Transcript

and I'm chairing tonight's meeting. And please note that we are not expecting a fire alarm test this evening. So if the alarm is sounded, please follow my instructions and evacuate the building. Please remember that this meeting is being broadcast live on the council's website. Please turn your microphone on when speaking and remember to turn it off when you've finished. To make sure that you can be heard, to make sure you can be heard on the broadcast and in the chamber, please speak clearly and directly into your microphone.

• I'll now ask my fellow members and the officers to introduce themselves starting on my right. Councillor Ruth Hayes, Clerkenwell Ward.
• Councillor Gary Ella, Finsbury Park Ward and I'm a substitute member this evening.
• Councillor Angela Weeks, Mardemey Ward.
• I'll just go over here and then go to the offices.
• Councillor Caroline Russell, Highbury Ward.
• Councillor Sharon Underhill-Rose Ward.
• Thank you, so go ahead, Will.
• William Russell, key account director for Kingdom Local Authority Support.
• Good evening, Bill Simfield, acting head of Operational Services.
• Thank you.
• Leaving all, I'm Mark Fontaine, I am the operations lead for Street Glensing.
• Thanks a lot and then I'll go over here, yeah. Go ahead.
• I'm Felice, I'm from an energy project and programs officer.
• Hi, I'm Martijn Kormans, director for climate change and transport.
• I'm Rayne Champion, executive member for environment, air quality and transport.
• Andrew Bedford, assistant director for Green Space and Leisure.
• Members of the public, welcome. You're very, very welcome. So, she's--
• Emma Taylor, part of the committee.
• Okay, so, any, we've got apologies from Councillor Phil Graham. Welcome, Councillor Jeeps. Where's your seat, you've got a seat, yeah? Good, and we've got a, any declaration of substitute members?
• Yeah, Councillor Gary Heather, part of substitute.
• Thank you, do you want to introduce yourself, Councillor Jeeps?
• Councillor Kallai Jeeps, the Canterbury Ward.
• Thank you. So, any declarations of interest? No, thank you. And minutes of the previous meeting. Can we agree the minutes of the previous meeting? Thank you very much. So, I'll just move on to my report. I'm just gonna cover a few things. The climate action supplementary planning document is going to be circulated to the committee, and we'll be having a report on this in January, at the January meeting. Mildmay Ward is set to benefit from an exciting package of improvements, including new green spaces, improved pavements, and more child-friendly streets, as it becomes one of Islington's first liveable neighborhoods. And then, Apple Day at the Ecology Centre on Saturday the 19th of October, from 12th 'til four. Come and enjoy live music, Morris dancing, and crafts and face painting, and loads of English apples to taste and juice and to buy to take home. And the Nature Neighbourhoods project coordinator, Rosie Appley, is attending this committee on the 12th of November. She's got some events coming up, and the next conversation they're having is on the 24th of October, 5.30, at the Whittington Park Community Centre. They'll be joined by the Co-op Sustain and Islington Council's local economies team for a conversation about food systems. And that's my report. So, public questions. We'll take public questions after each agenda item. And so, the agenda is gonna be as follows. We're gonna take B1, the presentation on street cleansing first, and then we're gonna take the B3 next, Archway Leisure Centre, retrofit. And then we'll take B2, the annual report of the executive member for the environment and transport as the third item. So, over to Bill Sinfield and Mark Fontaine for the presentation on street cleansing. Thank you.
• Thank you, Councillor. We've got quite a comprehensive presentation to present to the community tonight. So, I think there's 26 slides in total. Some of that information contains the work that Kingdon do with Islington around the reinforcement, but there is a lot of comprehensive detail with regards to street cleansing service, considering it covers a 24/7, 365-day operation. So, myself and Mark will go through the slides. Please stop us if you have any questions or you want particular detail on a particular slide. Thank you.
• I'll just ask you, because we've got three items on the agenda, if you could maybe take a, maybe--
• Hey, first slide just outlines the vision that council has for the 2013 missions with greener, healthier Islington. It describes how our liveable neighbourhoods, which communities can enjoy, looks fresh, clean, feel. The service uses LEQ, which is a local environmental quality metrics to measure cleanliness of the borough. We've improved this by reporting of littering through our in-house system that we just launched. It provides a comprehensive detail to residents who raise the notification, and the actual, it's an end-to-end process, so they actually get notification when it's been closed off. We're using littering enforcement through Kingdom, supporting us, to drive behaviour change. That's the cycle of improvement on your screens now. Clean, healthy borough, transforming using technology, using data for intelligence-led and agile responses, through littering enforcement, which changes the behaviour. That's just an overview of what we do in terms of the meterage roads we sweep every day, and the different sweeper beats there, now 72 across the borough. We do all main roads seven days a week. Side streets are now four times a week, and there's 49 additional staff that support with other services with street cleansing. Our sweepers are responsible for clearing not just litter, dog fouling, markets, any accounts that own properties, and they report fly-tipping and graffiti. We have dedicated vehicles that go around, remove those proactively as reactively as well. We have dedicated teams that remove graffiti across the borough. The recent sources we use for fly-tips and graffiti is not affected, that's four times a week, three is not affected, that's five-day service, and seven on main roads. The leafing season which is upon us is probably the most challenging period that we have throughout the year. The number of trees we have in Islington, we have lots of leaf fall, and it all comes down at the same time. So we support the service with some additional resource to ensure that walkways are kept clear. We also have a winter maintenance programme which starts in November, and that runs through until April. In case we have inclement weather, we can react and put troops on the ground very, very quickly to keep all main lines clear and safeguard our vulnerable residents. The current cost of the service, 3.1 million a year, 121 employees, 72 do the street sweeping, and 49 support with other services. In the MTFS proposals to reduce heat cleansing, service went from 86 to 72 road sweepers. This realises a saving of £300,000 a year, as main roads are kept at seven days, but side residential roads are now four days a week. The saving is a reduction of aging staff, so no permanent staff were impacted, so there's no redundancies. We did some benchmarking with other boroughs. As you can see, we're still superior in terms of the number of days we cleanse our streets compared to our neighbouring boroughs. Camden twice, usually. Hackney, two days a week on their side streets, and Haringey, one day a week. Those are our benchmarking scores against those boroughs in terms of litter, detritus, flyposting, and graffiti. We score quite highly, so we're quite proud of those statistics compared to the other boroughs.
• I think it's worth mentioning, KBT.
• Yeah, KBT come in and do surveys, independent surveys as well, and give us any pointers if we have any areas of concern. But we scored very good in the last survey. As I said before, those are the measures that we use to indicate how we keep our streets clean. We do a monitoring process, which looks at the quality of our cleansing, and it's marked accordingly. That's just a map of our different subdepots, which are dotted around the borough. We have six, which the sweepers fan out from and cleanse the areas closest to their subdepots. That's just a list of roads, which are not main roads, but we've maintained the cleansing schedule of five days a week because of the high footfall. They're quite key areas, so they maintain five days a week. So they maintain a five-day service. This is something that we're looking at to launch next year, community weeding. This is a scheme which involves local residents to take some ownership of their roads. We currently have a lot of residents that adopt tree pits, and a group of residents may come together and say, can you not spray my road? We're gonna take this one step further and involve and engage the community in an attempt to have them take ownership of their roads in terms of removing any invasive weeds and allowing nice wildflowers to flourish. We'll be monitoring that as well to ensure that the roads don't become unmanageable. Should they be so, we would have to take it back in.
• The driver to that is what turned it into glysophate.
• Yeah, to say the driver to that is, it would reduce our use of glysophate, which has been in a lot of the news lately. The EC, I think they're close to banning it, and I know it's banned in Austria as well, so I don't think it's got much shelf life left in this. There's not a lot of alternatives out there that will give the same results. Recently introduced a new back office system called Alloy. This extends the capabilities of the Love Clean Streets app. Love Clean Streets is an application that residents can go on, they can report things, fly tips, et cetera. That will send a message through into Alloy, which will generate a workflow which goes to the relevant crew. They would attend, deal with the fly tip or issue. Once it's complete, they'll submit on their device. That will send a message through into Love Clean Streets and then on to the resident to say it's done. This will help us improve first line contact as well and improve customer satisfaction.
• Yeah, sorry, Mark. Sorry, if I may add to that as well, that data will be collated. So what that will enable us to do is build heat maps and detailed data to design. (silence) That's just more on how the process works. That's just a quick screenshot of sweeping status. For instance, that was taken off a section of roads from one morning. Basically what happens, the sweeper goes along, he sweeps a particular road. When it's done, he presses submit, the road turns green. So those roads and that map, that green, had already been swept for the day. Roads that are red obviously remain active until they're cleansed.
• Yeah, sorry. Just to clarify, all our street cleansing staff are supplied with handheld devices. That automatically feeds into the alloy system. So what we've got is we've got when they first start out, first deployed in the morning, the beat is actually red and as they complete the street, it actually turns green. Again, what that gives us is it provides us with essential data of how long it's actually taking, how the route is done and which order it's done in also.
• That's not very clear. That's just a quick screenshot of the different reports that we can produce from Love Clean Streets, which tells us the type of issues that we have to face each day. Number of flight tips, for example, and other various items. It's not very clear there, but we can supply the presentation for you.
• Okay.
• Going on to littering enforcement. Current fixed bounties, 100 pounds, which reduced to 80 if paid within 14 days. Fines help change attitudes towards littering and decrease the amount of littering to mitigate the reduction of the street sweeping. We have dedicated patrols, both act as deterrents and enforcements against environment crime. We used to dedicate the training team to provide the proactive and focused enforcement. This is supported with our colleagues from Kingdom. That's just a quick snapshot of number of FPNs that have been issued from July 23 and the value of the FPNs and the amount that's been paid today. If I can just hand over to Will, he can perhaps run through some of the summary.
• So what we put together here is a summary of the work that we've done in Islington already. As you can see from the figures here, I've put together the start of the contract to date figures as well as the last three months. And the reason for that is to show that steady improvement. There's been a 56% increase in the quality efficiency of the team, looking at the income that's generated out of the fixed penalty notices for Islington Council. I've also put on there in terms of the latest report from September in terms of the representations, which again is another good indicator of the quality of the service. What that's looking at is out of the total, as you can see for a three month period, 2,307 FPNs were issued. For September, 0.7% of the fixed penalty notices that were issued were upheld. The reasons that those were upheld, we put below as well. Obviously all of those were reviewed. And it's not a case of the officer acting incorrectly, but it's a case of further evidence obviously being provided after that point through the representation process to give us that opportunity to review the decision to uphold or decline this representation. So I'm really proud of that. Another thing, obviously part of the contract, part of the social value is around donating 10,000 pounds to Islington's Library of Things across the year. Again, obviously a part of the way to give back to the community that we're serving. Again, the latest report for, data for patrols and fixed penalty notice being issued. Obviously the focus for the contract is around litter and dog fouling. So obviously target those hotspot locations as you can see across the south and the north of the borough. Our contract manager, Cliff, obviously patrols outside of those areas as well. Obviously just to pick up on a weekly basis to pick up any hotspot areas to help direct the officers that have not been passed as part of regular communications to do that proactive approach to looking for other additional areas. So just obviously on the, sorry, go on this side.
• Question, can I answer? Okay.
• No problem. That's okay. So yeah, just obviously on the services, as I said, at the minute we're providing a littering and dog fouling service for Islington across other boroughs and across the UK. We deal with obviously a much wider range of offenses. Obviously part of the contract scope with Islington, there is scope to deal with obviously a larger range of offenses as you can see those there. We do also deal with, so as an example, part of the training packages that we deliver to the officers. It's a level three accredited course. That's something that we deliver to customers as well. So their in-house teams take that same training as well. So something again that we're very proud of. And obviously the waste watch system as well, which we'll get onto in the next slide. So obviously part of the service that we do provide to other local authorities, we've got two examples here, is around the fly tipping. And we do that in two ways. One with our waste watch camera, which you can see is an AI piece of technology. At that point there's a freestanding tower that's solar and gas powered. But we can also stick it up on a lamppost if the space isn't available and that's an option. And we have worked with businesses as well in particular areas where they're not particularly happy about a problem as well. Obviously what that, in this particular case study there was five tons of waste being collected a week from that collection point. Obviously it's a bottle bank and the social impact on that is huge when you want to go and use recycling services. A ton of the waste collected each week was raw meat as well, so obviously significant health risks there. The previous to us deploying the camera, there was 50 incidents a week. Obviously after putting the camera up, we had seven instances in the first month. And it's working at roughly three or four instances a week, sorry, three or four instances a month after that. So in terms of the enforcement action, obviously the level of enforcement's gone down, but also the problems just completely disappeared as well. So that was the first camera that we've put in. There's four cameras now in Dartford doing similar pieces of work, tackling obviously fly tippers as well as some of the more serious organized crime data as well. Enfield is an example. The reason I put that in there as well is because that's a service that's primarily enforcement officers out on the ground investigating waste. We have a team of 14 officers of which there's six fly tipping officers that will go out and investigate waste. So for the last three months, they've issued 1,482 FPNs. Obviously the income generated off the back of that shown below. And of the cases that have been put forward to prosecution, we've had 100% success rate in the last three months, which is obviously ultimately the key--
• Thanks, Will. Just a quick breakdown of the type of FPNs that have been issued, mostly around smoke-emulating litter, some for food. There's other things and there's a spit-ee, which is-- Just a few FAQs here. LEQs, the monitoring methodology we use to score, which is developed by Keep Britain Tidy. It's a NI-195-10ness indicator, which is discontinued in 2015. Basically it mirrors that. Leaves, leaves on the ground are not detritus or litter. They become detritus when they're rotted. So leafing season, we continue to manage as usual. We'll continue to support the service to ensure that the roads are kept passable. We have annual initiatives such as the winter maintenance and obviously community engagement programs happen throughout the year with litter picks in certain areas, which we engage with local groups, which is a good thing that puts us quite in a high profile. So main roads and town centers will continue to be cleansed seven days a week. Detritus is a term used to describe dust, mud, soil, rot leaves, and actual human skin, which causes that buildup. Litter is mostly synthetic materials. Usually around things like smoking, eating, and drinking. Graffiti is obviously informal and legal marks that are put on walls, posters, et cetera. Flag posting is illegal printed material which goes on walls and public spaces that we have to remove. Okay, that concludes our presentation.
• Thanks a lot, Mark. And so now I'll move to the committee for questions. I've got Councillor Heather, I've got Councillor Hayes, Councillor Russell, Councillor Boswell-Quashie, and Councillor Weeks. So we'll take, should we do three questions and then we'll take the next bunch. So we'll take the first three. Councillor Heather.
• Yeah, thanks very much for that presentation and the information and what you're doing. On the frequency of sweeping and the main roads and the side streets, I mean, I've been an advocate for, and you are as well, like intelligence based, there is a bit of an issue with side streets that are in town center areas where they get quite a heavy lot of littering. But they're only cleaned four days a week. So I think that, and I know that you had some streets up there, but not some of the ones I know about. But so yeah, need to keep looking at those. In terms of what goes on in those streets, because I live in one of those streets off of a town center, I'm an expert in, I've almost done like a PhD in littering. (laughing) The problem is, is that when you examine the actual litter, it consists mainly of plastic bottles, cans, and sandwich, or food containers. What happens is, 'cause I've seen people do it, is that, and where it is, is it's always in the car. So what happens is, is that people go, come to the town center area, they park in their car, they go to eat it. It's not just fast food, it's sometimes a supermarket, you get a meal, they come back, they eat it, and for some reason, they don't feel the need to take it home, they put it in the gutter. So that's all bad. The thing that's really bad about it as well is that a lot of that stuff isn't recyclable when you, that would have been like plastic bottles, tin cans, 'cause it's so contaminated, you know? And I know a lot of this as well, because I, you mentioned litter picking. I actually do litter picking, like at least two or three times a week. It's a form of therapy, 'cause otherwise, it just annoys me otherwise.
• What? (laughing)
• But the point I wanna get to is that I've also been advocating that we need to get, I actually support the enforcement you're doing, but I fear that it won't solve the problem altogether. What we need is, we need a buy-in from local businesses, local community, I talk about advocating the civic pride in our area to make sure that it's good. And what we do is, is we actually, in some ways, we put a focus on the actual individuals that do this stuff in some way, and point out that that is unacceptable around here. So that's something I'd like us to continue doing. I think the question I had was that, on the fixed penalty notices, and I could see from your last slide after that, that there's quite a broad range of what that's for. So, obviously the dumping and stuff like that, you know, that needs enforcement, but I noticed that 63% had paid fines, and so that means 37% haven't paid fines, and you did have a bit about, I don't know, not taking people and prosecuting people or whatever, but what happens to the 37% that have not paid the fines?
• Yeah, so again--
• So I'm just gonna take, I don't know if you could keep--
• Sorry, yep.
• Keep that as a, come back to that. I'm gonna just go to, have you finished, Councillor Heather?
• Yeah, I mean, that's enough.
• Thank you very much, though. And if you could, Councillor Hayes?
• Thank you very much, yeah, yeah, actually, that question, I also got down, Councillor Heather, so I had got a couple of the questions. So firstly, I just wanted to say the indicators were really good. It was very helpful to see those benchmarks, and not infrequently when I talk to people who've moved to Islington, they comment on how clean the streets are. So that is really, you know, it is really positive, and it is really noted. I did have a question about the enforcement. I noticed that there appeared to be quite a bit in Clerkenwell. One of my questions was how many of those people are residents? 'Cause I'm conscious that we've got, a lot of people will be coming into the area to work or for nighttime economy. Is that data that you hold? So, 'cause I was wondering about what we can do in terms of education, you know, encouraging people not to do it in the first place, so I'm interested in that. And my other question, which was on the alternatives to spraying, which I think is really positive, is in addition to working with kind of residents in the street, are we proactively targeting schools, community organizations, faith groups, to try, because I'm kind of conscious that if one person moves and they were the person that did it, it's quite labor intensive. If there's an organizational buy-in, hopefully they will make that more sustainable. Thank you.
• Thanks a lot. So, Councillor Russell. Your questions, and go ahead.
• I have three areas of questions. So, first of all, thank you to all the street sweepers, particularly as we're coming into the leaf full time of year, and they do all do an absolutely amazing job, and I think every single resident is incredibly grateful to them. I have got something on littering enforcement, but I'll come back to that. In terms of the glyphosate reduction in spraying, you talked about working with residents to manage their needs. So, I'd be interested to know exactly how that work with residents is going to be managed. Is it through sort of community hubs, or how are you actually going to be engaging with residents on particular streets? In terms of Kingdom, I'm just wondering, I wasn't aware that we had a sort of model of, it sounds like, is it that the staff who are issuing these fixed penalty notices are paid out of the fines that come in? I feel really uncomfortable about, I mean, it sounds like people are getting fines for dropping a cigarette end, which is an incredibly antisocial thing to do, but for some of the people who drop a cigarette end, getting an 80 pound, well, 100 pound fine, but reduced to 80 if you pay it quickly, it may just be that they just cannot pay it. We know there's a cost of living crisis. We know that people are really struggling financially. So, it just feels uncomfortable in a borough where there are so many people who are really struggling in the cost of living crisis, that we've got a team of people who are out there effectively earning their wages by issuing fines to people who drop a bit of litter. And so, instead of picking up on Councillor Heather's point and Councillor Hay's point about education, it just sort of feels quite worrying that there is a group of people for whom it's in their interest to spot people who are dropping bits of litter. And I just wonder how that sits with the values of the council, to be honest. So, yeah, those are my questions.
• I just wanna say, can I ask a question later?
• Oh, you're, sorry, yeah, later, yeah. Okay, so thanks, Councillor Russell. So, I just wanna add that about dog fouling, that, you know, are we finding people for that? 'Cause I'd be quite happy to find people for dog fouling. So anyway, so if you could take all that bunch of questions, that'd be good.
• Thank you, yeah. If I could firstly answer Councillor Heather's question around residential street cleansing frequencies to that of town centres and those that are joined town centres, obviously we are aware that four-day-a-week street cleansing or variable street cleansing is not gonna meet the needs of all residential streets. I think it's more about re, sorry, it's more about redirecting resources to those that don't require a four-day-a-week street cleansing to redirect resources to somewhere that actually needs to be increased to five days a week, as an example. Does that answer your question, Councillor?
• That's great. If you could turn your mic off when you finish, and then we'll move over to... (no audio)
• If I can address the, I think it was a mute community weeding question that we had. Basically how the scheme would work, we'd have to have a coordinator for a particular road or location. They would get tools that we'd supply. We'd offer a garden waste collection service, obviously that would be free of charge. We would give them literature to show which are the invasive weeds which need removing, and show which wildflowers can be allowed to flourish. We would monitor those streets on a frequent basis to ensure that it's being kept up, because if we don't, then obviously the infrastructure may become damaged and that gives rise to ships, that slip ships and falls. So that's in essence how it would work, but we'd have to have buy-in, because if you had a group of residents on the street and the majority of them said yes, this is a great idea, and they join in, brilliant, but if you only have one or two and the rest don't care, that's gonna be the challenge to try and meet that target. (no audio)
• How the engagement would happen with people on the streets. We've had a description of what stuff you can supply, but I don't understand the mechanism for engaging with residents on a street. Have you got people going door to door, or how is that working?
• Yeah, the way it will work is we'll put some comms out to get awareness, perhaps do some leaflet drops, and yeah, I think some door knocking and getting some engagement going would be a good idea. As I say, this pilot hasn't started yet, but we're looking to launch that next year. So we're looking at all ways we can communicate and to contribute and engage with the communities.
• Andrea, go ahead.
• Yeah, just to add to that, I think it's similar to how we're doing the greener together. So it would be the owners would be on the street, the residents of the street to be able to demonstrate that they've got that consensus. We won't have the capacity to go knocking doors, so they will need to tell us and demonstrate to us that they have got a consensus on the street and some level of evidence for that. We've done that with the greener together schemes, that there's the demonstrable support from the community already before we say yes.
• And all your street sweepers have holes with them as well. Do they ever do weeding manually as well?
• Yes, they do. They have a variety of bits of equipment that they can do use, and they will manually remove weeds. It's quite labour intensive, but yes, that's part of their duties.
• Move on to Will.
• Yes, no problem. So you mentioned obviously around the data for people working or living, sorry, living or living inside the borough versus living outside the borough. I don't have the figures to hand for this until I can certainly produce those. For a recent, I mean, only because I've just gone through the report today for a London local borough. The statistics there were there was 63% of people that we issued a fixed penalty notice were residents of the borough, versus the, what is that, 30, 37% the rest. That live outside the borough. So I can come back to you with data for a second. In terms of the prosecution files, obviously if somebody refuses to pay a fixed penalty notice, what the part of the process is, obviously for us to put together a prosecution pack. And that's obviously, there's a limit to how many SJPK or single justice procedure cases. And that's the process for littering how many cases the court can take. So obviously we work with your legal team to make sure that those cases come through as we work with all local authorities, legal teams in terms of making sure we're meeting the requirements. But obviously, yeah, that's something that we do. As an example with Emmfield, they publicize as well, some of the statistical information on the court cases as well, just to get that message out further ultimately. It's not acceptable to commit the offenses that are criminal offenses that we're dealing with. We obviously do that education with the member of public, the person on the street. But then also obviously it's a case of making sure that enforcement actions follow through.
• And the point about getting volunteers from other local groups, you know, like schools and religious groups, did that?
• So yeah, so in terms of working with local communities.
• More around weeding, was it? There's more around weeding.
• Yeah, sorry. We have community events that go on throughout the year where we have people that form groups and help us with weeding and litter picking, et cetera. We've looked at wanting to extend that and engage with a lot more groups. There's definitely a lot more work that we can do to do that, to reach out and reach different groups. So that's something that we can look forward to doing in the forthcoming months.
• Thank you. And so I've got a bunch of more questions. And first is Council Weeks. And then it's Councillor Bosmapwashi, then it's Councillor Jeeps, and then Councillor Landa. So I'll take Council Weeks first, and then we'll come back around, okay.
• Thank you, Councillor Cutt. Yeah, thank you for your presentation. It was very clear, very comprehensive and detailed, and shows us how all the systems work to keep the area clean. And also just want to put on record my thanks to the area managers who oversee the Malmö area, 'cause they are very responsive when we call them about any particular issues. I just wanna come to one question, just around the sort of benchmarking that you do. I noted that it's, I'm saying, boroughs that surround us. But for every sort of 10 emails I may get with Shay, you know, Islington is very clean. I get that one odd email, you know, now and again, from someone who says, oh, my family visited, and said the area wasn't clean. But when they compare that to maybe, I'm gonna say Kensington or Windsor, or somewhere out of London, they say the streets are generally cleaner. Is there something that you can do around your benchmarking to look at, say, boroughs that don't surround Islington? So maybe that was, you know, past the M25, just to compare. The second question was just around, you have the sort of community weeding program, but is there something that you sort of have considered, yeah, maybe like a community cleaning program, because, you know, something that the councillors and I discuss often is around sort of this civic pride, which Councillor Heaver talks about, you know, quite often. And that's something that we want to instill in Islington residents and visitors. So I understand that the focus is on the weeding, but what about sort of community sort of cleaning program, especially with our young people, you know, maybe starting in schools. And then a question just around, there's sort of that quality control of the area. So I know that you have indicators where you can judge the success of how clean an area has. Have you ever sort of spoken to residents and said, can you feed back to us what you think about the cleanliness of our area? Because I think the quality control is good when a manager goes over what about the residents and visitors to that area. And finally, my question is just the kingdom. Yeah, I'm quite, I'm sort of conscious and interested in how, you know, sort of the quality control side of the enforcement officers is managed. You know, I don't want to sort of give details in a sort of public meeting, but, you know, how do you manage the sort of the behaviors of your officers when they're enforcing or attempting to enforce a penalty? 'Cause I've witnessed on occasions, you know, some behavior that I would maybe question in Islington, you know, probably by one of, you know, Kingdom's employees, it'd be good to just understand how you oversee that, thank you. Thanks, Councillor.
• Thank you. So we'll take a few more questions and if you can just keep those in mind. Councillor Bosham-Quillashi.
• Thank you, Chair. And Councillor Weeks has touched on some of my points. And thank you, officers, for your presentation. Mine comes back a little bit in terms of some green spaces where at the moment some are being, I guess, surrounded by some of our hired bikes with clusters of litter. Talking about the Thinsbury Square vicinity, specifically. And how are we looking at accessing those kind of spaces? 'Cause I think there's a health and safety issue there. I think that maybe officers need to be aware of when, you know, residents or visitors can't access bins to possibly put their rubbish away. Or even our staff can't access bins because bikes are in those kind of spaces. I can show pictures if that would help. Won't put it on social media. And then the other point was about our local estates, 'cause they do a considerably phenomenal job. Sometimes it could be one or two people that work on our council estates. And it's about, I guess, the equipment that they are using. Obviously, I know that there was a time in Islington that we had these machines that were making a lot of sound pollution, you know, that were affecting residents or people walking past. So just how much support are we giving to them in terms of updating their, I guess, their cleaning facilities and what they use and also making sure that they are compliant. And the last point was about the fly tipping. My Councillor, we just mentioned it. But I'm also a little bit concerned that we are finding people on these smaller scales. And there's bigger scales like when people drive by and actually dump like, you know, beds and furniture, which would actually go into their spaces that we could upcycle. And I know with the greener fare at Islington, we're trying to do things like that. So it's about how we, I guess, use things that are dumped. And again, back to Councillor Hevers' point about that civic pride. And it goes back to Sir's point at the end. I can't remember your name 'cause I didn't catch it, Sir, so sorry. Thank you, Mark. It's about the communication, the comms. I know when I first became a Councillor, there was information about litter picking within certain parks. But I think we kind of slipped back a little bit and I haven't seen much activities within our parks. And it'd be nice to get that started back because I think the local schools are doing a phenomenal job as well in their school and community spaces. But I think it's more about the adults. Thank you. Thanks. So, Councillor Jeeps. I like him. I went on a litter pick on Friday at my local park. But I don't think it was quite therapy. In fact, what I was picking out of the local park, some of it was really ultra disgusting. And so I just wondered what you do with your operatives. Because this stuff, I'm sure what I picked out was possibly human waste and probably from a nappy. And then there's also the substance that you get in plastic bottles, which has been put into the bottle after it's gone through the human system. And I wouldn't pick that up. I kicked it through the railing. So I just wondered what you did. I mean, this is driving me nuts. And it's in the new Riverwalk. People, Uber drivers, I think, they park up and 'cause they haven't got anywhere to use the facility. So they then shove whatever they don't like, including tin cans and everything through the railings, which is what I was going around and picking out. So I just wonder how you deal with and how you operate. How do you, is it a health care, health system that you've got for your operatives? 'Cause it is seriously awful stuff, really. It's just, it's not. And thanks for all the work that they're doing. It's really important. And the new Riverwalk was really quite good. I was going around fishing stuff out that I knew where people had, and there was little piles of it that people had clearly left there over some time, including the dog mess, et cetera. Thanks.
• Thanks a lot. So there's a whole lot of questions there. So who wants to start?
• I'll start if you don't mind. So firstly, thank you to Councillors for their proactive approach to litter picking. So I think in terms, just taking it first of all, Councillor Weeks, in regards to shrink cleansing standard measurements, I'm not sure all authorities follow KBT, NI-195, and have independent surveys, but we can definitely reach out to other London boroughs, and indeed, authorities outside of London, to see what their standards are and compare those two isn't intense. With regards to the--
• I think, just further to add to that, the benchmarking is not comparable because standard of cleansing is different. In rural areas, you'll have frequencies that might be anything from once a week to once every 13 weeks on any particular road. But you've usually got a demographic of people that is not so transient. So there is more of a community love, let's just say, for their local areas.
• I don't think the deacon's homework would be good to get.
• Yeah, we can certainly provide that.
• So I think the other question that you had was around quality control and how we monitor that. So as I said, sort of the start of it, really, is the four-day training course that's delivered to the officers. It is the first of its kind, environmental enforcement training, accredited, as I said, through CPD. Obviously, that's the starting point. They then go out with the contract manager, and then they go out with the, so we've got, on site on Islington, we've got a contract manager, a team leader, two training officers, and then, obviously, the officers underneath them. So it's obviously about monitoring on the street with that support, being next to the officer, making sure that they're signed off on their competencies. But then it's also, all the officers have body-worn cameras on, and the body-worn cameras are uploaded to a system that, obviously, Islington have got access to, as do all of the handheld devices. So all of the information is put through the handheld device that all is accessible, obviously, by us, but also by Islington for that complete transparency, obviously, if complaints do come in. As I said, we're, unfortunately, not dealing with robots. They are human beings. We do deal with those, review those cases with Islington as well. Obviously, if there's areas where training could be reapplied or if it's more serious than disciplinary action taken, then, obviously, we're quick to make sure that we put those in place. As soon as, obviously, we've seen that, the next day with the officers back in, we'll start that process with them.
• I think, just going to another point about community cleanups. Yes, I think there's more work we can do to involve more local groups. Our neighborhood managers are actively in their areas trying to engage with their local communities, but I think schools, definitely PACE of Education, other places that we can target and try and educate people and involve more people from the local community. In terms of measuring how streets are, in terms of resident feedback, I don't believe that's been done, but it's quite an interesting take and it's something we'll have to consider going forward because we might get some different feedback, let's just say, from residents. I hope I've got all your questions.
• Sorry, with regards to Councillor Cheat's question concerning urine and defecation, we have mechanisms in place for sweepers to actually report that, so we don't actually expect our street cleansing staff to remove that. That's reported to specialized teams who would then go out and clear that area, wash it down and remove the offending items.
• There's also, if operatives are in that sort of environment like that specialist team, we do offer them a hep B injection so they're further protected along with their PPE. Hepatitis B.
• Question about the equipment that people have. Is it up to date and it's mainly on the states, wasn't it, that you were talking about, Councillor Boss-McQuarrie?
• Yes, Chair.
• Yes, I think you're referring to mechanical sweeping, which can disturb residents. We are moving towards an electric fleet, so more of these bits of kit are coming out. It's a bit slow, but they will evolve and they do emit less noise. So we'll be able to carry out that activity a lot more quieter.
• Yeah, sorry, and also about the green are kind of the sustainability of those equipments. Can you just elaborate a little bit, please?
• Well, we're moving towards more of an electric fleet. Currently, we've got 21% of our fleet is electric. That helps our net zero carbon targets and we can continue to develop that and electrify more of our vehicles.
• I think there's a point about the seriousness of some enforcement. I think the flight tipping is probably like a more serious problem than maybe cigarette ends. And is there a sort of people flight tipping regularly or like people have mentioned actually drive by flight tipping, are they going to find more?
• So obviously, just to start with at the minute, what we're dealing with is the littering of the dog fouling. That's what we've been tasked to deal with for Islington. There is scope in the contract to expand that. So, and again, obviously, we're making sure that we're in line with your requirements. So yeah, absolutely, that's something that we deal with elsewhere, hence why we've put the case studies into this piece of work, into this project.
• Okay, can we see, we're still going round 'cause Councillor Nanda's got a question. We'll come round again. I'm gonna come round everyone again if everyone wants to ask another question. And Councillor Champion is asking to come in, but I'm just gonna take Councillor Nanda first and then I'll come to you, Councillor Champion.
• Thank you for your presentations and for helping to keep Islington clean. My question is about the frequency of street cleansing and the distribution of your patrols in high-purpose areas. So I just wanted to note that in my ward, Hill Rise, I've received a lot of feedback from residents that street cleaning is a big issue for them and they're worried that the frequency has gone down and that streets aren't as clean as they'd like them to be. And I also note that on the maps you showed, Hill Rise has a lower coverage than many other areas of the borough because it's more residential. So I'm just wondering, do you do any analysis of your indicators or feedback from residents from Love Clean Streets and other means and how that varies geographically? And does that feed into how you decide which streets to focus on with higher frequencies?
• Okay, Councillor Champion, do you wanna come in?
• My point was enforcement. So at the moment in terms of fly tipping, so the work, there isn't a team, Simon Kaufman's team works, I think, both with Bill, Mark, but also under Dan and Bez around enforcement of fly tipping and other antisocial behavior like that. So it's not that the fly tipping isn't being tackled, it's just they're being tackled in-house at the moment. There's quite a lot of work going on between the teams to see how that can be made more effective. As you can imagine, it's always quite difficult to see people littering or see people fly tipping, but quite a lot of effort does go into it. I mean, they use things like cameras, but again, sometimes someone's just walking around down the street and dumping something. It's extremely difficult to get anything you can then prosecute. So it's not that the effort doesn't go into it, it's just that sometimes it's just very difficult.
• Thank you. So if you want to just take Councillor Nanda's question, then I'll ask the committee for any supplementaries.
• Thank you, yeah. In answer to the Councillor's question, yes, we do use data. Data will be key to the street kinds of service going forward, both through the alloy system and the Love Clean Street system. So it's important to note with the Love Clean Street system that that has recently been revamped. So it's much more user-friendly for residents, members of the Republic to actually report. That information will actually be collated through the alloy system. So just getting back to the Councillor's point about the data. So if we've got a particular hotspot, a particular problem area, that will flag as a heat map and that will enable us to actually monitor that and focus on direct resources accordingly. Thank you.
• Okay, so committee, who has got a supplementary? Okay, so, right. So I've got Councillor Heather, Councillor Hayes, Councillor Boswell-Quashie, Councillor Russell. So let's, if you could keep it as brief as possible.
• Yeah, I just want to go back to the littering, my, you know, fly-topping enforcement again. So 30% of fixed penalty notice is not paid. I didn't really, I didn't quite know what I heard from you about that. But what I'm wondering is that in terms of numbers, that's well over 1,000, in my memory the figures, we don't really know exactly what it is. It's a lot of, it's a lot of non-payment, okay? So, and then you mentioned about, you sort of, it was very brief, you mentioned about problems with getting caught hearings and whatever. I don't know whether I really heard that there was gonna be like an approach whereby that was completely followed through. But if there is, is it sustainable going into the future? Is it sustainable or is, 'cause if it isn't, if it's left that 37% of people get away with it, then there's gonna, the word's gonna go around that you can do what you like. It's probably gonna be, might be counterproductive even. So, is it gonna be sustainable? Because what's the cost gonna be of taking all these people to court as well?
• Thank you.
• I'm just wondering, the other thing is is, is that I don't think like dropping cigarette heads is acceptable either. But it's a lot less acceptable than some of the other things that are going on. So in terms of a hierarchy, I'd sooner see the things that actually do make the area look terrible and cause a problem for people, be prioritized, if we have to prioritize them. But is it actually the strategy that it's gonna be eventually we will get you? Or is it not gonna be that? Thank you.
• Thanks, Councillor Hayes.
• Thank you, yes, very interesting answers. I was just following on from Councillor Jeeps' question. We know that homelessness has risen sadly despite a big focus. And it's obvious to many of us that people are sleeping in areas that previously people were not sleeping in. Plus, as Councillor Jeeps has highlighted, a number of delivery drivers simply don't have facilities and are working for quite long hours. Has there been a rise in human waste being reported or being identified by your teams? And is there any opportunity to share information with like the outreach team with Street Link to look at whether obviously the best solution is somebody is not sleeping on the street and therefore that is not created. But I appreciate this complex problem, but I just wondered if there was any crossover. Thank you.
• Thanks, and Councillor Boston-Prowsey.
• Thanks, Chair, and this goes back a little bit about the bins specifically. 'Cause we have different models, north of the borough and south of the borough, believe it or not. Not that I'm a bin expert. But there are obviously the modern ones that Councillor Heathers talked about where it encourages civic pride and where you can out your cigarette and then put it into wherever it needs to be disposed. So I'm just wondering, is there any work being done by the officers? And also, I know that you put the green and the sort of feelers. Maybe the next meeting could you do a green, what do they call it? Green, amber, red. So we can also, yeah, that's it, thank you. So that we can kind of get a bit more feel in terms of what we can do also as Councillors to also promote. I know you guys are not on the ground, but it just helps us 'cause we have experts that do litter picking and also encourage that awareness and civic pride. And I'm just conscious that the team is already overly kind of stretched 'cause I did note on one of the slides you mentioned about they have these things that they can zap in information to where they've done the work already. But then if we've got this issue of fly tipping and other things that are happening and we have the SMEs change of work post-COVID and they come in certain times in influx, how is our team managing that? And again, is it sustainable? 'Cause I wouldn't wanna see local asymtonians being fined for trivial things and people that actually come in to litter our community getting away with it. Thank you officers.
• Thanks a lot. Councillor Lawson.
• We've had quite a lot of different numbers being shared with us tonight and I think it would be really helpful to have some very clear data shared to the committee so that we can really understand what's happening with this fining of residents when they drop litter. We were told that in the last three months there have been 2,307 fixed penalty notices of which 1,350 were paid, which means there are 957 left over unpaid. So did all of those go to single justice procedures or did some of them, you know, what happened? And what kind of equality impact assessment is done on the people who don't pay? And are you, and this is a question for Islington officers who've commissioned this service, are you comfortable that you know the impact on the poorest residents in our borough? You know, what work are you doing to assess the impact on people living in this borough of this fining regime? You know, it's bringing in big amounts of money, sort of 116,980 of which just over 47,000 goes to Islington, 10,000 to the library of things. In total that's about, you know, that's sort of 57, 58,000 pounds coming to Islington from people walking around on our streets who maybe dropped a cigarette end or didn't pick up after their dog. Now those are really antisocial things, but these are quite big amounts of money coming in potentially from some residents who are really struggling with the cost of living. So my question is about, yeah, how many, can we have some very clear data on this? And what are the equality impact assessments that you're doing so that you are confident that you are not having an unacceptable impact on some of the poorest people, that this isn't tipping people into debt who are only just coping, and that can worsen their situation.
• Thanks a lot, that's great. So if you could take those questions in the order that were given.
• Thank you, yeah. First of all, with regards to the council's query, with regards to homelessness and associated potential antisocial behaviour, we've not noticed a significant increase in that. But we do proactively liaise regularly with the outreach team. There are particular hotspots, as you probably know, within the borough. One more recently in the north of the borough, but we've been successful in liaising with the outreach team to resolve that problem.
• So I think my first question is around, obviously the issuing of littering FPNs whilst there's other offences such as flight tipping that's occurring. Again, obviously we're really passionate about flight tipping, and obviously that's something that we are in talks with Islington to provide for you. Obviously that's something that we've got a plethora of different tools to target that. Obviously we've got officers out on the ground investigating waste. Obviously if they see an offence happen, as Councillor Arena obviously explained, it is difficult to catch people in the act, but officers do do that when they're out on patrol. We also obviously have the cameras, part of the AI technology, to tackle that waste as well. So obviously from those sorts of services as well as working with waste crews, actually going out with the waste crews to investigate waste, and then load it straight onto the back of the vehicles. Again, obviously to help by tackling that type of problem. Again, very passionate about that as a local authority. We deliver that to well over half of the, sorry, as a business, obviously we deliver that to well over half of the local authorities that we work for. Obviously it's something that residents are passionate about. It's something that we're passionate about as well. So the other question was about cigarette versus other litter. Obviously Keep Britain Tidy, so around 98% of litter in terms of the number of items in the UK littered on the floor is cigarette related litter. Obviously it does all add up, each cigarette has got the potential to pollute 40 litres of water. So when you're talking about that volume of litter, obviously it does add up. In terms of the approach of the officers, we are not focused on one particular type of litter. Anything that they do see, they will deal with. Obviously the volume of those types of offences, I think we issue 91% of litter, FPNs in Islington being cigarette related litter, so slightly under the national average. But it's also the deterrent factor. So when people see officers, generally it does change their behaviour more when we're talking about things like food waste and packaging and such. So our officers are out on the street for the entirety of their shift. The back office system and the administration team that we use, obviously, or utilise should I say, obviously allow our officers to be out there as our visual deterrent, to be engaging with members of the public and explain what we're doing and why we're doing it to try and change behaviour. Not just by enforcing, obviously that is part of what we're doing and that is ultimately the reason for the contract to carry out that level of enforcement. But you can't do that without the engagement, without the education and encouraging people to do the right thing. Around about obviously the court cases, with Islington at the minute, we're still waiting on the feedback from your legal team in terms of the amount of cases that the courts can take under the SJP. As I said, obviously the packs are produced, obviously it's just a case of putting those through the legal system. So that's, again, obviously in discussions on that one.
• Can you just clarify, could you turn your mic off? Could you just clarify, you need to turn your mic off, that's great. Could you just clarify about the engagement? Are you saying that you give people a warning before the, you know, is it like a warning and then first?
• So, with regards to the littering and the dog fouling that we're dealing with, obviously we've been instructed under the approach of, if somebody is committed to the offense, obviously we'll engage with that person and carry out the enforcement. It will be a fixed penalty notice unless there's a reason that you wouldn't issue that. As an example, if there's vulnerabilities there, you wouldn't issue those FPNs again, that's all part of that approach to training and making sure that we get that right approach with the monitoring as well that we've discussed earlier.
• Thank you, so I've got a couple more supplementaries and then we're gonna end this session. I'm just gonna go to Councillor Jeeps and then your question about bins, yeah? Yeah, okay, sorry. Councillor, could you?
• Equality impact assessments, wasn't asked that, that was a question for office. There was a question about more bins, green bins.
• Thanks, Chair, it's just I want specific answers to specific questions so I don't keep bothering you. It was about the team's capacity to cope with the change of the workforce that's happening across the borough. So you have some days where it might be high, you know, litter or whatever have you. How is the team gonna manage that? And also about the bins, 'cause we have different bins in different hotspots or areas. So just wanting something, if you can't do it today, it's fine, but I just wanna answer if you've got it. Thank you. Thanks, Chair.
• Okay, thank you, Councillor, yeah. So in answer to the question regarding litter bins and workloads, obviously our main thoroughfares are continuing to be swept seven days a week and we have sufficient resources in place for that. With regards to litter bins, litter bins are selected on the basis to enable members of the public to recycle litter. But also they are selected with the design to also extinguish cigarettes and dispose of cigarettes appropriately. I'm not quite sure if I've answered your question, if that was your question completely.
• Then there's a question from Councillor Russell about the impact on people, on the poorest people. Can we have data on that?
• I can definitely explore whether quality impact assessments are part of the process for enforcement. I don't have an answer at the moment, but I can see that information for you.
• I mean, presumably it's part of the contract.
• Councillor Russell, no more. So the Councillor Jeeps, and then we're gonna come to an end with this issue. It's been a very long session and they're gonna come back to us again. So thanks very much for your questions. So Councillor Jeeps.
• Yeah. I wanna say that we've got a lot of litter bins around the borough and I'm not impressed by what you said, Councillor Russell, because if people know there are litter bins set, if they're walking down the street and they're 10 feet away from the bin, I have seen people drop stuff on the floor. And this is not because whether they can afford to pay it. If they can't afford to pay the fine, then don't drop the litter. I am fed up with people's bad attitude and I don't, it's just not, people aren't paying their fines because they can't afford to or whatever. It's because they're really criminal and they don't want to pay their fines. And that should be made really quite clear. I've seen people for the New River Walk. There's so many cigarette butts that I picked up through there. You could do with some enforcement for the New River Walk there.
• Thanks, Councillor Jeeps. So it's a really part of the education thing that we've been talking about. I was named, am I able to come back? I was named, am I able to come back?
• Session has been a very long session. And I think that it's okay for Councillor Jeeps to have an opinion. You had your opinion.
• It's not usual practice for someone to name another Councillor, but I'll leave it for now.
• So we really, really, really appreciate that session. It's obviously a very important subject. And I would just like to say that on the street near where I live, there's been someone spilling paint. It's four times in a couple of weeks. It's obviously the same person. And the street cleansing have done a brilliant job really quickly acting proactively, cleaning up that paint. And it'd be really good if your team could catch that person who's spilling that paint. 'Cause it must be costing us a fortune. But anyway, thank you very much. Pardon?
• Oh, yes. So we must ask if there are any members of the public that want to ask anything. Can you say, you know, get a microphone. Have you got a microphone near you? (indistinct chattering) Yeah.
• You can just pick it up and bring it forward.
• Oh, thanks, Bill. That's great, Bill. Thanks a lot.
• Thank you very much. I'm from Tufnoe Park. And I was just wondering--
• What's your name? Do you want to say your name?
• Oh, my name is Angel. Thank you for the meeting. And then regarding the leafing season, I was wondering if you have some kind of more regional or specific plan for picking up leaf because area like Tufnoe Park is a huge natural conservation area. And I think there are more leaves than other area. So I was wondering if you have any plan for this kind of area specific situation. Thank you.
• Thanks, Angel. Tony Michael, please.
• I'll just respond back to that. We arrange a burrow in three sections and areas where there's heavy leaf fall, we provide those extra resources because we know those areas like that, Pemberton Gardens, Ivory New Park, to name a few, when the leaves come down, they come down in an abundance. So we've got extra resource there to tackle that. Unfortunately, it's not round the clock, but we'll provide resource through the day to make sure that's clear.
• Okay, so we're gonna end that session. Really appreciate you coming and the brilliant presentation. And will you come back and give us an update on how things are going with the data that's been requested by the committee that's later in the next year? That would be really good. Thank you very much.
• Thank you. - Thanks a lot.
• Thank you.
• Thank you very much.
• Moving on now to Archway Leisure Centre Retrofit Project. Martin to present. Thank you, Martin.
• Right, thank you for giving us the opportunity to present on Archway Leisure Centre. So we've talked a lot about the Climate Action Programme over the last few years here. And in class of the champions updates, there's further information about everything we're doing in environment, but also the climate programme. And the key one is what we're doing with our corporate estates. And I've taken the liberty to talk about Archway Leisure Centre, but also about another project that we recently completed, which is the Waste Recycling Centre, where we did decarbonisation works as well to reduce the impact of the buildings on climate. Felice has with me here for any technical questions. In three parts, like I said already, kind of a little overview of the carbon emissions that we know coming from a number of key council buildings. The council owns lots of buildings, but there's 200 buildings that we're looking at directly that includes buildings like the Town Hall Council offices, Waste Recycling Centre as I already mentioned, but also the schools that the council is responsible for. So a number of them are listed here. And what these green bars is showing the carbon emissions from each of these buildings. In blue, the schools at the bottom and at the top, the key kind of corporate buildings, council offices, libraries, care centres, leisure centres, et cetera. And what you see in the darker charts, Archway Leisure Centre was actually the one with the highest carbon emissions, largely related, because we have to heat the pool, of course, but also the Waste Recycling Centre has very high carbon emissions. In terms of the Waste Recycling Centre, first, you see Council Champion and myself here on the roof of the Waste Recycling Centre. So to decarbonise the building, we installed almost 1200 solar panels. We replaced the hot water supply with air source heat pumps rather than heating water with gas. Also in terms of the space heating, there's a big council office as part of the building. We replaced that with an air handling unit and rather than that being driven by gas, it's also driven by electricity. And any small gas appliances have been replaced by electric. So there is absolutely no use of gas to supply that building anymore. In terms of what that then means and what project costs and numbers. So all of this cost more than three million pounds and this is what's kind of showing the real key challenge on decarbonising the council's corporate estate, decarbonising any commercial building that may be in the borough. But as we also know from discussions about housing, it is extremely expensive to undertake the decarbonisation of all these buildings. In this instance, we got grants from central government under the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, PSDS, and they funded a third more or less of the changes at the Waste Recycling Centre. These works were completed in May this year. And what was interesting is that the new mayor's advisor for environment in his first week actually came to the Waste Recycling Centre to have a look at all the works we've done. So it is a unique achievement. Just an idea of what that costs if you look at the carbon saved. So it's 371 pounds per tonne of carbon saved and the annual carbon savings are between 200 and 300 tonnes of CO2. Then looking at the Archway Leisure Centre, this is a project that is midway through and construction is very soon starting. So we will be installing 83 solar panels on the roof. The gas boilers will be replaced by air source heat pumps. There's also a new building management system, BMS system, to really kind of work really efficiently with how the building operates. And we're making some changes to pipe works and pumps to also make it work more efficiently. Again, in terms of the numbers, a very similar price tag as the Waste Recycling Centre, about three million pounds. In this instance, the way the grant worked, we actually got two-thirds grant, but I think one thing that's really important to take into account that is very high and what we're finding at the moment is the grant is very low, considerably lower, which makes it more difficult for us to continue the decarbonisation of the estate. Here, in terms of the cost per carbon, it's a little bit higher, 476 pounds per tonne of CO2. We have a contractor lined up to start the works, Vital Energy, and these works will start next month and the carbon savings per tonne are very similar to the one of the Waste Recycling Centre. So hopefully these two buildings kind of give an indication of what it takes, what it costs, what it delivers in terms of saving and carbon climate benefits and the kind of measures that we're introducing to decarbonise buildings. What you haven't heard us say here is insulation. In terms of many residential buildings and sometimes also corporate buildings, insulation is really important or double glazing and these measures are extremely expensive and we can't get grant funding for them, so suddenly the whole kind of financial balance on delivering these schemes becomes much more difficult. So that's an overview from us.
• Thank you very much, I think this is really exciting. I raised with an officer a while ago about heating the water in a swimming pool. Will an air source heat pump heat the water?
• It's both heating and water as well.
• That's really good, yeah. So any questions or any comments? Thanks, Councillor Bothamopashi.
• Thanks, Chair, and great presentation. Thank you so much and for your hard work. Martin, I know you very well, you're as an eco and obviously, so remind me of your name.
• Felicia.
• Felicia as well, thank you so much. I was just wondering in terms of, this is a really great project, but is there any chance of us looking at how we can, I guess, I know we did it in the Bond Hill where they had some energy taken from somewhere else, the underground, the heat, the pumps and all of that. I know something that kind of fizzled out a little bit, but is there any chance of us kind of using or trying to reduce our carbon footprint by having a space that's central 'cause you're by the archway, obviously. Is there any work happening in terms of that? I don't know if that makes sense.
• I think you're referring to heat networks as an alternative way to kind of heating buildings. Yeah, so we're looking at two different approaches. So one approach is where we look at building by building, whether we can do what's called, sorry, do you want me to answer that or just take the questions? Do envelope measures generally. So insulation, double glazing or triple glazing so that we don't need as much energy. And then also combined with that, change the source of heating. So change gas boilers with a non-gas alternative, which is often an air source heat pump. Or if you do new builds, it can be a ground source heat pump. However, we know that it's extremely expensive. So one of the things that we're looking at at the moment is to what extent can we actually achieve carbon benefits also by introducing more heat networks? And of course, in Bunhill, we have the Bunhill heat network that takes the heat of London Underground to basically use waste heat. And we're looking at other future heat networks, whether we can use other waste heat, for example, from a data center. They have lots of heat from all the computers to use that as a kind of the starting point of a heat pump in essence. So you need less energy or you use energy that's already there to create a lower carbon and cheaper heat. So that's been looked at in parallel, but it's been early days to see how we go further on that.
• Okay, go ahead.
• Thanks, Chair. Supplementary, it is my birthday as well.
• Oh, happy birthday.
• Thanks, guys. I had to put that one in there. I know, swiftly. Thanks, Chair. Just want to also ask about the importance, obviously, because we're the borough that's always leading, and we do have some spaces where, or some, I guess, residential homes where we've looked at how we do the measurements of communal heating. So is there any kind of works going forward in terms of how we're going to maybe spread that out across the borough and look at spaces like this and how we share that kind of approach going forward? I don't know if there's any work that you want to share with us or?
• I probably need to kind of refer to my colleagues in housing to kind of help me come back to you on that question, because they're more closely involved than myself.
• So, we've got Councillor Hayes and then Councillor Jeeps.
• Thank you very much. It was a very interesting presentation, thank you. Two parts to my question. So one is, are there any indications yet, and I see that the new government has relaxed the rules I'm borrowing for investment. Do we expect that there might be some further investment? I take the point about the levels of grant being necessary to make it possible, especially thinking about insulation and glazing, because obviously reducing the need for energy in the first place would make a big difference. And secondly, it was really fascinating that the air source heat pump can heat the water. And I certainly know from consultation with residents on estates, there's quite a lot of nervousness 'cause a lot of the technology is new. People are worried that they'll end up being cold and they won't have any alternatives. So I just wonder a bit about the learning from some of this and how we might use some of that to inspire people and to give people confidence as we roll out changes. Thank you.
• In terms of the financial side of things, I guess in terms of kind of council budgets, generally for these kind of works, every year we go through a cycle to see how much kind of headroom we have to borrow to deliver all kinds of capital funded schemes in the council. Obviously when financial system changes, there might be more scope of that, but I'm not a finance specialist here, so I wouldn't want to give full advice on that.
• Sorry, my question was really whether we're hopeful that there might be further grants from government.
• Oh, sorry. Well, there is, there's always, for example, there's always, yeah, there is grants or there's social housing decarbonisation funding, which is for social housing specifically, then there's this public sector decarbonisation scheme funding and there's the next round coming out that we're now looking at and considering. And of course, we'll look out to any other sources of funding, for heat networks, there are separate parts of funding.
• Yeah, I've got three kind of questions there, that the Archery Leisure is right on top of Archery tube station. Now underground, it gets really quite hot. Is there no way of getting the heat from down, I know it's complicated, it costs money and all the rest of you need TFL, but sure, there's loads of heat down there from all sorts and it's right on top of Archery. Can't you get some heat out and do something with that? And then it's called decarbonisation. Is this not offsetting the carbon? I mean, how much is it you really get into zero carbon? It's not zero carbon, it's reduction really. And then exactly how are you heating the water in the swimming pool? I mean, is that the major cost of all of this thing and how can you go about reducing the carbon to emissions to heat the water? It's what are you doing with that? How is it heated now? Is it, you know, gas boiler underneath? I don't know. I mean, is that the only way to really heat it up with gas or are you gonna do something else?
• Great. I'll take a question about the heat from the underground and the decarbonisation. And then your question was also related to the pool. So I'll let Felice answer the questions about, you're both questions about the pool. In terms of heat from the underground, it's not straightforward. Like in terms of delivering the Bunhill Heat Network, you actually need to have like a proper heat network to kind of take the heat from the underground. So you need to build something around the vent shaft, an energy centre there. So it's not so simple that we can just say, oh, and then we take the heat or the waste heat and use it for Archway Leisure Centre. However, we have done it in Bunhill and it was the world's first. And we are looking at other heat networks. One of the ones that we are kind of thinking about is whether there needs to be one around the Arsenal Stadium. And we're discussing this with Arsenal Metropolitan University to see how we can also use waste heat from London Underground there potentially in the future. It's very early days and it needs to be affordable and we're looking at ways on how to do that. But yeah, it's been tested. So we need to see how we can do that in other places, but it doesn't work that you can just directly use it for a single building. It's more complicated than that. In terms of decarbonisation. So it's a very good question. Is it less carbon? I'll let Felice comment on that as well in a second. But I think the starting point for us is to not have any gas anymore or gas or oil or any carbon emissions to heat a building or to heat the water. So then as an alternative, it becomes electric. And the government is doing an awful lot of work to decarbonise the grid every year. And it goes faster than anyone had expected. There's more wind farms, there's more solar and the electricity that you get from the electricity network is getting lower and lower carbon because it comes from renewable sources. So the expectation I think at the moment is that by 2035, the electricity grid in the UK should be largely decarbonised. There are some days somewhere already when it's really windy that all the electricity you get is zero carbon, comes directly from the wind. So it is going down, but Felice might be able to say more on how close we are to zero.
• I think when we say decarbonisation, it's mainly the direct carbon emission rather than the indirect carbon emission. So direct is basically what Martin has mentioned. It's basically gas. So we're removing gas overall. So it will be 100% electric for the heating system. Can you repeat the last question that you had about the swimming pool?
• Right now, it's with the gas boilers. We're gonna switch it up. So it will be a two-stage air source heat pump combined with a water source heat pump that will be able to heat both water and heating as well.
• Sorry, I was gonna bring Council Champion and then you.
• Can I just come back in Ruth's question a little bit about whether or not there's more money? So I think, obviously, if we are going to achieve what the government set out to achieve, there will have to be money from somewhere. And I think everybody's looking at, actually, the models that can provide that. Some of that will be direct grant. I think one of the issues we have at the moment, I think as Martin has alluded to, is that we are getting grant funding, but the amount of money that we have to match is just too high. So previously, in previous rounds, you know, maybe 50/50, and now we're looking at something else having to provide something like 70% of the funding. And that's just not sustainable. If they were prepared to allow us to have a higher grant proportion, you wouldn't, you know, 'cause we go in and we make a bid for 13 projects, knowing that we can't do 13 projects. So we're having to return some money because we can't much fund it. We're doing loads of things. If we go in with a smaller number of projects, but get, say, 50%, 60% grant funding, then that, even for the same amount of money that the previous government had been allocating, we could do more projects. I mean, I think that's probably fair, isn't it? So there's a whole discussion about actually how you make these things effective for council to take forward.
• Okay, Councillor Landa.
• Thanks for your presentation. Really important topic. Just wondering on your figure about the cost per ton of carbon reduced, just wondering, do you even know anything about how that compares to other projects across the council or in central government? Like, is that, that'd be benchmark against anything?
• I think we do that work, Felicia, that we look at the cost of carbon when we look at different projects.
• Yeah, across the whole council stock buildings. We do look at, so we have a list of 200 buildings. We do a heat decarbonisation plans with the low carbon skill funds from the central government. And based on that, we make the calculation for the carbon costs and we do that comparison. And for Archery and the Waste Recycling Centre, it's actually the cheapest among most of the buildings.
• Can I just ask a follow-up question? Do we compare it to the cost per carbon reduced of any like non-building decarbon projects?
• Oh, I see. Whether it's better to invest your money in decarbonising through buildings than maybe through transport, is that what you're saying? Yeah, we are looking, we are, at the moment, we're reviewing the kind of the Vision 2030 net zero carbon strategy to really try to find out what is the things that we really want to focus on because they deliver our outcomes best. It is rather difficult to put a carbon price on lots of things because Felisa was already saying, well, there's the direct emissions from burning fossil fuels, but sometimes there's also the indirect emissions from the electricity that you use and then there is all the materials that are kind of included and whether, what's the carbon footprint from all these materials, where are they made? So it's actually really difficult to do that, but we have been trying to do that for a while and hopefully we'll get a bit closer to that.
• So any other questions? Councilor Blossom, of course.
• Sorry, chair, I was just to make sure for the minutes that it was retracted that I said Bond Hill 'cause of the boundary changes, it's actually St. Peter's and Canal Side. Thank you.
• When is this R2A project due to finish?
• We are expecting for May next year that it will complete.
• Well, maybe the committee could come and have a look at it when it's finished.
• Yep.
• It's really exciting, really lovely to hear about it and thanks for coming as a short notice as well. We'd appreciate it. Thanks.
• I think the member of the public has--
• Oh, sorry, hold on Martijn and Felicia. The question is the member of the public, go ahead and could you say your name, please?
• Yeah, hi, I'm Cameron. Thanks very much. Do you have a surname as well or just a first name? Okay, thanks for the presentation. I just had a couple of questions. Do you have any sense of the disruption essentially for users of the centre from the retrofit works? And then also, if you've done any modelling on the operating costs, because I know with the levies on electricity, sometimes the unit cost of the heat is more than the unit cost of gas. So if you had any estimate of whether the running costs might actually be higher in the short run post retrofit. But thanks.
• So for your first question was about disruption and I think that's the first thing that we've considered when we first started this project.
• So you have to speak into the mic.
• Okay. Sorry.
• Um, yeah, the disruption. We are working closely with the site manager and with the main contractor as well. We've also, when we appointed them, we made sure that they are aware that we do want to minimise disruption. So they've proposed to have temporary boilers and temporary generators while we doing the changeover from the heating systems.
• On the second question was the energy cost. So I unfortunately do not have the running costs for Archway Leisure Centre for now. But I can say that for the Waste Recycling Centre, we've actually had a reduction of energy consumption for the summer. That was an increase in the winter months. But there was also a decrease in the summer months. And in overall, it actually has a reduction of about 30% and hence, that was also a reduction of the cost of the running for the Waste Recycling Centre. Yeah.
• Thank you. So is that okay? Did you? Thanks. You can always write into us with questions. Thanks for your question. And that's, thank you very much for that. Look forward to seeing the results of that. Okay, so now we've got move on to Council Champions and your report.
• I think it's the annual report.
• Yeah.
• Yeah.
• Can I just check if the committee wants to have a comfort break? Couple of minutes. Or do you wanna just keep going? Two minutes? Yeah, let's have a two minute break.
• Okay. It's a testament to the quality of the report, which I'm sure Sarah has pulled together. And Steve Wills has pulled together, haven't they? So, Councillor Clark would like me to go through these slides because they're very, very informative. And that's absolutely what they are. I think before I start, I'd just like to say that I'm really grateful to the committee to ask for the presentation on the Archway Leisure Centre and WRC. Because officers like Felicia, who do an awful lot of work behind the scenes, very, very technical work behind the scenes, never usually come to a scrutiny committee. We know that, you know, Andrew's team will be here. They get public recognition, things like London in Bloom, where, just to say that we were the gold winner, really, really, really pleased that this year we were the gold, but also the winner in the category for the health and wellbeing. So our parks got the category in London in Bloom for health and wellbeing, which I think is a massive testament to the work they were doing. Also, absolutely, previous government putting together a study on sort of the model park departments. They identified two, previous government identified two, one of which was Leeds, one of which was us. So they get, we had the National Trust down here as well, so they get a lot of recognition, and they've come before here. Martine's team, in terms of active travel, in terms of soluble neighbourhoods, also get to see them. We know that they won the Health Street Scorecard against the fourth year running, and that they get recognition in other ways, too. But the energy team, who do such a tremendous amount of work, is just an example of council teams that are beavering away in the background that you don't normally meet. So I'm really pleased that she was able to come today. Right, so I'm gonna have a go at the slides. So that's just a sort of overview of the various areas that are covered by this particular report and by my portfolio, and as you can see, heat networks, energy services being one of those, and actually one of the most important ones. So just a few highlights of the delivery plan, and you can see that they're quite wide and varied. So just a few highlights. So first time, I think, ever, we planted, I think we planted over 930 trees, but actually it was a net gain of over 600 trees, which is absolutely huge in this borough. Recycling rates, unfortunately, we are still, we're struggling with recycling rates, but that's across London, certainly across North London Waste Authority, and I suspect people might want to ask me a few questions afterwards. One of the highlights of what we're doing is investing two million in estate-based recycling. I think for those of you who've either got those schemes on the estates or have seen pictures on the estates, they're really quite impressive. I know the Finsbury Estates in Ruthswald, with Clark and Well, perhaps he transformed an area. So I'm absolutely proud of that piece of work as well, and I think hopefully that will follow through. There's also engagement. It's not just putting in new infrastructure. That's really important, but it's also engagement with the tenants and the residents to try and help them to recycle more. Delivering more livable neighborhoods, as Angelo well know, today is a massive day. It's the, we've just gone public with our first livable neighborhood, and very, very, very grateful to the councillors in mild May for the work that's gone into that, and of course the officers who have put a lot of effort and time into making that an amazing project. It's not just an LTN plus. It's a serious piece of change of space, so watch the space. It's going to take about 18 months to construct, which might give you an example of actually what's involved, and then just what Marta and Fis had been talking about, long-term strategy for developing district heat networks, and I think one of the things that I find so, actually so inspiring, speaking to officers across my portfolio, is that when things get difficult, they don't just come and say that's difficult. We can't do it. In fact, heat networks being a prime example. I said to Marta the other day, she was explaining to me the complexities of some of the schemes and some of the thinking around how to get around some of the schemes. I said to him, Well, you could have just come to me and said it's really, really hard, and I don't know if we're going to be able to do it. He said, We're not going to do that. So they do come and think about, actually, how you get around these issues, and that was really about, well, we can't afford to do fabric first. We can't afford to do retrofitting in the way that we'd like to do it, and while that is important, and while the Homes and Communities team will continue to do all they can around that, we're looking at the district heat networks, because actually, if we can get that right, it doesn't necessarily mean the same level of investment in the fabric that we'd otherwise need, but it's very complicated. We are also looking, again, at our climate action plan. So when we first started it, we kind of went in with all these initiatives. Hold on, all these initiatives. Yeah, all these initiatives, some of which have more, have sort of more bang for your bucks, if you like, than others. So we're really looking at that, refreshing it, as Sarah's team, Sarah comes, obviously you know Sarah, and her team are looking at, actually, what is it that we need to focus on to really push the driver's agenda forward to get us to match 2030. That's just some highlights. You can see a number of people that you'll recognize. Just some KPIs, which I won't go through, but it does show that there has been significant progress, borough-wide carbon emissions. So this is climate change and transport. So, again, some just some information about climate emissions from council operational buildings. But Shine, again, I'm an amazing service, not just in terms of obviously net zero, which they do help with, but also real helping with fuel poverty. They are taking something like four times as many calls, three or four times as many calls at the moment as they normally do, and they are dealing with some really difficult cases. So, again, just mentioned before, this is our fourth year of being the top in a London borough in the Healthy Streets Scorecard, and this is the time, for the first time, we beat the city. Air pollution, again, one of these things you don't necessarily hear an awful lot about. The actual reduction in air pollution across all of Islington has been truly impressive. Obviously, that has a lot to do with some of the borough-wide, London-wide, and other international things, but it's really had a major impact on people's health and wellbeing. Again, just some of the other background things we're doing. So, 496 electric vehicle charging points. Primarily, we want to really get people to move around differently, but we also know that there will be some people for whom an electric vehicle, either occasionally or actually as their main use, remains important. So, we're trying to facilitate that. Parking, cycle parking facilities, we're getting near 500, which, again, is something that is really quite important to people who need to park their bikes. What we don't say here, though, is actually we've got the same, we've got almost the same number of places on the estates for which we don't charge. The 10 new bays for Dockers Bike, so that's part of a much bigger project now, so we've just gone out with 85 spaces, potential spaces for consultation. As people know here, I think we're looking at doing a mandatory Dockers Bike system where you have to park in bays. We think we need about 250 across the borough to make it work. It's taking some time to do, but you kind of have to get it right, because if you don't, you can also make the situation worse. So, hopefully, the next, I think, probably about 10, 12 months, we'll be in a situation where we probably have mandatory bays system, and I think that really will take the pressure off some of the pavements. I'd just like to say, though, there are issues, but with 3.2 million journeys in Islington on Dockers Bikes last year, it is obviously a tremendous option for people. Cycle training, some amazing cycle trainers that we have. If you want to get cycle training, it's free. If you know anybody who's a bit nervous about getting on a bike, please just point them towards the cycle trainers. And then, again, with the local neighborhoods, we've also been doing some cycle routes. Particularly, really proud of the continuation of C50, and I think it's just, again, it's an example of officers thinking differently. So, absolutely, it's a continuation of C50, which is a cycle route that TFL did from Finsbury Park to Holloway Road. We've continued it to join up in Camden, but what's really impressive, I think, with the work those officers have done is they've looked at walking as well. So, they've really looked at a bit of placemaking, too. So, it's a whole project. It's not just saying, well, okay, we can put in a few sort of cycle lanes. It's really about how you make space different, how you get people moving around different. Ruth, it was the other day, and you like the widened pavements, don't you, on Hillmartin Road, and yeah, yeah. So, again, just some more performance data. Liveable neighborhoods, as they say, first one being announced publicly today, but working on a large number. But then, they're all starting to have slightly different characters. So, Callee, we've built on We Are Callee, Tuffnell Park, which we're looking at. So, it's one of these areas of nature deprivation. So, we're looking at, actually, how do you make the Tuffnell Park liveable neighborhood very much about bringing nature back into Tuffnell Park, greening, how do you experience the children, young people, different through sort of greening and through that sort of thing. Data for 23 for KSIs that killed and seriously injured in road traffic shows a significant reduction. It's always very difficult to talk about being pleased about any KSIs, 'cause obviously, the aim is to have nobody killed or seriously injured, but pleased to see a reduction. Every person who is not killed or injured is a life that isn't ruined, basically, and the family isn't ruined, but there's still too many. 98 in Islington, but we're doing everything we can to try and reduce that. So, privately owned cars are reduced, and then there's one about potholes. 96% of potholes were repaired within a 72-hour target. I think what we're looking to do is also see were there other ways that we can fill potholes more effectively, and we've used some trialing, some vehicles. Here, just the headline performance. Cycling rate was 29%, I suspect, people. We've had discussions about this previously, and I know people may ask me questions about that, so I won't dwell on that. Just to say that our residual waste levels are really quite low, which is quite important to remember. So, again, this is just going back to recycling and waste. We've got a very, very big food waste campaign on at the moment. If we can increase our food waste, and that's everybody, because people in street properties who have absolutely no excuse not to recycle food waste don't recycle it anywhere near the rate we need them to do, and if they did, that would have a significant impact on the climate, but also on the council budget, and actually, for me, as importantly, on the conditions for the waste crews, because if you can just imagine people picking up black bin bags where just waste is dripping out of the bottom, it is a horrible, horrible process. So all those three now have the same priority for me. Just getting some information about missed collections and things, but if you wanted to ask me any questions about that, I'm happy to do so. Just mentioning our really ambitious targets on green space going forward. Again, one of the teams that really are having a massive impact on our carbon is the fleet team. Chris, I think Chris is with Demetrio, and has been here before, and he's another of these officers who, looking at situations where he's been asked to find particular types of vehicles, and they're just not out there, so he'll go out and find a manufacturer to work with. Really impressive. So just, we've gone through things like the fly posting and the cleanliness, and now we've got delivery in 2020. There's a lot of it, there's an awful lot of it. The waste and recycling center, that is just so impressive. You can get to about 95, 96% of decarbonization of a building with a lot of effort, but the remaining four was just so hard, and it just made so, you know, innovative thinking, that team did, but also that takes us forward. I mean, that kind of thinking can now go forward into other projects like Archway and other things. Again, just talked about the social housing decarbonization fund. It is difficult to do, but we do bid for it. We've done 32 street properties. It is actually quite hard to upgrade street properties. Even if we had the money, it's still very difficult. Obviously, it's a loss of disruption to residents, and quite tricky things to do. Bevan Court, so Archway, I think absolutely visit to Archway, but a visit to Bevan Court once it gets up and running. Grade two list of building. If we can retrofit Bevan Court, then that's a major step forward on the sort of journey we're doing, but again, very exciting project, and then just electric vehicle charging points we're doing. Just a little bit more about decarbonization of the fleet. Now, Councillor Clark mentioned the supplementary planning document. That is coming, and then just the bit at the bottom, because we really understand now that we have to drive district heat networks forward. It's really, it is the way forward for us, but actually it's a real pressure from the government as well. We're going to recuse, well, we are recusing assistant director for heat networks and energy services. It's one of these ones where it's an important piece of work. We have to get it right, because if you don't, it can cost us quite a lot of money, so we're really just making sure we've got someone with the expertise who can actually drive this forward. So electric vehicle charging points, yes, we've got some money for that. I think we've been through that. Oh, yes, climate panel. Climate panel, a really amazingly exciting piece of work, and Councillor Clark, I'm sure, will attest to that as well. 35 residents, real energy in the system, but real understanding of what Islington faces going forward. It was a climate panel about climate resilience, some really amazing ideas, which the team that came here last time is just going through, putting together, and actually working out how we can continue to work with the panel. So for example, I think it's not UCL, one of the universities wants to do some work with young people on climate, and two of those youngsters from the panel are likely to go forward and do some of that work.
• LSE.
• Who's that?
• LSE.
• LSE, it's LSE. Again, just some future plans. I think, again, another of the things I know I keep saying this, I'm really, really, really, really happy about, I'm really proud of, is actually the way that all the teams have come together. So we're not looking at things like livable neighborhoods, greening, just as one dimension. You heard the team talking about livable neighborhoods, and actually how street cleaning, how what they do contributes to livable neighborhoods, and I think that's absolutely right. But it's really working with the public health team, understanding the benefits, understanding actually the crises that we're facing at the moment, that has, I think, really helped the work and pushed it forward, and made it a very coherent piece. But every time we do something, every time we do a livable neighborhood, there's another layer that's going on at the moment. Children friendly borough, absolutely something front and center of what we're looking at in some livable neighborhoods. Flood risk and green infrastructure strategy, which Andrew's team's doing, we just recruited someone to sort of push forward the green infrastructure strategy, I think, and shine we've mentioned before. Oh yeah, so that was another exciting project that the team did, the Ken, the air quality team, who you probably won't see very much. They obviously carry on doing their day-to-day job, but they also worked with four care homes to look at how you reduce vulnerable residents' exposures to air pollution. And then there's a big project, Citizens' Science Project, going with Highbury and Mildmay to look at pollution data monitoring. A few things I like, the canal eco-mooring zone, which I think you probably know about. And then just creating the livable neighborhoods, which we've talked about quite a lot, and also you had the active travel scrutiny last time. It really is now about actually how you do make it truly fair, and to do that, you do need to be able to make it possible for people who wouldn't even consider that it's for them to get out and about, and we're looking at how you do that. Just a few more, just a few more things. And then second round of greening together. Yeah, so this is Clarkwell Green, which I don't know if anyone's been down there. Yeah, this is another imaginative piece of work, so absolutely, that was basically a roadway. Roads were going round this small square about four or five years ago, but not only that, and beds are being planted out by the planting scheme reflects the history, so it's got red for socialism, it's got purple, green for suffragettes, and so it's a real clever thinking from that, and that actually was the Martines, the team that did the public realm of infrastructure. That wasn't the culture team, although they've done an awful lot of work down there. So yeah, I'm really proud of that. Just a few more things, bus priority, which is really quite important, 'cause what we want to do is make sure that people can also get around by bus. There's a very good piece of work that Ms. Wathen's team's been doing with TfL on actually how you manage to mitigate the impacts of road works. I think we led that as a pilot borough, and that's being rolled out, so that's been very, very successful. So yeah, looking at road surfacing, as I said before. The other thing that we also found when we're doing livable neighborhoods, there are things that stop things in their tracks. So for example, Highbury, New Park, without tackling the junction at the bottom of Highbury Grove and St. Paul's Road, it just becomes very difficult. Band turns, honestly, band turns. Never realized they were quite so tricky, but they are, again, up in the north, band turns that make living livable neighborhoods more difficult than you'd think. We're having to look at that as well. So there's an awful lot of pieces that have to go, there are a lot of pieces that go into the work they do that a lot of people don't actually really see getting on in the background. Yup, don't quite know how many I've got there. So thriving neighborhoods, again, working really carefully, livable neighborhoods working really well with thriving neighborhoods. And Bill's team, Matthew Homer, is delivering the thriving neighborhoods program of the recycling and the new waste bins. So there you go. You probably don't want me to go through that, though.
• Yeah, that's a really good presentation. Thank you so much. So committee, have you got any questions for Councillor Chamkeone? Okay, I'm gonna start this side. Councillor Bosun-Kwashi, Councillor Russell, Councillor Weeks, Councillor Heather. So let's take three first. Councillor Bosun-Kwashi, Councillor Russell, and Councillor Weeks.
• Thanks, Chair, and thank you, Councillor Rowena, for all your hard work and your team, especially, and I'll go straight into the first question. It's about the streets, or sort of the main roads and you just mentioned your last remark about this intense work happening that people don't often see. But it does lead people to, I guess, feel that all the pollution is on particular, like, you know, say, where the shops are and where residents live. And I know there's still a bit of, like, question mark in terms of, like, what data can we read to make it clear to people that there is an equity approach to what we're doing. And I'll leave it at that, I hope that makes sense, thank you.
• To Russell.
• Yeah, I've got quite a few things. First of all, and I know you get this, Rowena, but the word accident is used a couple of times in the bit about road danger reduction and the killed and seriously injured figures. And I know you know what that's about, but it's road piece who represent road traffic victims prefer that people use collision or crash rather than accident. So it's just good if Islington can be up to speed on that. We're managing parking by apps. So presumably the council has access to quite a lot of data about who's parking, when people are parking. And I'm just wondering if you're doing any work using that data from app-based parking to kind of plan future decisions around parking. The older low traffic neighbourhoods, the ones that went in during the pandemic, the main roads didn't get any measures to kind of support them and to make those main roads feel like places for people rather than just being kind of faster flowing traffic. And I think I'd be interested to know what your plans are for those main roads, for those earlier low traffic neighbourhoods where the shops and businesses along those main roads are just sort of feeling a little bit left behind. The other thing was on food waste, properties above shops. I know you did a trial for bins for food waste for properties above shops. Just wondering what's happened to that trial and when they're being rolled out across the borough. And then there was one other thing and I will get to it. Yes, 10 bays for dockless hire bikes with space for 100 bikes. That's obviously not enough for a dockless bike scheme to work in a, you know, if there's only 10 places that people might be going to or from, that doesn't really provide the kind of flexibility and utility that people potentially need from dockless bikes. So are you planning to roll out lots more of them? And also on the consultation that is live on dockless bikes spaces, I noticed that a lot of the bays are in the south of the borough and for people in the north of the borough, there's many, many fewer bays. And so just, yeah, what's the plan on that? I've got loads more questions, but I'll leave it there.
• Thank you, thanks for that. Yeah, so council weeks.
• Thank you. My question is just with regard to, on sort of like the length and breadth of sort of the director, I think, you know, there's so much in this presentation which shows, you know, how Islington are demonstrating their green credentials. And I think there's so much that Islington are doing well, but have the directorate, you know, led by yourself, ever sort of considered whether or not so much is going well, why don't we focus on those key priority areas that are flashing red. So I note the portfolio commitments, but you know, I've been on this committee maybe sort of two or three years. And the one thing that we need to really, I mean, sort of improve, you know, slash increase is that recycling rate. And it'd be good to sort of see a, you know, detailed action plan about how, you know, between 24, 26, you know, the council wanted to get under the bonnet of sort of, you know, driving up that recycling rate, you know, educating residents and businesses just to really, yeah, improve it because it's staying around that sort of 24, 27 mark for a while now. Thank you.
• Okay, council champion, do you want to take those points? (audio cuts out)
• In terms of pollution on main roads, I mean, most range roads have more traffic. So probably by nature we'll have traffic pollution on it. The thing is on every road in Islington, pollution has improved significantly. And also air pollution moves around. So, you know, what we're doing within the livable neighborhoods, what we're doing is trying to get people on to move around differently to make it slightly more difficult for people to drive will have an impact across the borough. In fact, the Imperial did the study on the three low traffic neighborhoods down in the south of the borough and actually concluded that those three low traffic neighborhoods had a slightly bigger significant impact, beneficial impact on the main road, the boundary roads as they did on the internal roads. So absolutely, we do want to do what we can for the main roads, but actually we need to tackle, we need to tackle it across the borough and it will benefit everybody. Doesn't mean that, you know, going forward there are more things we can do on main roads. Accident collision, yes, I'm sorry, I didn't pick that up, otherwise I would have changed it. 'Cause it's absolutely right, we shouldn't be using the word accident. Parking by app. We do look at the data and there is some thinking around what we've done, so for example, we do at the moment a surcharge of a pound around the busiest times, the parking time, so I think 10 to one something, I think. So there is some thinking about that going on. Again, the parking team think about an awful lot all the time. Older LTNs, it's one of these difficult situations. We have limited resources. I mean, we are, as a borough, really well funded. I mean, our transport planning teams and the teams that support them, I think, are probably bigger than a lot of other boroughs. We are doing an awful lot of schemes. It's how you prioritize them. In terms of the older LTNs, it's absolutely true that we want to go back and look at them again. But it's resources and it's how you do it. And in some ways, what we're trying to do is go and change place quite quickly. And you kind of have to work out where you're putting your resources. So, well, absolutely, we will be going to do that and we'll be thinking about it. At the moment, we're focusing on some of the new areas and some new learning. And because what we're really trying to do is look at it as one area and say, actually, when we go in with Mark May, there's some significant improvements on some of the crossings on the boundary roads and things. So at the moment, that's what we're doing. That's not to say we won't be going back and doing that. It's just resources at the moment. I mean, Southgate Road, for example, is one prime example, though, of where we have gone to a boundary road, essentially boundary road, a real improvement, not just in terms of the cycle crossing, but actually also making a place outside the shops there.
• I think Blackstock Road, Highbury Park, Highbury Grove is a road with lots of different batches of shops. And it is a boundary road that runs all the way from St. Paul's Road up to Finsbury Park. And that's the road where it potentially needs a bit more treatment like Southgate Road has had. So if that could go on the list.
• Yeah, and I think a lot of the road, we want to uplift the roads as well. So as you say, it's not kind of just inside. We just want to look at it all. But it is, again, it's looking at resources. And I mean, we've had a look at Blackstock Road. To do something there is actually quite tricky. I don't know my time. I think it was Eshwin who led it, wasn't it? I don't know if you know much about that. And we did actually look at Blackstock Road to see if there's anything we could do. Sort of quick wins, but it is very tricky. Food waste, the pilot flats of our shops. I'll have to get back on that one. Obviously it's something the government who want all properties to have food waste. So that's something that is, it is sort of on the cards. But I have to get back to you on where we are with that. Yeah, we think 250 bays. To do a mandatory scheme, we think 250 bays minimum. We've gone out to 85 bays in consultation. The reason why they're south of the borough is kind of for two reasons really. One is because that's where actually the most uses, the densest uses, and also most of the issues are, or a lot of the issues are. But also it does give us an opportunity, because it's well-defined. It's south of the canal. It does give us an opportunity to look at a network which we can then look at how that works and then use that to do the other two. So it's quite a contained area, but actually it's also the area that has the most problems. The other two, there are two more phases, but they're being worked on simultaneously. And the transport planning team, two very experienced project managers have taken that on to do.
• I'll just say that, have you completed?
• Just the recycling rates.
• Oh yeah, just before you get onto that, just to say that North Central Waste are coming to the November meeting and Matthew Holmer will be coming. He's the big on food waste. And the linebacks are coming in January. So, and Councillor Russell, if you've got, you know, other questions which you have, you could write into Councillor Champion and me, if you like. Go on, carry on.
• So there are, every couple of years, I thought a year or a couple of years, Andrew might know, we have to do a sort of plan on what the next few years looks like. It's, we're stuck around 30%. In fact, we were over 30, just a touch over 30%. And then we went, I think the year before, we went down below, which actually was really disappointing, but there were a couple of quite good reasons for that. It's really intractable and nobody quite knows why, 'cause it's across, you know, it's across North London Waste Authority that rates went down slightly. In terms of what we're doing at the moment, there are two really big things that I think would make a significant difference. One is getting people to recycle food waste. So our dry recycling among street properties is actually quite good, but our food waste recycling among street properties absolutely isn't. And so that's a big thing. There's a big campaign at the moment. And the other one is the estates, because obviously it's much more, it's much less convenient if you're living on estates to recycle than it is if you're living on street property. So that's why the two million pounds investment has gone into making sure that the infrastructure's in there, 'cause sometimes you don't even have the right bins in the right place. So before you even start trying to encourage people to do more recycling, make sure we've got the right bins in the right place, and they look attractive to use. And there's a lot of work going into that one. I don't know if Andrew wanted to say anything else. I know you.
• Yeah, so we're gonna start work on the next waste reduction recycling plan. The next year's really sort of set out what do we need to do to drive that recycling rate target. Obviously we also need to look at other measures like the residual waste. We need to continue to be driving that down. But obviously the portion of waste that we recycle is still important. Obviously lots and lots of challenges to achieve in that, which are many and varied. There is more funding coming from the government, extended producer responsibility, the funding for rolling out of food waste. So actually starting to think now about how we will, what do we need to do to try and deliver, use that resource to try and drive behavior change.
• Yeah, go ahead.
• Yeah, if I can. So there were sort of the fire regulations that were sort of brought in a few years ago. But I think on those particular properties that are on sort of estates, it was helpful previously when the waste refusal sort of employees would come to the actual property. But I know that there was a whole thing around I'm sort of fire rigs and you couldn't leave it out on the property. But I think for me, when I used to walk around the ward, you would see on a particular day, whether that be a Wednesday morning or Thursday morning, you would see residents leaving out their recycling to be collected from their doorway. I think it's those little things that can get that rate up to 36. I think also, I think we've raised it before at this committee, working with housing associations to ensure that residents know that they can maybe get some sort of recycling, say food waste recycling bins from the housing association that isn't provided to ensure that they can sort of hold waste food to be collected. It's those little things I think could take you from the 29 up to that 36. You're happy to work on this offline, thanks.
• I think that we know that getting up to recycling rate is actually quite resource intensive as well. So it's a little bit of a tension between having the money to do that sort of detailed work. Say we have got the money to do on the estates and our estates be a really good pilot. Doesn't mean that we can't look at making it easier and making sure the messages get out to other people as well and try and put some responsibility on housing associations for getting their recycling rate up as well. I think the other thing that I have been trying to be talking to people about is we know that in 2020, the government basically said, local authorities have to change, have to give more space to walking and cycling. And that actually gave a real impetus to us to do it. But also it's a really clear message. And I think if the government came out with a really clear message that actually included talking to public about why it's important to do recycling, I think that would have a really, really positive impact as well. And it would really help the government because actually essentially that means that council's bills will go down. They won't have to give us so much money. So that's one of the other things I'm trying to push at the moment. If there could be a real sort of government public kind of emphasis on this. 'Cause they're talking about net zero carbon, but actually they could be talking about some of the things that you could do and recycling reduction is actually one of those very important things.
• Okay, just any more questions? Oh yeah, so Councillor Heather, Councillor Jeeps, Councillor Hayes. And then we'll have to close. Can I ask if you could be fairly brief?
• Yeah, I will be, yeah.
• Yeah, thanks.
• So I was pleased to hear, seeing the slides about the two million pound investment in state-based recycling. In my ward, when we were working on the Ando and making the improvements for new build homes there, we actually put some of our section 106 seal money towards new recycling bins, but we didn't have enough money to do as much as we'd like. So I'm pleased that there is gonna be some more investment, 'cause that's really important. In terms of the campaign, I think it's really great. It was on Eastern Life, about the recycling campaign, getting that message out, that's really good. And Councillor Russell has asked the question I was gonna ask him about was the trial on food waste premises of shots, but that's already been asked. On another slide, what I would say, in terms of this committee scrutinizing recycling and waste, it would be good if things were clearer. So this slide is, this slide here is not that clear, 'cause it's, I can't remember, it's this one here.
• It's the one with the comparative line, I think.
• So when it talks about, I mean, it says about 29% is the recycling rate, but then when you go down the bottom, it talks about residual waste as being an amount in weight. I mean, it'd be good if that was in a percentage as well, but just generally, I don't really, I know this is your presentation, but I think this committee needs more granular data about ongoing comparison of the recycling rate, what it was, what the target is, and what it is like, so that we can track that. And just to say that in terms of getting the message out, you're already, in the slides, mentioned about how well the climate panel did. I just wondered, is there a way of the climate panel being champions and recycling champions as well? 'Cause it might be that what we need is we need even more of those, and a drive on that, and of course I am easily a recycling champion. And although I have a son at this meeting, I intend to come to all of these meetings anyway in that role. So just a plug for that. Just very quickly, 'cause it's already been mentioned, but again, on the air pollution and the boundary roads, it's been mentioned, it'd be sort of good if we could have some firm stuff on that, because I'm still seeing lots of letters in the local paper, and I know only probably about 5% of people read them. They're always saying that we've displaced emissions onto the boundary roads. Now, we might have done, but do you know what I mean? So it'd be sort of good to pin that down a bit more, 'cause I'm not comfortable with that, because I look at it and I think, well, I don't think that's probably right. I know in terms of Blackstock Road, it was 58% and it got reduced. Yeah, thank you. - Thanks for your brevity. We appreciate that. (audience laughing) Thanks, Councillor Jeeps. Councillor Jeeps.
• Three notes, all right. Yeah, there was something on the notes that I heard, which had been around for a long time, which is EPR, extended producer responsibility, which is coming in now or tomorrow or in 2025. I just wondered how that's gonna affect it. Maybe too difficult to really know, but I suddenly thought, oh my God, what is this? And Gary's gone on about recycling. Well, Gary, you need to look up EPR.
• Councillor Hayes.
• Thank you very much. It's a really interesting report. I'll leave out some of the things I was gonna say. But I am really struck by the kind of cross sector benefits of some of the things that are being done. And certainly I know that you've mentioned the new bins, recycling bins on the Finsbury Strait. And previously, a lot of rubbish, just even where people put stuff in the bins, like birds and foxes would take it out of the wind sometime. So the area just constantly looked horrible. And I think having good new bins, not only hopefully improves the recycling, but actually makes the area a much nicer place to be and reduces the amount of litter. Do we have any evidence on whether the new bins reduce contamination? I've certainly noticed where I live, where we used to have open bins and we've now got the ones in the wooden boxes, that there appears to be a lot less black bin bags being put in. But I just wondered whether that was anecdotal. Does it improve the rate or does it actually make it harder because you can't just sling it in as you go? So do we have any data on that? And I'm slightly anxious that the comms around some of the new bins aren't that great. So certainly where I live, we've got lovely new bins, but I've never had anything through the door. It's only 'cause I've proactively tried to. So it looks like the old ones have gone and if you didn't go around the corner, you wouldn't know the new ones were there. So I just wonder on that. I did have a question about do we know why our residual waste figure is comparatively very good? Do we know what drives that? Thank you. You've got a minute to answer all those questions.
• Okay, what I should have said to Val and it answers Gary's question. We do an air quality report every year and that's got all the stats in it, including main roads and side roads. KPIs and the quarterly reports do go into a bit more detail, Gary, about what we're doing on our tracking, but this is an annual report, so it's a little bit broader. Extended producer responsibility. It's basically the producers of packaging, for example, will have to pay a proportion of the cost of disposal. We think that will help drive packaging down. Andrew, I don't know if you want to say anything about that.
• We've got a handy briefing, which will circulate. It explains all about it. But it's about a money that's gonna be coming from the government that producers of packaging will have to pay to help cover the cost. So it's the polluter pays principle. We don't know how much money that will be yet. We're waiting for that to come. But it should be a significant figure.
• It will give an incentive to drive down the amounts of packaging used. In terms of the climate panel, we're actually using the climate panel to understand how we can communicate more broadly. So actually, how you can communicate on recycling, Gary, could be one of those areas that we looked at as a result, maybe, of the climate panel work rather than necessarily than using them. Although, of course, there might be some people who are interested in being recycling champions. New bins, I don't know about reducing the damage. I think at the moment, what they're doing is they're putting in place the infrastructure. Then I think they'll start monitoring things like data and possibly contamination. I know that's something they are looking at. Again, I don't know, Andrew, if you want to say anything.
• Yeah, that's what we're doing next now, is see what the impact is and start doing the data analysis on the waste streams that are coming out. Does it make a difference in terms of recycling rate and contamination? So we're evaluating that now. Trying to look at much more about data to sort of drive and understand some of those challenges and where the weights are low and how do we start to affect it. So we've got more results in now to do more data analysis.
• That's slightly how, how do you prioritize your use of resource, but actually having someone to analyze data. I know Matthew Homer is incredibly passionate about that as well, so that will come. In terms of residual waste, I suspect it's kind of, it's the flip side of the reason why it's very difficult to get our recycling rate up. We know that people who live in multi, in flats, it's much harder to get people to recycle, but actually then they don't have as much space to throw things away as well. So again, the type of households Islington has too, I guess, is the answer to that one.
• Thank you very much, that was brilliant summing up of those questions and answering those questions. No, it's not, that is the end. If you've got any further questions, write in to me and Councillor Champion. Okay, yeah, have a lovely evening. Happy birthday to you and thank you everybody and thanks for that presentation, really excellent. And we've just got to look at the, I'm being directed to our work plan. Can we agree the work plan at the end? Thank you very much, well done everyone.