Transcript

Transcript

Good morning everybody and welcome to this meeting of the Giri area committee. Please note that the public section of the meeting is being live streamed and will be recorded and published online for public viewing after the meeting. Councillors should only use their microphones when invited to speak and should remain muted at all other times. Members should use their video for the whole meeting if their connection allows. If members wish to speak on any point, please use the hands up function in the Teams meeting and I will bring you in at an appropriate time. Please do not come in during items unless you are invited to do so. I also confirm that Councillors have been able to access the presentation provided by the committee officer on the website. Thank you, so we will move first to take in the second, Alison please. Thank you chair. Councillor Ewinsen. Present. Councillor Bailey. Present. Councillor Gifford. Present. Councillor Grant. Present. Councillor Georgie. Present. Councillor Keating. Present. Councillor Launchy. Yes, present. Councillor Mason. Present. Councillor Michael. I have apologies from Councillor Miller. Councillor Payne. Present. Councillor Reid. Present. Councillor Smith. Present. Councillor Walker. Present. And Councillor White. Present. Chair we have Anne Overton area manager with Jill Joss senior solicitor in the meeting and Helen Atkinson will be the one that's presenting the planning application. Okay thank you Alison. Move on to declaration of members interests. Councillor please use the hands up function to indicate if you wish to intimate an interest or provide a transparency statement. No indications. Item 28 on the agenda is our policy statement so in line with the council's legal duty under section 149 of the policy act 2010. In making decisions it shall have due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimization, advance equality of opportunity between those who share a protected characteristic and persons who do not share it and foster good relations between those who share a protected characteristic and persons who do not share it and we are integrating impact assessment that's provided consider its contents and take these into account for reaching a decision. Can I ask the committee to agree? Thank you. Agreed. To be looking at exempt items today it's proposed to take item 11 in private. Is that agreed? Thank you. We move on to item three which is the minute of the last meeting. I did just have one small amendment that I noticed just in the page seven paragraph two it was in relation to the master plan and the obligations to provide a crossing because it says an alternative location for the crossing currently shown on Burghamier Drive. I would suggest that the wording should just be potential for a crossing on Burghamier Drive and then a paragraph four as well take out the movement of and just leave it as the crossing over Burghamier Drive because I think that was unless comes a little key thing because we did wonder if that's where that might have come from. Yeah it was actually more general than that I think it was just an additional crossing to enhance road safety because we may need it somewhere else given we'd say it's been all the way to school so it was just to say we want a deal for a improvement in safety somewhere between that new development and thank you for taking that up because I didn't touch that. So do we want to agree the wording of just an additional crossing and take out the Burghamier Drive better so there's an additional crossing okay is that agreed? I'm sorry. Okay thank you. Councillor Walker. Thank you very much I'm not questioning the accuracy and I'm hoping this you'll allow me to raise this point just now it's on item six the roads program of work. We requested that officers give consideration to the inclusion of works that would end ditch. I'm just wondering if we could move that across to the outstanding business template or how are we going to follow up that because it's a really important issue a really important safety issue for local residents. Thank you. I think we could do that yes yeah okay we've got a note of that yes chair have okay all right thank you so with those amendments in that addition I'll be happy to give you the minute okay moving on then to the statement of outstanding business and that over to Alison taking that today. Yes thank you chair I have got some good news I think that we have finally got to the end or a conclusion with SIPA regarding Littlewood Court. We are now in a position we've got agreement moving forward so that we can close this piece of work down and have no further impact on the facility or its operations so I'm proposing that one for discharge. I know that there was a request from a councillor at the last meeting to provide the options appraisal that was provided to the local members chair and vice chair following the meeting so hopefully that's dealt with that and I would seek discharge for item one. There's no update on item three obviously you've just agreed to add a further item on which I will get done for the next meeting. In terms of item two I think Anne might have an update a verbal update on the situation regarding item two just very quickly chair. Okay thank you Anne. Thank you chair thank you Alison yeah we we've now got a slot on the Business Services Committee for the September meeting to take this board to ask for consideration of the member officer working with recommendation about moving forward with the policy. So it's about timing so we've got a fun consultation with the provost who's a chair of the MALG and this was that this was agreed and also took to the pre-meeting for business services and was agreed there as well so and I will bring back the update to it won't be the next meeting at the Business Services meeting but following that I'll give you an update because you're subject to business services agreeing and the member officer with recommendation about and the development of the policy we're back at area committee too so quite a lot's going on there but it's all a big timetable. Okay thank you so that'll be way into August probably there's the services called Thursday yeah we're not going to make the changes yeah okay thank you anybody happy with that and it's good to see that we would go at this finally going to be coming off our list of outstanding business and a lot of work gone on there to reassure people. So we now move along to our first of our director's reports today we have an report from business services it's the performance indicator report for near-end progress April 2023 to March 2024 and I think we have the director Rob Simpson with us online welcome Rob I'll hand over to you to present your report. Thank you chair good morning members and yes this is the year end performance for 23-24 for business services in support of the council plan. 16 indicators showing within the papers of which five are green, two are amber, two are red and seven are data only which mainly relates to benefit and grant claims and payments so very much demand-led areas and turning to pages 23 and 24 of your papers you will see the indicators that are showing as red both relate to areas of customer services so average call wait times and call abandonment rates so both proving stubbornly hard to resolve we've spoken before about the issues we have there in terms of staff turnover and the issues that poses for those areas and obviously at the year end we there was a budget decision to close some of our service points with lower footfall we have taken the staff that were within those service points and they are now working within those areas of customer services and we are seeing improvements in both those areas so and hopefully next time I report through on these types of indicators albeit we will be looking at what those indicators are and how they time the council plan going forward and we will see improved performance that is it's absolutely starting to show through so there is a positivity coming through the back of what as I say has been a very difficult area for us to to work through performance relating to processing of claims for council tax reduction discretionary housing payments that continues to hold up well and good performance across the finance team in those areas and on pages 31 and 32 of your papers you have information relating to our operational assets and the suitability for use continuing to improve overall across Aberdeenshire and condition also improving there and this does need to be considered alongside our asset rationalization and suitability will of course improve as we remove some of our assets that are not showing as suitable at the moment whether we sell those or choose to do something else with them but that absolutely has an impact on those areas happy to take any questions chair that indeed may have thank you thank you and just while we're actually on that page that was one of my comments that I was quite surprised to see that of the key operational assets over 70 percent are supposed to be suitable for their current use you know given that we've got a lot of the sort of industrial units and some older LLE assets in the area I was quite surprised that it was that high question from concern Bailey yes I would make it a couple not point as well it was under the page 31 when it raises that up and it was saying that the further to the fund performing assets it's also progressing through as it's supposed to I was mentioning about the total operational asset features within the GIRIA extends to 91 she creates the 15.19 percent of Aberdeenshire to operational portfolio um looking at the numbers within this showing that we have 121 operational buildings unsuitable in their current use this would indicate the GIRIA that has 21 unsuitable assets for my current use of the total 91 can we have a further break during what these 21 actually are what we're actually looking at as what these assets are so we can get a better understanding of how they've came that way and how we can move them on are you able to answer that Rob? Yes happy to provide that list of assets and you'll recall last time we had a conversation about suitability as well and how it's not an exact science but suitability does bring into in a number of factors around this but there's no sort of one size fits all across Scotland in terms of what suitability means and so I'll provide that list of assets with a bit of a breakdown a bit more information for committee members thanks. Okay thank you. Hi Rob I've got a few questions um first one is my normal observation 3.2 here is the GIRIA area data except it's all Aberdeenshire data bar two and I and I'm sorry I just keep saying this why I mean I understand why we should challenge this perhaps in your committees but this is not GIRIA data having said that we'll now move on to the questions my last observation is actually that page 31 and 32 the two pages where we've actually got GIRIA data the table is in fact the Aberdeenshire wide data so the narrative has a bit of an acknowledgement of GIRIA but the table which we're scrutinizing actually talks to Aberdeenshire right but I have now looked at the Aberdeenshire data so page 23 24 all the call centre response times etc. I would suggest all that data points in completely the opposite direction to our transformation agenda and saving in this year for um digital transition we're actually having staff in this position so my question whether that data tells us our transition is struggling a little bit. Page 20 is a really good performance and you drew attention to it I absolutely agree with you so being a proper performance manager I wondered if we should make the targets a bit lower because that's been sustainably delivered for five quarters and I think we should be encouraging people to see if they can just keep that one going because it is a great performance right we need to deny that and then 20 and I can say yes my normal one there is no there is no target and there is no data so what are we performance managing and I think this these areas should be performance managed but can you take service and I appreciate it's not a good job but could somebody think of what thing we could performance manage within those services because at the moment it's just here's how many we did and it's a variable number and I'm not sure what we can do with it to actually manage or improve the performance of those services and you'll be pleased to get that so three three chairs thank you and yes and I take on board all those comments around the data not being area enough focused and we are looking at this as we move forward so we're moving into that new year we are potentially looking at new priorities as we move forward so what will this information have to look like what will the performance targets have to look like etc etc and we are starting with a blank piece of paper to do that to get something that's more meaningful for area committees you will not be surprised to hear that you are not the only area committee that that pushes that back to us and says this is not enough area specific data coming through this is too abidin share focused and so we absolutely take that on board we are looking at that and in terms of the the customer services and the call wait times what have you and yes I take your point on that I don't think we're there in terms of that push and solutions that sit behind it in terms that digital transformation so a lot of that will come through and we will be able to ensure that there's a lot more of a push to channels that work for people so that could be the chatbot that could be lots of different ways of doing things which takes people away from the telephones we're not there at this point in time so we have to source the telephones to ensure we can deal with that capacity issue that we have there but at the same time we will look how that transitions has moved forward across the rest of the year and so yes note all your points there and I say we're working on a lot of that in the background at this point in time thank you okay thank you can I just add to that on page 29 things like grant claims and crisis class kind of really set a target for that because you don't know what the demand is going to be so I don't really know how you're going to manage that but I don't know either but if you're going to performance manage there has to be something that team does then you could say we're going to do this and I don't want this I'm not operations at the moment it's just a bunch of data you're not performance managing on a bunch of data sorry winning my own tactic getting there so maybe not the the number of claims but we're calling it I guess let's say near this speed of process in something like that anything something I don't know what they can target and what they can deliver. Okay Councillor McHale please. Good thank you chair and good morning Robert it was on page 30 same page you're talking about but it says amount paid out for community care grants seems to have it's it's it's a very big area and in this one in quarter one we were going from 92,000 to quarter four it's 119,000. Is it an explanation of the reason of the change in particular grant doing what is what is the I can see it's community care and give some detail on that and once we've given the grant and we do anything to follow up to see that the grant is being spent appropriately. Thank you through you chair and yes generally a lot of these grants will come through people that we are working with be that through housing be that through social work or what have you so there will be that follow-up to ensure that the spend is in the areas that it should be on and we will work with them generally to ensure that they get what they need as well so we'll we'll normally assist with that spend and it could be things homeless households coming through and things essential things they need to set up their home for example and so it's very much demand-led some months are much less than others in terms of that demand coming through it is very situational it does just depend what's coming through at any given time so while quarter one and may have been lower last time next time you could see that see that being the highest quarter and there's not always particularly a rhyme or reason because I see it as that demand led approach to it but we do manage that as closely as we can and I say there are teams that are normally working with those people anyway and assisting them so we keep quite a close handle on it through that. So this is our initial valid data and this is really area committee so why don't we get data for Robbie? At the moment I am told that they have difficulty pulling area specific data to the systems because of the way it's held within the systems I do want to see a shift away from that however I do think we need to hold the data in such a way that we can pull it so you can see it per area and I think that's going to be much more meaningful to area committees than what we show at this point in time so we are we are working on that I see that as being part of our digital transformation we need to hold data in a way that we can provide it in a more meaningful way to you as councillors. Thank you. Thank you Councillor White please. Thank you Rob I feel I should know this but I'll just ask it because I'm not clear. These grants are they fully funded or are we having to budget for an anticipated trend? They are generally fully funded and in the past discretionary housing payments for example we have added to that as a council we have made a choice to add on top of that but I think this year certainly the decision has been that we will go with the the budget that we are allocated for that. Thank you. Okay thank you. Any more questions or comments for Rob? No okay so if we go to the recommendations on the age of 19 which I'll need to make bigger because I can't read it there we go. The committee is recommended to acknowledge and consider progress made in relation to business service services performance indicators relating to the Giri area. So really relating to the Giri area there were just two areas there and I think we did comment on them both. So I think I'll just thank Rob and just check with Alison. Have you got a note of those? I have a note sorry I was away getting Alan Wood ready for the next item but I have got everything written down here. Okay thank you. Right thank you Rob. Thank you. Okay we're going to alter the agenda slightly at this point we're going to hear from Environment and Infrastructure before Education and Children's Services. So Environment and Infrastructure we're going to have the director Alan Wood with us and I think he's actually here so we can just wait until he comes into the chamber. Are you ready to go Alan? Yes. Yes. I'm over to you. Okay thank you very much. Good morning. Good to be here again here in person with you to present the wage support from my director in terms of the performance measures that are taking place and reporting on them for Quarters 3 and Quarters 4. I'd say there's a generally positive report and positive aspect to the indicators of the 13 that are confronting you in your favour today. Nine are showing as green that's up one is eight last time I was here up one so it's nine. These include all of our household and non-households all the planning applications are currently showing as green. Both the building work applications indicators are also green as our trading standards current tenants are used. Our times resolve homeless cases and also our avoid rent loss they're all showing as green. Three of our indicators are for data only and I know some of you have an issue with that indeed that's all right. One is showing as red just now and that's the positive votes on to that. There has been some positive moves to the eight to nine indicators that's but one of the alerts move in Q3 to Q4 now green and that's the void rent loss as a percentage of rent due. Maybe just to highlight them one green and one red and I know there was certainly some interest from yourselves around some specific issues but let me just talk about the if I can avoid rent loss and some of the active measures that the team have been taking to positively address that performance indicator. First of all sheltered housing voids I've spoken about this before and at other area twenties and how they're different from the mainstream housing voids but in terms of the sheltered housing voids these are included now in fortnightly and cross housing function volume meetings. So internally they're discussed much more frequently and that reviews any tissues that emerge quickly and that they can affect the progress and likely and current voids. So rather than the situations go on they're now actively discussed by the housing team on a regular basis. Housing options have also undertaken a number of steps to promote any available sheltered housing properties and that includes the holding of open days within some of our sheltered schemes which were identified as low demand and have a number of vacancies. Speaking of low demand the low demand procedure is also recently reviewed and updated to include contact in some of our local community councils about vacancies which exist within shelter housing schemes and that's part of the promotion of those within the community and in addition to advertising any vacancies on our housing online system. Finally in terms of the measures the Sheltered Housing Tenant Forum has recently asked for a workshop to look in depth at the sheltered housing voids and the housing management team included Alan Jones the housing manager and Kate McDonald and also the chair of the Sheltered Housing Tenant Forum are going to attend and share that to look to progress. Just a statistic to end in terms of the voids over the last four hours there was two percent rent loss then 1.5 then 1.6 then 1.4 percent rent loss. So there's a gradual improvement over the last four quarters there. Just to highlight the the alert the street lighting faults went on we'll just mention a few things on that and that this is indicators moved from green in Q2 through to alert now in Q3 and Q4. This is a particularly I don't know if an adjective I'll say frustrating with variable one I don't know if we've talked about it here before just to give you that the same statistics or the statistics of the same four quarters as I did in the voids quarter one fifty percent of the faults were fixed within seven days quarter two eighty seven point five quarter three fifty four point eight and then quarter four under twenty one percent so a real variation there across the four quarters. There's a number of reasons for that you can see in the paper plant breakdowns and LED premature failures. LED premature failure is a new one for me in terms of reasons. It's a reason I accept that but it's a new one because one of the advantages of LED one of it is the the life expectancy of the bulb however. In addition to a little bit of detail we have six positions I'll call them electrician positions some are qualified to some are not there are six positions. We consistently have at least two vacancies and they are so a third of the team but two out of six so we only tend to have four at the maximum and this has been at recruitment and apprenticeships and advertising in different regions have been tried and will continue to be tried in addition to that if there's illness and that again impacts on the team numbers quite quite significantly. It is sometimes difficult to physically get to the lighting issues if our cars for example are an issue and then team or the person will also move on. We've also found that the weather has impacted particularly elements in some of the corridors the availability of plants and the elevation and equipment has been in for repair and there isn't that resilience in the fleet to have a spare ready to come out. Now these nations we are looking to address those as best we can and that itself is it's challenging but just like including in Q4 19 repairs were actioned within seven days of the 91 repairs that are listed here and the average time taken to repair street lights at Los Dios is just over 33 days. In Q3 53 repairs were actioned within seven days out of those 93 and I think there is a direct correlation between staff illnesses availability and the reduced repairs within seven days. Just a bit of context on a couple of the indicators for you and for community information. Okay thank you. Hands it up, give us that gift card please. Yeah thanks chair and thanks Alan for coming to present the report. I'd like to focus just really on the planning figures that you mentioned in passing because they really are very good in terms of performance that's which 45 40 obviously but we all see from the list a number of applications that are relatively low can certainly be computed. We could a few years back we would very very busy agendas and things like this but at the same time we've got some very large which is where we're consultees so we're still doing a huge amount of what we don't get paid for as far as I understand it. So that's obviously in the mix here as well. I just want to make the things starting to pick back up to something approaching here is saying horrible getting back to it a bit before who serves coal with that increase in demand and maintaining something like this very very good performance. Yeah thank you. I think that the usual who will answer is yes stay with the coal. The thing just underneath that is I think that what we would see is an increase in the time taken. Now the caveat with that is it will depend on the complexity of the case for example but I do think longer periods of time will be seen. It's something that I have been reporting a number of area committees the counter to that is we have been successful in increasing the role of improvement in some areas in terms of the time to turn around these applications. What we have been doing in recent years I suppose is now as a result of some of these larger applications and larger regional rather larger national is some pre-application work as well. The pre-application work where the planner is allocated to that particular planning application that helps us a lot. So there's different ways of tackling it but there is the reality I would say that we will be taking longer as the if and when the numbers of applications do exist. Yeah a specific point these very large applications that we've been consulting up and having to put back in them they're still coming through the community process. We're very aware of that. Is there any lobbying going on through national bodies about getting some payment for councils because this is not going to stop anytime soon from the list of things we see can we do and we're not getting paid for it which doesn't seem particularly fair. Yeah I'll say a couple of things there. One is I think both of the points they'll make are difficult to resolve. One of them is a greater certainty of the time periods and the timescale involved in the consultation. We're certainly seeing just now a major application which again timescale has slipped and reporting through a number of area committees and then back to infrastructure services committee is challenging to get the time of reporting right and then the interest from a number of people who want to come and speak at committee so that that timing can be quite challenging. I guess through the some of the discussion and follow up our kind of planning as with his counterparts in the heads of planning Scotland group and their discussions in the Scottish Government there is there is mention of fees or hot income coming through for these because there is as you say there is quite a lot of work involved in these initially explaining that we are not the decision maker we're the constant team but then there is also some of the work that are coming back and report and your time as well. But if we don't pay the video can we get that back? Can somebody please? Yes forgive me it's a technical question in a way. I know that under page 52 it mentions there are the LED street lighting and premature failures. But this is a review that we're seeing on these potential failures at least from the the first installed LED bulbs. It started to change over the college into LED that we're now seeing some failure some of those early installed bulbs. We'll get into this but maybe see that trend continue with us that they've already been installed. Yeah yeah I think that's a really really good point the answer being yes to that that again however is that there has been attempts and say a small number of failures for more recently installed ones as well. I know that personally I was reporting one just last week and I can't remember it's not that old that light in there but yes predominantly some of the older ones as well. What we will be looking at is just the period of time that's involved here because we're saying bread and sugar yeah that that'll be the case but compared to what is an average or is it the expected life so predominantly yes the older ones. But I guess technically it could be a batch of a full batch. It could be we were later to this swapping out mainly because of the the price of the LEDs at the start so we weren't in with the original ones but we are so we've played catch-up and we're about 85 percent of the streetlight state has now been swapped out and we are looking at these when we're doing either column replacements for the head replacements as well as checking on the one length of settings. Okay thank you yeah as you correctly I guess we've still got some of the targets and that's fine you've acknowledged it so my question is when do you think you and the team can come up with something that has got a target that the team can own and work towards delivering and that's question one there question two is on the first three targets I think seven point three is essentially irrelevant if unnecessary because we've got all the data in 7.1 and 7.2 in more granularity as they say yeah so I don't know what number three gives us but the it's the 44 or it's the extension of time numbers so one these are not split between 7.1 and 7.2 g so could they be do they refer to it should be a split 44 is the two combined so what's the split and then what I wasn't I think it'd be really useful because at 86 percent that's below the target for 7.1 g but well above the target for 7.2 g now if we are setting the extension of time that to me becomes the new target for that team to deliver so I would expect 95 percent for 7.1 and the lower target for 7.2 so I think we need to split and we need to say now I'm equally conscious we're all very busy and I want to create huge effort of work so if that's too much work for and I'll just come back and say so I really don't want to say the electric member said therefore we have to do but to me to actually get into the guts of this performance manager we need to know that split okay and the final one and I too will go into an ET so I'm afraid so I think you've answered with Neil the possibilities why so I'm assuming that the two things on that because that's a pretty catastrophic reduction in service what is about the LED so I'm assuming the two things mentioned like the breakdown LED failures are the two main contributors assumption so what is about the LEDs is it can't get the bits because of supply chain problems or is it that the volume is simply big it's overwhelming our four electricians and then second one which we haven't discussed but is the big one first when you mentioned is plant breakdowns what they yeah that's my question okay thank you go in reverse order when my mind works out of this morning LED and you know I wouldn't say that the LED premature failures are the main issue it's been flagged here as a reason it's another reason rather than me just listing it's stopping but I left with with staff at mind for me the main contributor in terms of getting this turnaround is it's stopping I would then probably put plant equipment alongside physical access but probably plant equipment and then the LED failures it's a factor I wouldn't say it's it's a number one factor and recruitment and then plant equipment those are the two that were challenging respecting of course we're checking it on the on the length of the LEDs recruitment we've tried a number of different things on recruitment and I think if I turn a negative positive we're doing well to retain four but I still want to reach into the other other two positions as well the plant equipment is a really difficult one and I've challenged a number of my teams particularly around roads waste landscape and in roads becomes street lighting about the the lack of vehicles plant equipment the age of vehicles plant equipment and the challenge is right look to year two to five what do you need tell me what you need not what you're going to get put a plan in place I'm not just going to come to the place to say I don't have enough we'll stop what's the plan so we're putting in place the plan we're also reusing and I've mentioned this here before we're putting less vehicles for sale or for auction we're keeping them either we are repairing them as best we can or we're using them as donor vehicles to basically for spares as well that will work more effectively I think I'll say more effectively in some of the more obvious vehicles like the reckless collection of vehicles for example rather than this an elevation to go up the street light we don't have many spares to fix that so it's a different approach there but I'm going to get together a plan of what we need and how we get just finally on that and the availability and a gully cleaner on order for over 18 months and we're told that we can't get the gully cleaner fitted onto the chassis within the next six to 12 months so just cancel the order it's pointless so there's a number of factors in the market that are still persisting as well as so maybe I've gone a bit too much on the mic yeah and so there's a number of challenges there but I want to look at ways through the challenge and then come to committees like this or policy moves I get I know the answer's kind of yesterday so we'll work with them and on the the planning statistics I think it's a really good one about you know is it important for you to receive household and non-household and then total now some things I've seen in committees that household can be red non-household can be green and overall you get green for example fine and I think that's where you get some of the averaging which is perhaps masking some of the time periods and the percentages that you say I'm very keen and will build in this to the review in the year about the indicators that we've got it tends to be about targets but equally for some detail about the time period as well look at that and say look at them in terms of the data ones as well are they useful so I'll take a bunch of points but the split of the data under the three plannings your first response so okay so it is not standing was written it's actually planned and people yes yeah I've been in council for three years especially every time I come to see any performance management the world people can't get enough appears somewhere in the narrative yes that's the reality of our world and financially I'm sure your plan will be lovely and I'm sure it'll be competing with all the other lots of plans for the money you don't have yeah so I'm going to turn it on its head and say do we select members have to recognize that we don't have the people we don't have the money and it is not reasonable to assume we're going to find them all over the place do we have to review the target and make it less stretching because at the moment it's beginning to look not like a smart target but like an aspirational target and that's not good for the team to be trying to hit something they can never hit yeah so and I'm not saying we should or shouldn't do it but I think to me as well as coming the plan to to build new sharing pickers and galley cleaners and whatever else is in the plan maybe you need to come back to us and say I just can't do this realistically here's a more realistic target yeah I'd at least like to have that conversation I think um the the the budget the performance of information and the expectations are just not buying up just now and you know okay I'll approach it's 85 percent one quarter 20 one quarter the statistics don't help given the size of the team I've got but this is the performance indicator reporting on so yeah I also think you know given the priorities that I've got as a bunch of decisions should I be moving something from road maintenance onto street lighting if the skills were compatible I'm not doing that and I'm looking to recruit so those all those factors come into it but I do think the the level of expectation through the performance indicator is is is too high and the PI doesn't allow me for that significant flexibility and performance item so yeah I'd also talk to you that's my view and I think it'd be useful if any other member has a view and whether that is right or wrong to speak up thank you so successive years that then change the target that always seems a long thing to do what we can do is what we can do simply because you know I think it's good I mean if you look across the year it's fine I'm probably around 55 across the four quarters okay but if I get my target that's still you know not the target and it's not just about the part that is about changing the target but it's changing and acknowledged so if I'm at 50 odd percent in the target 61 percent is that reasonable so the quarters can help show some variations but 20 percent is yes please thank you I'm looking at page 49 and 51 where it mentions domestic noise complaint settled with or without attendance understandably there's no targets being given but so there's nothing to scrutinize really so I wondered if either an informal or a formal briefing to committee just to give us a flavor of the the complaints and the outcomes if we don't have any targets to to to look at and I suppose it's gone back to the narrative there's no narrative to actually tell us much so I don't know if a briefing would be helpful chair do you guess the answer in another committee was asked about some of the building standards ones about the potential dangerous buildings and I was certainly able to find details around building the town etc so I'll see what information would go on these and provide a briefing back okay just apologize for the background I think it might actually be a good way to go back to where it comes to Keith's point there talking about you know service delivery and we can extend the expectations yeah and the you know meet targets it has to share just it's an interesting aspect that it's a bit more you know we don't meet the the target then reducing the target to meet that level and that is concerned that really is quite concerned I also think it's going to set up an expectation you know we're using expectation those what they bring into the real aspect of what expectations and that necessity we're providing services because it's necessary we've got a minimum standard what has to be necessary to be provided and if you're talking about mean tax or reducing targets then that clearly impacts upon what's necessary needed as a service and you can't necessarily adjust that as easy so I think that where this comes up in and this is the point where just like being you know we're trying to meet you know a expectation of this target to be that financial aspect that I'm trying to meet these targets then I'm sorry but you know it's necessity aspect of it that we need to be really looking at that we're providing that service nothing else is more of a headache more questions to ask but how we're going to do so that's so be it you know that's this is something we have to identify rather than just just manageably yeah that's fine sorry I think that's a fair comment it's interesting there's two statistics that haven't been mentioned by me or by you by me in particular what is that there's 99 percent street lights are working at any point in time now I'm talking the 20 percent of fixes within seven days that doesn't look good compared to the target and a small yes if this is I think building the wider context here give that explanation as well and we've got approximately 48,000 street lights across that region so it's a context here it doesn't take away from the measure that we've got here and that 20 to 21 percent it's just not good you know but there's 99 percent so I if the target changes next year because of another year's data onto the other day I would want to make the point of the context and again for all the performance indicators I think some of the points today about explain the data and then I think I think you have a more detailed understanding of the PI. So 99 percent take it up here. Just from my own experience and important and all the street lights and things through that up that I tended to really quickly. Yes I as I said I had an example last week when I did that I had the same experience and I think a lot will depend on location and where the electrician is as well and so I don't want to say it's just by chance that that would be fair but there are some really positive experiences as well yes. Great concern. Cleo please. Okay thanks thanks Chair. I just maybe would like to make some comments when I reported street lighting in behalf of constituents they've been repaired quite quickly so I'm going to realize when you said earlier 100 percent of street lights most of them were okay but you have problems. So I wanted to ask a question. It's about the average time to resolve home messages and you shouldn't take us through the kind of sequence. Somebody's homeless maybe with your family. What is happening to them? I think you also say it's been resolved. What does that reservation mean? Yeah yeah yeah so one of the I would say success stories if I can use that word when we're talking about homeless cases is that we do not put any homeless people into bed breakfast accommodation in Aberdeenshire. We hold a number of properties within a mainstream housing stock rather than shelter housing stock and when somebody presents as homeless they would be allocated to one of those properties that are held and that in itself could then impact on the rental that we take it and now that's a factor rather than a shooting up. The important thing is to get to get that person into accommodation. Now that accommodation will be of temporary nature so once they are moved from that temporary accommodation into something that is more permanent the resolution of homeless would then when they have a more permanent set up in terms of their accommodation. So the move away from the bed breakfast have been really positive and into mainstream housing but of a temporary nature and then on to that in a more permanent solution. What happens if people who are homeless are we talking about those who live in Aberdeenshire or is it people coming into our area? Yeah, predominantly Aberdeenshire but there are other cases but predominantly and what we're seeing is where we have been able to analyze some of the reasons for homeless presentations. I've got some information here that the team put together forming around the reason for that. Disputes, breakdowns within a household, between spouses or indeed parent and child. Those are the leading reasons for homeless presentations across Aberdeenshire. There's no exception to that. I'll look at that in a little bit more detail. There has been a significant shift in breakdown of disputes in the number of presentations where someone's been asked to leave a household doubled from 29 to

1. I can also read between 22, 23 and 23, 24 and that can often be where a child is asked to leave the home, an adult child I should say is asked to leave the home. Now in contrast to that the number of presentations resulting from a non-violent dispute or relationship breakdown they halved from the bottom three cases down to 22 and then just for final information and resulting from violent or abusive disputes or relationship breakdowns they increased from 20 to 28. So there's a number of reasons for that. Those are the more local to Aberdeenshire. Thank you. Question? Okay thank you. There's a right please. Yeah thank you, sorry to mark statements. Just a thought card to me. I know I've highlighted to Alan the issues you're very aware of and I know you're working hard to try and find ways to resolve them. I had an incident recently where we had lights that were actually on during the daytime in the town centre that were obviously not part of the main circuit of street lights and it took a bit of time to get that resolved. I thought it was a little ironic when we were encouraging everyone to save energy and these lights were running but it is now resolved. But I think the issue was that if I'm connected to some set of roads and some set of street lighting or something, so really just to sort of highlight as part of the review and solution finding that you're working on is you know maybe the management across service that's as efficient as it can be. And also just thinking about the you know have we got the right location and number of street lights. I don't know if there's a policy on that that's worth knowing that and is outsourcing if the street lighting is a challenge is outsourcing and certainly there works really an option as well. So just really just throw that in the mix, I'm not expecting any responses. Well I'm not being invited. It was really helpful to get these issues because you'd think well all street lights will be all the same but clearly not. I'm hoping to accelerate the final rollout to L&D, so say the last 15%, I want to accelerate as quickly as possible to lead financial savings and CO2 savings by doing that as well. So that would be an opportunity again to look at how the lights are managed and what locations etc to look at it and not say we'll change locations. The good external yeah it is certainly something that we're thinking about and again it's proven difficult to get adequate by adding a bit of a timely and cost effective solutions to that but luckily I'm open to those solutions to that. Thank you, I'm willing it on. It's back to homelessness again on page 55. Quite interested in the carry figures because they weren't down compared to everywhere else, 22, 23 and then we did the opposite and flipped and rose and quite a lot, 23, 24. I wondered if that was because of the tech tenure that we were up in this area. The thinking on that is that there's roughly about six percent moved across the years thinking as that's a natural fluctuation rather than anything more specific. I'm not saying you're wrong, I think that that level of movement is seen as that natural movement across the field and nothing has been flagged specifically around 10 years to be explained. The other thing that sometimes comes up with this as well is it's not really a true reflection because people often present in the city or they might be from the shire, their figures in the city can be elevated because the young people in particular would be more likely to present. Yes, I think that that is fair, there are conversations between our colleagues in the city so I don't have the statistics there but I think that's a theory. Okay, Ron is that an old hand? I think it might be. It was in the applications and the rest of them would absolutely split. That's because the rest of us tend to be smaller, maybe a lot of them tend to be bigger, probably more complex. But on the targets there, you can't begin with both two but I didn't really decide what to say. You shouldn't have a permanent change of the market just because they're not hitting it. But for the reason behind it, I mean they obviously changed it, the ability to hit a target is not the fault of the target but sometimes it is because the target is unrealistic and we did it. For example, the capital plan, the target was 180 million, we couldn't afford it so we changed it to 150. We did it all the time, yeah, if there's reason and logic behind it. So with some of them, I think, they do need recalibrated, for what the measure were. If we set up for 100 people and 20 million a year, but we only get around some 70 people and the budget's 50, something has to change. So it's done on the basis of some fact and knowledge, but other than we don't get our expectation, we're going to always find out why it's not, it won't be that much. So I think in some cases it needs to be tweaked, but not wholesale. I just think it's going to be easier because that's not what anyone wants to see or anything like that. Yeah, I think linking the kinds of charities to budget decisions with performance indicators makes a lot of sense, you know. For example, targets on the point of recycling, we're counting about 41-42% by initial targets, 45, then move to 50. So moving that target deliberately as we move through all the measures that we're taking. So I can give you the logic behind moving those targets, achieved with the past, it's totally difficult at the moment. So yeah, I think the logic and linking into something, not just I failed in the last six months, I want to change it. No, I don't agree with that. I would even agree with that. Okay, any more questions or comments for Alan? No, thank you. And same as always, I think your service is the one that always seems to generate the most interest with the public. Indeed, indeed. Do you want to have a short break? Oh, sorry, going back to the first page. Recommendations, technology and consider progress in relation to environment and infrastructure service performance indicators. I'm sure it's related to the hearing. And instruct the Director of Environment and Infrastructure Services to continue to present performance reports to the area committee on a six-monthly basis, in line with the performance management framework, evidencing progress of performance with delivery of the council plan with an area perspective. You got it? Yes. Okay. Yes, thank you, Chair. We're having a few technical issues, not quite sure why, but there's some breaking up. So I'm not, we're not actually sure why. It could be teams, could be network, we don't know, could be, you know, what's outside, the weather is great, but can everyone project and increase the volume that's in the room a little bit, please, just to try and mitigate the breaking up, if that's okay. Thank you. So this is actually item six on the agenda. The Education and Children's Services hearing performance monitoring report 2023-24, and well, it's firmly that the Director is with us. Thank you, Chair. So teach your voice today at the end of the chamber. Just hope everybody can pick it up, okay, online. So pleased to be with you today to provide an update on how the ECS direction has contributed to the Council's overarching strategic priorities for every year area throughout the year 2023-24 or so. First, we're really pleased to note that within the area, most of the agreed performance indicators are performing within or exceeding target. Another particular note, and I'm really pleased to see is the S5 attainment. So that's improving on pre-COVID levels and also quite significantly outperforming other areas of Aberdeenshire. On the flip side, LLA usage has reduced, and this is mainly due to the unexpected closure of the course of Inverurie Community Campus pool. It's also due in a large part to the ending of the COVID recovery funding, which we used to allocate to LLA. So ECS committee allocated that to LLA to provide holiday activities for young people. So as such, there's been a significant reduction in overall participation of opportunities and therefore reduced usage overall. Another area of focus for improvement within Gilead relates to facilities with just under two-thirds of facilities being categorised as being in satisfactory condition. I should say not all of those are operational facilities, some of those are on the list of those waiting to be dispested. So 64% of total venues in Gilead are graded ARE, which is satisfactory. In total, in the area there are 25 LLA venues, which is 14.6% of the LLA estate. That percentage will improve as the service moves through the disinvestment programme, so for example during stage one there are halls which we'll be divesting ourselves of and that will allow better use of capital funds for ensuring that the remaining facilities remain fit for termers in future. So those are just a couple of highlights in terms of positives areas for improvement. I know it's the questions and the conversation is really important, so happy to pause there. I know Chair, you've requested some numbers as opposed to percentages. I passed on to my colleague who pulls all the data out of the system for me, sadly she was ill yesterday. So when I get that, we'll pass that on to you. Thank you. Thank you. And two lovely questions I got from you. No? Goodness me, I didn't know if she thinks I was working out of the budget. Couple of things, well we did speak about the total usage of the LLA estate and a lot of that being down to the rather lengthy pool closure that we had in Inderi. That must have really affected the whole system. That went on for just a bit too long. I was going to ask about the Foundation apprenticeships. That's always something that we celebrate I think in Aberdeen, Chair, but there are some cases where young people have applied to do particular courses. They don't quite make the numbers, so they don't run the course. It's very difficult to then say to them well that thing that you're really interested in pursuing, I'm afraid there's nothing involved yet. Can schools work together on that maybe or something so that youngsters could get their choices? Yeah, I think Chair that's an interesting observation and it's spot on. So in the same way that not all schools will run advanced higher Spanish or advanced higher for 16, we do encourage schools to join often to do that. I guess the challenge with doing that with Foundation apprenticeships is that very often we are bringing in external providers to provide that experience. So where it's been provided by our own staff, that there's no reason why we can't do that and we're relying on other partners, providers, public students to come in and do that, it becomes more challenging. It's certainly something that the argument team had a keenly aware of and looking at how we can resolve it because you know by and large we can be able in the technology we have now to provide the opportunity. It's hard on some of the more technical based apprenticeships and for some of them it is something we're looking into. Because it means that depending on where schools are located students can travel between as well. Yeah, okay thank you. Councillor Gifford please. Yes sorry, apologies for starting to cherish your prominent transparency statement at the beginning of the meeting. But North East Scotland College and I'm a member of the regional board there and since we're now talking about the college I'd better make that statement. It's clearly not a full-on conflict of interest or else it may not be sitting yes. No I think it's a good point about the traditional apprenticeships. There isn't a real weight being what we do, what the college is doing, the ability of both to work is a real challenge and something we need to maximize as much as we can. The figures in the end are very successful. But that really was my point was about the figures. I raised it really against the question to example. It's particularly to find the potential value of the numbers. I have to be there. Saying it's got 10% is great but that's only one person out of 10. That's important if you think of 10,000 students into their programmes. If I can say both in this report that would be very kind of simple. Okay thank you. No more questions? No? Councillor Green please. Yeah thanks chair. This one's slightly off topic. It's education but it's not about the year-end. Just a quick one Lawrence, seems we've got you here just now. Can you maybe give us a wee update on Kemney Academy? Obviously we have got the bus park getting built just now but we all know that there's an extension required, if there's an extension planned, there's no capital budget for it. But what we're going to do you know in the next few years until you know we can actually find the funds to build the extension? Yeah so the Learning and the States team will work closely with the School of Management in terms of how we can make investments in the space that we have available within Kemney, given the current condition of the states rather than the Capital Plan Council agreed and that'll be reported back from the area community as we would do and obviously communicate it to parent council and so on and so forth. They don't have enough state position from the Learning and the States team. They haven't had everything on it. There's a leadership team for some time. I'm happy to get that for you to share it back with the area committee. Much appreciated. Thank you. Okay thank you. Alison do you want to come in? Sorry I'm missing your hand. No it's okay I just wanted clarity around about the transparency statement. I caught that it was something to do with NESCO. Can I just get clarity for the minute what the transparency statement relates to? Yeah I'm a member of the usual board at NESCO. Okay thank you. Okay thank you. I did actually highlight on page 39 the statistics on the expected levels and achievements at the end of primary school. So let's say for example you're looking at one and a half percent and higher than the Aberdeenshire rate at 69.6. So the expected level presumably is level two we're looking at? Yeah. And the national rate is 72.7. What happens to the you know the sort of 30 percentish there that haven't achieved level two or maybe not even level one? That will be part of the transition planning between primary and secondary to ensure that the scaffolding is there for those young people and as they move up into secondary school so they are getting the support required to allow them to achieve the level they should be at. One thing that we are doing just now yesterday Susan and I had a meeting with our College of Education Scotland actually and I was there at that meeting too, looking at how we set our stretch aims as part of the Scottish Inment Challenge. So until recently we have just looked at data trends and set an Aberdeenshire figure for our 168 primary schools in some perspective. So what we are going to try and do it will be hard given the size of the central team now that we're going to have conversations with all 168 schools to look at their data to have that with the assurance in their professional judgment, judgments, insurance robust and moderated to quality assured and so on and then we will ask them to set their own, we'll work with them to set their own stretch targets and we will then aggregate to an Aberdeenshire wide level. That's quite a big undertaking but I think it will give us a lot more confidence in the data that we're using. But in terms of your question Chair, yeah it's about ensuring that the young people have got scaffolding and the support to move on up to the academies that they'll be going to and the teachers are aware of where every young person is at and their learnings are being addressed. So I just wondered if something could be done earlier, you know if they're they're way off level two, you know intervention maybe around 24/5, something more appropriate. Yeah absolutely and just by way of reassurance some of the work we're doing as part of our work for strategic equity funding so we get additional funding from government for closing the poverty rates. I think the gaps for some of that goes to schools directly through PEC some of that we retain at the centre and we use it that's called strategic equity funding or SEF because we do a lot of that in education and what we're doing with that is we've appointed using that funding at least teachers for electricity and you want to say primary and secondary. So they'll be working across clusters as early as possible in terms of supporting staff, upskilling staff and looking at our professional learning offer for staff. So we're investing in some programs and you'll be aware of some of these top for writing, big writing, big maths, new math mastery approaches, reading and phonics, that kind of thing. We're keeping some of the funding to create a bidding system so schools can bid in for funding for additional resources and so on and we're also looking at our attainment advisor who works for Education Scotland is doing some work with individual schools offering support and challenge. Currently that's in SIMD areas one and two so that's not in this part of Aberdeenshire but that learning we will then use elsewhere in Aberdeenshire so we can offer targeted and universal so targeted support to other schools that need it. We're also looking at in some areas a point saying what we're doing once upon a time in called homeschooling workers because we're aware that attendance is a bit of an issue post-pandemic. So Aberdeenshire is still one of the highest in local authorities in terms of positive attendance to before Covid we were at 94 95 so it's a small dip and it's still a dip and we know that if we get young people into school that the chances are that they will learn and they will retain and so on. An interesting statistic that you might want to know is that so you know that absence all absence effects attainment even if they're related to illness but an average of 90 percent attendance so 90 percent sounds good but if you get to the end of third year and you've got 90 percent attendance that actually means you've missed an entire year of school and that's actually quite significant so 92 percent is great in some respects compared to some local authorities where it's way way down but actually if you start to strip that back to individual schools we want schools that have got a fair way to go in terms of improvement. Most of them in Aberdeenshire the Buchan and Bamford areas but there are pockets elsewhere that we need to address and we know that one percent of absence leads to a three percent decrease in terms of a standard deviation in post-16 qualification tariff scores so there's going to be a big focus on attendance and this will be a national campaign in attendance. Kickstart in the autumn. I'm being introduced as part of a kind of research focus group on that in a couple weeks time so we're going to be doing a lot of that work in Aberdeenshire too. In fact today tomorrow and Wednesday we've got area head teacher days and we've got colleagues from Education Scotland working with Susan and her team talking to head teachers about the things they can do to support attendance. So part of that we'll be looking at that is where the target thing is to break that positive bridge between home and school but I'll make a bit of a difference and I'll talk a little bit there. Yeah thank you Lawrence. Thank you. Can I have Keating please? Let's get that conversation now give me a question. So when you talk about stretched targets Lawrence I wonder you just be clear what is meant in the national conversation because to my example we just looked at something 73.7. A smart target might be 74. To my mind a stretch might be 75. What would not be a stretch would be 100 percent aspirational. Of course they all love to get there but to me a stretch target has to be within the concept of achievement of the organisation otherwise it's just people debates. So can we check what we mean by stretch targets? Yes if I may share an example. So we are required by Scottish Government to set these stretchings in a range of different areas that have been reported through ECS. So for example if we take literacy and numeracy so combined our current levels of literacy and numeracy P1, P4, P7 combined are between 70 and 72 across Aberdeenshire. For SIND quintile one our most deprived young people it's actually 50 percent, 50 to 52 percent but actually quintile one in Aberdeenshire is only 2.8 percent of people so it's actually not significant because quintile five is 30 percent of the people in the population quintile five is about 71 to 72 percent so that means the attainment gap there is 20 to 22 percentage points between our most deprived and at least deprived communities. So in terms of stretch aim current position is 70 to 72 percent and for 24 to 25 we're aiming to get to 72 to 74 percent and then for 25 to 26 we're aiming for 76 percent so it is that incremental step change we're looking for now. Education Scotland will come in and challenge us and say well are you being ambitious enough and that we are safe based on our current data we think that's okay but that's why we now want to go and say well actually rather than us sitting with our data centrally we're going to have those conversations with schools to see how realistic it is in terms of the actual data that sorry the targets that are being set so hopefully that provides some assurance and then I really do like the idea we asked the school to set some targets that's so whatever we're powered just so I think that's it. Thank you Lawrence. Thank you. A lot of interesting information in there today. So recommendations. Page 33. Acknowledging considered progress made during 2020-24 towards achieving the council planning priorities of 2022-27 prefer to amend its one and provide comments to the director of education of children's services. I think we did and instruct the director of education and children's services to continue to present performance reports daily and committee on a six monthly basis. And he's coming back with numerical data that was asked for. Okay so I must be desperate for a coffee but we will look shortly I think before we go into item eight which is our line number. So yeah time is it now? Yes 11 o'clock. Okay are you hearing me? I don't know now.

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