am almost there, yes, sorry, Councillor, after the presentation, you have five minutes, we will come to the questions after, by the members. Over to you. Thank you very much. Thank you, chair. So, as you've already read the presentation, we won't painstakingly go over it. Essentially, the aims of the presentation is to give a wider context and drive us for the change. The process of forming the panel, the panel's purpose and work plan. Working with housing and regeneration, scrutiny subcommittee, and the council, and recommendations for future reporting. I'll pass on to Paul Patterson, who is the corporate director for housing and regeneration, and we have Daniel Reynolds over here as well. So if there are questions, we'll answer those questions. Thank you, Councillor. Thank you, chair. I think, obviously, the council, since November, two major events have taken place from a housing perspective. One is that we brought back in Tower Hammers Holmes into the council, and in April this year, we've seen the introduction of the new consumer standards and regulations that came into effect in April of this year. This Tenant Voice panel is part of our commitment to have a commitment to residents in the work that we do around housing management and investments in those properties. This work that's being done to set up a Tenant Voice panel is to enable us to engage and for residents to influence and scrutinise the strategies that we will have and that we are accountable in relation back from the consumer standards, it's the regulator of social housing would expect us to undertake. So what this presentation that you've received will tell you how we've gone about setting up that panel. It talks about the work programme that will evolve, and it will give a residence for you. So this is just the start of a journey to develop that panel, and it will evolve over time. And you'll see in the back in the presentation that there is timescales and dates and a series of areas that the panel will begin to start covering. It will come back and report back here from the work that that Tenant's panel will do. So you would expect to see in the future, in the near future, that residence panel could be represented here, talking about the things it's looked at, what it's scrutinised, and the strategies that it's influencing. Thank you. Are you both done? Thank you. Questions? Susanna, yes, over to you. Thank you. Asma, I'll come back to you after. Thank you. Yeah. I remember when it was first presented, I think one of the suggestions was how do you manage the different groups, that you have the Tenant's Voice, and then you have this group amongst us here, the challenges of integrating or making sure that it's quite seamless. That's one question. So what are you going to do to make it quite seamless? Because ideally, I guess my suggestion then was whether this group can be kind of absorbing more residents, and therefore you have only one group to speak with, and one group with hopefully more skillful and competence as well to work with. So I think that was initially kind of the ideal situation I was trying to propose. But that's it. I can understand that I think the reasoning given was that you want to reach out to a lot more residents. That's fine. But I just wondered how you're going to kind of help them, because everyone has their own thing, and how you're going to make them be able to communicate and link back with us. So around that first question, the Housing Scrutiny Subcommittee has a greater, wider remit, which is for all housing in the borough and not just council stock. This particular group, Residence Voice, specifically focuses on Tower Hamlet's council housing stock. So as you will understand, in the previous item, you scrutinized Hamlet's community housing, and you've had sessions with Poplar Harker, Clarion, and various other housing operators. So this particular cohort of people are specifically focused around the council's housing stock, and that's why the two has to be separated, as opposed to the wider function of this committee. If I may just add to that as well, with some of the forward plan and the plans that we've got coming forward, we are doing some really in-depth work with the panel in terms of looking at and agreeing our key performance metrics that they want to scrutinize, and also looking at other ways that they can then almost spin off that panel and do some really in-depth work. So given the broad remit of this panel, it might perhaps be too detailed at this stage, but we are still forming the forward plan, and I think one of the ways we can work together, and I think it is in the presentation, is about synergizing the work plan, or a better word is sort of making sure we're not duplicating and that we're working together. Thank you. Suzanne, do you have a follow-up? No? Good. Thank you. Councillor Asmore, your question, please. Thank you. Thanks for this report. I was going to ask, when it comes to the makeup of the panel, I think there's a change, so it's eight tenants, three resident leaseholders, one subtenant, is that change because you're proportionately trying to make up whatever the percentage is of leaseholders we have? It doesn't sound right, but I just wanted to ask why that was the rationale. The argument of a leaseholder, I think that's interesting, actually, because I can see why, what experience that will bring. I just wondered, what was your rationale behind that, or is it something that we've taken off other councils that have done it, because a lot of like Hackney have their own panel quite similar to this. I wanted to talk about, pick up on Susanna's point, we have this committee, I understand, but I think her point was more around, how does this panel, in order for residents to feel empowered and for it to have importance and actually have outcomes from it, is how will it fit into the council structures, and how do we fit it in here with this committee? So for instance, if there was a bit more work, like a suggestion for me is like, at least this meeting meets every two months, so have a report from the panel as to what was discussed, even if it was shared in the pack, maybe once a year, twice a year, have a report to this committee. Your question, please, thank you. I asked two questions, I've got one more. They're taking suggestions. And the last one was, when it comes to the panel itself, obviously, legally it doesn't have any, so it's not like this committee is not an official council committee, but a lot of times communication can help residents resolve issues without it having to go through that whole long stretch of trying to find solutions for, so does it make sense to also include council officers, at least one, caretakers, other stakeholders that might be able to help this panel regarding information, regarding that guidance, regarding that support, because you don't want it just to be a place where people go and make complaints, but actually it might just be guidance and they'd be able to just resolve things amongst themselves as well. Yeah, thank you Asma. So in terms of the structures, I must say, officers did various different desktop research around other panels that were set up, or its equivalent, and formulated kind of, we did want it resident-focused first and foremost, then you've got the leaseholders, and then you've got other stakeholders who sort of fit into that as well, so sub-leaseholders and so on and so forth. In terms of the reports and the role they play, as highlighted within the paper, there's various different training segments that are being run in order to empower those panel members, in addition to that, myself or the mayor will meet them every six months within that meeting, they will have quarterly meetings, so two monthly reports might be quite difficult for them, because they don't meet as often. It's not been a full year since they've set up, it's quite recent, so we're still finding the drivers and the mechanics behind that, but their role is a fundamental role in terms of driving how housing is delivered within the council. So pretty much in some ways, they're the direct interface of what residents, leaseholders, those occupying within sort of council-managed estates feel, and what their needs are. There is a number of issues that they will raise within their work plan, and their work plan is also evolving, so depending on particular issues or needs that are raised within housing management estates, then we will explore those issues. There is a core group of officers, both senior and junior, from the housing management director to Darren as an AD, and other officers cascading down that support this group, in both when the meetings are run, in preparation for the meetings, as well as the training that will be provided around that. Just to pick on the point that you made about outcomes, one of the real key parts of this panel is really for the council to learn about how it needs to evolve its services. One of the objectives within the consumer standards is that the landlords will listen to residents, but design their services around residents' concerns and issues, and what the service needs to look like so that people feel valued, they remain safe, while the council will need to deliver and prioritise those things, and we just heard from the other guests a moment ago in terms of how they are prioritised, while we will prioritise the services that we deliver and the investment we deliver, this is also about the outcomes as listening to those residents, what their expectations of those services are, and how we design those services to match that. So there may be simple things like how we are contacting residents, so it is building those things into the service delivery that makes sure that we are demonstrating a customer-first approach. Can I also just add with that, that is not the only mechanism as well, so we still have the TRA, so they feed into how councils deliver services, we have the annual resident survey, and there is a long list of others, so this does play a big role, just like some of the other mechanisms that are in place as well. Thank you. Councillor Kabir, your question, please. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. Last year, October 2023, the committee asked THA to review the resident engagement to give the resident opportunity to contribute other ways, you know, the resident, how will you engage and ensure the resident will contribute in this committee or panel? So this whole panel is made up of different types of residents, so the whole panel, if you see the breakdown, let me just go to the page number, so if you go to page number 8 of the presentation, you will see the make-up of it, so we will have eight tenants, three resident leaseholders, one subtenant of a leaseholder, so that's a private renter essentially, and observers are permitted to attend as well, so if any other residents want to attend and observe, then they're welcome to do that, but they need to contact the housing management director in advance to let them know, so that we can facilitate enough space for such meetings. So they will all be residents. Sorry, can I just add one more point as well around why the resident engagement, because we've just recently completed our consultation on our resident engagement strategy for the Council, and that sort of covers a wider menu of opportunities for people to be involved that perhaps haven't got the capacity to sit on panels, but can share their views and shape services and look at the way services are designed. Thank you. Councillor Amina, your question, please. Thank you. Thank you, guys, for your presentation. Thank you for that. I just wanted to ask three quick points. First of all, how are you going to select the panel members, how is the selection process going to happen, so people know they can apply, how that's going to happen? Secondly, how can we show it's not just a talk and shop, so it's not going to as you know, we've just had Tower Hamlets Community Housing, they've got one of these already. It's obviously not working that greatly, because people are still complaining, so how can we make sure we learn from other housing providers' mistakes so that we don't fall into the same kind of pitfalls? And secondly, in terms of repairs, our contractors that we have, Tower Hamlets Homes, they contract out to MERS and some other people, yeah, they're a big problem, so a lot of the repair issues that we have is to do with contractors, and I'm sure a lot of people start complaining about repairs on the panel, so how do we feed that back to our contractors so they know that their quality of work is an upstand or whatever, and how will we make sure that the outcomes of this panel, how's it going to be scrutinised? How are we going to know? How are people going to feel that it's not just a talk and shop, it's going to be scrutinised, and what the process is about, how that scrutinisation is going to happen? So in terms of the selection process, we notified letters went out to all residents. There were certain criterias, one of the criterias, we wanted a wider range of representatives, so those who were already participating in TRAs, because sometimes people participate in multiple bodies and others don't get the opportunity. So as we are also feeding into these other bodies, such as TRAs and safer neighbourhoods teams and so on and so forth, and various other resident engagement bodies that happen, we wanted this cohort of people to not be - they could be members of it, but they can't be office bearers, so they wouldn't be the chair, secretary, treasurer or hold certain key positions, because otherwise you kind of create an echo chamber and you don't get other residents' opinions of it. Not that we don't value those who are involved in all these other forums, we do value that. So that was one of the criterias, but it was open to everybody who is not an office bearer in another housing-related forum that will report back. And then how it's not a talk shop, well, myself and the mayor will definitely go there, and we will take those issues seriously. It's part of regulatory compliance to actually listen to the residents, so this stuff will be minted, it will be documented, and if we sit back and kind of can't evidence ourselves to the regulators that we are listening to residents, then we'll be held accountable by the regulators, and potentially by yourselves as well. In terms of repairs, so that is a very key and tricky issue. So again, we go back to the regulators, the regulators have set up various different compliance stuff that Osman and Leah will talk about afterwards as well. So again, it is constant learning around that. Some of the sort of early learning we have is the monitoring process that we've had in the past hasn't been effective enough. So going forward, we're going to have a more robust, direct monitoring process, and officers can sort of go more into detail in terms of how layers will be created and how observations will also be implemented in this. In terms of holding contractors to account, now, I'm not sure if it's confidential or not, so let me just confer with Paul for a second before I can go into certain details, so bear with me one second. So there are certain contractors without mentioning names, and I want to be as open as possible with that, and maybe offline I can speak a bit more detail, but this is a public meeting, and language is important, as was said before. So there are some contractors that we are sort of terminating their contracts earlier, and we're going into those things because of their ability not to perform. So these are measures that we are taking. But, however, we also have to know that when a notice goes in, their services drop even further. So we've got to have resilience and contingency built up behind that before that notice goes in there, because if a contractor knows that they're going to lose the contract, then naturally they'll pull their resources away elsewhere. The impact of that will directly fall on residents, and the last thing we want is residents to have a greater failing service. The other important thing is how these contractors are, contracts are drawn up through the procurement process. So we've brought in, we've invested in procurement, because however much people want to blame housing management, it's not housing management that decides who the contractors are. It goes through a corporate council procurement process, and if that procurement process is not tight enough, or robust enough, then unfortunately performance management is handed to a department, be it housing management department, okay, and they're expected to perform manage on a substandard contract, and in the past we've had lots of learnings that we've evolved in relation to that, and one of the clear learnings is, and you'll see through the MTFS, is that we've invested in legal, in procurement, because as a council we need to be more robust around those areas. I hope that answers the questions. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor. We will move to our next agenda tonight. Sorry. Oh, I missed you. Sorry. Just briefly, yes, we want to -- >> Thank you. Can you just give us a brief overview of the governance structure of Tower Hamlets Housing as it was, where this residence board reports to and why resident representatives don't have more -- it was decided resident representatives wouldn't have more of an executive function, as it were. Obviously one of the potential benefits of the old Tower Hamlets Homes governance style was that there were residence representatives at a board level, and obviously we don't have that anymore, so just tell us why that decision was made, and give us reassurance that executive decision-makers within Tower Hamlets Council will be actually taking up the concerns and issues raised. I can't answer that. I think there's a couple of points you make, and you mentioned that residents being on the board of Tower Hamlets Homes, it has been within the housing association sector, a move away from having residents on the board, because clearly the complexity of those businesses and the complex nature of regulation these days and the financial state of the sector in relation to dealing with some of the big issues that's gone around retrofitting investments and development, that there's been a move to bring more greater expertise onto those boards, so that executives within that board are far more greatly scrutinized, and there is a shift, and the regulators are expecting to move toward more panels, resident panels, that we're working with those residents to develop how that services run. The governance structure in RPs is about delivering the business and the strategy, and the focus on that and making sure that that business is viable. Those organizations are operating in a far more volatile market environment in local governance, where we have our structure around housing management, we will have those ten panels. We will be scrutinized by this committee, as well as members through the MARB session, so it's a different governance structure that we're dealing with, but I can say to you that from experience that there's been a more severe shift to have more greater expertise on those boards because of the far more commercial operations that those organizations are, and a lot of housing associations are being heavily criticized for not having that great deal of expertise. It's no disrespect to residents, they have to have a voice, and the way to deal with that is in the way that we're trying to do it this way, it's about trying to develop the service that matches their needs and aspirations, and that the experience they get is a good experience and they're treated with respect, that's what residents are looking for. One other thing I want to add to this is when the company, Tower Hamlets Homes, stopped trading and staff were two-peded into the council, it came back to the landlords, essentially the council, so the legal responsibility lies with the council, and that's in line with the housing regulators, and that was one of the key drivers of bringing alignment in. So in terms of structure, you can't then hand responsibility of the legal - you wouldn't be able to hand the legal responsibility away from the council to whatever board you have there. That legal responsibility will still stand, and as a council, housing management is a wing of the other elements the council runs as a structure. Thank you, thank you, Councillor, and Paul, for your presentation and taking the questions. Just we would like, if it's possible, I'm sure, the structure of management in your department, who reports to who, vice versa, if you could provide that to us, we would be grateful. And now we will move to our next item on the agenda tonight, cabinet member and corporate director, director's reflection on priorities for 2024/2025. Housing and regeneration are key areas to the council's ambition and delivery, and its paramount importance to the residents of Tower Hamlets. It's known for its rich culture, diversity, and has a complex housing landscape with a mix of social housing and private development. For its residents, housing represents not just shelter, but a sense of stability and belonging. Many have deep-rooted connections to the area, and regeneration initiatives offer the promise of improving living conditions, upgraded amenities, and increased job opportunities in the borough. So with this brief introduction, I would like to once again welcome Councillor Kabir and Paul Paterson. Councillor Ahmed, can you introduce the item, and we will take questions after. And if you wish to add, Paul, in between, you may do so; you have five minutes. Thank you. We'll try to be as brief as possible, because the pack has already been published. So in terms of our outlook on the priorities, we break it down to five key areas, and they're not in specific priority order, but they're all important areas, and that's why they're priorities. Housing management, regulation and compliance, housing supply, planning, place-based regeneration, and homelessness. So I'm going to touch up on some of those areas, and housing management we just spoke about now. So in November last year, Taramlet's Home ceased to operate as an organisation. It was transferred over to the council, and council took on housing management. We're in the process of interfacing services directly into the council, we're embedding processes. There were some departments that were lifted and shifted, and now they are being embedded in. There are other services that need to be reshaped and redesigned. So we're at the moment going through a restructure process. Those who are part of the HR committee have had sight of proposed restructures, but it's still being shaped in terms of what the final version should be, and there will be consultation with the unions as well as staff in terms of reaching our end goal. So hopefully, Paul, we're looking at probably within the next two or three months, we should have that restructure embedded and in place. In terms of regulation and compliance, a very, very important area, just to note, and for the sake of transparency, just going to highlight that quite recently, as of the I believe it was the fifth of this month, through various surveys we've been running through all our housing stock, we found out that Randall House still has ACM cladding. Which is very, very serious. On the 6th of September, the council notified all residents, and I believe on the 5th, actions were already taken to put a waking watch in there, along with certain fencing off of areas in order to make sure that vehicles don't block access. We on the 10th, so this was the following Tuesday, so Friday, residents were notified on the following Tuesday, myself and Paul Patterson along with some senior officers met with residents directly. We had a public meeting with residents, met them directly. Residents are really scared. Residents are really scared because in 2018, this very council assured them that they had removed ACM cladding and it was written over on East London Advertiser and other newspapers. However they are very, very fearful. So myself and Paul have sort of committed on a weekly basis to give them an update report. We are expediating how contractors are brought in, in order to remove this ACM cladding that's left around the balcony and around the peripheries of the building. Previous contractors failed to remove that. So these are some very serious issues. So they are an extreme priority. Other buildings include Johnson House, which is in my and Asma's ward. You also live in the ward as well, Susannah. Again, we've got a waking watch in there. Latham House, ongoing issues. So again, we've committed to sort of millions of pounds in order to have those improvements. In addition to that, at the last cabinet, we passed another sort of commitment to put in around 160 million pounds. Councillor, you have a minute. Oh, sorry. Sorry. All right. I'll go into this stuff afterwards from your questions, if you're interested. Housing supply, again, is very important. We're working closely with developers. We're looking at our own programs. We're looking at a buyback scheme. We're also looking at the CHAP's funding, which was passed at the last cabinet as well. And also working closely with various different products so we can deliver social housing. Planning and regeneration, again, good news is, LLDC powers have transferred as of 1 September to the council. So all applications within that area, it will need an act of Parliament, but it's projected by December 1st, the LLDC will be wound up and all that planning powers will come back to the council. Councillor Francis spoke about it at the last full council. So that's a positive story around that. And we're also creating a fast track program for developers in order to expediate planning applications which will deliver sort of social housing in the Tower Hamlets. Homelessness, we've put in an additional 2 million pounds into that. We're driving up capacity and, of course, you're welcome to speak about the placement policy. We've put a hold on the placement policy pending a review. Positives are that the drivers that we put in place have reduced the number of people in commercial hotels to zero now, which means those costs have gone down substantially. We're also looking at how we can acquire better properties, which is which provides cooking facilities and a better quality of living for residents. Thank you, once again, to both of you. I think it was a good overview and I think it was useful to get a sense of our council's position and ambition moving forward on this very important item. We will go into questions at the moment. I can see a few hands raised. I will take Councillor Amin, he's been sitting there nice and quiet for the time being. Thank you. Thank you, chair. Thank you, guys, for the presentation and everything. Can you quickly elaborate a bit more on the homelessness for me, please, here? So in relation to this, so I suppose the elephant in the room is around the placement policy. So there's been lots of hype around it and I think it's a misunderstanding of the policy that was there, okay? So a lot of focus was around Zone D, okay, nobody was purporting to send everybody out of town Hamlets and Scotland, Manchester, there's been lots of press statements and sort of speeches given in relation to that. The current policy, 90 minutes policy, although we've got it at the moment, is difficult to calculate, in the sense that when officers look at Google Map or when those who do a calculation of distance, 90 minutes, as I pointed out in the overview and scrutiny calling, okay, can be as the crow flies, you know, in a straight line or whatever it is, journey time. However, it doesn't take delays and things like that into consideration. And with modern technology we can travel far distances in very short periods of time, Elizabeth Line and other sort of transport facilities. So this was a rationalisation of the policy, that that didn't mean that you forget your primary drivers, which is A, B and C. After A, B and C comes D, but in any case we've suspended that in order to see what more the council can do and the new director of housing options and homelessness can do in order to drive those costs down and look at how we can procure more properties both in town Hamlets and around town Hamlets and these drivers are going on, and that includes the council's estate agents essentially, okay, direct management of properties, being more proactive in acquiring properties within town Hamlets and surrounding properties. Just coincidentally, I just want to put in, the borough with the most number of homeless residents is actually town Hamlets, with over 1200 residents of the 2400 and something, just slightly off the 50%. Most of the residents are located in town Hamlets and then it's the peripheries, okay, you're looking at Newham, Hackney, so we do make an active effort to locate residents as close as possible, particularly with their needs and so on and so forth. I hope that helps. Thank you. Councillor, do you have a follow-up or are you happy? Thank you. Councillor, ask about your question, please. Thank you. Thank you. Two things. There's a positive here, one of the priorities is about the face-to-face for the homeless unit extension times and the weekends, I really think this is a good thing and I know from the department that the infrastructure is there to support it and I hope this turns out to be a really good thing and I think this is the way probably other councils also need to move towards, so I do want to start with the positive. I do find it really, really interesting that you put a lot of weight into homelessness and the compassion you have towards making sure we can really tackle the re-housing list, but actually if you read this paper, if anyone from outside read this paper, one thing that is clear is there's a lot of dependency on other people to deliver numbers here. The first thing when it comes to housing supply is working with developers and builders to deliver a minimum of 1,000 homes per annum. When we came, during the election, that was not how it was sold, number one. Number two, where's the language around direct delivery for this council? It's really important that this council gets its feedback in building 100% council homes, genuinely 100% council owned because we know the benefit of that and when it comes to TAs, we need to get ourselves back into that framework. When it comes to developers, we are able to gain a lot of housing supplies with our developers in partnership, but language like this and documents like this gives the upper hand to developers and I think that's one thing that I want to point out because we still need to be able to negotiate with partners, third party parties in order to get the best we can for our residents, especially understanding the land value of Tiara Hamlets, I mean the joint venture is nowhere near the priorities, I would be happy to hear what the priorities are there, but this council just needs to build, build, build and build council homes more than anything else. Thank you, Councillor Ainslie, music to my ears, unfortunately there is a process which is the SDC and the committee has to decide, but we, those who work proactively in trying to deliver as much as possible, I'll take you to the point where within the presentation, ongoing delivery and site identification for housing development schemes as part of the council's capital programme. So it is definitely there, okay, and that includes the JVs, that includes the direct deliveries, that includes a number of site identifications and capital budgets and so on and so forth, which have been allocated for various different programmes, and I know James is going to come in on the Limehouse site in his ward, okay, all right, so that's that part of it, but councils, it's quite a recent phenomena with councils compared to when councils got stopped from building housing, okay, and the funding available for that, and that was government law that was put in for a whole generation, okay, and we are unfortunately playing catch-up. In terms of the new local plan that we're going through, we're at Regulation 19 at the moment, we are asking, we're actually dictating that instead of 35%, we want 40% social housing, and in terms of a 30/70 split between intermediate and affordable, we want an 85/15 split, so we are pushing those drivers so developers aren't getting an easy ride. We've got one of the best viability teams in the country and without naming officers, the head of that team has won a Royal Institute of Surveyors Award for the best surveyor in the country, so, you know, these signatures on that paper with data sets on them don't go lightly and developers are tested on a regular basis. I can assure you these things happen. In terms of our priority in doing that, we're putting a lot of resources in there. We are expanding the teams and within the Housing and Regeneration Redesign, we're bringing capital delivery, housing supply, housing delivery, all of that together, so we have a succinct process. As I said, we've got fast track planning process that we've set up and all council applications will go through those fast track processes, so it expediates the programme. There are always time lags in programming, there's always lags in procurement, in legal. Again, we've invested in those areas and they will be prioritising council programmes in order to run, shorten the time from conception to delivery as quick as possible. I hope that answers your questions. Councillor, you have a question or if you could be brief. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for the presentation. You just mentioned you are prioritised about the cladding issues. On my ward, one of the residents, he want to try to buy his property and reason why he couldn't go forward because of the cladding issue on a modelling house. Anything you're planning to do, modelling house on...? Is that council stock? Yeah, council stock. Oh, right, it's on the Cranbrook, isn't it? I can't give a specific of it, but by all means, if you email me or email Paul, he will definitely look into that specific issue, but I know it's a high-rise concrete building. It is very high-rise building, yeah. So in terms of the specifics, by all means, either email me or email Paul as the corporate director and he will look into that issue. Is there any general other questions that you'd like me to answer? That's fine, thank you. Thank you. If you could be brief. I'll be brief. Thank you. I'll be brief. Thank you for sharing the priorities. I think what would be useful is to, I guess, share the kind of delivery plan. So for example, we just talked about housing supply and if you have like what the programmes would look like, what the targets are, what perhaps the budget is, and like to take example of what you mentioned about direct deliveries, JVs, working with developers, so I think if you have that, then you can measure that and say at future committee meetings, we can see where we are in terms of performance. So in terms of the annual report, we do come down and give various reports, but if you choose to have a work plan where you want one of those specific areas really honed down on. Unfortunately, the time constraints and the overview, okay, that's what we're providing for that. If you want more detailed breakdown of it, by all means, myself and officers, we're happy to come down and go through. Bear in mind some of the stuff can be quite commercially sensitive, so it's only what's not commercially sensitive can we disclose in a public forum. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you once again to both of you for coming tonight. Oh, sorry. Oh, I thought you said your question was answered. Sorry. Okay, so you said in your presentation that no homeless families are in commercial hotels at the moment. Can you just confirm that's the case? When you say commercial homes, that includes B&Bs as well, yeah? No. No. Okay. So commercial hotels are your very expensive hotels that are there. It's not realistic for me to turn around and say no families are in hotels. Families will be in hotels, but they won't be in commercial hotels. I mean, okay, I'm just getting clarity. You mean like big chain hotels? Yeah. Because all hotels and bread and breakfast commercial by the nature of making money, yeah. Yeah, big chain hotels that charge excessive amounts of money, which puts a strain on the council's budget, which limits our ability to provide services to residents. Right. So last week we had the call in about homelessness allocations and it was a decision of the committee to not call it in. You were robustly defending that policy and then subsequently the mayor called a review. Yeah, I mean, I agree you're still defending it tonight. You're saying there's been scare mongering about what the meaning of B&D is. Obviously the mayor disagrees because he's called a review of it. So with that in mind, tell us when will the review of homelessness allocations be completed and who's it being conducted by and who will make the final decision because it's surprising that the cabinet member and the mayor seem to have a division on the policy going forward. So just to reiterate, I'll start reverse wise, the cabinet member and the mayor do not have a division. What I said was the rationale behind the policy and what I commented on is the irrational propaganda that was being thrown about, not taking bands A, B, C into, sorry, if you don't mind, okay, however, so I was talking about the statements that were made in public around the policy and I was clarifying the council's intention was never to ship people out to Scotland, Birmingham, certain places that were quoted within the media. The council's intention is always to locate people as close as possible and if possible within Tower Hamlets and that's what I said again, that's what I said last week and that's what I say this week. There isn't a division between me and the mayor, in terms of this council, it's an executive mayoralty, so who will be the final decision maker? The mayor will be the final decision maker, it's in the constitution. What is the point of the review? Well the point of the... My question wasn't the point of the review, the question was the timeline, the timeline, so at the moment a timeline hasn't been set because we need to identify the parameters we're looking at, which is particularly the zone D area and if the need of a zone D area will or will not be needed, if we can drive the costs down, then zone D and the application of zone D, so although at the moment there is no application of zone D and will there be a need? So therefore officers have been asked to go back, look at the drivers of the costs and look at the need of zone D, if there isn't a need of zone D and officers come back with new data, which I suppose they will because there's great pressure put on them in order to drive those costs down and look at greater procurement within the borough. Hopefully in the meantime if the government makes certain changes around benefits caps, around what the council receive in terms of the local housing allowance, because the council are on 90% of the 2011 local housing allowance, so by default the council will lose money when they rent out within the private sector. So there are lots of dynamics in place, so taking all of this into consideration, I don't feel there may be a need for zone D, so we can simply write out zone D, but the point of zone D wasn't to put people there, it was to rationalise the policy, because the current policy has potential of legal challenges, because people's lives don't run mechanically on what it says on a guidance map from Google and other ... I wasn't asked you to defend zone D again, you said the officers have been tasked, when have you tasked officers to feed back the review on different options? So you've said that you've tasked officers to look into this, particularly look at the task proposals and whether we can find ever closer accommodation, which is all good, they must have been tasked with a time frame to come back, so what is that time frame? So an express time frame hasn't been set, because we're getting live weekly updates, with Power BI being included within the council, these live streams, so there are various processes that are being followed in order to give us that live data. As soon as we get that, a formal decision will be forthcoming. Thank you, Councillor, to you and Paul for coming tonight, this is a significant priority of this administration and this council, and we look forward to inviting you both back for discussions and progress and the challenges that we face, thank you very much, thank you. Okay, we will move on to our final item of tonight, agenda review, reports and actions plans from the local government, social care ombudsman. So with this brief introduction, I would now like to welcome Usman Zia, head of information governance. Usman, yes, he's just sitting. Usman, it's up to you. I'll just ask Usman Zia to introduce them. Yes, fine, I'm happy whichever way, thank you. So Usman is our head of information governance. We have Leah, who's our director of customer service, and you have myself again. So let's cut it short and I'll let Usman just present. I'll go very quickly if that's okay, so thank you very much, no worries at all. Prior to the public interest reports that we received, the last one that we had actually received was in October 2020, and it's really important to note that we have taken these really, really seriously. Receiving one from the ombudsman does mean that they've identified some failures and also administration issues within our service provision, so the main purpose of public interest reports is to raise awareness of significant issues, encourage scrutiny, which is why we're here, and local, and hold services to account. So Usman will take you through the action plans that we've devised in response to the ombudsman recommendations. Thank you very much, Leah. Sorry, if I could just stop you there. We will take the slides as read by the members, and you can move on, thank you. Thank you. Sorry, Chet, do you want to move to the questions, then, because if you've read it we're happy to move to questions from members. I think we've lost a few, I think they've gone to a meeting or something, they said they had prearrangement they had to attend, I think. Okay, I've just been told by the officers it's a Labour group meeting. So any questions from the members or co-optees? Susannah, yes, please, thank you. So Mr X, has he now been homed, it wasn't very clear for me, as in the incumbent that suffered the issue, is he currently housed? So what we're doing here is we did have specific feedback, because you're right, that was one of the recommendations in the first public interest report where there were, I believe there was a reference to the individuals housing review decision and the backdated priority. So while we're not here to discuss the specific instances, but I'm happy to pass on an individual answer to you, we did have evidence of that action being completed and we did pass it on to the Ombudsman that that action had been completed as well. So you can't share whether he's been housed? We're not here to discuss the individual actions of the individuals within the cases themselves, we're here to discuss the implementation of the recommendations that the Ombudsman had, but just to give you assurance, Councillor, every single recommendation that the Ombudsman had within the action plans, we fed back to them in June with the relevant evidence and they have been satisfied on those points. The only action remaining from the recommendations within the public interest reports is to present the reports via the relevant committee, which is here today, so we're here specifically to discuss the implementation of the recommendations and to assure the committee that they've been carried out. But every action that you've seen and the recommendation from the reports in the Ombudsman, including the specific circumstances of Mr. X, we would have completed those and provided evidence back to the Ombudsman at the time. Thank you. Yes, Councillor, your question, thank you. Thank you, Ousmane, thank you for your presentation. What step has the Council taken to ensure Council officers are aware of the paragraph 6.35 to 6.38 of the Code and medical priority? Thank you very much. So just following on to the point I made to your fellow member just earlier. So I think it's probably good to help summarise the different types of recommendations that were there from the Ombudsman and in the action plan as well. So one of the types of recommendations is specifically about learning and reminding officers. We have various mechanisms to do this, not just through public interest reports but through the standard decisions that the local government and social care Ombudsman makes. So the mechanism in which we did this is we shared the relevant information and the findings of the Ombudsman's identified faults and the findings within this case. To my understanding, they were delivered through a service meeting. So we had minutes of that to evidence that that information had been given to the officers to remind them of the housing code specifically. And that evidence was also passed over to the Ombudsman in June for their verification which they received and they verified as well. So we delivered it directly to the staff via one of the service meetings that they had, we had evidence to show that that training and reminder had been delivered and we passed it on to the Ombudsman. Thank you. Can I just also add, within housing management we've increased the number of people who deal with complaints. There is a backlog in order to both work through the backlog and also the current cases as well. And a number of them are actually ex-Ombudsman employees so that they are specialists in that field to deal with complaints in line with that. In addition to that, there's also been a reconfiguration because the time periods in terms of responses need also to be aligned so Ombudsman's teams realign that time frame in terms of responses. And lastly, the information governance department itself did not exist until we brought Ombudsman in and we created that specialist department in order to deal with complaints at both a corporate level and sort of how people interface with the council. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor James, your question. Thank you. That was a useful answer, thank you. But, yeah, reading the answer, reading these two reports, I mean, they're quite familiar with the casework that we have as councillors. So they probably are, you know, the thin end of the wedge, the tip of the iceberg, if you like. So, yeah, could you just give us a commitment that there will be a further review of any other cases like this that are going through the complaints process and to make sure they don't get to the Ombudsman particularly, I think, obviously I'll work on what you just said in your previous answer. I think the other thing as well, just, and I'm sure you're looking at it, it's just about, and I think it applies, it could apply in one of the cases, it's like medical forms being lost and never picked up, that's a recurring theme that I certainly get and that is a key sort of driver to applications not going forward and the correct banding not being allocated to people. Yeah, thank you for that, Sue. You're absolutely right. So we've got a big focus, as Councillor Armid said, on compliance and making sure we're responding to things in time. And then the other part of that is that we've got to take learnings from all complaints and any feedback that actually comes into us and we've got to start building that into our service plans, which we are doing in the background, but of course this is, you know, a long-term fix, it's not an overnight fix, so we're definitely making inroads with that. Your point around things going missing, we are really dedicated to improving our online journeys, which we are working through as well, so there's lots of improvements that are happening in the background and they will be showing very, very soon. I just want to add in addition to that, the council operated within the housing team itself on seven different operating systems, some of whom don't talk to each other. So that includes operating systems that everybody feeds into, all the housing providers. So the housing options operates on one. Another one was around application processes. Another one was around allocations. So there were multiple systems that operated. What we've been trying to do through investment in infrastructure is align those systems together and do away with sort of redundant systems that may have been put in contract 20 years ago, but IT's moved on. So we're also going through a period of serious investment in the infrastructure to get those systems aligned so we can expediate processes without losing data. Some of it was so archaic, and I brought this to committee, I think, when Raj was sitting in Leersey was residents would put things into systems and then someone on this side in the council would literally print it off and then input it into another system. That's where we were. So that plays a really important role in terms of quality assurance and in terms of cutting these stop gaps from one end to another. The investment in staff and, you know, whatever company you work in or council or local authority, it's always highlighted. Your greatest asset is your staff. And the wellbeing of staff by putting more staff in, reducing caseloads, means we can ensure quality is delivered and we can ensure that residents are treated with dignity and also applications are processed faster because there's less to deal with. But another important thing why Leersey is here, because Leersey and the customer service is actually tracking all of those changes and Leersey has monthly meetings and if need be weekly meetings with divisional directors to make sure that those areas of concern are addressed and monitored. So some of the stuff we did, I don't know if you remember, but we spoke about putting in a new telephony system. Again, you know, Leer can now see when response times are. We can assure quality assurance. There's lots of different sort of gadgety stuff that Leer can talk about, but again, this is to enhance the experience of our residents. Thank you, Councillor. Anyone? Anyone? Any questions from the members? Councillor? Yeah, why not. Thank you. Just a quick one. What training has been in place for the officers so that they make sure they know what they're doing? So that's probably one for the service, but we do know that they've got overarching plans that they're not, we don't just train people when it's a one-off, it's got to be continuous. So those plans have been written and we can get you the detail if that's what you want, but I don't have that at the hand. I have seen the overarching plans. Oh, is Mo still on? I'm happy to respond to that. Thank you. So we have been working with the teams, discussing with them the approach that we want to take to training. It was identified as an area where we could do better, and so we are already in discussions with relevant training providers to provide specialist training around the homelessness legislation, the allocations and registrations legislation around suitability and HHSRS inspection training for those officers that go out and procure properties, and the plan is for that training to start early in the new year from January, and because of the number of staff and the extent of the training, it's likely to roll over two or three months. Thank you. Susannah, your question? A very quick one, both cases, it's about delays, the time taken to respond. So I think, do you have in place now something that kind of really monitor response time? Yes, so there is a considerable level of detail that we have in terms of monitoring our application process, but the the the blunt fact is that we are not processing them as quickly as we are receiving them. Now what I've been working with my colleagues in the service to understand is why there is that misalignment. Is it a lack of resource, or is it the process that we're using, or is it the systems that are creating the obstacle? So we're looking at all of the different elements of what happens to identify the causes, and then to put in place alternative approaches that will mean that what comes in is what goes out, and that that is a sustainable model. Can I just also add with that, in terms of structure, so we've put Mohammed Hussein as director of housing options and homelessness, specifically focusing on that, that's his specialism, but the point of it is was that previously there was so much the director had to have oversight with. So we've got a director specifically focusing on this area, because it's an area that's very challenging and very demanding, and that's to do with the redesign of the council and in terms of the restructure of the housing, regeneration and housing director. Okay, thank you. Thank you once again to Councillor Ahmed and Leah and Usman for this, and it's been very useful and a very important update on this. Thank you very much. Thank you. No, the action log, I turn to you. Just bear with me. Could we have this one? Any other business? AOB? Yeah, thank you. Thank you. You know, I think items 4 and 5 on the action log, items for Sri and Rupert, they were going to respond to us, so can we get a response from Sri and Rupert? So one was going to come this week and one was going to come by end of September. I'm expecting they said they were going to get the response imminently, I'm expecting it by the end of this week. Finally, on any other business, I have one item. The council is collecting feedback from members about their experiences speaking at meetings. If you wish to participate, please complete a paper copy of the survey and hand it to the committee officers after the meetings. Or if you prefer, you can complete the survey online. The committee officer has a QR code to access the link. If there's no other business to discuss, do you have something? No? That's it. Thank you very much. Thank you to all the members for your attendance and your participation was very unique today, very important issues we had, agenda items. Thank you very much and have a good evening. Thank you. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]