Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Thank you all for attending. Please note that the meeting will be recorded and broadcast by the Council or by people present. Can I remind speakers to turn on the microphone by pressing the speaker icon when speaking and turn it off when finished? And please speak directly into the microphone so that the audio can be picked up clearly for those joining the meeting in the gallery and remotely. Are the minutes of the previous meeting held on the 8th of October 2024 agreed as a correct record? Thank you. There's no absence of members. Do members have any declaration to make in relation to the agenda items? No? Okay, so we move on to agenda item four, which is questions from non-executive members, if any. As usual, the first four questions will be from the opposition group members. We have both Councillor Zinke on line and Councillor Cornelia, if you want to come up to the table Richard. There's a limit of 15 minutes for this section. We might as well go straight in. And Peter, if you want to start, when you ask your first question, the 15 minutes will start. Thank you, Councillor. So it's not quite accurate to say that the entire project has been defunded. There is an element of income generation expectation within the MTFS relating to playing fields being provided. In that particular development, that is being retained and it is going ahead. As part of our revisions to the capital programme, some very difficult decisions have had to be made about other pieces of infrastructure, which does include elements of West Hendon, but it's inaccurate and incorrect to say that it's been defunded. Question asked was when you began to level with the residents of West Hendon as to what the consequences were of the decisions that were given in an appendix to this paper where literally millions of pounds were being taken out of the funding for that project. Councillor, given that the paragraph you referred to exists in a report to be discussed in this meeting, no decision has been made just yet. So you can't level with people prior to a decision having been made. But unfortunately because of... You can either get me to answer a question or you can ask the question. We've had to make 69 and a half million pounds of reductions to the overall capital programme overall because of the scale of financial incompetence that we inherited. So yes, lots of millions of pounds have had to be reprofiled and adjusted. I think you're missing the point that Councillor Nagley put you, that that decision's not been made. These are reports they've got to go through. It's part of the overall budget and until the budget's agreed, including both capital and procurement plans, they are at the moment theoretical. There's two ways of looking at that. One is to thank you for endorsing our approach, but the second one is to say, just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, was that the budget that had the note from the 151 officer for being probably inoperable and outside the bounds of what it should be? I think you find that from a 151 that's a polite way of saying this is rubbish, but it's not for me to comment on that. The budget you presented was defined by the 151 officer as not deliverable. In other words, it was a work of fiction. Now, of course, the difference between your budget and our budget is that we were affected by the national budget and there's a lot to thank this trust for putting us into a different position, but generally it seems like you're endorsing our approach and I thank you for that. No, Peter, the reality is that we have uncovered so much incompetence and been left with something. You knew that incompetence was there. You never found it under your scrutiny committee, but you put it into your alternate budget. The more we find out, the more difficulty we've got and we're determined to clear up the mess you left us. I think you can argue, but you're only meant to be asking questions and we are getting... I'm not sure what you describe as frivolities. Yeah, and Councillor, if you read the pressures that have been noted within successive outturn reports and forecasts that have explained why overspends have happened, I think it's borderline insulting to suggest that those areas of expenditure are frivolities. Statutory services relating to adult social care and temporary accommodation to deal with homelessness, it's their core responsibilities that local authorities have to deal with. No, hold it. It's meant to be questions. This isn't your time to make speeches or comments. If you're saying that in your budget you're going to make bigger cuts to children's and adult services, we'll see it when you present your budget. We do have Councillor Cornelius also wants to ask a question. Thank you. Thank you very much. My two questions are quite specific. Obviously, I completely resent Councillor McVie saying that we left a mess. We didn't and the leader actually said that the affairs were in good order when he took over. Well, we've discovered a lot more since then, which we will bring you now. I think you're in a difficult position to defend. Then you're slow learners, but without becoming insulting, running the council has always been difficult. One of the difficulties is actually collecting money. I look through the papers with some disappointment that there's 25 million quid owed by the NHS as a debtor. Traditionally, we've had a problem getting the money out of them. Harking back to the past as leader, it sometimes took a personal phone call from me or from the chief executive to shake money from that particular tree. I wonder what actions you've taken to remind them they do need to pay. Obviously, there's not any regular meeting both from the adult and the children's services. I believe there have been some payments, but nothing like the total. The difficulty is they argue case by case, whereas there used to be an agreement if we take the children's that it was a tripartite agreement between education, social services, health. We pay a third each, you win on some, you lose on some, but it balances out. Because of the pressure on the health service since then, and the constant reorganisation, which makes it very difficult to find anybody in the health service who can make a decision, as you well know, Councillor Cornelia, all I can say is there's lots of meetings. I do agree, but it's something we've got to pursue. I appreciate that. But just to give you a little tip in the form of a question, we sometimes found that these one could reach back through what was then the Department of Communities and Local Government and get the minister to have a word with the appropriate health minister and do a bit of shaking from that way. And I wonder whether you'll be sympathetic to trying that. We will be working with the MP. Now we've got some good MPs to ensure that messages get to the minister. Good. And I will be reminding them when they reply to my emails. The other question I had was, can I give you just a bit of reassurance that the 25 million pound figure in the report is actually money's raised rather than overdue. So we're in regular discussions with the health authority. And because we want to do a full reconciliation process before we raise a bill, we want to make sure that there's a degree of certainty in the amount that we're actually billing. So the receipts are accurate and that's what the report is. Okay. So that will be done in a timely way. Because I think, you know, the short term borrowings went up to cover the lack of payments. The second question slash point was on the report from overview and scrutiny and the answer we got to our query about the collection of business rates. And it's slightly missed the point, I'm afraid. I was actually querying the whole basis of the report, given that so many small businesses don't have to pay business rates at the moment with all the various schemes there are. And I was actually, I was wondering whether there was any confirmation as to whether the baseline was correct that showed such an alarming decrease in collection. I believe it is, but I wouldn't check that and get someone to contact you on that. I do think that there are a lot of things that have been extended. And it changes me years. It's hard to keep up with the business rate. On the capital tax, you may have seen in the paper on capital, we're trying to build in an incentive scheme there that the extension depends on the collection rate going up. Yeah, I did actually, I did also issue the caveat that the collection system can be quite or very tough on people when one unleashes it. So I just hope that suitable care will be taken. If it's any comfort in looking to ensure that the first contact gives things to things like debt advice and so on, rather than they've got to have a bit of a carrot and the stick straight away. I agree with that. Just going back to the discussion you're going to have later, I'd be very interested to know, given that things are clearly getting worse, and it isn't completely clear how trend data is taken into account in your thinking, what are we assuming about what happens in the balance of this year in terms of things getting better or worse and all of those cost savings being achieved in terms of the starting point for next year? We're going to have an extensive discussion, councillor, under the outturn report business planning reports about how we've got to this current situation, what the forecasting modelling suggests the situation will look like at the year end and how we're planning for it in the medium term. But what's important, I think, for the previous administration to recognise is that we are now taking a more realistic approach to forecasting and not as fictionalised as we discovered it was when we took office. The future modelling is actually determinative of what the financial outlook looks like so we can be properly financially sustainable. We're not just making up figures to artificially make the book's balance, that's going to be inherent to our approach. Councillor Napby, I don't understand what you've said at all because at the budget time I produced a presentation identifying the areas of your budget that were fantasy. Every single one of those has been proved to be true. We left you 100 million of reserves that you've squandered so give me one example please of what you were meaning about the figures being not correct given that they were all signed off by council accounting officers. Are you saying the accounts are wrong? Do you want us to ask the district auditor to come in and inspect because you're saying officers got the accounts wrong? What we're saying is that the administration in the past was fully aware of the scale of the pressures that were needed in areas like adult social care, chose to ignore the true value in order to artificially make it look like you had the finances under control, you didn't. You had a business planning report in 2018 which forecast your reserves position dwindling down to 28 million. Had it not been for Covid relief grants and being bailed out by central government, the position we would have inherited would have been significantly worse than what it ended up being. So we're going to take no lessons from the previous administration on financial accountability or responsibleness because what we've discovered as we'll discuss later in this meeting has been truly harrowing. I just think this is complete nonsense. All you're doing is blaming the past for the future. No sense of responsibility. There are no petitions, there's no deputations and we've had no public questions. The next item on the agenda is item 8 which is matters referred to the executive. If we take this as a bump, we've got the motions from Councillor Weisel on celebrating Barnett's assets of community value, from Councillor Cornelius, amended by Councillor Weisel about let's help Barnett leaseholders, from Councillor Amherst on lofted inspections and from Councillor Nigel Young on welcoming the 310 bus route. I'll have the members in agreement to note the referred motions and endorse the resolutions made at council at the 15th of October 2024 in relation to the four motions. Agreed? Okay. The next one is consideration of which is page 19 to 22 which is the consideration report from the overview and scrutiny section. Now that has been a part of the referral to it. It comes from the review of capital contracts. Any questions or issues or shall we move straight to the recommendations? All right. So what we've got is comments were from the meeting on the 20th of October and will be considered together when we're looking at the related item in agenda 17. All right. We'll do that in item 17 when we look at the capital contracts. So we move on to item 10 which is the task and finish script. This is a referral from the adult and health overview and scrutiny subcommittee on GP access. Oh, sorry, Caroline. I didn't see you there. Yeah, sorry, Caroline. You're welcome. Thank you very much indeed. I'm Tracy who Tracy scholars who've actually been amazing helping this task and finish group. So I think you have a lot of information. If you are there any other questions you can actually ask Tracy. When we first started this off, we had an initial meeting with GP's past and present as well as we had people working with patient participation groups. We knew that people were patients. We didn't need to go and ask patients because I think we've all had issues where we know that patient access is a real issue. And I was really actually very happy to be sharing this. So the first thing that I'm just going to run because I know you're very busy. I'm just going to run very quickly through the factors that are actually affecting Barnett and GP access. Barnett as we all know has a very large population, one of the largest in London with a very high number, bless you, of elderly people. There's also a very high number of care homes which really does add to GP time having to try to go and visit elderly patients outside their hours. Patients are now living a lot longer and that's something we really do have to recognise. They're not only living longer but they're living with very complex problems. So they might have diabetes but then they have heart conditions and they have many other problems and this is something that in the past patients wouldn't have lived that long. GP's are wasting an awful lot of time when we went to visit because he's read the report. So we went to visit a number of GP's throughout the borough, each one of them having different issues. The one we went to visit in Graham Park, I think Tracy you would agree, was actually heart wrenching because the GP put his head in his hands and he said I spend most of my time having to sort out sick notes, housing, there's a huge issue and I am not seeing patients, therefore I do not have the time to actually give patients the time that I would like with actually real problems and I do think that's something since the report was made we actually do now know that I think the governments are going to try and look at that particular point. So the problems really when we actually spoke to the GP's that we realised that a number of GP's after Covid have decided to retire and that is a massive loss particularly to Barnett because they had a huge experience. If they were retiring before 60 or just after 60, that's five years at least that we could have actually had them to actually help the junior doctors. Younger doctors are absolutely not picking this as a speciality, they're deciding to go into something whatever's more sexy, these specialities but not general practice. When we spoke to receptionists which we did, they had very very low morale and it's very difficult for doctors to actually get good receptionists and they felt the job was very very stressful so the GP's are finding it very difficult and I'm sure all of us have had issues when you go along and try because that's your front line. If you have good receptionists, people that are engaged, it makes far easier to actually gain access to GP's. There's also since Covid been a very large increase which we all know with mental health conditions and people with anxiety again taking up a lot of appointments which weren't originally going to be there and finally something they all felt was there under funding. What are the things I think that we recommend? There are actually in the report on page number seven you'll see the recommendations that we've made there for but one of the things that I think is very very important is if we better signpost. That's on our first meeting someone came in with a really really good flow diagram that says exactly how somebody if they're not feeling well go to your pharmacist, you don't need to go to your GP, go along to see somebody else maybe make an appointment with a physiotherapist at the general practitioner. You do not need to see your GP and the other thing is that generally when you go you don't with with an appointment your expectation and my parents used to talk about their panel doctor and I don't know what that actually was but they had a relationship with a doctor. We're all going to have to their expectations. There will no longer be that you can go and see Dr X because there won't be that relationship and with that relationship came some very important things because if you came in with a headache they might know that unfortunately your father had died and your mother is being affected. They knew the family history you are that is out the window. We have too few GPs so we are going to have to manage people's expectations and I think that's probably one big thing go home message is that GP access will now be a problem because there are so few GPs. We are going to have to use whether it's the pharmacist or whoever else in the practice whether we have nurse practitioners or the new physician's assistant which are very highly trained and we're going to have to signpost to them often which will actually be giving better advice than the doctor. So I think if we can do I think that would be very important. I'm going to finish because I know you're very busy but things like age concern I think we can actually use them to try and teach elderly people how to access the GP because I don't know if any of you've done this but I have recently to try and do an e-consult I couldn't get anywhere because it didn't actually answer a very simple question I wanted and then I had to phone the GP at eight in the morning. I then actually was put on hold then it went there are 35 people in front of you you will now be disconnected and that's what happened and how on earth are people going to access their GPs. We have to think very carefully about that so I believe that you've got all the other things are actually in the report some other points. Thank you for that councillor's talk and for and for the work involved and the four recommendations so they are recommendations more for the ITV so it's to do with our relationship with ITV but councillor Moore and then councillor Clark. Thank you chair and thank you councillor Stockholm on behalf of the task and finish group for a very thorough a diligent and detailed report which is really helpful I mean this is an area that's really important to local residents and rightly so and you and I know from work that I previously did on the with the health overview and scrutiny committee to say we're aware of it sounds like it's pushing it away and trivialising it recognising that it's a really important issue but a really big one to tackle as well. Primary care is a fundamental part of our NHS and the past few years have been particularly challenging time for our GPs and I think that's been particularly so because we have a wide range of smaller GP practices and we're we're not we're a little different from some of our north central London partners in that sense and that gives them very particular challenges and I think that that is true I think being able to access GPs in a timely fashion or your GP or your GP surgery whether that's digital phone consultation face to face or with practice nurses or other health professionals is really important and I think there is that sense of of having to move away perhaps from the always seeing your one GP that's a real culture change but of course they are really important conduits for treatment for referral onto specialist treatment actually also for referral to all sorts of wider support through social and other prescribing mechanisms so I think it's something that we really need to get it right and you're quite right to recognise that we are a population who are living longer but with a range of issues and that puts great pressure on our GPs so some of the answers lie within GP contracts and hence for the government and funding is obviously something that that will have come up but also through the ICB they've started to do as you know a range of support through the Islington GP coalitions training sessions and support and a range of other support going into GP practices but I think your report just highlights a whole range of things in a very systematic way which is really helpful and the recommendations as the chair noted are larger for the ICB but actually we work really closely with the ICB and I think they are they are points for discussion and and and working but also I guess drawing on the strengths of the scrutiny committee going forward as well so we will be preparing officers repair report and we will come back to cabinet with that but in the meantime there's a lot that we can and will be doing and I hopefully you'll be part of that as we go forward because drawing patients and patient groups in is really important I notice you've got the poster and that's the patient consultant group absolutely and that was put together by the patient consultative group who I'll be seeing in a couple of weeks time and so working with them and thinking about how we can best support patients to recognise the amount of support that is there yes for their GP but right the way across a whole range of services and I think the campaign that's currently running is it is promoting your health team and I think that's the change that we will be pressing forward on but thank you for the report and all the efforts you put into it if it is true and I believe it to be sure but it's said to me as well that a lot of GP time is spent doing this rather than seeing patients have patients referred elsewhere but I think I'm right in saying because Tracy was honestly it's like like a beaver going into all the court but I think I'm right in saying that the actual they aren't changing but they're trying to change the policy on sick notes because it's also compromises the relationship with the patient and the doctor and I think a lot of the I mean the GP went to see which is so upset about that it really that needs to change I mean maybe that could be one of the recommendations that we could actually come from that if maybe we could write someone can write to somebody to encourage that to happen because it is it is using up so much time which is stopping GP access I can sort of stop you're a long way away so I'm finding it difficult to hear from that end of the room but I just want to thank you as well for the report I read it with interest I have a question and I don't know whether you in your work you came across this in your study but when the wealth health and well-being board went and had one of its meetings a Barney hospital and we had a tour around that particular time of day I was being taken around by somebody from the A&E one of the consultants on the A&E and it was absolutely healing with people and I said to him my god is this what it's like every day and he says yeah but we will have it cleared by four o'clock and the reason he said it was full was because most people came there because they wouldn't or couldn't get an appointment with their local GP or it took it would be a long time so they knew they would get seen on that day and I don't know whether you came across this in your study and whether you've got any kind of reflections on it thank you very much indeed and one of the things that when I was chairman of health and well-being board is we actually looked at very closely was people going into A&E it's really terrible I mean if you go into Barnett hospital any time of day even be it at night it is absolutely it is horrifying I don't know how many of you've been to A&E there recently it is terrible but actually they do have and it was brought in I think probably about five years ago a triage system so when you actually go in there and they do feel it should be referred to a GP they don't go through the door into A&E they actually aren't allowed in so the majority of problems that actually are there are not that they will be straight they will be referred back into general practice so they shouldn't be just there because they can't see their GP so I do believe that's my understanding a very welcome report I mean that's I know with Millbrook Park which is one of my in our in my ward that they they do all the time say they want a new GP but actually it was interesting when the estate was being built the government whoever it was was making decisions said they didn't need a GP so that's why because one of the buildings was meant to be allocated to a general practice whether you could or couldn't get the general practices it wasn't the point but I do think I mean that's obviously nothing to do with this but I really do think we need to make sure that we have GPs in on you wherever we we think ahead because it's it is very distressing for people and not to be able to access their GP but thank you all very much indeed for your time okay if you could turn to the recommendations on page 24 which is note the referral ask officers to prepare a report move on to item 11 which is the Grand Park North East or business case but can I remind people that there is an exempt part of this report if you wish to go into the exempt report let me let us know first so we can clear up and press right uh councillor yeah I mean this has been in planning for many years and and basically we're at a key stage where we're proposing to to uh quite levels as our our partner and the joint venture and that's been a long process of tendering and they analyzing the tenders and we're confident the levels are the right choice to make to take this project very important project forward I what it does is it carves out and and the carving out itself has been a major piece of work because we've had to agree with in effect the world with Notting Hill Genesis terms and actually the exempt paper covers one of the items that's part of that carve out say agreement I the the terms with with Netting Hill Genesis to in effect take the northeast of Grand Park out of the regeneration scheme that they're delivering for Barnett and actually they put Barnett homes in the driving seat and take Barnett homes in the council as the department's going forward to deliver that I I think it is right then I've said this before and I think that I don't think this is even controversial I think I think councillor Karelius might agree with this point that actually had it had had there been different arrangements many years ago in relation to housing a finance and the housing revenue account in particular that actually our preference would have always been to have our own Alamo for Grand Park but that wasn't the way that housing finance was allowed to proceed before John Healy's proposed the array allowance allowed that councillor building to restart I so I think that's I I'd say this this this does go back some time we're now at this critical stage where actually if we you know we're basically work will start next year if we agree this I think works to make the site site ready to start next year there's been a lot of work with the existing residents a lot of very good work we're in a really good position in relation with police holders and tenants and it's just one of the important things to say is that all the residents here have the right to return so what we are delivering is a mixed tenure a development that's going to be funded out of the HRA that's already in the HRA business a a budget I this is although there's a small addition to that that's in this paper I and basically you know we're being able to take forward a mixed tenure scheme which will I end up with 168 social rent homes a lot of them and this is one of the things that we've been planning today as being family homes larger families that the real need for the fit 46 shared ownership 262 private sale private sale is one of the ways that we're funding this the housing associations do this this way and that we can make sure that the housing revenue account can can bear this so one of the very good pieces of news is that we've had a substantial amount of the grant funding say funding I and that's thank you by the mayor of London I that's a considerable a sort of investment in Barnett's an investment in the a project go ahead I and and there is boring which is done from the HRA to so I think you know as I say this this has been something that I think cancer's been working on for quite some time I think it's a very good scheme and I think it will help I bring forward Graham Park I think it's not I think one of the you know Graham Park is at a stage as well they're actually I think I think the you know the housing associations are are finding it difficult to take things off you know the whole of across London housing associations are finding it difficult to take schemes forward just because of the pressures of funding and and that's the same sort of pressures that we've had dampened mobile the fire safety this actually is a way of us taking this forward and making sure the northeast gets goes ahead as as the next key really important a phase of the regeneration of the empire I happy to answer questions but I think it's fairly self-explanatory and as I say I think it's a really good news story for the borough situation particularly for larger family homes I don't know if there's anything that's that I think you've covered it pretty much any questions or comments I think it's basically a good news story thank you leader just one very brief comment that I think is worth mentioning given the the types of discussions we're going to have later in cabinet about the scale of the financial problem that we face I think it's to be celebrated that the administration is still finding ways to deliver on an ambitious agenda that meets the needs of local residents in spite of the scale of the financial problems we face so it is it is something to be applauded I believe one of the key things is obviously this is funded through the ads revenue account which is separate from the main general fund of the council so it's actually going to help the general fund because what I've been saying in this stage is a lot of work has brought in to getting us to this stage I and I think you know I'd like to thank the officers in both council and in the borough any other questions or comments on the public report council bag so there's always been there has already been an extensive president consultation program are we happy to move on to the recommendations which you can read yourselves on pages 72 and 73 because there's 16 of them are we happy to accept the recommendation for the three-year plan for the next year cancer snide and thank you leader yeah this is the report on the local implementation plan for the next three years which sets out the highway and transport improvements for funding by tfl and no residents are keeping a very close eye on on some of these the stuff that's set out in here needs to reflect tfl's priorities for the transport network and indeed the mayor's transport strategy particularly safer streets including and including cycle training and cycle parking which which are very important um just important to say these projects are separate to other improvements are funded separately by the council this is our commission tfl funding um it's approved tonight without if jane sitman sitting there will imminently be sending it to tfl um there's a bit of a toing toing and fraying but hopefully we'll receive final confirmation of funding in march and then the work will be able to start we're expecting similar funding to last year which is around 1.6 million pounds and which is comes to about over four and a half million over a three year period but in addition to to allocated funding there are a variety of discretionary funds particularly on bus infrastructure where we're putting a bid forward for north finchley to improve the bus station there and other methods in the area and also for the safer streets fund where we've got a number of bids for that part which particularly includes a bid to implement 20 mile an hour zones as you know we're currently working on our policy of 20 mile an hour zones to make those easier to implement where they're needed and wanted by residents and the bid that's in here if it were successful would be would be really helpful so alongside the allocated funding we've got our fingers crossed for those discretionary bids that we've put in and just say have asked officers to brief members on proposals that affect their walls so that everybody is is clear about what's happening um i think finally just to thank officers particularly jane for all the work that's that's gone into putting the program together as well as e and craig and andrew on the particularly on on the bus side and they come along tonight to answer any difficult questions but thank you i think this is it you know there's some tricky reports on the agenda tonight but i think this is a good news story in terms of important sometimes small projects but that mean lots of residents across most of them i believe so yes we're expecting feedback sort of informal feedback from tfl in january so i guess we'll have some sort of idea then with a with a revised is an expression of interest at this stage so that if our is chosen as one of the i think three boroughs that they were looking to to do they will then ask for a worked up bid in it that's a while already but i wanted to comment on the number of 150 in childs hill ward as a former counter in childs hill ward i know how many residents have contacted me repeatedly asking for 20 miles an hour the other question for councilor moore um just um with my health and well-being um hat on um just welcome the emphasis within the papers around air quality but actually also around active travel and the work the ongoing work that happens in schools in terms of um school travel plans and training because i think it's really important with our young people and you make a point um within the papers about people having real choices about how they how they travel about and actually making sure that walking cycling using public transport is as easy right the recommendations are on page seven four six which is basically agreeing with the prioritization to be sent in and in further yeah agree thank you thanks for that uh item 13 is the child care sufficiency assessment uh councilor kokey works thank you um this is a report that obviously you get to look at every year online if any questions on this i would really like to thank officers for the trouble they take to actually really make sure that we have the good or outstanding we'll also see that we have a lot of contact with the asylum hotels to make sure that the children in there are all located for in terms of care and it would probably not be a surprise because i know there's been a big advertising drive right across all medias that the only thing that is often difficult is to make sure that there is still enough people that want to work and stay within this type of work of looking after young children i'm really pleased that we've got really good staff that make sure that what we need is looked at every year we obviously get data from obstet we get data from birth rates we get data from all the different providers and we know and have a really good idea of what the situation is of what we have to provide for and of course the various different types of timeline of change which you can see on 275 and 276 as to what we're still working towards because at the minute you've got the working parents for two-year-olds can access 15 hours september this year it's 15 hours extended to all working parents of children from age of nine months and then from september next year it's working parents of children under the age of five they'll be entitled to 30 hours of child care a week but yes we do a really good job we do a really good job in making sure that we have enough provision and we do a good job in making sure that things are inspected and that everything is on track to make sure that we actually we provide a really good service and a really good quality service in terms of early years sufficient any questions or comments anything that's right me and it's a national thing is it's going to be more to do early in especially Barnet College we're working with Barnet College and Middlesex so we can and we've got lots of we've got apprenticeship schemes that we can sort of grow our own as well so the recommendations are on page 274 which is basically noting and agreeing so noting the assessment and the plan are we happy to agree those recommendations that's me to introduce if you like and within it there's quite a lot of good news stories but what i think it does show is our ability to remain ambitious there's still a lot of delivery going on and although obviously finance can tend to dominate for the people Barnet is the services that have been fenced i think there are a couple of things i wanted to point out which is that when we look at our benchmarking on page 363 it is actually and i'll just bring it up that compared with other authorities on the whole we're doing that a lot better the issue there are a couple of issues but they tend to be around waste management and recycling that i'm sure we can look at in more detail but at the moment we we are better than a lot of authorities at delivery and we hope that continues i don't know if people got any comments about their own particular areas but i think what this report as a whole shows there's a lot that we can be proud of a lot of good work being done by officers across the council to continue to deliver to continue to think in terms of comment for sniderman thank you thank you i thought it just might just it wasn't really a question just a comment thought it was worth highlighting some of that some of the good news that's in there i mean there are particularly good statistics with regard to keeping residential roads clean with regards to delivering community skips which we know residents really appreciate and are well used also with regards to picking up almost all fly tips within the agreed time and work is ongoing there to do you know extra enforcement so that people who flight it are actually caught and fined and but in all cases that the fly tipping is actually collected very promptly on the environment side as well there's various bits of good news in there including applying for the decarbonisation program there was a very successful repair cafe that was held in edgeware at the skill center where people were able to come along and get things repaired and also just work highlighting the community energy group which is really exciting that barnet now has a community energy group that's just recently been incorporated of the community benefit society so barnet was a bit behind other boroughs in that so it's great and that was one of the groups that came out of the citizens assembly the energy group from that and they've actually gone on and founded the group and have got some funding to do some initial feasibility studies so that's another really good progress there on sustainability side and just leading you so just mentioned with regards to recycling so you know it's just worth putting that in context as you mentioned when you compare our recycling rates and other figures with boroughs within the north london waste authority where we're part of they are broadly similar and the other thing we're working on is reintroduction of the food waste service which is another thing that's eagerly anticipated by residents and that will help to reduce contamination rates one of the key contamination rates is is food going is going going going in at the same time so having a separate collection there will help help with that as well so just thought it's worth highlighting that if you read through it there are some there's some really positive progress that's being made yeah and i think that you know we've also been we touched earlier linked in with the the scrutiny report around primary care access and one of the areas that's often of concern there is around digital access and it was really pleasing to see the rising numbers of particularly older people and though it doesn't say so in the report i know that it is often older people who are undergoing the digital skills training being offered either devices or vouchers for free or cheap access online and that's enabling them to to contact their gps in different ways health and mental health and well-being are quite fundamental there's a whole range of things that they decided within the report that are really valuable there are regular 158 mental health and well-being events took place in libraries now that's about encouraging people to look at a whole range of other services that are available either for mental health or general well-being and that will support people to either after or before sometimes they go and approach their gp we've got increasing numbers of people following the social prescribing route and that may be everything from exercise programs through through our partners better but it can be a whole range of different things we've got health champions taking mental health training so there are people out there we've got an increasing number of skills joining the resilient schools network so they're looking at how they build that resilience among their young people and we have got a significant rise in the numbers of of people within the eligible population of 40 to 74 being offered and taking up their nhs health checks and the point about that is that allows us to identify those health needs ahead of time so that we can get the right preventative or early intervention programs into place that saves money for the nhs but it also allows people to live longer and happier lives and to to live and whether those sorts of multiple health problems that many of our older people are are are encountering at the moment so if we catch those earlier people will will live longer healthy and more active lives so thank you very much i just wanted to thank the officers from community safety family services and community participation that have been working on all these issues better for residents thanks i think it would take me too long to go you will know in terms of people that have spoken at council and might say matters the great strides that we've made is actually bringing young people on board and making sure that their views are listened to on how they think of what council is and if anyone lives at the youth assembly they will know that they've actually passed a motion to want to know a lot more about how council finances and how the area that affects them actually works which is something we will be continuing to work on be in this report is that i'm really pleased to see the um what's being given out by the minister for education today in terms of extra funding and extra yes quite an interesting statement about the here in bainite uh councillor clark was next and councillor bake thank you just i wanted to i like the work not just of officers but of our community groups and really rising to the challenge of how we work best together and deliver more for the bar at the same time thank you leader i thought i would take the opportunity to share some of the positivity and optimism of my cabinet colleagues while i still had the chance um it's it's an often overlooked element of a council's delivery system as to what you are able to do given your resources and the financial envelope available to you so having a financially responsible work stream that isn't as much concerned with what are we no longer able to do but is more interested in what can we do now under the current landscape of local government finance and how do we meet our very ambitious agenda given the current state of the finances is something that is is inherent within the way we're approaching the remainder of our administrative term and i think that there's a lot to be proud of given that outer london shares very similar concerns and pressures to us and yet as you've mentioned in your introduction we are proceeding in a way that's far more successful and laudable than some of our colleagues on on the outskirts of london thank you any any other shall we move straight to the recommendation which is really simply to note the contents of the report are we happy to do that then we move on to item 15 which is the three financial officers report which includes the 2425 the quarter two financial forecast and the 2425 budget management which thank you leader so i thought i'd give some preliminary remarks to to introduce the report before we delve into some of the detail relating to it before i start may i just give a sincere statement of gratitude and thanks to finance officers and kevin bartle the interim section 151 officer for the extent of the work in budget monitoring this year i think it's it's been an extraordinary effort on the part of the entire team and executive directors across the organization i think everyone has accepted realized the scale of the challenge we face and have acted appropriately which i am extremely grateful budget monitoring by its nature is is a cumulative and progressive edifice you don't just ignore what's going on and then arrive look at it again periodically you have to monitor it over a period of time because you have to understand the trends as they're emerging where you came from and more importantly where you're intending to go we we approach finances over a medium term we we look at them in in blocks and cycles the in-year process is a more detailed look at a moment in time but it's always within the context of how we are going to manage the organization in in the long term which is why read the report the very very first thing that you will see is a contextual understanding of how of the environment we are in in which the forecasting is taking place the financial pressures in particular that are emergent and being understood in greater detail it could be seen as excuse excusatory certain sense but it is more explanatory of the different types of pressure that the organization has to deal with there are those that are proactively dealt with because they are within the organization's control and ability to respond to and there are those that are externally shock factors to which we have to be more responsive now the resilience of the organization as it was given to us by the previous administration to deal with external shocks is something we should reflect on as an administration and it is something that i will discuss in the business planning report which succeeds this but what's important to understand is that some of the some of the areas of pressure that we have encountered are they are obligations and necessities that we have to deal with as an organization to which we are legally bound to respond and we are doing so as in an appropriate manner because we are an organization that takes our responsibilities and commitment seriously if we turn to the financial outturn report it isn't it isn't a prospect that we are taking like at the current state of affairs we we are projecting close to a 25 million pound overspend against the budget that we set in february of this year which is 389 million pounds if we turn to paragraph two section two of the report it will be apparent where the preponderance of that overspend has arisen in the growth and resources directorates are reporting a combination of the temporary accommodation pressure so partly the housing subsidy gap that we face and partly the actual cost of emergency nightly paid accommodate accommodation which has escalated beyond any historically precedented limits for a combination of reasons the inflation and interest rates being almost amongst them and the and the story with adult social care continues to be more acutely felt in barnet not only because of the number of service users we have but the complexity of social care need of those users in in the london borough barnet the other element of dealing with the financial climate that we don't just focus solely on the revenue accounts is capital program we have been very serious in in making sure that our capital program is deliverable and that we uh we look through it with a fine level of detail to eliminate anything that could be considered access to requirements or beyond our ability to fund via the various forms of funding and financing that capital works are able to be funded so i mentioned earlier in response to council zinc in that 69.5 million pounds of capital program has been um has been reallocated or in our corporation this is this is a a serious figure it is it is uh an indication of just how how much work has gone in behind the scenes into looking at our capital program with fine levels of detail and um um being being honest with ourselves as to what we are able to afford given the cost of borrowing now and the fact that any additional borrowing that we do take on will will have us at a uh a more greatly negative position than we already are when we come to budget setting in um in february i think that there there is a there is an element to which we have to talk about the the local and national um management of the finances that has led to this particular situation so naturally the incredible financial shock that we faced in the autumn of 2022 immediately upon taking over the autumn of 2022 immediately upon taking over the administration the list trust fiscal event as it's come to be known has had long-lasting implications and substantial damage to the national local economy which is not recoverable in a short period of time and it is something that has devastated the vast majority of of outer london we we we find for instance that um croydon are facing very similar levels of overspend despite 38 million pounds of capitalization that they've been um they've been able to do due to their uh their resort to extraordinary financial support haybring and and um hillingdon faced very similar levels of overspend also it is it is a it is a concern for the entire local government sector as a consequence of national mismanagement but locally we have seen that there are unfunded commitments that we have inherited to which we are now bound and we have to find a way to provide for them which is having this impact on our ability to provide good quality service yet we're doing it we're still finding ways as the previous report indicated to be a well run well managed and financially responsible organization in spite of the fact that we've we've uncovered a lot of financial mismanagement which i will give more detail in the subsequent report suppose that um that will be the end of the summary of the of the outter forecasts just to say that it is currently being monitored it isn't something that we're going to now set aside because we have next year's budget to uh to deal with that that isn't at all the way we are approaching this it will still be something that we um attempt to to remedy and find mitigations for but in the truth and the reality is that our position within the financial year is now considerably late and we are running out of opportunity and time to intervene in a way that's going to make a financial dent in that full cost overspend i mean there are some positives from the recent budget the the right to buy receipts being able to retain 100 percent and and looking towards a five-year potentially 10-year rent settlement that is not fully funded it's a statutory provision service for the council but we don't get funded by the government and the basically that we've never had something like that coming between one of the officers and records sorry yeah i just wanted to say a few words really about all social care because obviously it came up in councillor's presentation and it's the context really so in barnet today we have over 56 000 people over the age of 65 um but that doesn't really tell you the true story because when we said when the national health service was set up in 1947 the average age life expectancy was only about 67 anyway or 68 now today of course there are some people in this room and who well over the age of 65 and and living very very healthily and and are likely to live you know well beyond the the expectation that was you know after the second world war and and the the older people get and they're more likely that they are going to need some some support and that figure is growing and what i've been informed by officers is that i think it's um 27 out of the 32 london boroughs are all struggling to meet the um demands on adult social care and within the budget constraints that they have so it's not just unique to barnet but because barnet has a particularly growing elderly population there are even bigger pressures or faces facing us here and for example what we what we what we do know is that um there's been a 14 over a 14 percent increase in the number of people that we are supporting 2020 and that figure is going to continue to grow enough 14 percent increase is equivalent to about 1.1 million pounds a week and and at the at the moment i can't see how that figure is going to go down in any significant by a significant degree so we wait and hope that the 600 million pound announced in the budget is going to give us some some help and some respite but it's important to for people to realize that that 600 million pound is for children and adults here so it isn't going to be the panacea that you know some people might think so that pressure is going to continue for some time as the population continues to get older someone who was born someone who was 65 was born in the 1950s and there are people who remember the second world war and and so i just see that figure getting bigger and bigger as the baby boomers start to become into the late 60s 70s and 80s and so it's not a i'm one is trying to be positive but i'm just saying the them challenges and then pressures aren't going to go away anytime soon in fact the problems are increased in ways it's a good thing that people are living longer because they're not necessarily living healthier lives for longer and of course there's more people with disabilities and learning difficulties who are living longer so there is pressure there that all councils are and i suppose part of part of the move to optimism is that seem to have now had the government that recognizes those rather than the government who started off talking about austerity in finding the bell but then became a straight racket that then hollowed out and that's the name of councils to try and run under greater pressure anyway anybody else want to ask any questions or any comments on this report i knew you see i knew it was going to be your council back i just predicted it so i just want to ask a question of three months that didn't seem to come up with anything that would contain spending but then you want to talk a bit about our monitoring so councillor beg will recall that when when we can the budget monitoring cycle for this particular year a schedule was published as part of the very first budget monitoring business business monitoring report that explained how we would deal with it we've actually added significant additional financial controls and oversight meetings since then it's it's been it's been a quite extensive process of understanding how particular departments spend their money how cash flow progresses through the organization understanding forecast modeling on an individual direct group basis looking at how that modeling can be used more proactively for the medium-term financial strategy as well as for in-year expenditure and understanding how we can be much more accurate with our long medium and long-term estimations of need that the organization has particularly in adult social care which naturally is one of our most important obligations so it's been it's been a serious it's been a serious matter of focus for us but there was actually one element that i forgot to mention in my my introductory remarks which i suspect section 151 officer would be low for me to overlook without express mention which is our reserves position so the report does does require and invite cabinet colleagues to consider in-year adjustments of our reserves and consequences of an overspend to them and of course it is stark it is it is naturally something that we have been alerted to as a matter of risk for the for the local authority by our external auditors and we don't underestimate just just what that means and entails for future budget setting the budget monitoring process has been as intense as it has been because the fact that we are so keenly aware of consequence on the reserves reserves position i'll have more to say about reserves in particular on on business planning but just for the purposes of the i'll make a brief comment if i may thank you for the opportunity i'll just say this one thing very quickly that councillor beg talked about monitoring and i think councillor knackery adequately responded to that point but i think i would want cabinet members to sort of turn their attention to budget management so monitoring monitors what's going on and reports and makes that transparent to us but what the organisation needs to do is manage their budgets within the constraints of approved and approved budgets that have been allocated to them which is our our challenge and of course councillor edwards mentioned how difficult that is but i think that's one comment i'd want to make and i also concur with councillor knackery's point about reserves and i know we'll talk a little bit more about that one when we get to when we get to that item thank you just your specific question about what offices are doing to control their spend we have introduced restrictions on non-essential spend and on vacancies and extension of agency staff and fixed term contracts so we're getting in things like children's homes where we know that going as it's been in the news today and as we've mentioned we know that going into the private sector is very expensive so can we provide in-house and we've also heard obviously about lots of council housing being delivered to tackle our temporary accommodation so just to reassure you from an opposite perspective that there are lots of work streams in place to make sure like that that the balanced budget is a statutory duty as well as providing services to keep of all those strategies you know i think that i'll just do the approval so it's a positive move that to approve the changes to the existing capital program in relation to the addition set out in section six and the environments as detailed in section 5.2 so do we approve that and the whole report agreed thank you so we move on to item 16 which is business planning and medium term financial strategy and i think we're back with councillor knackby thank you leader this is this is an exceedingly important important and incredibly important moment i think for for the administration to to grasp and grapple with so when i referred earlier to being realistic and genuinely in grip of the requirements we have in the medium term in terms of the the scale of service delivery the requirement of resource to properly fund them this is what is encapsulated within the report so we we have come together with particular scenarios for what the medium term may look like and made certain assumptions that inform the calculations that go into into providing figures toward those we'll find in paragraph 3.6 precisely what those what those assumptions are and how those scenarios have therefore come together and we have chosen scenario b as our base case assumption for what the medium term would look like and the consequential potential overspends that we would face based on the medium term financial strategy as it currently exists so whilst cabinet colleagues and anyone else is is ruminating upon the implications of that i thought that i would i would speak to why it has been it has emerged to be so important for us to undertake an exercise of this nature when we came into administration it fast became apparent to us that to a certain extent there was a a lack of acceptance of the scale of resource required to provide for the services that the local authority needed to give by the previous administration in adult social care for instance it may well have been accepted that the need outstripped the amounts that they were allocating to it there was a general ignorance to that fact and would subsequently if an overspend arose meet that overspend with whatever adjustments needed to be made to the medium term financial strategy that is not a financially sustainable way of approaching any organization's expenditure let alone one that deals with services as serious and impactful to one's life as that the local authority does our entire approach to financial management therefore has now become much more realistic forecasting we're using the resource allocation to directorates and the seriousness with which we take potential overspends is completely transformed and i think that if if this report is read through with with that subtext in mind it will be properly understood i've mentioned the reserves position in in the outturn forecast previously there's one very important thing to understand about the reserves that we inherited prior to coming into office that the previous administration lords as as adequate there there's a degree of misdirection as almost a fictional a fiscal fiction with which they they have been presented those overspends don't exist in the same way as they would had the types of decision making the previous administration entered into not taking place i'm referring to internal borrowing to care to provide funding for the capital program i'm talking about using making financial commitments to projects in the in the short term in the medium term financial strategy while expecting receipts that cover that funding to come in the latter end of the of the of the program and had it not been for covid relief grants in the middle of that 2018 to 2022 administrative cycle the reserves position would be in no way as healthy as it was when we took power it's very important to understand that any that reserves are ready-day funds they are single use they are to be used in extraordinary and extreme circumstances such circumstances arose in the immediate aftermath is bungling of the national budget however when we went to make use of that emergency fund what we found was as soon as we removed money from it the next budget setting cycle would have an immediate negative position that we had to contend with because of the debt financing obligation that we would incur by externalizing the debt the money that the conservatives had already spent that is not a real reserve that is not an actual rainy day fund that isn't realistically managing your finances for the future it was short-termism it was inappropriate and it is something we are attempting to rectify um i i'll leave it there and allow colleagues to to feed him as they will absolutely councillor houston what i've outlined is actually the reason why the entire capital program has had to go extensive revision and a prudent analysis of what is affordable colleagues will know that you can only fund capital projects by either capital receipts grants or borrowing and because of the debt obligation we would incur if we did take on extensive borrowing we've had to be very very careful about how many capital commitments we enter into currently at a time of extraordinary unprecedented interest rates that would then have a consequence on a revenue budget and on essential services that residents count on on a daily basis so yes absolutely but given that we've now realized that when projects that should have been funded that if it had been done into what we consider the correct way and has been done at a low interest rate do we have any ideas higher interest rates i don't know if that has been worked out or not but that seems to be one of the main causes of my money taken the different way um prior to inviting officers to give a more detailed speculation i suggest rather than an actual answer to it i would say that um there's an extent to which not capturing the upside of low interest rates has had a significant impact on on service delivery right now in our current financial environment so it is it is clear that there has been an impact on service delivery that there has been an impact whether that can be quantified is is a difficult question to answer and i suspect that the true revenue implications of internal borrowing are not quite as easily calculable as as perhaps the the qualitative knowledge that they exist is so i don't know if that was helpful at all to officers before they contribute so if i may then um leader uh the point i was going to make is similar to councillor knackers um it would be speculation to an extent it hindsight's the perfect science we would have to know right now what the appropriate date was that we would have actually gone and done some of that external borrowing you could you could work out a few scenarios and uh and give a view um but it would be speculation and sort of as i say hindsight being the perfect science in that regard uh and if you wanted something done on it we could look at a range of options and where we could see what might have happened if we'd have done option a or what might have happened if we'd have done option b but i think what's very important for cabinet to understand when they raise that sort of question is that of course that at the time we uh uh encountered or got on with that internal borrowing there was there was an upside in the organization that would have required to have been captured to help us now so that's another part of this this jigsaw that needs uh explaining more fully but i think i think councillor knackery really hit the nail on the head with his answer on this point thank you um i was just going to ask councillor knackery you talked about oh and we talked generally about how much more monitoring and scrutiny is is now going on um to what extent would you say that the previous outsourcing of lots of services including finance to capital uh has contributed to to that lack of oversight taking place i suspect the leader will uh would want to answer a little bit about the consequences of um the efficacy of monitoring when when we outsourced capita uh naturally the the impact of of uh monitoring relates more to the fact that the administration decided to take a back seat and fell asleep because they thought that it was being done for them rather than taking a proactive role but the the point that the leader constantly makes about the fact capita has an overriding obligation to shareholders rather than residents of barnett is something that's really important something that's really important to keep in mind here the reason why a certain advice was given previously was not because it was in the best interests of residents of barnett or even the organization as it transpired but because of the implications it had for capital the for-profit organization which is something i think no one should ever get when we discuss this matter um so it was a case that they often marked their own homework and gave themselves gold stars that now we look back perhaps it wasn't quite like as good as that but also the responsibility was the administration at the time one way of looking at it is the conservative administration knew what's going to happen they produced the forecast that said we'd run out of money in 2324 it was known as the graph of to that predict but what i want to know is having done that what did they do about it and what they did as councillor knackley said is oh this is too difficult for us we're we're not a private company run it provide you know providing that there's no sort of bumps on the road and plenty of bumps on the but one there's no bumps on the on the road that's all we have to do i mean there was a dereliction of thinking about it i was going to say sweet fa but i think i'm gonna have to so they did very little about it and so on and i'm not actually blaming CAFTA as an organization but it was more of that handing over everything and thinking that that that would work and now doing it at the same time the national government sometimes you need to cut your cloth let's say what was as i'll say again what was the belt tight you became a straight jacket and councils became a name and therefore unnecessary there was going to be some inflation there was going to be some increase in interest but the cost of that and the fact that in order to there was a lot of things that were heading about the promises made on capital we're overspending on our capital program because of promises years ago put in the internet years ago without the money being put aside so if you like those reserves were a fiction that came through i'm not saying they weren't there but they had already been forward planned to be used up and that wasn't given sufficiently to deal with it we are dealing with it there's increased financial money we are going to to make savings and that's fine because we have to put it outside what we were elected to do anyway i saw some hands after soon as i started talking which was probably asking me not to talk a bit less i'll move from the right across so we'll have councillor more councillor clark councillor houston thank you chair um you um talked about monitoring and and knowing what was there but not doing anything about it do you think do you think that the committee system which basically split all of the reporting around committees up into silos um made it harder for transit it didn't enable the transparency that was necessary in some of that budget monitoring and understanding exactly what was going on under the the hood of the bonnet um because it feels to me like it could be a vehicle for smoke and mirrors if you are talking in different committees about part of the picture and i suppose the corollary to that is do you think the cabinet system has enabled us to bring a much sharper focus on those problems but i'll just say yes to that i don't think i'll presume but i think there's two points to make about the change of governance arrangements so the fact that the cabinet system allowed us to be far more collegiate and cooperative with working and therefore need of service delivery and made um a delivery of policies far more holistic is important but as we've now discovered it also meant that we are much more aware of one service areas way in which cash flow uh precipitates across the organization and it is part of the financially responsible transformation agenda that we are looking at the organization in a cross-cutting manner and and to understand that there are intersections and codependencies across the entire network that ought not to be overlooked when you consider obligations it's been incredibly useful i think the governance change to not just understand how we've got here but more importantly with respect to this report how do we improve the mission really and all of us have been going through in a lot of detailed budgets in our own areas as cabinet members and it was quite hard sometimes to get to understand that because and i think that that's that's been improved this year i i basically you were the company was delivering to a contract without any real without any motivation to actually reimagine the services i and potentially think about the pressures that we have now or we're leading up you know after covid and everything else that not the pressures that were in place 10 years ago and you know that's the trouble when you don't have when you've got outsourced services on a contract is very rarely quotes councillor colman but that was one of the that was one of the criticisms he had of the outsourcing i do remember him saying this councillor more will remember that comment as we talked about it at the time that actually what you're doing is is limiting the ability of the administration to find savings if if for example the financial situation that might be the first and last time i quote because comment at the cabinet meeting but there we are i just wanted to make some closing remarks because obviously this report is a prelude to budget setting it is a context under which we are going to enter into a budget setting cycle which will begin the referred to overview and scrutiny in the latter part of december prior to the provisional local government settlement which we are expecting on the 19th of december at the latest so naturally the scale of the problem is an important piece of context when you're entering into budget setting and it will form part of the report that we bring to cabinet in december and we'll need to accept that reality the the baseline scenario that we highlighted in this business planning report as the context within which we're entering into budget setting so prior prior to the six-week consultation that we'll enter into after the december cabinet meeting we will lay out our plan for how to deal with it taking into account the savings assumptions that already exist in the mtfs if if the savings are not realized they become precious in subsequent years we're not going to ignore the fact that the savings were were assumed and not realized it is it is a recognition that we we have those as as previously agreed within the mtfs when when we came to it in the past and so the timetable for for this entire process is in paragraph 3.01 comfort to the tree finance office so i can promise you we're not wasting money on heating in the committee room right the call to the recommendations that are on page four three four and four three five if you look at them there's a couple of amendments which is on both recommendation four and five to strike out the word injury because the 151 officer does exist that does exist right given that i'll be happy to agree those recommendations on business planning we move on to item 17 which is the review of capital contracts uh yeah and on that we have got the overview and scrutiny referral earlier that we take on i'll be i'll be very very brief if there's anything the officers want to add in addition to what's already written in the in the summary this report was obviously brought to our view and scrutiny prior to to cabinet the explanation for why an extension to the contracts are needed is is written here the it contract in particular is of critical importance to extend because it does go beyond the period of the local government elections disruptions to the it system during that particular period would be particularly inconvenient for both political parties i i would assume in terms of the ovian scrutiny committee's requests or representations that there is a there's an attachment to that particular item that provides context and detail as to business rates performance and in relation to the other matter about a informed cross-party reference group i i assume that that's a question for governments and shouldn't necessarily be any subject to what what legal has to say on the matter is there is there anything else the officer wants to explain about the contract extensions three months and it can only be extended to six are there any other questions on the main the main report that the review and and the business plan the council tax support scheme was assessed by a third-party consultancy company called the visionary network a report by them is appended to the report itself and they were asked to put together an options appraisal to assess how we could best change the current arrangements um the various options that they they they proposed are summarized in the report but in brief the one that um the one that is suggested to be the most beneficial for future uh future purposes takes our current arrangement reduces the number of income bands from seven to five reduces the uh discounts by about two percent on each of the relevant brackets and caps the maximum discount available to that of a fantasy property naturally all of this is still subject to a seven-week consultation and it will be properly um assessed based on qualities implications as well but the necessity and need for a review of the council tax support arrangements is explained in the very very first paragraph which does which does relay the very challenging financial position that itself or question so what would be announced in if you'd like prove option four as the ones would be consulted on but it is subject to a budget setting meeting sorry I should have mentioned it is it is for ratification by full council it is there is a full council mandate required for it and that will happen at the budget council in february of 2025 and display machine as though I would like to act between you sir I would ask council Snigelman thank you leader although it's a bit unfair to leave the most exciting reports to the end of the meeting when some people may not have been able to wait through the whole meeting um so this this fairly straightforward report is just recommending the decommissioning of the current display machines that we have in the borough of which there are currently 59 um and the main rationale for that is that we're not going to be able to do that in the future but we're going to and the main rationale for that is that they are they've been in for 10 years have you know do regularly develop faults and the cost of replacing them which is likely to be necessary within the next two years would be half million pounds and that's uh you know in addition to currently 86 000 pounds a year is what they're likely to cost maintenance maintenance costs um and as we've seen in the financial reports earlier that's not really something that that is affordable which is why the recommendation here is to withdraw those machines and alongside that this would see the withdrawal of the scratch card vouchers which are sent out by post book for which there are very few very very few customers I think it's just important to say so obviously the vast majority of people do pay by phone for their parking but it's important to say that an equality impact settlement has been carried out and there is an alternative to paying by phone for people who don't wish to or aren't able to and that and that's by paying by paypoint in in news agents and other stores and in those stores you can actually pay by cash um as well as card if you so wanted to I think it's important to say most majority people do pay by phone but there is an alternative which is being maintained for those that are not able to say or want to and um office also working with age concern to know particularly this stuff may affect elderly residents but to make sure the whole meeting but he's ready to offer any detailed questions but I wonder if maybe I could just start with a question I wonder if you could just say a bit about the um equality impact of settlement and how we're making sure that any questions I think just a really quick comment I'm really pleased to be able to answer more um I remember some time ago we were talking about bringing in when pay by phone was first coming in and we had challenges from some older residents who are finding difficulties one of the problems was that they struggled to hear if they were doing it on on the phone obviously they have an opportunity to to use the app to do that and to do it um through that route um so when you're talking to huk that would I would respectfully suggest emphasizing that element for some of those older residents where they might struggle to hear the telephone on a busy um busy high street but with age it takes a lot more difficult to maintain just as a general rule of life not just for pay and display machines we got the recommendations on page six one seven and six one eight to know thank you then move on to the short breaks funding methods change which um is councillor cockney web anyway we'll see what comes back are we happy with the recommendations as laid out in the report okay thank you the enforcement and prosecution policy indeed have the update to appendix dry yeah answer any questions I basically to update our policy to take account of upper tier tribunal rulings which have clarified in effect how this this regime will work pulling pulling the issues penalties basically to people so it is to provide that clarity in line with law it does something else also it amends it gives it gives future the legal changes on a separate paper it would be an addendum right so it becomes item 22 which uh may need some explanation to me i'll just say that uh because the open door homes acquisition update where it was protecting as an urgent item and the chair of scrutiny he has been called it calling has been been waived but okay yeah if you want to introduce it yeah it's quite a complicated day but let's paper but it is basically to bottom line we this is to give us comfort in terms of maintaining the program of buying a street property that's been a place for some time and this is to allow us to continue that this year and into next year adam can correct me if i've said anything but basically it's a it's a it's a kind of technical a report that aspects of finance a subsidy regime a loan loans housing legislation everything else that goes into to to to carry out this program and at the bottom line is the you know this will allow us to continue the program this year and my homes are to go when medicine that's why the urgency part of it seems to be to ensure that we carry on now on the recommendation i will read them out uh because it's an urgent item and people may not have looked at you know i just wanted to ensure that we do know the recommendations here we go one that cabinet note for the avoidance of doubt in relation to decisions taken under the door homes acquisition item on the 6th of february 20 2024 that only 87.5 million have been borrowed today by odh through the odh 500 loan facility the company agrees the existing loan facility is now resumed and that the related loan facility agreement dated the 27th of april 2020 may be utilized in relation to the approved capital programs for odh acquisitions that cabinet note in relation to the new odh acquisitions program for 300 homes that the 31.5 million council contribution as defined in the 6th of february 2024 cabinet report will now subject to compliance with the subsidy control act 2022 the grant funds into odh for the and it's that change of relationship to the grant okay grant funding to odh for the purpose of delivering additional affordable homes and that such grants comprise allocated third party grant funding for affordable homes and allocated capital receipts such as the right to buy receipts changing cabinet note the award of 11.337 million of grant funding by the by mhc lg to date and agrees that any external grant funding secured for this program may be transferred to odh on such terms as specified by the grant funder that cabinet agrees subject to compliance with the subsidy control act 2022 for allocated capital receipts to be transferred to odh where this is the purpose of the council's contribution to the odh acquisitions program that cabinet agrees to lend three million to odh at the agreed commercial rate of six point one five percent for a term of 12 months under the terms of the original loan facility agreement almost there that cabinet delegates authority to the executive director for booth in consultation with the tree finance officer the section one five one officer and the cabinet member for homes and regenerates in any further interim lending that may be required under the terms of the existing loan facility agreement providing it is within the remaining financial envelope of allocated capital receipts defined as the council's contribution to the program after accounting for recommendation six which is namely the 16.193 million the cabinet notes the existing odh 200 loan facility which commenced on the 27th of april 2020 has been extended previously and further authorizes the loan facility to be extended through until the date of expiry being the 26th of april 2025 that cabinet instruct the interim chief executive to ensure that good governance continues to be in place in respect of the existing loan facility and for the proposed new loan facility that have been improved to ensure that the sip for 2021 credential and treasury management codes are implemented in full and the council continues to adhere to its capital strategy in respect to both odh 300 and odh 500 loan facilities and now that cabinet recommends that at the next meeting of the overview and scrutiny committee on the 12th of december 2024 the committee considers adding the oph acquisition programs to the board plan of work for overview and scrutiny committee in 2025-26 i'm sure we're all very familiar with the sip for 2021 credential and treasury management codes and given that can we agree the recommendations thank you i think i want a final point go on there it would be remiss for me to not also mention that actually we do get gla substitute funds i am very grateful for that so thank you we have the cabinet fourth plan with the peter city schedule we're happy with that that we will keep cabinet meetings full and exciting for the foreseeable future can we just note the exempt report rather than open it up and talk about it are we happy to note the report on grand park northeast yeah now you're going to be disappointed but i will end the meeting all right thank you everybody for your patience good night all

Transcript

Thank you all for attending. Please note that the meeting will be recorded and broadcast by the Council or by people present. Can I remind speakers to turn on the microphone by pressing the speaker icon when speaking and turn it off when finished. Please speak directly into the microphone so that the audio can be picked up clearly for those joining the meeting in the gallery and remotely. Are the minutes of the previous meeting held on the 8th of October 2024 agreed as a correct record? Thank you. There's no absence of members. Do members have any declaration to make in relation to the agenda items? No. Okay. So we move on to agenda item 4, which is questions from non-executive members, if any. As usual, the first four questions will be from the opposition group members. We have both Councillor Zinkin on line and Councillor Cornelius, if you want to come up to the table, Richard. There's a limit of 15 minutes for this section. We might as well go straight in. And Peter, if you want to start when you ask your first question, the 15 minutes will start. Yep. Thank you, Councillor. Thank you, Councillor. So it's not quite accurate to say that the entire project has been defunded. There is an element of income generation expectation within the MTFS relating to playing fields being provided. In that particular development, that is being retained and it is going ahead. As part of our revisions to the capital programme, some very difficult decisions have had to be made about other pieces of infrastructure, which does include elements of West Hendon, but it's inaccurate and incorrect to say that it's been disfunded. If you go through the report, you see that millions of pounds have been taken out of that project. As there is no explanation, my question was not whether this was a good thing or a bad thing or whether it was necessary or not. The question I asked was when you were getting to the level with the residents of West Hendon as to what the consequences were of the decisions that were given in an appendix to this paper, where literally millions of pounds were being taken out of the funding for that project. Councillor, given that the paragraph you referred to exists in the report to be discussed in this meeting, no decision has been made just yet. So you can't level with people prior to a decision having been made. But unfortunately, because of... You can either get me to answer a question or you can ask the question. We've had to make 69 and a half million pounds of reductions to the overall capital programme overall because of the scale of financial incompetence that we inherited. So, yes, lots of millions of pounds have had to be reprofiled and adjusted. How much has been taken out of the West Hendon and how much is left? I think you're missing the point that Councillor Nagley put to you, that that decision has not been made. These are reports that have got to go through. It's part of the overall budget. Until the budget's agreed, including both capital and procurement plans, they are at the moment theoretical. There's two ways of looking at that. One is to thank you for indulging our approach. The second one is to say, just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, was that the budget that had the note from the 151 officer for being probably inoperable and outside the bounds of what it should be? I think you find that from a 151, that's a polite way of saying this is rubbish, but it's not for me to comment on that. The budget you presented was defined by the 151 officer as not deliverable. In other words, it was a work of fiction. Now, of course, the difference between your budget and our budget is that we were affected by the national budget. There's a lot to thank Liz Truss for putting us into a different position, but generally it seems like you're endorsing our approach, and I thank you for that. The reality is that we have uncovered so much incompetence and been left with something. You knew that incompetence was there. You never found it under your scrutiny committee, but you put it into your alternate budget. The more we find out, the more difficulty we've got, and we're determined to clear up the mess you left us. I think you can argue, but you're only meant to be asking questions. I'm not sure what you describe as frivolities. Councillor, if you read the pressures that have been noted within successive out-turn reports and forecasts that have explained why overspends have happened, I think it's borderline insulting to suggest that those areas of expenditure are frivolities. Statutory services relating to adult social care and temporary accommodation to deal with homelessness. They're core responsibilities that local authorities have to deal with. It's meant to be questions. This isn't your time to make speeches or comments. If you're saying that in your budget you're going to make bigger cuts to children's and adult services, we'll see it when you present your budget. We do have Councillor Cornelius who also wants to ask a question. Thank you very much. My two questions are quite specific. Obviously I completely resent Councillor Naqvi saying that we left a mess. We didn't. The leader actually said that the affairs were in good order when he took over. We've discovered a lot more since then, but we will be doing enough. I think you're in a difficult position to defend. Then you're slow learners, but without becoming insulting, running the council has always been difficult. One of the difficulties is actually collecting money. I look through the papers with some disappointment that there's 25 million quid owed by the NHS as a debtor. Traditionally we've had a problem getting the money out of them. Harking back to the past as leader, it sometimes took a personal phone call from me or from the chief executive to shake money from that particular tree. I wonder what actions you've taken to remind them they do need to pay. Obviously there's not any regular meeting, both from the adults and the children's services. I believe there has been some payment, but nothing like the total. The difficulty is they argue case by case. Whereas there used to be an agreement, if we take the children's, that it was a tripartite agreement between education, social services, health. We pay a third each, you win on some, you lose on some, but it balances out. Because of the pressure on the health service since then, and the constant reorganisation which makes it very difficult to find anybody in the health service who can make a decision, as you well know, Councillor Cornelia, all I can say is there's lots of meetings. We need to see the adults. I do agree, but it's something we've got to pursue. We can't run the health service at a bad effort. I appreciate that, but just to give you a little tip in the form of a question, we sometimes found that one could reach back through what was then the Department of Community and Local Government and get the minister to have a word with the appropriate health minister and do a bit of shaking from that way. And I wonder whether you'll be sympathetic to trying that. We will be working with the MP. Now we've got some good MPs to ensure that messages get to the minister. Good. And I will be reminding them when they reply to my emails. The other question I had was – Councillor, can I give you just a bit of reassurance that the £25 million figure in the report is actually monies raised rather than overdue. So we're in regular discussions with the health authority and because we want to do a full reconciliation process before we raise a bill, we want to make sure that there's a degree of certainty in the amount that we're actually billing so the receipts are accurate and that's what the report is. Okay. So that will be done in a timely way because I think the short-term borrowings went up to cover the lack of payments. The second question/point was on the report from Overview and Scrutiny and the answer we got to our query about the collection of business rates. And it slightly missed the point, I'm afraid. I was actually querying the whole basis of the report given that so many small businesses don't have to pay business rates at the moment with all the various schemes there are. And I was actually – I was wondering whether there was any confirmation as to whether the baseline was correct that showed such an alarming decrease in collection. I believe it is but I will check that and get someone to contact you on that. I do think that there are lots of things that have been extended and it changes the gears. It's very hard to keep up with the business rate. On the capital tax, you may have seen in the paper on capital, we're trying to build in an incentive scheme there that the extension depends on the collection rate going up. I did also issue the caveat that the collection system can be quite or very tough on people when one unleashes it. So I just hope that suitable care will be taken. If it's any comfort, it's looking to ensure that the first contact gives things to things like debt advice and so on rather than – they've got to have a bit of a current on the stick straightaway. I agree with that. Just going back to the discussion you're going to have later, I'd be very interested to know, given that things are clearly getting worse and it isn't completely clear how trend data is taken into account in your thinking, what are we assuming about what happens in the balance of this year in terms of things getting better or worse and all of those cost savings being achieved in terms of the starting point for next year? We're going to have an extensive discussion, Councillor, under the out-turn report business planning reports about how we've got to this current situation, what the forecasting modelling suggests the situation will look like at the year end and how we're planning for it in the medium term. But what's important, I think, for the previous administration to recognise is that we are now taking a more realistic approach to forecasting and not as fictionalised as we discovered it was when we took office so that the future modelling is actually determinative of what the financial outlook looks like so we can be properly financially sustainable. We're not just making up figures to artificially make the books balance, that's going to be inherent to our approach. Councillor, I don't understand what you've said at all because at the budget time I produced a presentation identifying the areas of your budget that were fantasy, every single one of those has been proved to be true. We left you 100 million of reserves that you've squandered. So give me one example, please, of what you were meaning about the figures being not correct given that they were all signed off by council accounting officers. Are you saying the accounts are wrong? Do you want us to ask the district order to come in and inspect because you're saying officers got the accounts wrong? What we're saying is that the administration in the past were fully aware of the scale of the pressures that were needed in areas like adult social care, chose to ignore the true value in order to artificially make it look like you had the finances under control, you didn't. You had a business planning report in 2018 which forecast your reserves position dwindling down to 28 million. Had it not been for COVID relief grants and being bailed out by central government, the position we would have inherited would have been significantly worse than what it ended up being. So we're going to take no lessons from the previous administration on financial accountability or responsiveness because what we've discovered as we'll discuss later in this meeting has been truly harrowing. I just think this is complete nonsense. All you're doing is blaming the past for the future. No sense of responsibility. There are no petitions, there's no deputations and we have had no public questions. The next item on the agenda is item 8 which is referred to the executive. If we take this as a bunch, we've got the motions from Councillor Weisel on celebrating Barnet's access to community value, from Councillor Cornelius amended by Councillor Weisel about let's help Barnet leaseholders, from Councillor Anfatt on the lofted inspections and from Councillor Nigel Young on welcoming the 310 bus route. Are all cabinet members in agreement to note the referred motions and endorse the resolutions made at council at 15 October 2024 in relation to the four motions? Agreed? Okay. The next one is consideration which is page 19 to 22 which is the consideration report from the overview and scrutiny section. Now that has been a part of the referral to it. It comes from the review of capital contracts. Any questions or issues or so we move straight to the recommendations? All right. What we've got is comments were from the meeting on 28 October and will be considered together when we're looking at the related item in agenda 17. All right. We do that at item 17 when we look at the capital contracts. So we move on to item 10 which is the task and finish script. This is a referral from the adult and health overview and scrutiny subcommittee on GP access. Oh, sorry, I didn't see you there. Welcome. Thank you very much indeed. I'm Tracy scholars who have actually been amazing helping this task and finish group. And so I think you have a lot of information if we if you are there any other questions you can actually ask Tracy. And when we first started this off, we had an initial meeting with GP past and present, as well as we had people working with patient participation groups. We knew that people were patients. We didn't need to go and ask patients because I think we've all had issues where we know that patient access is a real issue. And I was really actually very happy to be chairing this. So the first thing that I'm just going to run because I need very busy. I'm just going to run very quickly through the factors that are actually affecting bond and GP access on it, as we all know, has a very large population, one of the largest in London with a very high number. Bless you of elderly people. There's also a very high number of care homes, which really does add to GP time, having to try to go visit elderly patients outside their hours. Patients are now living a lot longer. And that's something we really do have to recognize. They're not only living longer, but they're living with very complex problems. So they might have diabetes, but then they have heart conditions and they have many other problems. And this is something that in the past patients wouldn't have lived that long. GPs are wasting an awful lot of time when we went to visit because he's read the report. So we went to visit a number of GPs throughout the borough, each one of them having different issues. The one we went to visit in Graham Park, I think Tracy would agree, was actually heart wrenching because the GP put his head in his hands. And he said, I spent most of my time having to sort out sick notes, housing. There's a huge issue in GPs. I am not seeing patients. Therefore, I do not have the time to actually give patients the time I would like with actually real problems. And I do think that's something since the report was made, we actually do now know that I think the governments are going to try and look at that particular point. So the problems really, when we actually spoke to the GPs that we realised that a number of GPs after COVID have decided to retire. And that is a massive loss, particularly to Barnet, because they had huge experience. If they were retiring before 60 or just after 60, that's five years at least that we could have actually had them to actually help the junior doctors. Younger doctors are absolutely not picking this as a speciality. They're deciding to go into something whatever's more sexy, these wonderful specialities, but not general practice. When we spoke to receptionists, which we did, they had very, very low morale and it's very difficult for doctors to actually get good receptionists and they felt the job was very, very stressful. So GPs are finding it very difficult and I'm sure all of us have had issues when you go along and try because that's your frontline. If you have good receptionists, people that are engaged, it makes far easier to actually gain access to GPs. There's also since COVID been a very large increase, which we all know with mental health conditions and people with anxiety again taking up a lot of appointments which weren't originally going to be there. And finally, something they all felt was under funding. What are the things I think that we recommend? There are actually in the report on page number seven, you'll see the recommendations that we've made there for. But one of the things that I think is very, very important is that we better signpost. On our first meeting, someone came in with a really, really good flow diagram that says exactly how somebody, if they're not feeling well, go to your pharmacist. You don't need to go to your GP. Go along to see somebody else, maybe make an appointment with the physiotherapist at the general practitioner. You do not need to see your GP. And the other thing is that generally when you go, you don't with an appointment, your expectation. My parents used to talk about their panel doctor. I don't know what that actually was, but they had a relationship with a doctor. We're all going to have to their expectations. They will no longer be that you can go and see Dr. X because they won't be that relationship. And with that relationship came some very important things, because if you came in with a headache, they might know that unfortunately your father had died and your mother is being affected. They knew the family history. You are that is out the window. We have too few GPs. We are going to have to manage people's expectations. And I think that's probably one big thing. Go home message is that GP access will now be a problem because there are so few GPs. We are going to have to use, whether it's the pharmacist or whoever else in the practice where we have nurse practitioners or the new physician's assistant, which are very highly trained. And we're going to have to signpost to them often, which will actually be given better advice from the doctor. So I think if we can do that, I think that would be very important. I'm going to finish because I know you're very busy, but things like age concern, I think we can actually use them to try and teach elderly people how to access the GP. Because I don't know if any of you've done this, but I have recently to try and do an e-consult. I couldn't get anywhere because it didn't actually answer a very simple question I wanted. And then I had to phone the GP at eight in the morning. I then actually was put on hold. Then it went, there are 35 people in front of you. You will now be disconnected. And that's what happened. And how on earth are people going to access their GPs? We have to think very carefully about that. So I believe that you've got all the other things are actually in the report. Some other points. Thank you for that Councillor Stock and for the work involved. And the full recommendations, there are recommendations more for the ITB. So it's to do with our relationship with the ITB. Councillor Moore and then Councillor Clark. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Councillor Stock, on behalf of the Task and Finish Group for a very thorough, diligent and detailed report, which is really helpful. I mean, this is an area that's really important to local residents and rightly so. And you and I know from the work that I previously did with the health overview and scrutiny committee. To say we're aware of it sounds like it's pushing it away and trivialising it, recognising that it's a really important issue, but a really big one to tackle as well. Primary care is a fundamental part of our NHS and the past few years have been particularly challenging time for our GPs. And I think that's been particularly so in it because we have a wide range of smaller GP practices and we're not. We're a little different from some of our North Central London partners in that sense, and that gives them very particular challenges. And I think that is true. I think being able to access GPs in a timely fashion or your GP or your GP surgery, whether that's digital phone consultation, face to face or with practice nurses or other health professionals is really important. And I think there is that sense of having to move away, perhaps from the always seeing your one GP. That's a real culture change. But of course, they are really important conduits for treatment for referral, especially treatment. Actually, also for referral to all sorts of wider support through social and other prescribing. So I think it's something that we really need to get it right. And you're quite right to recognise that we are a population who are living longer, but with a range of issues. And that puts great pressure on our GPs. So some of the answers lie within GP contracts and hence the government. And funding is obviously something that will have come up, but also through the ICB. They started to do, as you know, a range of support through the Islington GP coalitions, training sessions and support and a range of other support going into GP practices. But I think your report just highlights a whole range of things in a very systematic way, which is really helpful. The recommendations, as the chair noted, are largely for the ICB, but actually we work really closely with the ICB. And I think they are their points for discussion and and working. But also, I guess, drawing on the strengths of the scrutiny committee going forward as well. So we will be preparing a report and we will come back to cabinet with that. But in the meantime, there's a lot that we can and will be doing. And hopefully you'll be part of that as we go forward, because drawing patients and patient groups in is really important. I notice you've got the poster and that's the patient consultant consultant group. Absolutely. And that was put together by the patient consultant group, who I'll be seeing in a couple of weeks time. And so working with them and thinking about how we can best support patients to recognise the amount of support that is there. Yes, for their GP, but right the way across a whole range of services. And I think the campaign that's currently running is it is promoting your health team. And I think that's the change that we will be pressing forward on. But thank you for the report and all the efforts you put into it. If it is true, and I believe it to be true, because it's said to me as well that a lot of GP time is spent doing this rather than seeing patients. I think I'm right in saying because Tracy was honestly like a diva going into all the calls. But I think I'm right in saying that the actual they are changing. They're trying to change the policy on sickness because it's it's also compromises the relationship with the patient and the doctor. And I think a lot of the GP went to see just so upset about that. It really that needs to change. I mean, maybe that could be one of the recommendations that we could actually come from that. Maybe we could write someone can write to somebody to encourage that to happen because it is it is using up so much time, which is stopping GP access. I can't stop. You're a long way away. So I'm finding it difficult to hear from the end of the room, but I just want to thank you as well for the report. I read it with interest. I have a question and I don't know whether you in your work, you came across this in your study. But when the health and well-being went and had one of its meetings at Barney Hospital and we had a tour around that particular time of day, I was being taken around by somebody from the A&E, one of the consultants on the A&E, and it was absolutely healing with people. And I said to him, my God, is this what it's like every day? And he says, yeah, but we will have it cleared by four o'clock. And the reason he said it was full was because. Most people came there because they wouldn't or couldn't get an appointment with their local GP or it took it would be a long time. So they knew they would get seen on that day. And I don't know whether you came across this in your study and whether you've got any kind of reflections on it. Thank you very much indeed. And one of the things that when I was chairman of Health and Well-Being Board is we actually looked at very closely was. People going into A&E. It's really terrible. I mean, if you go into Barnet Hospital any time of day, even be it at night, it is absolutely horrifying. How many of you have been to A&E recently? It is terrible. But actually they do have and it was brought in probably about five years ago, a triage system. So when you actually go in there and they do feel it should be referred to a GP, they don't go through the door into A&E. They actually aren't allowed in. So the majority of problems that actually are there are not. They will be stressed. They will be referred back into general practice. So they shouldn't be just there because they can't see their GP. I do believe that's my understanding. If there's no. A very welcome report. I mean, that's I know with Millbrook Park, which is one of my in my ward that they do all the time say they want a new GP. But actually, it was interesting when the estate was being built, the government, whoever it was, was making decisions, said they didn't need a GP. So that's why. Because one of the buildings was meant to be allocated to a general practice, whether you could or couldn't get the general practices. It wasn't the point. But I do think I mean, that's obviously nothing to do with this. But I really do think we need to make sure that we have GP's in on you wherever we think ahead, because it's it is very distressing for people and not to be able to access their GP. So thank you all very much indeed for your time. OK. If you could turn to the recommendations on page 24, which is no referral. Ask officers to prepare a report. Move on to item 11, which is the Grand Park North East All Business case. But can I remind people that there is an exempt part of this report. If you wish to go into the exempt report, let me know. Let us know first so we can clear up and press. Yeah, I mean, this has been in planning for many years. And basically, we're at a key stage where we're proposing to two point levels as our partner in the joint venture. And that's been a long process of tendering and analyzing the tenders. And we're confident that levels are the right choice to make to take this project, very important project forward. What it does is it carves out and the carving out itself has been a major piece of work because we've had to agree with the fact that, well, the Notting Hill Genesis terms. And actually, the exempt paper covers one of the items that's part of that carve out agreement. The the terms with with Notting Hill Genesis to, in effect, take the northeast of Grand Park out of the regeneration scheme that they're delivering for Barnet. And actually, they put Barnet Homes in the driving seat and take Barnet Homes in the council as the department is going forward to deliver that. I think it is right, and I've said this before, and I think that I don't think it's any controversial. I think I think kind of so Cornelius might agree with this point that actually had it had had there been different arrangements many years ago in relation to housing, a finance and housing revenue in particular, that actually our preference would have always been to have our own arm over Grand Park. That wasn't the way that housing finance was allowed to proceed before John Healy's office allowed that downsizing building to restart. So I think that's a, as I say, this does go back some time. We're now at this critical stage where actually, you know, we're basically, work will start next year if we agree this. That works to make the sites ready to start next year. There's been a lot of work with the existing residents, a lot of very good work. We're in a really good position in relation to the police holders and tenants. And it's just one of the important things to say is that all the residents here have the right to return. So what we are delivering is a mixed tenure, a development that's going to be funded out of the HRA, that's already in the HRA business, a budget. There's a small addition to that that's in this paper. And basically, you know, we're able to take forward a mixed tenure scheme, which will end up with 168 social rent homes. A lot of them, and this is one of the things that we've planned into this, being family homes, larger families that the real need for. We fit 46 shared ownership, 262 private sale. Private sale is one of the ways that we're funding this. Housing associations do this this way and we can make sure that the housing revenue account can bear this. So one of the very good pieces of news is that we've had a substantial amount of grant funding, say funding by the Mayor of London. That's a considerable sort of investment in Barnet's and investment in the project Go Ahead. And there is borrowing, which is done from the HRA. So I think, you know, this has been something that I think Council has been working on for quite some time. I think it's a very good scheme and I think it will help bring forward Graham Park. I think it's not, I think one of the, you know, Graham Park is at a stage as well where actually, I think, I think the, you know, the housing associations are finding it difficult to take things on. You know, the whole, across London housing associations are finding it difficult to take schemes forward just because of the pressures of funding. And that's the same sort of pressures that we've had, dampen the fire safety. This actually is a way of us taking this forward and making sure the North-East goes ahead as the next key, really important phase of the regeneration of Graham Park. I'm happy to answer questions, but I think it's fairly self-explanatory. And as I say, I think it's a really good news story for the boroughs, particularly for larger family homes. I don't know if there's anything that's... [Inaudible] Thank you, Lita. Just one very brief comment that I think is worth mentioning. Given the types of discussions we're going to have later in Cabinet about the scale of the financial problem that we face, I think it's to be celebrated that the administration is still finding ways to deliver on an ambitious agenda that meets the needs of local residents, in spite of the scale of the financial problems we face. So it is something to be applauded, I believe. [Inaudible] One of the key things is obviously that this is funded through the Housing and Revenue Act, which is separate from the main general fund of the council. It's actually going to help the general fund because, like I was going to be saying at this stage, there's a lot of work that's gone into getting us to this stage. And I think, you know, I'd like to thank the offices in both the council and in the bar like this. Any other questions or comments on the public report, Councillor Begg? [Inaudible] Are we happy to move on to the recommendations, which you can read yourselves on pages 72 and 73 because there's 16 of them. Are we happy to accept the recommendation for the three year plan for the next year? Thank you, leader. Yeah, this is the report on the local implementation plan for the next three years. It sets out the highway and transport improvements funding by TFL and no residents are keeping a very close eye on some of these. The stuff that's set out in here needs to reflect TFL's priorities for the transport network and indeed the mayor's transport strategy, particularly safer streets, including cycle training and cycle parking, which are very important. Just important to say these projects are separate to other improvements that are funded separately by the council. It's approved tonight, if Jane will be sending it to TFL, there's a bit of a toing and froing, but hopefully we'll receive final confirmation of funding in March and then the work will be able to start. We're expecting similar funding to last year, which is around £1.6 million and which comes to about over £4.5 million over a three year period. But in addition to allocated funding, there are a variety of discretionary funds, particularly on bus infrastructure, where we're putting a bid forward for North Finchley to improve the bus station there and other methods in the Finchley area. And also for the Safer Streets Fund, where we've got a number of bids for that part, which particularly includes a bid to implement 20 mile an hour zones. As you know, we're currently working on our policy of 20 mile an hour zones to make those easier to implement where they're needed and wanted by residents. And the bid that's in here, if it were successful, would be really helpful. So alongside the allocated funding, we've got our fingers crossed for those discretionary bids that we've put in. And just to say, I have asked officers to brief members on proposals that affect their ward so that everybody is clear about what's happening. I think finally, just to thank officers, particularly Jane, for all the work that's gone into putting the LIPS programme together, as well as Ian, Craig and Andrew, particularly on the bus side. And they've come along tonight to answer any difficult questions. Thank you. I think this is, you know, there's some tricky reports on the agenda tonight, but I think this is a good news story in terms of important, sometimes small projects, but that mean a lot to residents across the country. Most of them, I believe so. Yes, we're expecting feedback, sort of informal feedback from TfL in January. So I guess we'll have some sort of idea then with a revised, is an expression of interest at this stage, so that if borough is chosen as one of the three boroughs that they were looking to do, they will then ask for a worked up bid. That's the one already. I wanted to comment on the number of 150 in Childs Hill Ward. As a former council member in Childs Hill Ward, I know how many residents have contacted me repeatedly asking for 20 miles an hour. Just with my health and wellbeing hat on, just welcome the emphasis within the papers around air quality, but actually also around active travel and the ongoing work that happens in schools in terms of school travel plans and training, because I think it's really important with our young people. And you make a point within the papers about people having real choices about how they travel about and actually making sure that walking, cycling, using public transport is as easy as possible. I think we can agree with Highway Officers that we hope this is the only cold snap of the winter. The recommendations are on page 746, which is basically agreeing with the prioritization to be sent in. 13 is the Child Care and Sufficiency Assessment, Councillor Caulfield. Thank you. This is a report that obviously gets looked at every year. I believe Debra is online, if you have any questions on this. I would really like to thank officers for the trouble they take to actually really make sure that we have surveillance, good or outstanding. We'll also see that we have a lot of contact with the asylum hotels to make sure that the children are educated for in terms of care. And it would probably not be a surprise, because I know there's been a big advertising drive right across all media, that the only thing that is often difficult is to make sure that there is still enough people that want to work and stay within this type of work of looking after young children. I'm really pleased that we've got really good staff that make sure that what we need is looked at every year. We obviously get data from Ofsted, we get data from birth rates, we get data from all the different providers and we know and have a really good idea of what the situation is, of what we have to provide for. And of course, the various different types of timeline of change, which you can see on 275 and 276, as to what we're still working towards, because at the minute you've got the working parents for two year olds can access 15 hours. September this year, it's 15 hours extended to all working parents of children from the age of nine months, and then from September next year, it's working parents of children under the age of five will be entitled to 30 hours of childcare a week. But yes, we do a really good job, we do a really good job in making sure that we have enough provision. And we do a good job in making sure that things are inspected, and that everything is on track to make sure that we actually provide a really good service and a really good quality service in terms of early years sufficient. Any questions or comments? The only thing that struck me and it's a national thing is it's going to be more difficult early in the first few years, but Barnet College still do the training? We're working with Barnet College and Middlesex so we can, and we've got lots of, we've got apprenticeship schemes that we can sort of grow our own as well. Any questions or comments? Okay, the recommendations are on page 274 which is basically noting and agreeing, so noting the assessment and the plan. Are we happy to agree those recommendations? That's me to introduce if you like. Within it there's quite a lot of good news stories, but what I think it does show is our ability to remain ambitious, there's still a lot of delivery going on. And although obviously finance can tend to dominate all the people at Barnet, it's the services that have been prevented. I think there are a couple of things I wanted to point out, which is that when we look at our benchmarking on page 363, it is actually, I'll just bring it up. Compared with other authorities, on the whole we're doing a lot better. There are a couple of issues, but they tend to be around waste management and recycling that I'm sure we can look at in more detail. But at the moment we are better than a lot of authorities at delivery and we hope that continues. I don't know if people have got any comments about their own particular areas, but I think what this report as a whole shows there's a lot that we can be proud of. A lot of good work being done by officers across the Council to continue to deliver, to continue to think in terms of comments. Thank you. It wasn't really a question, just a comment. I thought it was worth highlighting some of the good news that's in there. I mean, there are particularly good statistics with regard to keeping residential roads clean, with regards to delivering community skips, which we know residents really appreciate and are well used. Also, with regards to picking up almost all flight tips within the agreed time, and work is ongoing there to do extra enforcement so that people who flight it are actually caught and fined, but in all cases the flight tipping is actually collected very promptly. On the environment side as well, there's various bits of good news in there, including applying for the decarbonisation program. There was a very successful repair cafe that was held in Edgware at the Skills Centre where people were able to come along and get things repaired. Also, just work highlighting the Community Energy Group, which is really exciting that Barnet now has a community energy group that's just recently been incorporated in the Community Benefits Society. So Barnet was a bit behind other boroughs in that, so it's great, and that was one of the groups that came out of the Citizens' Assembly, the energy group from that, and they've actually gone on and founded the group and have got some funding to do some initial feasibility studies. So that's another really good progress there on the sustainability side. Lida, you also just mentioned with regards to recycling, so it's just worth putting that in context. As you mentioned, when you compare our recycling rates and other figures with boroughs within the North London Waste Authority, where we're part of, they are broadly similar. The other thing we're working on is reintroduction of the food waste service, which is another thing that's eagerly anticipated by residents. And that will help to reduce contamination rates. One of the key contamination rates is food going in at the same time, so having a separate collection there will help with that as well. So just thought it was worth highlighting that. If you read through it, there's some really positive progress that's being made. Councillor Houston and Councillor Moore. Yeah, I mean, as well as Graham Park Northeast, which is the biggest council [inaudible] for decades. And I think that, you know, we've also taken the digital [inaudible] We touched earlier, LinkedIn, with the scrutiny report around primary care access. And one of the areas that's often of concern there is around digital access, and it was really pleasing to see the rising numbers of particularly older people. Though it doesn't say so in the report, I know that it is often older people who are undergoing the digital skills training, being offered either devices or vouchers for free or cheap access online. And that's enabling them to contact their GPs in different ways. Health and mental health and wellbeing are quite fundamental. There's a whole range of things that are cited in the report that are really valuable. There are regular 158 mental health and wellbeing events took place in libraries. Now that's about encouraging people to look at a whole range of other services that are available, either for mental health or general wellbeing. And that will support people to either after or before sometimes they go and approach their GP. We've got increasing numbers of people following the social prescribing route, and that may be everything from exercise programs through our partners better, but it can be a whole range of different things. We've got health champions taking mental health training, so there are people out there. We've got an increasing number of skills joining the Resilient Schools Network, so they're looking at how they build that resilience among their young people. And we have got a significant rise in the numbers of people within the eligible population of 40 to 74 being offered and taking up their NHS health checks. And the point about that is that allows us to identify those health needs ahead of time so that we can get the right preventative or early intervention programs into place. So it's money for the NHS, but it also allows people to live longer and happier lives and to live and weather those sorts of multiple health problems that many of our older people are encountering at the moment. So if we catch those earlier, people will live longer, healthier, more active lives. Thank you very much. I just wanted to thank the officers from Community Safety, Family Services and Community Participation that have been working on all these issues. Much better for residents. Thanks. I think it would take me too long to go, as you all know, in terms of people that have spoken at council and might say matters, the great strides that we've made in actually bringing young people on board and making sure that their views are listened to, on how they think of what council is. And if anyone looks at the youth assembly, they will know that they've actually passed a motion to want to know a lot more about how council finances and how the area that affects them actually works, which is something we will be continuing to work on. We in this report is that I'm really pleased to see what's being given out by the Minister for Education today in terms of extra funding and extra funding. Yes, I find interesting statements about the property here in Bona. Councillor Clark was next, then Councillor Baig. I just wanted to highlight the work, not just of officers, but of our community groups and really rising to the challenge of how we work best together and deliver more for the poor at the same time. Thank you, leader. I thought I would take the opportunity to share some of the positivity and optimism of my cabinet colleagues while I still had the chance. It's an often overlooked element of a council's delivery system as to what you are able to do given your resources and the financial envelope available to you. So having a financially responsible workstream that isn't as much concerned with what are we no longer able to do, but is more interested in what can we do now under the current landscape of local government finance and how do we meet our very ambitious agenda given the current state of the finances. It's something that is inherent within the way we're approaching the remainder of our administrative term. And I think that there's a lot to be proud of given that. Out of London shares very similar concerns and pressures to us, and yet, as you've mentioned in your introduction, we are proceeding in a way that's far more successful and laudable than some of our colleagues on the outer ring of London. Thank you. Any other? Shall we move straight to the recommendation which is really simply to note the contents of the report. Are we happy to do that? Then we move on to item 15, which is the three financial officers report, which includes the 4/24/25, the quarter to financial forecast and the 24/25 budget management. Thank you, Lita. So I thought I'd give some preliminary remarks to introduce the report before we delve into some of the detail relating to it. Before I start, may I just give a sincere statement of gratitude and thanks to finance officers and Kevin Bartle, the interim section 151 officer for the extent of the work in budget monitoring this year. I think it's been an extraordinary effort on the part of the entire team and executive directors across the organization. I think everyone has accepted, realized the scale of the challenge we face and have acted appropriately, which I am extremely grateful. Budget monitoring by its nature is a cumulative and progressive edifice. You don't just ignore what's going on and then look at it again periodically. You have to monitor it over a period of time because you have to understand the trends as they're emerging, where you came from, and more importantly, where you're intending to go. We approach finances over a medium term. We look at them in blocks and cycles. The in-year process is a more detailed look at a moment in time, but it's always within the context of how we are going to manage the organization in the long term. Which is why when you read the report, the very, very first thing that you will see is a contextual understanding of the environment we are in, in which the forecasting is taking place. The financial pressures in particular that are emergent and being understood in greater detail. It could be seen as excusatory in a certain sense, but it is more explanatory of the different types of pressure that the organization has to deal with. There are those that are proactively dealt with because they are within the organization's control and ability to respond to. And there are those that are externally shock factors to which we have to be more responsive. Now, the resilience of the organization as it was given to us by the previous administration to deal with external shocks is something we should reflect on as an administration. And it is something that I will discuss in the business planning report which succeeds this. But what's important to understand is that some of the areas of pressure that we have encountered are obligations and necessities that we have to deal with as an organization to which we are legally bound to respond. And we are doing so in an appropriate manner because we are an organization that takes our responsibilities and commitments seriously. If we turn to the financial out-turn report, it isn't a prospect that we are taking. At the current state of affairs, we are projecting close to a 25 million pound overspend against the budget that we set in February of this year, which is 389 million pounds. If we turn to paragraph two, section two of the report, it will be apparent where the preponderance of that overspend has arisen in. The growth and resources directorates are reporting a combination of the temporary accommodation pressure, so partly the housing subsidy gap that we face and partly the actual cost of emergency nightly paid accommodation, which has escalated beyond any historically-precedented limits for a combination of reasons, the inflation and interest rates being almost amongst them. And the story with adult social care continues to be more acutely felt in Barnet, not only because of the number of service users we have, but the complexity of social care needs of those users in the London Bar of Barnet. The other element of dealing with the financial climate, so we don't just focus solely on the revenue accounts, is capital programs. We have been very serious in making sure that our capital program is deliverable and that we look through it with a fine level of detail to eliminate anything that could be considered access to requirements or beyond our ability to fund via the various forms of funding and financing that capital works are able to be funded. So I mentioned earlier in response to Councillor Zinkin that 69.5 million pounds of capital program has been reallocated or earmarked for formation. This is a serious figure. It is an indication of just how much work has gone in behind the scenes into looking at our capital program with fine levels of detail and being honest with ourselves as to what we are able to afford, given the cost of borrowing now and the fact that any additional borrowing that we do take on will have us at a more greatly negative position than we already are when we come to budget setting in February. I think that there is an element which we have to talk about the local and national management of the finances that has led to this particular situation. Naturally, the incredible financial shock that we faced in the autumn of 2022 immediately upon taking over the administration, the LISG Trust fiscal event, as it's come to be known, has had long lasting implications and substantial damage to the national local economy, which is not recoverable in a short period of time, and it is something that has devastated the vast majority of outer London. We find, for instance, that Croydon are facing very similar levels of overspend despite 38 million pounds of capitalization that they've been able to do due to their resort to extraordinary financial support. Havering and Hillington face very similar levels of overspend. Also, it is a concern for the entire local government sector as a consequence of national mismanagement. But locally, we have seen that there are unfunded commitments that we have inherited to which we are now bound, and we have to find a way to provide for them, which is having this impact on our ability to provide good quality service. Yet we're doing it. We're still finding ways, as the previous report indicated, to be a well-run, well-managed, and financially responsible organization, in spite of the fact that we've uncovered a lot of financial mismanagement, which I will give more detail in the subsequent report. I suppose that will be the end of the summary of the out-turn forecasts, just to say that it is currently being monitored. It isn't something that we're going to now set aside because we have next year's budget to deal with. That isn't at all the way we are approaching this. It will still be something that we attempt to remedy and find mitigations for. But in the truth and the reality is that our position within the financial year is now considerably late, and we are running out of opportunity and time to intervene in a way that's going to make a substantial dent in that forecast overspend. There are some positives from the recent budget, the right to buy receipts being able to be retained 100 percent, and looking towards a five-year, potentially ten-year rent settlement that is not fully funded. It's a statutory provision of service to the Council, but we don't get funded by the Government. Basically, we've never had the comment that was made to be one of the officers. I just wanted to say a few words really about adult social care, because obviously it came up in the Council, this presentation, and it's the context really. So in Barnet today we have over 56,000 people over the age of 65. But that doesn't really tell you the true story, because when the National Health Service was set up in 1947, the average age and life expectancy was only about 67 anyway, or 68. Now today, of course, there are some people in this room who are well over the age of 65 and living very, very healthily, and are likely to live well beyond the expectation that was after the Second World War. And the older people get, and it's more likely that they are going to need some support. And that figure is growing, and what I've been informed by officers is that I think it's 27 out of the 32 London boroughs are all struggling to meet the demands on adult social care and within the budget constraints that they have. So it's not just unique to Barnet, but because Barnet has a particularly growing elderly population, there are even bigger pressures facing those here. For example, what we do know is that there's been over a 14 percent increase in the number of people that we are supporting in 2020, and that figure is going to continue to grow, and that 14 percent increase is equivalent to about 1.1 million pounds a week. And at the moment, I can't see how that figure is going to go down in any significant degree. So we wait in hope that the 600 million pounds announced in the budget is going to give us some help and some respite. But it's important for people to realize that that 600 million pounds is for children and adults here. So it isn't going to be the panacea that some people might think it is. So that pressure is going to continue for some time as the population continues to get older. Someone who is 65 was born in the 1950s, and there are people who remember the Second World War. And so I just see that figure getting bigger and bigger as the baby boomers start to become into the late '60s, '70s, and '80s. So I want to try and be positive, but I'm just saying that those challenges and those pressures aren't going to go away any time soon. In other words, it's a good thing that people are living longer, but they're not necessarily living healthier lives for longer. And of course, there's more people with disabilities and learning difficulties who are living longer. So there is pressure there that all councils are fit. And I suppose part of the move to optimism is that we seem to now have a government that recognizes those, rather than a government who started off talking about austerity and finding the bell, but then became a straitjacket that then hollowed out and left anemic council to try and run under greater pressure. Anyway, anybody else want to ask any questions or any comments on this report? I knew it was going to be your council, Bec. I just predicted it. So I just want to ask a question of three months that didn't seem to come up with anything that would contain spending. I don't know if, Councillor Nack, do you want to talk a bit about our monitoring? So Councillor Begg will recall that when we began the budget monitoring cycle for this particular year in schedule, it was published as part of the very first budget monitoring, business monitoring report that explained how we would deal with it. We've actually added significant additional financial controls and oversight meetings since then. It's been a quite extensive process of understanding how particular departments spend their money, how cash flow progresses through the organisation, understanding forecast modelling on an individual director basis, looking at how that modelling can be used more proactively for the medium-term financial strategy, as well as for in-year expenditure and understanding how we can be much more accurate with our medium and long-term estimations of need that the organisation has, particularly in adult social care, which naturally is one of our most important obligations. So it's been a serious matter of focus for us. But there was actually one element that I forgot to mention in my introductory remarks, which I suspect Section 151 officers will be able to overlook without express mention, which is our reserves position. So the report does require and invite cabinet colleagues to consider in-year adjustments of our reserves and consequences of an overspend to them. And of course, it is stark. It is naturally something that we have been alerted to as a matter of risk for the local authority by our externals and auditors. And we don't underestimate just what that means and entails for future budget setting. The budget monitoring process has been as intense as it has been because the fact that we are so keenly aware of consequence on the reserves position. I'll have more to say about reserves in particular on business planning, but just for the purposes of the out-of-turn report. I'll make a brief comment, if I may, thank you for the opportunity. I'll just say this one thing very quickly that Councillor Begg talked about monitoring, and I think Councillor Knack really adequately responded to that point. But I think I would want cabinet members to sort of turn their attention to budget management. So monitoring monitors what's going on and reports and makes that transparent to us. But what the organisation needs to do is manage their budgets within the constraints of approved and approved budgets that have been allocated to them, which is our challenge. And of course, Councillor Edwards mentioned how difficult that is, but I think that's one comment I want to make. And I also concur with Councillor Neck for his point about reserves. And I know we'll talk a little bit more about that one when we get to when we get to that item. Thank you. Just your specific question about what offices are doing to control their spend. We have introduced restrictions on non-essential spend and on vacancies and extension of agency staff and fixed-term contracts. So we're getting in things like children's homes where we know that going, as it's been in the news today, and as other people mentioned, we know that going into the private sector is very expensive, so can we provide in-house? And we've also heard, obviously, about lots of council housing being delivered to tackle our temporary accommodation. So just to reassure you from an opposite perspective that there are lots of workstreams in place to make sure we provide that. The finance budget is a statutory duty, as well as providing services to people of all those sectors. Anyway, I'll just do the approval, so it's a positive move that to approve the changes to the existing capital programme in relation to addition set out in Section 6, and the environments as detailed in Section 5.2. So do we approve that and note the whole report? Agreed. Thank you. So we move on to item 16, which is business planning and medium-term financial strategy. And I think we're back with Councillor Nakbe. Thank you, leader. This is an exceedingly important and incredibly important moment, I think, for the administration to grasp and grapple with. So when I referred earlier to being realistic and genuinely in grip of the requirements we have in the medium-term in terms of the scale of service delivery, the requirement of resource to properly fund them, this is what is encapsulated within the report. So we have come together with particular scenarios for what the medium-term may look like and made certain assumptions that inform the calculations that go into providing figures toward those. We'll find in paragraph 3.6 precisely what those assumptions are and how those scenarios therefore come together. And we have chosen Scenario B as our base case assumption for what the medium-term would look like and the consequential potential overspends that we would face based on the medium-term financial strategy as it currently exists. So whilst cabinet colleagues and anyone else is ruminating upon the implications of that, I thought that I would speak to why it has emerged to be so important for us to undertake an exercise of this nature. When we came into administration, it first became apparent to us that to a certain extent there was a lack of acceptance of the scale of resource required to provide for the services that the local authority needed to give by the previous administration. In adult social care, for instance, it may well have been accepted that the need outstripped the amounts that they were allocating to it, that there was a general ignorance to that fact and would subsequently, if an overspend arose, meet that overspend with whatever adjustments needed to be made to the medium-term financial strategy. That is not a financially sustainable way of approaching any organization's expenditure, let alone one that deals with services as serious and impactful to one's life as the local authority does. Our entire approach to financial management, therefore, has now become much more realistic. Forecasting we're using, the resource allocation to directorates, and the seriousness with which we take potential overspends is completely transformed. And I think that if this report is read through with that subtext in mind, it will be properly understood. I mentioned the reserves position in the out-term forecast previously. There's one very important thing to understand about the reserves that we inherited prior to coming into office that the previous administration lauds as adequate. There's a degree of misdirection. It's almost a fiscal fiction with which they have been presented. Those overspends don't exist in the same way as they would had the types of decision-making the previous administration entered into not taken place. I'm referring to internal borrowing to provide funding for the capital program. I'm talking about making financial commitments to projects in the short-term and in the medium-term financial strategy while expecting receipts that cover that funding to come in the latter end of the program. And had it not been for COVID relief grants in the middle of that 2018 to 2022 administrative cycle, the reserves position would be in no way as healthy as it was when we took power. It's very important to understand that reserves are rainy day funds. They are single use. They are to be used in extraordinary and extreme circumstances. Such circumstances arose in the immediate aftermath of Liz Truss's bundling of the national budget. However, when we went to make use of that emergency fund, what we found was as soon as we removed money from it, the next budget setting cycle would have an immediate negative position that we had to contend with because of the debt financing obligation that we would incur by externalizing the debt, the money that the conservatives had already spent. That is not a real reserve. That is not an actual rainy day fund. That isn't realistically managing your finances for the future. It was short-termism. It was inappropriate. And it is something we are attempting to rectify. I'll leave it there and allow colleagues to feed in as they will. Absolutely, Councillor Houston. What I've outlined is actually the reason why the entire capital program has had to go extensive revision and a prudent analysis of what is affordable. Colleagues will know that you can only fund capital projects by either capital receipts, grants or borrowing. And because of the debt obligation we would incur if we did take on extensive borrowing, we've had to be very, very careful about how many capital commitments we enter into currently at a time of extraordinary unprecedented interest rates that would then have a consequence on a revenue budget and on essential services that residents count on on a daily basis. So, yes, absolutely. I don't know if we've got a figure. But given that we've now realized that when projects that should have been funded, if it had been done into what we consider the correct way and had been done at a low interest rate, do we have any idea of higher interest rates? I don't know if that has been worked out or not, but that seems to be one of the main causes for money taken the different way. Prior to inviting officers to give a more detailed speculation, I suggest rather than an actual answer to it, I would say that there's an extent to which not capturing the upside of low interest rates has had a significant impact on service delivery right now in our current financial environment. So it is clear that there has been an impact. Whether that can be quantified is a difficult question to answer, and I suspect that the true revenue implications of internal borrowing are not quite as easily calculable as perhaps the qualitative knowledge that they existed. So I don't know if that was helpful at all to officers before they contribute. So if I may then, leader, the point I was going to make is similar to Councillor Nakbez. It would be speculation to an extent. Hindsight is the perfect science. We would have to know right now what the appropriate date was that we would have actually gone and done some of that external borrowing. You could work out a few scenarios and give a view, but it would be speculation and sort of, as I say, hindsight being the perfect science in that regard. And if you wanted something done on it, we could look at a range of options and where we could see what might have happened if we'd have done option A or what might have happened if we'd have done option B. But I think what's very important for Cabinet to understand when they raise that sort of question is that, of course, at the time we encountered or got on with that internal borrowing, there was an upside in the organisation that would have required to have been captured to help us now. So that's another part of this jigsaw that needs explaining more fully. But I think I think Councillor Nakbe really hit the nail on the head with his answer on this point. Thank you. I was just going to ask Councillor Nakbe, you talked about generally about how much more monitoring and scrutiny is now going on. To what extent would you say that previous outsourcing of lots of services, including finance, to Capita has contributed to that lack of oversight taking place? I suspect the leader would want to answer a little bit about the consequences of the efficacy of monitoring when we outsourced Capita. Naturally, the impact of monitoring relates more to the fact that the administration decided to take a back seat and fell asleep because they thought that it was being done for them rather than taking a proactive role. But the point that the leader constantly makes about the fact Capita has an overriding obligation to shareholders rather than the residents of Barnet is something that's really important to keep in mind here. The reason why certain advice was given previously was not because it was in the best interests of the residents of Barnet or even the organisation as it transpired, but because of the implications it had for Capita, the for-profit organisation, which is something I think no one should ever get when we discuss this matter. A few things arise in fact. One is the decision to outsource Capita wasn't just the financial department, it was also the strategic oversight of it, so it was a case that they often marked their own homework and gave themselves gold stars. Now we look back, perhaps it wasn't quite as good as that, but also the responsibility was the administration's at the time. One way of looking at it is the Conservative administration knew what was going to happen. They produced the forecast that said we'd run out of money in '23/'24. It was known as a graph of that, but what it was knowing, having done that, what did they do about it? And what they did, as Councillor Knack said, is, Oh, this is too difficult for us. We'll let a private company run it, providing that there's no sort of bumps on the road and not plenty of bumps on the road, but providing there's no bumps on the road, that's all we have to do. I mean there was a dereliction of nothing about it. I was going to say Sweet FA, but I think I'm going to have to. So they did very little about it and so on. And I'm not necessarily blaming CAPTA as an organisation, but it was more of that handing over everything and thinking that that would work. Now doing it at the same time as a national government, sometimes you need to cut your cloth. So what was, I'll say it again, what was a belt type? It became a straitjacket and councils became anemic and therefore unnecessary. There was going to be some inflation, there was going to be some increase in interest. But the cost of that and the fact that in order to... There was a lot of things that were hidden. The promises made on CAPTA, we're overspending on our CAPTA program because of promises years ago, certainly 20 years ago, without the money being put aside. So it would be like those reserves were a fiction that came through. I'm not saying they weren't there, but they had already been forward planned to be used up and that wasn't given sufficiently. But anyway, we'll deal with it, we are dealing with it. There's increased financial monies. We are going to have to make savings and that's fine because we have to put it ourselves what we were elected to do. Anyway, I saw some hands up as soon as I started talking, which was probably asking me not to talk a bit less. I'll move from the right across, so we'll have Councillor Moore, Councillor Clark, Councillor Houston. Thank you Chair. You talked about monitoring and knowing what was there but not doing anything about it. Do you think that the committee system, which basically split all of the reporting around committees up into silos, didn't enable the transparency that was necessary in some of that budget monitoring and understanding exactly what was going on under the hood of the bonnet? Because it feels to me like it could be a vehicle for smoke and mirrors if you are talking in different committees about part of the picture. And I suppose the corollary to that is do you think the cabinet system has enabled us to bring a much sharper focus on those problems? I'll just say yes to that. I don't think I'll presume you came to knock me. I think there's two points to make about the change of governance arrangement. So the fact that the cabinet system allows us to be far more collegiate and cooperative with working and therefore need of service delivery and made the delivery of policies far more holistic is important. But as we've now discovered, it also meant that we are much more aware of one another in this area, the way in which cash flow precipitates across the organisation. And it is part of the financially responsible transformation agenda that we are looking at the organisation in a cross-cutting manner and to understand that there are intersections and codependencies across the entire network that ought not to be overlooked when you consider obligations. It's been incredibly useful, I think, as the governance change, to not just understand how we've got here, but more importantly with respect to this report, how do we improve the mission really. And all of us have been going through a lot of detailed budgets in our own areas as cabinet members and it was quite hard sometimes to get to understand that because that's been improved this year. Basically the company was delivering to a contract without any motivation to actually reimagine the services and potentially think about the pressures that we have now or are leading up, you know, after Covid and everything else, but not the pressures that were placed 10 years ago. And, you know, that's the trouble when you don't have, when you've got outsourced services on a contract, as I very rarely quote Councillor Coleman, but that was one of the criticisms that he had of the outsourcing. And I do remember him saying this, and Councillor Moore will remember that comment because we talked about it at the time, that actually what you're doing is limiting the ability of the administration to find savings if, for example, the financial situation occurs. That might be the first and last time I quote Councillor Coleman at the cabinet meeting, but there we are. I just wanted to make some closing remarks because obviously this report is a prelude to budget setting. It is a context under which we are going to enter into a budget setting cycle, which will begin the referred to overview and scrutiny in the latter part of December prior to the provisional local government settlement, which we are expecting on the 19th of December at the latest. So naturally, the scale of the problem is an important piece of context when you're entering into budget setting, and it will form part of the report that we bring to cabinet in December. And we'll need to accept that reality, the baseline scenario that we've highlighted in this business planning report as the context within which we're entering into budget setting. Prior to the six-week consultation that we'll enter into after the December cabinet meeting, we will lay out our plan for how to deal with it, taking into account the savings assumptions that already exist in the MTFS. If the savings are not realized, they become pressures in subsequent years. We're not going to ignore the fact that the savings were assumed and not realized. It is a recognition that we have those as previously agreed within the MTFS when we came to it in the past. The timetable for this entire process is in paragraph 3.41. I'll move to the recommendations that are on page 434 and 435. If you look at them, there's a couple of amendments, which is on both recommendation 4 and 5 to strike out the word injury because the 151 officer does exist. Given that, are we happy to agree those recommendations on the business planning report? We move on to item 17, which is the review of capital contracts. On that, we have got the overview and scrutiny referral earlier. I'll be very brief if there's anything the officers want to add in addition to what's already written in the summary. This report was obviously brought to overview and scrutiny prior to cabinet. The explanation for why an extension to the contracts are needed is written here. The IT contract in particular is of critical importance to extend because it does go beyond the period of the local government elections. Disruptions to the IT system during that particular period would be particularly inconvenient for both political parties, I would assume. In terms of the committee's requests or representations, there is an attachment to that particular item that provides context and detail as to business rates performance. In relation to the other matter about an informed cross-party reference group, I assume that's a question for governance and shouldn't necessarily be initially subject to what legal has to say on the matter. Is there anything else the officer wants to explain about the contract extensions? [inaudible] Are there any other questions on the main report, the review and the business track? The Council tax support scheme was assessed by a third-party consultancy company called Visionary Network. A report by them is appended to the report itself and they were asked to put together an options appraisal to assess how we could best change the current arrangements. The various options that they proposed are summarized in the report but in brief, the one that is suggested to be the most beneficial for future purposes takes our current arrangement, reduces the number of income bands from seven to five, reduces the discounts by about 2% on each of the relevant brackets and caps the maximum discount available to that of a band C property. Naturally, all of this is still subject to a seven-week consultation and it will be properly assessed based on qualities and implications as well. But the necessity and need for a review of the Council tax support arrangements is explained in the very, very first paragraph which does relay the very challenging financial position. [inaudible] It is for ratification by full Council. There is a full Council mandate required for it and that will happen at the Budget Council in February 2025. [inaudible] Thank you, leader. That is unfair to leave the most exciting reports to the end of the meeting when some people may not have been able to wait through the whole meeting. So this fairly straightforward report is just recommending the decommissioning of the current pay and display machines that we have in the borough of which there are currently 59. And the main rationale for that is that they have been in for 10 years and do regularly develop faults and the cost of replacing them, which is likely to be necessary within the next two years, would be half a million pounds and that is, in addition to currently 86,000 pounds a year, is what they are likely to cost maintenance costs. And as we've seen in the financial reports earlier, that's not really something that is affordable, which is why the recommendation here is to withdraw those machines. And alongside that, this would see the withdrawal of the scratch card balances, which are sent out by post, but for which there are very few, very, very few customers. I think it's just important to say, so obviously the vast majority of people do pay by phone for their parking, but it's important to say that a quality impact settlement has been carried out and there is an alternative to paying by phone for people who don't wish to or aren't able to. And that's by paying by pay point in newsagents and other stores, and in those stores you can actually pay by cash as well as card if you so wanted to. I think it's important to say the vast majority of people do pay by phone, but there is an alternative which is being maintained for those that are not able to, as I say, or aren't able to. And I think it's important to say that a quality impact settlement has been carried out and there is an alternative which is being maintained for those that are not able to pay by phone. Any questions? Councillor Conway. I think just a really quick comment. I'm really pleased to be able to. Councillor Moore. I remember some time ago when we were talking about bringing in, when pay by phone was first coming in, and we had challenges from some older residents who were finding difficulties. One of the problems was that they struggled to hear if they were doing it on the phone. Obviously they have an opportunity to use the app to do that and to do it through that route. So when you're talking to HUK, I would respectfully suggest emphasising that element for some of those older residents where they might struggle to hear the telephone on a busy high street. But with age, it takes a lot more difficult to maintain, just as a general rule of life, not just for pay and display machines. We got the recommendations on page 617 and 618. Thank you. We then move on to the short breaks funding methods change which is Councillor Coakley Webb. I suppose it's not a surprise that the conversation does give a difference for those who are used to having this short break provided and those who have greater free money. Anyway, we'll see what comes back. Well, we're happy with the recommendations as laid out in the report. Thank you. Can I ask you the enforcement and prosecution policy in detail, the update to Appendix J? Yeah, to answer any questions, it's basically to update our policy to take account of upper tier tribunal rulings, which have clarified, in effect, how this regime will work, pulling the issues, penalties, basically to people. So it's to provide that clarity in line with the law. It does something else also, it gives future legal changes. Separate paper, it would be an addendum. Right, so it becomes item 22, which may need some explanation to me, I'll just say that. Which is the open door home tax position update where it was accepted as an urgent item and the chair of the scrutiny has been waived. But okay, yeah, if you want to introduce it. Yeah, it's kind of complicated on the next paper, but it's basically to bottom line, this is to give us comfort in terms of maintaining the program of buying a street property that's been in place for some time and this is to allow us to continue that this year and into next year. In fact, Adam can correct me if I've said anything. But basically it's a kind of technical report that aspects of finance, the subsidy regime, loans, housing legislation, everything else that goes into carrying out this program. And the bottom line is, you know, this will allow us to continue the program this year and buy homes that are to go. That's why the urgency. Part of it seems to be to ensure that we carry on. More people have had an exciting evening. Now on the recommendation, I will read them out because it's an urgent item and people may not have looked at, you know, some of them to ensure that we do know the recommendations. Here we go. On that cabinet note, for the avoidance of doubt in relation to decisions taken under the Open Door Homes acquisition item on the 6th of February 2024, only 87.5 million have been borrowed today by ODH through the ODH 500 loan facility. The company agrees the existing loan facility is now resumed and that the related loan facility agreement dated the 27th of April 2020 may be utilised in relation to the approved capital programs for ODH acquisitions. That cabinet note in relation to the new ODH acquisition program for 300 homes, that the 31.5 million council contribution as defined in the 6th of February 2024 cabinet report will now, according to the subsidy control act 2022, be grant funding to ODH for the purpose of delivering additional affordable homes and that such grants comprise allocated third party grant funding for affordable homes and allocated capital receipts such as the right to buy receipts. Cabinet note the award of 11.337 million of grant funding by MHCLD to date and agrees that any external grant funding secured for this program may be transferred to ODH on such terms as specified by the grant funder. That cabinet agrees, subject to compliance with the subsidy control act 2022, for allocated capital receipts to be transferred to ODH where this is the purpose of the council's contribution to the ODH acquisitions program. That cabinet agrees to lend treatment into ODH at the agreed commercial rate of 6.15% for a term of 12 months under the terms of the original loan facility agreement. It delegates authority to the executive director for the booth in consultation with the chief finance officer, the second one by one officer, and the cabinet member for homes and regenerates any further interim lending that may be required under the terms of the existing loan facility agreement, providing it is within the remaining financial envelope of allocated capital receipts defined as the council's contribution to the program after accounting for recommendation six, which is named at the 16.193 million. The cabinet notes the existing ODH 100 loan facility which commenced on the 27th of April 2020 has been extended previously and further authorizes the loan facility to be extended through until the date of expiry being the 26th of April 2025. That company instruct the interim chief executive to ensure that good governance continues to be in place in respect of the existing loan facility and for the proposed new loan facility that have been improved. To ensure that the 2021 prudential and treasury management codes are implemented in full and the council continues to adhere to its capital strategy in respect to both ODH 300 and ODH 500 loan facilities. Now, the cabinet recommends that at the next meeting of the overview and scrutiny committee on the 12th of December 2024 the committee considers adding the NPH acquisition programs to the board plan of work for overview and scrutiny committee in 2025/26. I'm sure we're all very familiar with the sit for 2021 prudential and treasury management codes and given that, can we agree the recommendations? Thank you. It would be remiss for me to also mention that actually we do get GLE substitute funds. I am very grateful for that. We have the cabinet force planned with the E-decision schedule. We're happy with that, that we will keep cabinet meetings full and exciting for the foreseeable future. Can we just note the exempt report rather than open it up and talk about it? Are we happy to note the exempt report from Grand Park Northpiece? Yes. Now you're going to be disappointed, but I will end the meeting. All right. Thank you, everybody, for your patience.

• Goodnight, all. [BLANK_AUDIO]

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