Transcript

Please note that we are not expecting a fire alarm test this evening, so if the alarm is sounded, please follow my instructions and evacuate the building. Please remember that this meeting is being broadcast live on the Council's website. Please turn your microphone on when speaking and remember to turn it off when you have finished. To make sure you can be heard on the broadcast and in the Chamber, please speak clearly and directly into your microphone. I will now ask my fellow Members and the Officers to introduce themselves, starting on my right. My name is Ruth Hayes, Councillor for Clerkenwell Ward and Vice-Chair of the Scrutiny Committee. I pledge allegiance to the Councillor in Canterbury Ward. I am Councillor Gary Heathers, in Fisher Park Ward. I am a substitute Member for another Member this evening. Thank you. Caroline Russell, Highbury Ward, Councillor. Officers over here. Thanks, starting with you, Martijn. Hi, I'm Martijn Gormans, Director of Climate Change and Transport. Andrew Bedford, Assistant Director of Green Space and Leisure. And I'll go to Rowena. I'm a Radio Champion Executive Member for Environment, Air Quality and Transport. And then I'll go to you, yeah. Yes, good evening. Bill Sinfield, Head of Operations. Hi, I'm Matthew Homer, Head of Waste Tragedy and Circular Economy. Good evening. Kristina Vamos, Estate Recycling Officer. Hello. Jean Hughes, Recycling Officer. And the Recycling Officer, Paweł Ritom. The person at the back there. Hello. Oh, my name is Aidan, I'm just visiting the City of St. George's. Okay, we'll come to public questions later. So, we're going to start the meeting with a presentation from Nature Neighbourhoods. We've got Rosie Appellee and Julie Parrish. Go ahead. So, you've got about ten minutes and then you can take questions. You haven't done the formalities. Thank you. Thanks. And could you introduce yourself? Emma Taylor, Clerk to the Committee. Very important person, yeah. So, we've got apologies from Councillor Gill. Any other, no other apologies received? And Declaration of Substitute Members, we've got... Thank you, Councillor Russell. Apologies from Councillor Graham. And we've got a substitute member, Councillor Gary Heather, substituting for Councillor Gill. Any declarations of interest? No, thank you. And the minutes of the previous meeting, they're deferred to the next meeting in January. And I'll just go to my report, I've got a short report. So, the proposed date for the joint meeting with the Environment, Climate Change and Transport and Corporate Resources Screening Committees and Thames Water is on the 23rd of January 2025. So, just to remind the Committee about that and anyone else is interested. And I also want to let the Committee know that I've written to the Secretary of State for the Environment and Rural Affairs, Steve Reid MP and Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, asking them to act to protect London's water supply which is currently on a knife edge. And then I just wanted to say there are lots of events happening in Islington's parks and to check out the website under Parks and Green Spaces. Some examples are carrels on the green, Islington green 15th of December 1.30 and the menorah lighting, Islington green at 2 o'clock on the 26th of December. That's my report for today and so we're now going to move. I'll just let you know that public questions will be taken after each agenda item. And the order of business, so I have discretion to alter the order of business and as such we'll have item B2 first with a presentation on nature neighbourhoods. And then we'll go on to B4 which is a presentation from Merritt on e-waste. So, we'll take nature neighbourhoods first. Thank you, go ahead. Hi everyone, as Tricia said I'm Rosie and this is Julie and we're from Octopus Community Network. Some of you may know Octopus, we're a network of Islington's 14 largest multi-purpose community centres. And we've also been running an urban growing programme for the last 14-ish years. There we go, nature neighbourhoods. So, nature neighbourhoods is a four-nation project that we're involved with. It's coordinated by the RSPB, the National Trust and the WWF. They have engaged 18 community partners, community groups across the four nations, one of which is Octopus and we're the only one in London. The project came about through the People's Plan for Nature, which was a plan that kind of emerged from the People's Assembly on nature that happened a few years ago. And the idea being that in order to get communities involved in nature work, working with local community partners was a good way to go. The ask from the 18 community partners is to create neighbourhood plans for nature with their communities for a local area that they work in. In terms of the People's Plan for Nature, the kind of key themes that came out of it were concerned generally about the threat to nature, but also a real push for considering nature as well as people and communities in the decisions that are being made at policy level. So now to kind of focus in on Islington and the work that we're doing on nature neighbourhoods, we have taken a strategic approach. We really want to look at this within the context of what's already happening in the borough and also use the data that we have to focus on areas that are particularly deficient in access to nature, but also looking at other deprivation measures about the people that live in the borough and some of the deprivation that they face. As always, with everything we do, we're focused on collaboration and working in partnership. So there's a bit of a graphic there about all the different groups that we're engaging with, including the council, TRAs, other community groups, schools and community centres. As a network of community centres, they're always central to the work that we do. When looking at what our neighbourhood would be, we very quickly realised we couldn't look at the whole borough. So thinking about data and working with Councillor Champion and Andrew Bedford, we identified Tufnell Park as a neighbourhood that we wanted to look at, it being one that's deficient in access to nature, but also has high economic deprivation. This is a rough map of the area we're looking at. We're not being overly prescriptive if someone lives or there's an area we want to work on that's the other side of the Holloway Road. We're not going to ban it, but this is giving a general idea. The area also, luckily for us, includes Octopus's Community Plant Nursery, which is on the Tufnell Park Estate off Tufnell Park Road, and also Hill Drop Community Centre and Whittington Park Community Centres, both of which are members of our network. So they've been key in the work we've done so far. All of the 18 community partners that have taken part in the project across the four nations, it was suggested that we begin with a walk and talk, which we did in February this year. So with help from Sally Oldfield, we created the route to take in growing that was already happening in the area. So it takes in a couple of estates where there's really great growing groups happening. It started at the plant nursery and finished at Whittington Park and was just a good way to not just explore what's already happening where there are the green areas in the area, but also just explore the streets and get people to think about how streets could look different. We worked with an anthropologist from the University of Cambridge who uses an approach called PhotoVoice, where people were encouraged on their walk to take photos of areas that they thought were really good examples of local nature, or areas where they thought that there could be some positive changes made. We then all got together at Whittington Park and over lunch looked through the images that everyone had taken and everyone had a chance to speak to them. We found that it's a really good way to get people just to think about space differently, but also kind of give everyone a chance to share their ideas and what they think could be changed in the area. We had a really great turnout despite it being the wettest windiest day ever, which is testament to the people of Islington. It was a good mix of residents, people from local organisations, people from the council, which was great. And there was lots of really good conversation, not just kind of at the end of Whittington Park, but along that walk route. We also, in order to kind of engage as many different groups as we could, we've done some work with Beacon High School, who come, a group of young people from their SEND department come to the plant nursery every week. They did their own mini walk and talk, so they did the same kind of thing, but from the route from the school to the plant nursery. And they took lots of pictures, particularly of tree pits that they were interested in planting up, just to make that improvement that they would see every time they walked from the plant nursery to school and back. And a few weeks after they'd done the walk and talk, they then had a tree pit planting day of a couple of tree pits along that route, which was really great for them to do the walk, have some ideas, but then also be able to make the change happen. After the walk and talk, we planned a series of six community conversations. These were all themed along the themes of the People's Plan for Nature. We took a couple out about waterways and beaches because we weren't sure they were relevant to Islington. But generally, those themes that run across the bottom are from the People's Plan. And we had experts come in to each of those events and talk about different things. So in the July one, we had Rory, who's the project manager for the Whole Nature Neighbourhoods project, to talk about the role of the big NGOs that are involved, the National Trust, RSPB and WWF, and where their voice and help is needed in creating nature neighbourhoods. Some of the key themes that have come out of the conversations, one of them has become a bit of our mantra for this project, which is that nature needs to be on our doorsteps and not a destination. That's something that really came out of what residents were expressing and having nature, not as somewhere they had to travel to visit, even if it's just around a few corners, but having it in their front gardens, on their streets as they leave their houses. Also, the importance of anchors. We've started calling them local organisations that can support greening work that's happening to make sure that there's that sustainability. So not running things, but being there if residents groups want to grow things, having an organisation that is going to hopefully be around for a very long time that can support that work and ensure that it's sustainable. Also, a lot of residents were really keen on just capturing what's there and capturing the history of spaces and not always coming in and saying loads of things need to change, but actually really just taking time to appreciate what we do have and appreciate the stories behind some of the growing spaces we have and having some visual, written way to really capture the story of spaces and what's been tried on them, instead of trying the same things over and over again over decades, if we can capture what's happened in spaces, then that's really valuable. And also green careers. This is something that's come up across the community projects when we've spoken to them. A lot of young people feeling that careers in the green sector aren't viable. The green sector's not very diverse at all, so thinking about what we can do to increase diversity in the green sector and for us getting Islington young people into that sector and believing it's a place that they can work. From all these conversations, we'll be starting to put together the framework that is the big outcome of the Nature Neighbourhoods project for all of the neighbourhoods. So we're consolidating all of the conversations, looking at what's come out and starting to put that into a framework that's based around the themes of the people's plan. And that's it. Thank you. There's a few photos there of our last community conversation, which Councillor Clark joined us at, making some very lovely nature arts and crafts. Thank you. Thank you very much. And it was a really lovely event, actually. There's young people there and very, very engaging and it's just so important to be involved in that way, in a community way, making things with natural leaves and sticks. That's very good. So this is really good, what you're doing. It's great work. And I just would like, you talked about walking the streets. I'd like to know what sort of, tell us some of the things you saw when you're walking the streets. Because we're talking about greening our streets, you see, so could you say some, give us examples of where you saw greening working and where you saw greening could happen. In terms of what could happen, and I've mentioned them, but tree pits came up a lot. I think just, yeah, people kind of identifying trees, obviously, great, but there being areas around them that are maybe kind of used as litter bins sometimes, because they don't look like there's much greening going on. In terms of good examples, there were a few on estates in particular, like on the streets within estates where communities had kind of got together to get pots out and start creating their own kind of green areas. And also there was some kind of, I mean, a lot of people were really appreciated where there were like hedgerows along the streets rather than fences. That came up a lot, kind of how can we use natural versions of fences rather than other materials. So yeah, there were some good examples, but yeah, I think lots of potential, especially on streets, because there were areas where, you know, away from streets in parks where everyone thought it was great, but there were certainly a lot of areas where there was kind of disrepair or a lot of litter on the streets that the residents felt could be improved if it just looked like there was some greening activity going on. Committee, any questions? Okay, Councillor Heather, Councillor Hayes, Councillor possible. Yeah, I mean, I'm aware that you work on council estates as well and the Andover estate and Six Acres, I remember, but what are the challenges with that and financial challenges and stuff like that? Yeah, okay, thank you. I think the challenges we always find is that for many years people living on estates have been told not to sit on the grass, not to play on the grass, not to play ball games in public spaces. And even though those signs have come down a number of years ago, I think the mentality is still there. I mean, we had a young parent tell us through the conversations where during the summer, the mother of a new baby, she just wanted to come out of the flat and sit on the grass and just got hurled abuse by other people saying that she shouldn't be sitting on the grass with her baby when all she wanted to do was just be outside with her baby. So I think there's challenges all around in terms of how people view that space on estates, whether they feel ownership of that space or whether the council just comes and mows it, clips it and then that's it. So I think there's a lot of work to be done to reimagine how estates could look like and feel like, but also how that green space is used. On the Tufnell Park estate, and if any of you know the Tufnell Park estate, when we first went on the estate with the community plant nurse, we were told about the level of antisocial behaviour there. I mean, obviously I've got to think about the safety and welfare of the staff that work on site. And you know, we've had no trouble whatsoever because we're there more or less every day, the young people, the children, they come and engage with us, they've watered for us in the summer. So I think it's that presence, you have to be present all the time. And something what we've learned over the years is just doing things on a one-off doesn't work. It is just a one-off. So being there and the Tufnell Park is a good example. We're there all the time so residents get to know us and we start to build up relationships. So the more we can actually do on estates for people to actually come out and feel that that space is for them, I think the benefit of that is tenfold really. And like I said, we've never experienced any antisocial behaviour with the community plant nursery site or around it at all. Thank you. It was a really interesting presentation. Is that the end of the community conversations or is there future work? And how is that work taken forward? So I guess it's like you talked a bit about local community organisations and having places, and clearly a number of them were involved, where people can get engaged. But who will be taking that? Is it with octopus, I guess is the question, and how long is their funding for? And what would you see as the next phases of the work? Thank you. It's definitely not the end of the community conversations. We set up that series of six as we felt a good initial, but partly we know we haven't reached everyone, but also we haven't reached as diverse a spread of Tufnell Park residents as we would have wanted, despite our best efforts. We have actually recently engaged a volunteer who's a local resident who has drawn up an engagement plan and done some stakeholder mapping. So there'll be another stage of them looking at other organisations that we can engage with on the project and go through them to engage the residents they're working with. In terms of what we're doing at the moment, as I said, is consolidating a lot of what the conversations have brought up and starting to put that into a bit of a framework, looking at what we've done and then looking at what ideas have come up and where they might want to go. The project itself runs until next September, but as a project as a whole of nature neighbourhoods, but also internally, we're now looking at how do we deliver some of this stuff and how can we work with partners in Islington, but also work with partners like the big NGOs to make some things happen. I think just to follow up on that as well, when we first got offered to be included in this fantastic four-nation project and represent not only Islington, but London, I kept asking, what is it that we've got to deliver? We get so used to having to deliver lots of stuff and they said, well, actually, all you need to deliver is a framework. We want you to develop a blueprint of what a nature neighbourhood would look like, what it would feel like. And that's certainly working with Councillor Champion and Andrew Bedford, because we wanted this to be a strategic piece of work as well as doing stuff on the ground. And what we're working towards now is where we're starting to populate that framework, so where we've been doing a lot of thinking, a lot of doing, a lot of piloting. I mean, I'm very really delighted to say that, Tricia, you'll be delighted as well, that after probably about in excess of 12 months of consultation on the Tufra Park estate, we've actually been given the go-ahead to work with residents to develop the woodland garden and create a new growing area for them. But what Rosie said about what's really interesting about the area is how essential it is to have nature anchors. In fact, Rosie and I was in a project meeting today with all the four nation partners, and many of them referred to the fact how important having an anchor organisation is to work with the community. Well, we're lucky we've got three, because as Rosie said, the community plant nursery is well established now, and we grow plants to distribute out to about 26 community leg growing groups in the borough, and we also distribute food that's grown from that site as well to community food hubs. Then we've also got Hilldrop and Whittington Park, both who have got small gardening groups. And what we learnt through the conversations as well, because we rotated them around the site, is that people are very kind of parochial to their sites. So even though we had the community conversation up in Whittington Park, we got the Whittington Park crew. And then when we went to Hilldrop, we had the Hilldrop crew. And so what came about through those conversations was the idea that we need to join up those spaces. And so what we did was learn from what we found out about the walk and talk and how people enjoyed it. We had 23 people on that wet and windy day. And just the fact that people walked around the neighbourhood to parts of the neighbourhood that had not been before. So we've already submitted a small application, and hopefully we'll get to find out about it soon. But that will be to train local residents as walk leaders and they will be able to map walks around the neighbourhood as well. So, yeah, there's a long way to go and it's certainly the beginning and not the end. Thank you. Yeah, I am delighted. Welcome, Councillor Boss-McQuarrie, your question. Thanks, Chair. And this is so refreshing to hear. I caught the back end of it, but I just want just to maybe quiz you a little bit in terms of what does maybe a community campaign look like to you both in terms of engagement, you know, to get people more infused about their community. And then second was about reclaiming, I heard you say about reclaiming that green space. So how do we work with, like, you know, I guess stakeholders that own certain housing, you know, sports that often we have that private sector versus us as, you know, council state, you know, where they go through one back end and then we go through another, if that makes sense. And then about, I guess, that cooperative value as well. Do you see, maybe we can do some sort of cooperative kind of initiatives where we could engage in maybe people like buying spots or plots in green spaces. I know we have allotments, but there's always that kind of demographic of people that often have spots in those spaces. I don't know if you can think of any sort of initiatives. And the last one, Chair, sorry, is have you looked at any other boroughs? Because I think it's all good that we're, you know, sort of quite marking here. But is there any sort of other engagement in other boroughs you've seen that maybe we could model here or do better? I don't know. Thank you. There's a lot there. What's really exciting about being involved in Nature Neighbourhoods as a four nation project and with 18 community partners across those four nations is that they've established almost a community of practice. We meet once a month and we share that practice and we learn a lot from what other cities, because it's mainly cities, we learn a lot from what other cities are doing. We've already been up to Manchester, being very impressed by what is happening there, learned a lot already from Birmingham, who's doing some fantastic work around tree planting in the community and getting the community to do that. We absolutely have to, from today, we have to go to Manchester because we've seen and witnessed where a group of residents have gone beyond the framework. They're actually doing it now. They've set up their own CIC. They're already negotiating land that they'll be taken over from the council and they're en route to engage in local businesses as well. This is in one area of Manchester that is one of the most impoverished areas. We're capturing loads of really excellent examples. But I think the consistent what's come across all of those examples is that one, that naturehood, whatever that is and looks like, is so important as the consistent because neighbours and residents come and go. Often neighbours, especially in Islington, are very transient communities. You build up relationships and then suddenly they have to move on or they don't want to do it anymore. So I think there's lots we're learning and certainly we're bringing that into Islington. But the fact that we have got a little fund as well through the project to go and visit some others, we'll bring it all back. So if there's anything in particular, send us the list and we'll go and find it. But yeah, we've got all of those resources and sources. Thank you very much. Did you want to come in, Rosie? Yeah, just on your first question about community campaigns. I mean, a lot of the work that Octopus is doing now is around community organising. We're a social action harbours network and a community organising training provider. So that's kind of the approach we take is facilitating residents to do things themselves, skills building, finding out what's important to them and then being that again as that kind of anchor, not just in terms of the infrastructure of building things, but actually in campaigns as well. This is what we definitely want to take forward in terms of getting out and speaking to more residents, knocking on doors and kind of facilitating their skills and building their own campaigns that they take forward in whatever way they want. Thank you very much. If there are no more questions, it would be really good if we could have a copy of your framework when you've drawn it up. That would be great. We can put it into our scrutiny. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks, Emma. Any members of the public want to ask a question? No? Thanks a lot. Okay, so now we're going to move on to... Thank you very much indeed. Mercedes is going to talk on e-Recycling. So if you could talk for 10 minutes or something and take questions, that would be great. Or you can talk for less than 10 minutes. We'll ask questions. Thanks. I do my best, yeah. Hello, everyone. My name is Mercedes. I run Merete Digital, and I'm going to talk about electronic waste. Let me see if I can see the screen. Say it again. Would you like me to get a laptop? No, no, just a battery. Oh, a laptop. I see what you mean. Okay. No, it's gone too far. I think you've got the PDF. We need to see the slides. The slides, not the PDF, if that's okay. I can't start talking. There are two parts. One is about electronic waste. The other one is why was I so insistent in coming and present today. I'm not sure if I'll have time for the second part. But the United Kingdom is about to become, if it hasn't already, the worst offender of electronic waste in the world. We only recycled 30% of our electronic waste. We only recycled 30% of our electronic waste. I'm going to try again. Okay. Sorry about the wrong start. I'll start again. When we look about electronic waste, we normally look about our planet having limited resources, and we need to recycle them, because obviously we want to use what we already have. However, it's important to remember that 80% of the CO2 that is emitted, it normally happens during the manufacturing process. That is particularly true with devices like laptops and desktops and tablets and mobile phones, and they are the ones that get used for a longer period. And that is why it's so important that we focus on strategies of repair and reuse before we look into recycling. However, even though recycling is very, very important still, we only recycle 30% of our electronics. 70%? Well, we have a lack of infrastructure. I'm going to focus a bit on the problems that we have. We have a lack of infrastructure, so why do we only recycle 30%? People normally do not lack information. They don't know how to data wipe, how to remove, how to get rid of their mobile phone if they really want to, drop off points, home collections. There's a lot of logistics that is lacking. 70% of those electronics actually is hoarded at homes, like leftover food that we leave in the fridge until it gets rotten. It's a bit like that. Basically, there are a few reasons why people hoard their electronics at home. It could be that it's in need of repairs and it's too expensive or they don't know where to take it. It might be that they think they might need it in the future, so they just keep it just in case. There is an emotional attachment that's quite important, mainly when there is a combination of factors. For example, you have a phone, it's got your pictures, again, data on it. It's broken. And you want to take your pictures before you give it away, but it's broken, so you just hold on to it. And also, this is quite important, it's got the people believe it has a financial value. So, you buy a laptop, it costs you £1,000. One year later, your laptop, you only get £100 for it. And they're like, there's no way I'm going to sell this for £100, you know. They believe there is a financial value in it, when really there isn't. Now, the combination of all those issues hinders repair and reuse options, because those devices are going to stay in a drawer or in a box or whatever at homes. It's estimated that every household holds 25 devices, at least. And they're going to stay there until the people think, I really cannot do anything with this. And if it's too small, it will go on the bin. Next one, please. Oh, another problem that we have is that the problem is really too big. It's very big, and that's why it's a worldwide problem. We've got large recycling organisations that are overwhelmed, they don't have capacity. We heard from them last month, they're investing on, you know, £7 million on CO2 capturing. However, the target for repair and reuse options is only £250,000 to be divided between 16 organisations. Now, a word of caution on these numbers is that I don't know how long those £7 million are going to last. It could be 10 years, and the £250,000 is just for one year. But it's just about seeing the amount of budget that goes into one strategy and the amount of budget that goes into another. And this is definitely due to the overwhelming problem that we are facing. Now, how can we look at this from a different perspective? I'm very interested about grading electronics. A word of caution again, we have very limited data, but we do not have a clear definition of what electronics are and what their value is. So we don't have enough data, but when we talk about electronics, we talk in tones, and we've got everything together. So when you look at the definition of what electronics are, you are told that it's anything that has got a battery or a plug, as long as it has electricity. So a fridge or a mobile phone or an electric car is an electric car part of electronic waste. It obviously isn't. And that is when it gives us the value of the electronics really depends on the perspective. When we are looking at electronic waste, we are normally looking at the perspective of recycling. So we can look at electronics. When I'm proposing to grade our electronic waste, I'm proposing to look at the devices from different perspectives. So what will it be? The reparability value. Is it worth it? Can you repair it? Can it stay in the market or in our society for 10 more years? What is the recycling value? Again, a fridge versus a mobile phone. What are we looking for? If we are looking for components, metals that are very difficult to mine and in horrible conditions, we really are looking at a mobile phone. Even though it's very small, it's full with those components. Now we are looking at aluminium because it's what is, you know, depending on our political situation, it might be aluminium price is very high. Therefore, then we will be looking into a fridge. So the price is going to vary depending on what we are looking into. That is the financial price that I just mentioned. Sustainability and environmental value. This is quite interesting as well. And again, we need so much research to be done in these areas. I just learned that an electric cooker is not environmentally sustainable after two years because of how quickly the technology is improving. So when you look at all the environmental impact is if you have a five-year-old cooker that is working perfectly fine, is emitting more CO2, is using more electricity, it is more environmentally friendly to upgrade that cooker. Obviously, think of a hospital, think of a university, don't think of your cooker at home that is going to have a small impact, but think of large scale. So again, it happens with power tools, we have the problems of software with Windows 11, which is a safety concern. But there are so many different variables that we need to take into account when we want to grade and identify what is the value per device. Toxicity, I want to talk about toxicity as well. The problem with toxicity is we might have no value on a device, however, it is very toxic. For example, lithium batteries, CRT monitors, so again, maybe a device might have no value, no financial value, no recycling value, no repair value, but it is toxic and it is in our environment and none of a sudden it should be put on the top of the list. Repair is not financially viable. I don't know how many times I have said repair is not financially viable. So I don't know how we are going to build up a system that is based on repair before recycling when repair is not financially viable. Oops, sorry, I'm not going to touch it again. So if we can click on it, this is just a small example of one of the main problems that the repair market face. And this is our website from the right to repair. It's called the price is not right. And if we scroll down until the first images, we are going to see that the price of this one, we've got an electric trimmer, it's priced at 37 euros. The motor from that trimmer breaks, if we go up a bit, we see the price of the motor, sorry Dan, the price of the motor is 59.63. Now this is outrageous when it comes to washing machines. You have a tiny piece on a washing machine and it can cost you 3,000 pounds, so obviously you are going to get rid of your washing machine. But the price, the problems that we have with parts is huge. We have, we can go back to the presentation if that's okay. The problems we have with parts is, the problem we have with parts is parts are often, if they are new, more expensive than buying the new device. Then you need to add the time of the person repairing, the salaries, the rent, the taxes, everything else. And there is also, sorry I'm still on repairs, yeah thank you. And there is also that refurbished parts do not have the way, the value that they should have. There are many different reasons for this, I could go for hours talking about this, but they are seen as an opportunity to generate income. So when you talk to the repair market, there is a lot of competition between repair shops. So basically a lot of repair shops are telling you that they are using a new part, but in reality they are using a refurbished part. Therefore competition are saying they are not acting in a clear way. We need to create a system where people take pride into using refurbished parts. I stand on it and people, as I'm saying, take pride and it's cheaper and it's better. I'm going to ask you to wind up and if you could just move to your conclusions about what needs to happen. The conclusion is, don't worry I'm going to skip the second part. How long have we been talking? We've been talking for ten minutes and that is your time really. Okay, thank you. So you just wind up, that would be great. Okay, go to the next one. A possible solution is turning electronic waste into currency. So basically we've got computers for example. So let's say you've got young people that want to buy one of our computers from us. We can say bring me cables, bring me electronic waste that you find on the streets and in exchange we can give you a computer. Go to the next one. I'll just take a couple of minutes. I will go into the next set. And I should lock them up. It doesn't click? Oh no. No? Is it the next one? Okay. Let's leave it here. We can stop here. I'll just summarize the thing. So basically we need a centralized platform, okay? Sometimes like an app where people can say I've got a mobile phone or a hoover, I want to get rid of it and people can see how much environmental value, repairability options, CO2 emissions and how much money can they get if they actually get rid of it. A voucher system. A voucher system is being trialled in Germany, in Austria, in Belgium in many different ways. However, the voucher system is based on I buy a kettle from Argos, I go back and so I can bring my old kettle back to Argos. We need something that is more generalized. We've got new legislation putting the financial pressure on the retail market. So we need something that if you get a kettle from Argos, Argos also has Sainsbury's. Can you do your weekly shopping because you brought to Argos your old kettle, your old hoover and whatever else you brought. Second of all, can we please include the community? So the centralized hub ideally should be designed by the younger generations because it's going to be for them. I'm afraid we'll have to just take questions now. Okay. Okay. So if you turn your mic off. Yes. Thanks very much. Thank you for your presentation. So I've got Councillor Russell, Councillor Heber and Councillor Hayes. Okay. Go ahead. Thank you. And I'm feeling very guilty about the drawer in my desk with a couple of old phones in it. From going back a very long way because my phone is about eight years old. And yes, don't know how to get rid of them, don't know what to do with them. So I can absolutely imagine that mountain of e-waste that is hanging out collectively in the homes of Islington residents. And the kind of, you know, the hoovers that kind of still work but don't quite and you're not sure where to get them repaired. So I'm just wondering what the solution is here. And what also, I mean, it's really good to hear about things happening in other countries. But I'm just wondering if there's anything that the council could actually do that could properly help in this situation. Whether it's trying to collect more waste items and kind of in particular categories and really focus in on recycling like whether it's old mobile phones. But try and really have some impact in that area. Or whether it's about setting up kind of repair cafes so that people can be helped to repair these items so that they can have a second bit of life. And I just wondered if you've got any thoughts about, you know, on that very practical level, how can the council have an impact quickly? Thank you. So I'm going to just take Councillor Heather and Councillor Hayes. So if you could come back on those questions, that'd be great. Councillor Heather. Yeah, thanks very much. It strikes me that to make a difference here, it's going to have to be scaled up. So have you considered the possibility of a supply chain solution to this? A supply chain solution, i.e. you've got all these items that people don't know what to do with. I've got them as well, you know, I'm not going to go on about it. I normally do, but I won't digress and go on to a toaster under the stairs and stuff like that. So we've got new technology, we've got the internet, we've got like delivery companies, whatever. Surely, I think probably, I think if we're going to do anything useful, it's got to be done at the scour. Personally, I can't see the council doing it. But I could see maybe that a business solution might address it, whereby people could return it to trusted like Recycler or whatever, maybe. I don't know, but I just wondered, are you looking at that? Because I tell you what, as much as I simplifies with what you're saying, all the forces in our current society and the way the economic system runs, you know as well as I do that the consumers and they're just going to create more and more products. They're not going to stop doing it. So I'm not trying to be pessimistic about it, but I think that if we want to find a solution and something that's meaningful, it's got to be done at a scale. I don't believe the council can do that. Thank you. Councillor Hayes. Yes, thank you very much, and there's a lot to cover on this. Part of my question, Councillor Russell has already asked, but I was interested in one of your slides, you were talking about repair shops running repair parties to generate more trade, essentially. And I just wondered whether the barriers, how you would tackle the barriers to be economically viable to repair things. You have to charge, you know, and as your slide shows, often the incentive is just to buy something new, because you might have a limited life and if you buy a new one, it might last you for three years, I suppose for another six months. How might that be incentivised or how might that be done in a way that makes it economically viable for those repair shops? Thank you. Okay, Mercedes. Yeah, please. Okay, thank you very much for your questions. I think with regards to your question, it really depends on what an impact would you like to have. Would you like to have a long term impact or would you like to have a temporary solution? Let's go for long term. If you want a long term impact, you are very, very ambitious. And yes, I think there are many different ways in which I think, and I want to reply to all three of you together, if that's okay, just jumping. Of course, the corporate shouldn't, you know, companies shouldn't be involved. We could maybe try to use that with the new ESG policies and they could contribute financially. Actually, we've got the London Bridge team, we've got bids in Angel, in the Nax Head. Can we use some of those Levi's to use the money for creating a system like that? Definitely. But if you ask what I think, I think a problem like this is only going to be sorted by the community. It's not going to be sorted by a council, it's not going to be sorted by politicians. We need policies to impose norms on companies. But if we really want a change, a long term change, it's going to come from the community. That's why I didn't have a chance to show, but I want the proposal is to target it in a very small area in the Nax Head. The Nax Head already experiences the symptoms of the climate crisis. We've got, when it rains, you've got all the water coming from Hibernate, Slinton, from Archway, from Taffnell Park, from Camden. It's just, you need to go on wellies on the community centre. I used to work for two years at the Holloway neighbourhood group and we are literally on wellies when it rains. So it's an area that is already very aware of the climate crisis. So it's a very good area to start developing something. When we look into creating something that works for the community, that's what I'm thinking of, vouchers. But it has to be a voucher. Yes, we can trial it out with computers from us because we've got computers. We could trial it out with refurbished kettles. You bring your old kettle to Arcos, not to Arcos, because Arcos doesn't have the infrastructure to take all the kettles that we have. But you bring to a community centre, we are working with Holloway neighbourhood group, they are very, very involved in the project. So you will bring your old kettle or your old phone or whatever it is to a community centre where you are talking to the people when the community centre can take on the feedback of what is working for you and what is not working for you. And then you get a voucher from the company because you are doing a service for Arcos. What do you do with that voucher? Ideally, we have within that small area all B&Q, you've got B&Q, you've got Waitrose, you've got Lidl. They all have the responsibility. Can we get people to bring their electronic waste and transform it into food, into doing their shopping in Lidl, into buying what you need, a kettle? Don't get it on Arcos. Buy a repaired kettle from the community centre. With your question with regards to repair parties, I love repair parties. I've done repair parties since I started. They are great, again, to talk to the community, to explain why repair is not financially viable. But can we get the repair market to run them because we want to bring customers to them. And a lot of the time, we don't know what's going on and we don't know if they... because we don't know how to repair. We don't know if they are going to do something that maybe is not so legitimate. So, by repair shops, running repair parties, we are putting in touch the community with the shops itself. And they get to build a relationship and then later on they can go back to the shop with any other problems that they might have. I hope I've answered everybody. Thank you very much. Can you turn your mic off? Thank you. That's really good. Any other questions? Just a comment. Of course. Yep. Thanks, Chair. It's a comment. Because I started a personal experience a couple of years ago. I started to just unwrap my shopping at supermarkets because I saw it on a TikTok thing and I was like, this looks really cool. And actually, I realised when I went back home to live in a council estate, I had less waste in my household. And it's just thinking back about what you're saying about electronic goods, because I know there's a place in Ghana where a lot of our goods comes from the UK, wherever, in Europe. And actually, the children on these sites, old enough, some of them are actually recycling and taking the bits off and selling them to companies and stuff like that. So I'm just thinking, there is something that you're saying, but I kind of want to push back in terms of you saying it's got to come from the community. Because I think some people, when you look at demographics, they're unable to do what you're saying. So sometimes some of the fly tipping receives, maybe people can't afford to ensure their appliances and they think it's broken, so they dump it. So I think there's something to be said about how we bring our community together and kind of re-educate or look at our schools. And there needs to be a policy that comes actually from central government. I think there's something to be explored. I like the vouchers idea, but again, it's not sustainable because if you give a voucher this, then what about if it's a bigger product? Because you're just giving things out and people are going to be more consuming, if that makes sense. And we don't want a society that already we're already over consuming. I don't know, I think it has to go back to the companies. When you upgrade, you get to send your phone back to the company. I don't know what they do with the phone, but I know that I can send it back to that company and upgrade. So it's something to do with what we do with the companies. Does it make sense? It's just a comment. Thank you. Thank you, thanks. So, yeah, I'm just going to take, I just want to say if you could, you know, you're focusing on the NAG's head. Yes, it needs to be a pilot because there are so many variables. You're doing a pilot? Is that what you're doing? I am proposing to do a pilot, yes. Who are you proposing it to? To you. Oh, to us? Yes. To do a pilot of the NAG's head? Yes. Well, okay, so we can, that sounds like a good idea. Okay. So we can work out how to do that, you know, yeah. Is there anyone got any ideas? Well, she's probably asking for funding, Tricia, so I think that's probably more than just doing a pilot. The funding. I'm not necessarily asking for funding, but again, this is an initiative that no one can do on their own. So when it comes to, it's a very, very important point I haven't had a chance to present, but we are training providers. Meriti provides training, so when we are thinking of community centres running them and people bringing the equipment, we are having a training, you know, community centre is a place where the training happens, where the equipment gets refurbished, and when it gets put back into the community. Okay, so I'm going to just take in one of the officers, Matthew Homer. Just turn your mic off. That's great. So Matthew, are you coming in? No, well, when we finish this, we'll go to the member of the public. Have you got something to say? Well, only that, so as an immediate action, the North London Wastes have got their community waste fund open at the moment. I'm sure you're probably aware of that. Possibly it might be worth considering, but I think it's worth a conversation with my team, possibly with the local economies team, community centres, and so on, so that we can, because obviously you haven't had, there hasn't been time to kind of go through your proposal in full, and I think it's worthwhile getting together with a few of us so that we can go through it in a bit more detail. Thank you very much, Matthew, that's really, really helpful. And so I'm just going to finish, we've finished our questions and we're going to go to the member of the public now. If you could say your name and where you're from and what's your question? Hi, I'm Chris Proctor and I'm an architect nearby. I just wanted to interject that this is such a crazy big problem that it needs very alternative solutions. And I was in France recently and in France there's a big movement of artists who recycle these appliances into art objects. So you have to think of beyond just remaking them work again. And this one gallery was full of these little robots made of hoovers and lights as eyes and things. And that's another way out of this problem. Thank you very much. So Mercedes, if you give your contact details to Matthew, because he's offering a conversation about this and I really, really appreciate you coming and talking to us about this. It's a big problem. Thank you very much. Q1 and Q2 performance report with Councillor Champion, Executive Member for Air Quality, Environment and Transport. And Martijn Kuyman, Director for Climate and Transport to present. Thank you very much. I think just obviously hearing both the previous presentations, firstly about from Octopus and then also from Mercedes and the merits. I think we are going to go through our performance report, talk about what we're doing in Islington. And it kind of sometimes feels very parochial. But it is always really important to remember that what we're talking about is an existential threat to the planet. And actually what we do here in Islington is contributing to a really important global effort. But I think also it just again is incumbent on us to show leadership here. And we are in a wealthy country. We're in a wealthy city. We have many, many things going for us. And actually it is for us to take leadership. And I hope when you go through the report that you'll agree that actually some of the things that we're doing here is really quite impressive in that regard. So just to start off, it's the quarter one and two. Can I just say you've got ten minutes? Yeah, performance reports. So I think you probably realise it's quite a comprehensive piece of work and I don't think I can talk to all of it. So what I will do is pick out a few highlights. And in terms of the recycling and the waste, I propose that we take that actually with the next item if that's all right. Okay, so I think that just to start some introductions. So what we've done here is incorporated the key performance indicators within the report itself. So they don't get lost, this index shows where they are. So if you want to compare and have a look at the KPIs, you can turn to page four and this sets out where you'll be able to find them. This again is just the basics of where we are. Obviously if you want to ask any questions, both Marcin and I can try and help. Probably Marcin is probably more helpful than me. Again, just a quick look at where we are more generally. Get some specifics. So planning, I just wanted to sort of highlight planning. So one of the things we're really trying to do is facilitate sort of private homeowners to take forward and tenants where possible to take forward measures where they're able to. And we know that there is, you know, people kind of feel that they're actually block on that, particularly within the conservation area. So it's a piece of work, quite an important piece of work around how you explain to people actually what they can do. And then help to give some guidance on how they do it. And attached to the local plan, which was passed last year, the planning team are working on a supplemental planning guidance. And that's your handbook, a practical handbook that goes with that to try and explain, as I say, what is in simple terms and accessible terms, what can be done. That will go out to consultation in January. And I think there will be sort of opportunities to feed into that. But we think it's a really quite important piece of work. Because as we all know, council is only responsible, including its role as landlord, 9% of the emissions in this borough and private homes are responsible for quite a lot of the other ones. We're also trying to support them. At the moment, the duty planning officer will give some advice as to retrofit options. But going forward, we're hoping that we've just recruited a more specialist officer who will also be able to try and help them go through. As part of just going back, there was a slide on community energy. So trying to work with community energy organizations like Power Up to try and unlock some of the funding for things. For example, in particular, solar panels. Power Up and London work with schools to do that. But this is the heat and energy networks. This is becoming a really, really important work stream. It's one of the things that we've kind of found when we're looking at sort of fabric first, traditional retrofit. Actually, it's incredibly expensive. And while there are absolute reasons to do that, it isn't going to get us to where we are quickly enough. So actually looking at the heat and energy networks is really, really important. Do you want to say anything, Martin, coming on that? Yeah, just to add to that. So in Islington, we have one heat network where rather than guests on the street going to your house and being burnt in your boiler at home, actually hot water pipes run under the road and provide heat that way. There's also a number of small heat networks across the borough and there are a number of buildings that have communal heating, which in essence is also a heat network. Now the government is changing legislation because they see that in places like central London, in Islington in particular, and other central London boroughs, actually because it's so densely populated, this form of district heating is a really good way to replace heating by guests to decarbonise the way we get heat. So we're really trying to work out how that might work in Islington and lots of kind of feasibility work is underway to understand that and what that might mean for Islington. Some of the details of what we're doing, as I mentioned here about the Community Energy Fund, please do ask for more information. I think at some point it's probably going to be worth actually having an item on district heat networks because they're becoming increasingly important. I think governments think they're increasingly important. I think one of the things we're really trying to do is make sure that we remain on top of it so that when the opportunities arise, we're actually part of it because I think there is a risk if we're not in that position, actually things could happen without us, which is something that we just don't want to happen. So these are just the affordable energy. We've known about Shine. Shine are doing an amazing piece of work in very, very difficult circumstances and I think they remain as the team we're very proud of. They have been doing sort of energy saving work for many, many years but absolutely focused around reducing fuel poverty, which as I say is always a priority for us whenever we look at anything we do and it's one of the reasons we're looking at district heat networks because at the moment if you just put net zero carbon heat, air source heat pumps for many buildings, actually the bills will just go up. So that's the importance of district heat networks for us is also about tackling fuel poverty. We go on to the next one which is the decarbonising council homes. So this again is a work stream which is led by Matt West. Again it's incredibly difficult. We know that the cost of decarbonising our council homes, retrofitting our council homes is huge, but it's also particularly complicated and it's quite complicated because you're causing quite a lot of disruption to residents when you're doing it. So we're doing a series of pilots through the social housing decarbonisation fund. We've just put a bid in as part of a London-wide consortium for a number of council homes. I think is it 300 or 400? Yeah, 250.

1. And that's very much a London-wide consortium. In terms of our council estates, we're doing some quite interesting work around how you actually do retrofitting, including or I think we've mentioned before Bevan Court where we're not looking at Fabric First. We're looking at quite an innovative solution and I think this is what the team is really good at, looking at ways of getting around these things. Lots of work going around London which feeds into actually what we do. So that's just a summary of what we're up to. It's got some of the KPIs in it. Again, sorry about New Build. We know how challenging New Build is, how challenging doing a net zero carbon New Build is, but actually in terms of affordable energy, the standards of New Build will make it much cheaper to run a sort of electric or an air source heat pump than the old leaky buildings. Then just going on to transport and active travel. Again, there's a huge amount of work going on in this space. I think we know. We've obviously had quite a lot of information around scrutiny on that. There are just a couple of highlights that I think I just want to point out. We've now, I think since the last scrutiny, the Liverpool neighbourhood in Mildmay has started to be actually constructed. And then the decision on the Kelly Liverpool neighbourhood has been taken, I think it's subject to call in, which may have expired today. So our first two Liverpool neighbourhoods are well underway now. But also just something slightly different is the TFL travel for life, which used to be active travel programme, STARS. It used to be called STARS. So it's the work that schools do. And we have got the best results in London. So it's working with schools to try and get sustainable transport to school. And I say I think, you know, tremendous congratulations to that team who delivered that. I'm not very good at this. I just keep, sorry. Who now? This is great. Have you got much more to go through? I think I wasn't going to pick up. There is quite a lot more of information about what we're doing, things like electric vehicle charging. And again, I mean, that's something again, that's a bit behind the scenes, but actually really important piece of work. And then obviously we know we know things about bicycle hangers. We know, you know, the dockless bike bays are going in. So we get to get to that. I'm not coordinating the natural environment. And I think we've just heard from Rosie and from Julia how important natural environment is. And actually how important working with teams like Octopus Groundworks actually are as a garden classroom. So we go on to page 30. Some of the things we're actually already doing. So they were talking about actually working with the community, but there are a series of initiatives that we're actually taking already. So the whole Islington Green Together program was around working with the community to deliver their own ideas of how they can dream their streets. But there's a greener together champions program. And also, actually, I don't think probably quite so widely known, but also working with residents around a survey of our trees. And then I think the other thing I'd just like to point out is that the tree team planted 981 trees this year, which, I mean, that's an incredible achievement given our constrained space. I think we've talked before about pocket park frameworks, and that's incredibly important because that's a way of, when we get money, moving forward quite quickly. So there is a real recognition that, you know, nature on the doorstep is such an important part of what we need to be doing going forward for many reasons. And then I don't propose to go to the waste reduction recycling circular economy because, obviously, Matthew and Pawel and the team are here. Okay, so I'm just going to ask you to very, very detailed report and lots of really good things happening. So I'm just going to go to the committee now and ask the questions of Councillor Heather, Councillor Russell to start with and Councillor Hayes, Councillor Heather. Yeah, thanks, Councillor Chairman. So I'll put that aside because I noted that we're going to do recycling in the next bit as the recycling champion for the council. So question I'm going to ask you is about, so the genesis of this report was about the council achieving net zero carbon by 2030. So what's the sort of, how are we getting on with that? That's the question. So there's quite a big piece of work going on at the moment. So we obviously did the strategy in 2020, 2021 and there's a whole refresh of actually that strategy which actually looks precisely at what you're saying. What are we, where are we? What are the really important things that we need to be doing to be going forward? And I think give us a better position when we've done that. Again, I don't know if Martin wants to come in because obviously it's being led by your team. Yeah, like Councillor Champion says, so there's a lot of work happening in the background to kind of refresh the strategy. So we set out vision 2030 with a number of initiatives to kind of work towards net zero carbon. In the kind of refresh of the strategy, we're also looking into how we kind of tell the story. As you can see in the slides here, first is about planning, making sure that when we develop anything, it's low carbon, that the heat source is low carbon. That's why we're focusing on energy, that the buildings that will be decarbonised either by changing the heat source or by insulating buildings in essence. And what we're doing in each of the work streams is really working out what does it take to reduce the carbon emissions and what is actually where we should spend our money most because it has the most impact. That's also why we're talking about heat networks, insulating a building and putting a heat pump in, just to give an example and the real challenge ahead. You're going to get a low carbon heat source, the heat pump, but energy costs, electricity is much more expensive than gas, so people end up with higher energy bills. You then have to insulate a building and it makes it incredibly expensive and the money just simply isn't there. You know, it's really hard to do that. With the heat networks, what we're hoping might be an option and a way forward is to say we work to see if there's funding to invest because people have to pay for the heat so you can kind of see how it's being funded. So that might be a way where actually there might be the funding to do it. So we really need to look at how things are funded and what's the best way forward to decarbonise. And if it wasn't just decarbonising, we also know that climate change is here and we're at the climate panel to look at climate adaptation and resilience to hear from residents what is it actually that they feel we should do to protect us from the impact of climate change, extreme heat for longer, flooding, other risks that come with climate change and that needs to be brought into this action plan as well and as part of that we'll have a better kind of indication on where we'll be by 2030. Thanks for that very thorough answer. Councillor Russell. Thank you. I've got quite a few questions but I'll try and rattle through them very briefly. So in terms of the SPD which I think is out for public consultation January adoption in April, is the retrofit handbook also going to be out for public consultation during that timeframe? And we were told by I think it was either Sakeba or by Karen Sullivan that there would be an opportunity for councillors to respond potentially before it went to public consultation so that we could have some input into it. Is that still the plan? Were you planning to get councillors and this committee for instance to respond to the public consultation? Then as there's more retrofitting done and particularly with this new guidance are all case officers going to be taking on retrofit planning cases or will you have some specialist planners who do the retrofit cases while the others just keep going with what they were doing? Then on page 45 you mention that the training programme for climate awareness for leadership staff and mandatory e-learning for all staff supported by in-person workshops is overdue. And I just wonder kind of what your timescale is to get back on track with that because presumably that's important in terms of delivering on all of this. Then in terms of decarbonising council homes pages 18 and 19 you've got projects mapped out up to 2029 but the proposals list projects and numbers of homes but it's not as a percentage of the total number of homes in Islington. So the impression that I'm getting from this report is that we're talking about hundreds rather than thousands of homes. So I'm wondering what percentage of retrofit is going to be achieved by 2030 both in council homes, in social rent from other institutions like housing associations and then in the privately owned sector. Whether that's the private rental or people living in homes that they're buying with a mortgage. So what percentage of these homes you're expecting to be retrofitted by 2030? And then one other question which was about the line bike bays. There aren't very many of them at the moment. If we're going to really get line bikes off the pavements being badly dumped, getting in the way of disabled people, older people, blind people we're going to need a massive depth change in the number of bays and what's the plan for that. We actually have line bikes coming in January so we'll park that till January. It was part of this report which is why I asked the question. A lot of questions, very good questions. As for Councillors putting into the SPD, Sakiba did come to this committee and she said we could put into that. So you can write to Sakiba at any time. I got the impression we were going to be invited to respond to a document which hasn't yet. There was an impression given that we would have a chance to contribute before it went to public consultation. It doesn't matter, it's about to go to public consultation so we can do it afterwards but I was just wanting to get clarity about that. Maybe we could ask for that to go around the committee and then you can put into it. I think we had discussion about this earlier this week, a little bit about timing. I think the view we came to was actually we would go out to consultation and then very early within that consultation have a briefing for Councillors so Councillors can then feed back. I think one of the things is we could go out and talk to Councillors first but actually we wouldn't really have the time then to seriously consider Councillors changes and incorporate it unless we were going to delay the consultation. I think it was felt to do that together. So absolutely very early in the consultation I think is the plan at the moment with the handbook. The handbook is a very important part of the SPD. The details within the handbook are very complementary to the SPD. In terms of the retrofit officer, I think the intention is that that person will be a very skilled and expert at that but also part of what we are doing around the SPD, around the handbook is to give all the planning officers the confidence to take decisions on this as well. I am sure that they will be supported by the officer but I don't think the intention is that only that officer takes those decisions. I can check that but that wasn't my understanding. Martin, can you do the awareness? An important part of the climate programme is to make sure that everybody who works for the Council and also members think climate with everything we do. That's where the training comes in. So we started with training for the executive and corporate management team. We've rolled that out now to all senior officers in the organisation at various networks and what we're also doing is we're giving workshops for anyone who is involved in a project or any initiative to understand what climate action is because it's not straightforward. People think yeah temperature but what can I do? It's about heat and recycling and all these kind of things to give them a bit of a point so that when they start a project and they start also writing a report to actually know how do we really address climate action. What you also see in terms of the Council's reports now, they have a finance, legal and equality implications section and something that used to be called environmental implications but that's now climate and environmental implications for people to really think about climate with every decision the organisation makes. And the climate action team is kind of helping people to do that. Now in terms of your specific question about individual staff, so the plan is that all staff in the Council will have a basic level of training on climate action and that's simply taking a little bit longer because the officer that was going to work on that left. We hired someone new and when they started they go on jury service for 15 weeks. Hopefully it won't take that long. So it's simply kind of a resourcing kind of thing but it should happen quite soon. There was one other question which was about the number of, the proportion of homes retro. Again I think my time might be to come on this but I think my understanding really is that at the moment we can't say that because it is very much dependent on the money that's available to do it. We will take every opportunity we can to do that but the handling revenue account can't fund it. That is one of the reasons why we're seriously looking at district heat networks. Councillor Haynes and then Councillor Bostman-Quashie. Thank you very much. Really interesting report and very easy to follow. Thank you. On the Shine service, it's brilliant that they've exceeded the targets by quite a significant amount and also the financial gain for people getting the energy doctor is really significant. My question really was about capacity that I would imagine that we're seeing a very cold winter, we're seeing more people affected by the cost of living crisis. That is likely to make more people be in energy poverty and my question was really is it able to, is the service able to continue to expand to meet more targets or have we hit full capacity? And then just my other question was also about the training and I've been at a few things recently where it's just really hit me how many different jobs are affected by changes in the climate. Things like the severe weather, shelters when people are street homeless for example, that the more we experience extreme weather the more likely it is that those services will need to kick in. And I wondered whether that training, once a person has come back from jury service and trained staff, whether that could be expanded to the voluntary community and faith sectors. Quite often they are providing real front line services to people who are most likely to feel the direct impacts of extreme heat, extreme rain and extreme cold. Thank you. In terms of the Shine Energy Advice Service, the demand goes up and down and it's very much so that when winter starts demand goes up again normally and when summer takes place there is less demand from a kind of immediate need but then we work on various cases to help people with their bills and various other things from a kind of fuel poverty point of view. It has been a very busy period because also there were changes in terms of grants that residents can get and what Shine always does is they have a really good overview of all the different grants that are available to help our most vulnerable residents as best as possible. So there was a period where it was very busy, we're hiring extra people to support the team and I don't have the latest but I hope the real peak has kind of calmed down now so that they can continue to provide support to our local residents. I think the point you make about the voluntary sector, I think it's a really good one, I think it's interesting and maybe we could take that away. Thank you. Councillor Boswell-Kwashi. Thanks, Chair. Just an observation in terms of the info we were given. I'm just wondering, or maybe it's just me missing out, about the SMEs, so how many of our street properties that are bus shops are also getting that retrofit in terms of looking at maybe the private businesses that might be able to invest in their buildings? And support our scheme going forward as stakeholders, if that makes sense. Because obviously there's some that are renting, there's some that actually own their buildings, so I'm just wondering can we add that to our data because that also would help us in getting figures for 2030. And then just a little bit more information and clarity on the amount of trees that we've planted but in terms of the longevity of those trees, I think in the past when I've watched online and seen the data come back, we've had some trees that were planted because of weathering or whatever have you or because of pavements and sometimes often just, you know, when we've had private companies coming in, they've messed up our pavements and we've not been able to hold them to account. I think it was about how trees have been damaged, so it's kind of like a bit of feedback on the trees. And then I had one more point as well, Chair, so if I can find this. I think it was about how we're also supporting our TRAs and TMOs in terms of also them planting more trees in and around their local spaces, especially where we know that we're trying to reduce cars, for example, and if certain spaces are not being used by SMEs to park their cars, then possibly we could get maybe some trees planted in and around those community spaces. Thank you, Chair. In terms of specifically flats above shops, I don't know. I suspect they may be some of the harder ones to reach. But as I say, we are trying to make it as easy as possible for people who want to do that to be able to retrofit. It is quite difficult for us to engage, obviously, with landlords, although we do try to do that and we are trying to reach out. In terms of SMEs, there is work with the Inclusive Economy team to support them, but that's often in respect to their own sort of businesses, if you like. In terms of trees planted, trees are damaged for a number of reasons, or just actually don't take for a number of reasons. I don't know if Andrew wants to come in particularly about that, but I'm not sure that most of the trees are damaged because of things like contractors or anything like that. I think often it is a natural cause, they die, and young trees don't always take. We did have some challenges with a previous contractor in terms of watering trees that were planted and establishing that. That's been resolved now. Sometimes we get vandalism, sometimes people object to the trees that are planted outside their house, and we've had reports where people have actually had builders that have lifted the trees out and then paved over the footpath. Which we are pursuing. Obviously, we get evidence and we will pursue criminal damage to trees, but it's a tough environment for the trees to establish in. We have a three-year watering program for all trees. Once they are planted, three years usually then they are alright on their own. So those first three years are pretty critical. In heatwaves we do lots of comms messages around getting people to help and support with watering. We have watering bags, watering pipes attached to trees. Lots of things we are trying to do. We have really ramped up the tree planting over the last couple of years. We do a similar number again this year. Finding locations that are suitable for trees, where they can thrive, where they don't block CCTV or street lamps, or too close to people's properties, or there's not utilities under the ground. Because sometimes you can't plant trees because of what's underground. It might look like a brilliant location, but actually you start digging and then go, ah, right, cover that back over. So lots of challenges. We are working with Martijn's team as well about creating new opportunities, creating build-outs into the carriageway to create more space for tree planting. Obviously that's more expensive, but those are the sort of opportunities we are looking at. I think unfortunately Bunhill is one of those wards where it's very difficult to get space in the ground to do anything, but again we are looking. In terms of our own estates, tree planting, we are absolutely looking at our own estates to increase the amount of tree planting. And again I think it's one of these tensions which I think Octopus discussed a little bit about how people want to use their space. So it's a little bit of an ongoing conversation sometimes with people in the estates, but we also know that we are absolutely getting people out into those green spaces. Actually having shaded spaces for them to go to, particularly when it gets hot, is so important. So it's not something that we've given up on, and I think there is a real development. And I think there are some amazing teams that work on the estates. Mark Rhodes' team, who have community gardeners, have been amazingly successful at changing space and changing how people use space. Thank you, yeah. Thanks, I was just going to say, I think you are one of the best teams, not that I'm trying to have favourites here, but I just wanted to squeeze you a little bit more back on in terms of our numbers and the SMEs. I think that's a real thing we need to kind of pick up on, because if we can do this with our communities, because they are a part of our community, then that would be something that we can champion, that we've done here in Islington. So I think sometimes we miss out those residents, and I think even in the past when I've seen consultations being done and we've been trying to, obviously when the LTNs, or I say Liverpool neighbourhoods, in terms of moving traffic and having a free flow, we've sometimes missed those voices. So I think on this part where we're trying to encourage retrofitting, we need to get that engagement, because we do have also some empty properties. I think if you're working with the exclusive, sorry, the Inclusive Economies team, yeah, it would be really good just to really try and get that data, because I think it's really important. Thank you. Councillor Cheaps. I just want to say something about housing, but before that about the trees. I think that there's, it would be good if there was a bit more control and influence on people who have private land, because I understand that they can do what they like. If a tree isn't protected in an area, then they can just remove it and they don't have to answer to anybody. So I'd like to see you lobbying the Mayor of London and a broader lot and the Government to say if you can put a lot more pressure on private landowners and people in private houses to not do what they like with trees. If you can take that, that would be good. Then I wanted to ask about selling the harvest that you're replacing the cladding, which is really good, because what our housing means and what would really help is if we had really good cladding that wasn't going to catch fire and burn the place down. So if we've got a lot more of that, then we discussed it on the committee years ago here and we were going to clag various buildings. So if such a really good substance building material existed, then we need to do more of it. And I just want to ask about Newbury House as well. That's in my patch and I know that's sadder. The residents there are revolting about their boiler and issues around that. But the thing that was frustrating is that Newbury House and plenty of others is right on top of Essex Road station. So it's just a shame if you can't get all the heat that might be underground in the stations and the Queen Elizabeth line runs pretty close to that. So you could suck out the heat from there, then that could really help an awful lot. There's a River Place Health Centre and all sorts there. So if we could pursue TfL governments, we've got our own government now to do all these heat networks, which would in the end be great and beneficial for people. I know you agree. I think you agree. I do definitely agree. I think it's not just about whether or not there's a tube station underneath. It's about actually access to that tube heat. So it's actually quite complicated to find sites that actually work for another Bunhill. I think that's probably right to say, isn't it? In terms of the harvest, the harvest is interesting because I think it's one of the reasons we can actually do what we're doing on the harvest without increasing the electricity bills, the heating bills, actually, because they had got electric heating. So that's a very interesting retrofit. Absolutely. I know that the Mac Western Homes Communities team are looking at how they can do retrofitting of buildings as part of the cyclical maintenance, because at the moment we just don't have the sums of money that would enable us to kind of accelerate a net zero carbon solution. And I say, as Martin said, actually, because what we can't do is we can't put people in fuel poverty by doing something that is good for the environment, but actually then increases their bills by so much that they can't afford it, or even, you know, there's a discussion about whether we can increase their bills at all. So it's complicated. Yes. I mean, you're right that there is less control, but there is still some controls. I mean, the survey that Councillor Champion referred to that we're getting volunteers to at the moment is looking at trees on private land. So we're starting to get a picture of the full, you know, sort of urban forest, and that will help us develop an urban forest management strategy. So looking not just at the 40,000 trees that we manage and maintain, but also all the trees on the private land. Any tree in a conservation area requires conservationary consent to prune or to fail. So that's control. But we also have tree preservation orders. So if there was a significant tree that we felt was at risk, then we can serve a TPO on that tree. So thank you very much. I agree with Councillor Bosman-Quashie. Great team. Brilliant team. So thanks, everyone. And we'll move on to the next item. Oh, any public questions? Oh, thanks, Chris. Go ahead. Hi. Chris Proctor again. I'm an architect, so I deal with a lot of this day to day. And I just want to congratulate the team, because Islington year after year is making real progress, and these reports get more detailed each year. And Islington is particularly strong in low traffic, in livable neighbourhoods, and in heat networks. They sort of, you know, leading the country in those two fields. But there are some places for improvement in housing and in retrofit and planning. And so I just need to tease out a few more answers a little bit from what you said. I've got one question. Go ahead. Well, there are a couple of half questions. Like, the retrofit handbook, is that definitely part of the SPD consultation? I wasn't clear with your answer on that. That they're coming out at the same time, and the retrofit handbook would be adopted. I know the retrofit handbook, Karen told me, and Sakiba told me, is updated. The SPD is a fixed legal kind of document, whereas the handbook is updated and more easily updated. So it's more fluid about that book. But we would like to see it as soon as possible, because it relates to the whole process. And then the planning officer, just to tie these together, the planning officer, I was told by Sakiba earlier that it was someone who would be handling retrofit applications. But oftentimes there are conservation design officers that never really speak to the public. As an architect putting planning applications in, sometimes I need to go to the specialist, and I'm sort of gatekeeping from the case officer. And I guess I'm wondering, is this specialist person going to be directly facing the public for particular applications? Okay, that's great. Thank you for that. So go ahead. My understanding of the handbook is an integral part of the whole package. I can absolutely check that to make sure my understanding is correct, but I'm pretty sure it is. And I think one of the reasons why it's a handbook. So normally a lot of that information could be included in the SPD, but for the reasons that Chris has suggested, which actually allows us to update it actually much easier, is why it's being separated as a handbook. In terms of the planning officer, I think we'll be a public-facing officer. Thank you very much, everyone. And we're going to move on to the next and final item, which is the presentation on recycling rates in Islington. Oh, yeah, with Matthew Homer, Jean Hughes, Pavel Rauschen, and Christina Vamos to present. Thank you for your patience, and please, does everyone want to come up? Yeah, come up, everyone. Brilliant. It's great to have Bill here. I know. Yeah. Okay, so do you want to introduce yourselves and then go ahead with the presentation? You know, I'm asking people to do a presentation for 10 minutes and then take questions. And that could, you know, who knows how long that will be? Hopefully, before 10 o'clock. Hello, I'm Matthew Homer, head of Waste Strategy and Circular Economy here at Islington Council. On my right. I'm Jean Hughes, and I'm dealing predominantly with food waste recycling. I'm Christina Vamos, and I'm dealing with estates recycling. And I'm Pavel Rauschen, and I deal with waste prevention. I wanted to bring a few colleagues along because it's normally just me, and it's nice to see, plus they know more about some of it than I do. There's an awful lot here. So we're going to sort of whiz through, probably skip over a few slides, see how we go. But we're looking at recycling performance, a bit about the work that we are doing within the team, some stuff around policies. There's a lot of policy stuff going on, a bit about the reduction recycling plan that is in preparation as well. So, just briefly at the beginning, a bit about recycling rates, but also in the context of our North London Waste Authority borrowers. Recycling rate for last year was 30.4%, which is, you know, better it could be worse, but it is fairly flat lined over the years. I think what, and the residual waste per household is relatively low compared to previous years as well, moving in the right direction. I think what we wanted to show, if I can go in the right direction, is just if we split that out into dry recycling and organics recycling, you have a lot of very high performing borrowers who have very high recycling rates, but they have very large numbers of households with very large gardens with an awful lot of garden waste. Our dry recycling rate, which is the one on the right, historically has been quite strong compared to our North London borrowers. Whereas the sort of the composting rate inevitably has tended to be a bit lower because of the relatively small amount of garden waste that we have available to collect. So I've always tried to sort of push the dry recycling rate as a success story. So just wanted to talk briefly about contamination, so non-recyclables collected in the recycling rate. There's sampling that's done at the MRF, the Materials Reclamation Facility, run by BEFA. They take samples and they analyze it to see how much of it is recyclable, how much of it isn't. The bad news is that that figure is creeping up for us and for all of the NLWA borrowers. There's a lot of work going on to sort of try and understand exactly what's going on. But of all of the mixed dry recycling that we send to NLWA, just short of 20% of it is deemed as being non-recyclable. So that's something we're really trying to sort of focus on. There's a lot of data here to show the breakdown of this. But I suppose one thing to highlight is whilst it's creeping up, it's creeping up for all of the NLWA borrowers. And our non-recyclable rate based on those samples is the lowest of all of the seven borrowers. And part of the reason for that, that's basically the same data again, but again showing the trend in these contamination rates, these non-recyclable rates for each of the seven borrowers. As you can see, they're all going up and Islington nevertheless remains the lowest. So there's that at least. But there's a lot of work we are doing to try to keep non-recyclables out of our recycling rates, improvements on our recycling sites, lovely new enclosures with slightly restricted apertures to stop black bags going in and so on, signage and labels, crew training and all sorts of things. We also do work with landlords where sites are reported as contaminated. We reach out to them and provide them with information. But also there's a certain amount of responsibility placed on the landlord to clear the contamination themselves. We will gladly do that for them for a small fee. But we're also trying to be innovative and we're trialing at the moment a system by a company called Lixo, a French company, and they, I don't know, Christina, do you want to sort of just quickly say something about this? Yeah, so we have a couple of recycling collection vehicles fit with cameras in the back so it can detect what items are collected from the communal recycling bins. And then it basically it puts all the data on a map and we can see where the contamination is coming from and what kind of contamination. Basically very briefly that's the description. It uses AI to sort of identify, you know, process the images. So we're hoping that will help us to identify sources of contamination and target those. In terms of other work that we're doing too, so a quick whistle-stop tour of some of the projects and the work we do around recycling, we use some repair and briefly on working with schools as well. So on recycling, so we've been rolling out food waste to purpose-built blocks of flats. Project Eugene's been leading on the tonnages that we collect, been creeping up as the service has been rolled out and we've been integrating those food waste services into the improvements on estates as well. And Eugene will say a bit more in a moment about some of the other work we're doing around encouraging food waste recycling. We also did a trial around collecting food waste from flats above shops. Almost annoyingly not quite the first local authority in the country to try collecting food waste from flats above shops. Paavo, did you want to touch on this or do you want me to cover this? I don't mind. It's still the food waste. It's still the food waste, fine, sorry, apologies. So we did a trial arrangement for 200 properties, 10 communal food waste sites down Holloway Road. We reached out to them, we did engagement, we knocked on doors, we gave out caddies, worked with NLWA to promote that. And that's been relatively successful, the yield we get from those is lower but comparable to what we get from other food waste schemes in the borough. We are ready to sort of look at rolling the scheme out to the rest of the borough but we are waiting on promised funding from the government. Which is, it is coming, it is coming. We had an announcement, actually a letter just today, reconfirming this. So we are hoping that in the next year or two we will be able to roll it out to remaining properties. Food waste campaign, Jean. Hi, so of course people have got their food waste service but now we need them to use it. So we've been doing a recycling communications campaign, it's called Do Amazing Things With Your Food Waste. And this aims to encourage residents and employees to make the most of the food that they buy and to reduce the amount of wastage. So any unavoidable food waste should be placed in their food waste recycling bin rather than in the refuse bin. So we ran a corporate gold campaign in September and that consisted of social media posters, isn't in Life magazine and stores at various events. Also we are currently running a door knocking campaign and that's 10,000 street properties. And when I say street properties I mean the properties are sort of houses or subdivided houses that have their own frontage. They have their individual food waste boxes, green boxes, that type of thing. So there are door knocking agents that are having conversations about food waste reduction and recycling. And as well as providing top tips they are distributing guidance leaflets but also handing over equipment that might be missing there and then so people with striking while the iron is hot. And here on the screen we've got Lorena and Ilan who are two Islington residents who have been employed as part of the door knocking team. So there's about 10 door knockers in all. Now replicating that kind of work we've got recycling officers that are doing this on estates and blocks which have communal food waste recycling facilities. So the work has been about £50,000 for the door knocking and that's been funded through LEL in full profits. And this is ongoing so we'll keep you posted on the results. And as part of the campaign we've done things like videos and then this is our new food waste vehicle. There are actually two food waste vehicles and this is the new one that we've bought. So it's 100% electrical with on-board weighing so we can monitor the performance of various sites and collection rounds. And also it will give the bins a quick rinse as well. We ran a competition for the primary school children inviting them to suggest a name for the winning vehicle. And the winning name was selected via a vote by the recycling champions. So the winning name is the Food Waste Muncher. So it's a great name and the associated livery will give the vehicle a noticeable presence and personality. It should bring a smile as it passes by and can act as an ambassador for the service as it moves around the borough and attends the events. And this was bought through Defra Food Waste Capital funding. No, that was bought through something else but there is Defra Food Waste Capital funding for us to be able to buy a second vehicle. And this is going to give us cleaner bins, better data and more reliable services. So another area we focus on is the estates to improve recycling on estates because there is more room, seems to be more room for improvement here. Just very briefly about the project, we have a £2 million investment over three years to improve recycling on estates. And this project is part of the borough's driving neighbourhood programme. And we have already completed or commissioned recycling facilities for nearly 4,000 households. And we have a couple of case studies that we recently completed. So one of them is Mackindo Court near Rotherfield Street. So just quickly about the background, on the top picture we can see a row of different types of bins, different sizes and types of bins. And we had a request from the housing transport team to relocate these bins so for the request we started to look at this area. And on the bottom picture we can see the result where we have enclosed them in fireproof nice looking enclosures with also brand new signage for recycling. And also we have balanced out the recycling under refuse capacity because they had more capacity for refuse so we tried to increase recycling as well as make it more safe in terms of fire safety. Just another example is Thornhill Houses. These units are slightly different. We also tried to make them fit into the environment. They are made of timber and also support sustainability so not just for storing bins but they have also a green roof and it's not visible at the moment but on the side there is also a buck hotel. So yeah it supports the insects. There is a little video here but anyway you can check that in your own time perhaps we should probably move on. And as part of the project we also do engagement and we gather feedback after each installation. We do this via an online survey, unless talk is linked on but also actual paper feedback in postcard form. And so we have gathered quite a bit of feedback so far and overall it's positive. So most of the people stated that they think it's the recycling improvements make the recycling easier. Some people said that they think there is no difference. After talking to them it turns out that they feel they already recycled a lot. But I would say the majority of them feel that the improvements make recycling easier, also make the estate look more presentable, nicer and safer. How long is the video? The video? It's about a minute I think. Tell it because you have taken the trouble to make it. Well how do I just? Emma can you trigger that? Yeah because there was an error. Okay, so thank you Christina. This is briefly about the project we're doing with housing to trial whether or not closing refuge sheets can help to improve recycling as well as reduce maintenance costs and reduce fire risk and so on. That's another project that we're working on and this is around a trial we've done around improving recycling on flats above shops. Thank you Matthew, thank you Chair, thank you Committee. Flats above shops are a very difficult area to engage with and to do anything really. We've looked into improvements in flats above shops together with ReLondon. ReLondon, probably everyone knows, but it's just a partnership between the mayor of London and London boroughs looking into creating a circular economy and improving our performance on waste. So ReLondon wanted to just do some more research on flats above shops and how to really improve the service because they really poorly perform. And we applied and were selected along with Waltham Forest and Hammersmith and Fulham. So lessons from this project actually just finished and it was running for six months since April till November. And the outcomes will help others to implement the improvements in services. So we've selected Upper Street and Seven Sisters Road to be part of this trial. What we did as part of this was on Upper Street we've introduced grid beans, grid style beans as points for collection of recyclable items, recycling bags and stickers to designate points for refuse. So they were next to one another. We've changed the design as well as part of it. On Seven Sisters Road we only decided to go for designation and designated the points with stickers, with the pavement vinyls. So overall the results were really good. All this introduction was obviously... We had to start with the engagement so there was a lot of engagement as part of it. Door knocking, sending letters, we've engaged with businesses, with business improvement districts and all this is very expensive and necessary part of the improvement. So we've managed to get over 70% of people to comply with the points of disposal for the bags. We've managed to increase the recycling by roughly double the number of bags we collected before to what we collected after. And we've seen that we have to keep the communication going to sustain the results. We need to, we should come back to maybe delivery of the bags to floods above shops to be able to just keep the rates up. And yeah, the integration works, so that's the main thing. So we'll be looking to see what lessons we can learn that might be applicable to other areas of the borough with our colleagues in operations. There's so much more here. So much more but we're going to have to stop and take questions now from the committee because they're raring to ask you questions and really good to hear. So the first person I saw was Councillor Heather and then Councillor Hayes, then Councillor Russell and then Councillor Boswell-Quashie. So what we'll do, what we'll do is take the questions and each one of your team, whichever it's relevant to, could answer. So I'll take two questions, two people first and then the next two. Councillor Head. Yeah, thanks Matthew and team, thanks for that. You're doing a great job. On the previous slides about the recycling rate, it occurs to me, would there, from what you presented there, would there be any, so the difficult I have with this, this is about data and compare it, but you can't compare it because the narrative changes about why the rate changes. But from what you said is we're doing better on dry than we are on, that we've got contamination going on. So it would be better, wouldn't it be better to have like two KPIs, one for dry and one for organic? Because then at least you could sort of, I don't want you to answer it now, I'm just saying just consider that about whether that would be, so it, while I'm on that, I mean, so for example, would it, would we, because we're still going down, that's what this data says, still going down. Would it, would it actually not be going down if, if you separate it out and the dryer was like, would that be going up? So that's the question. The other thing is, is not me, but people are skeptical about the North London Waste Authority and, you know, do we really think that they're, they're supporting us properly on this? You know, and I won't, I won't mention the elephant in the room about what the other incentive might be. The other one is, is that I was pleased to see about the estate reuse trial, maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that, about the lumber stores. I was pleased to see the lumber stores have got signage on them that directs people to websites because I've been asking for signs on, on ours for years. Anyway, interested in a bit more than that, interested to know a little bit more about the estate shoot closure trial. When I first read it, I thought it was your idea, Caroline, I thought it was about turning the chute into a recycling chute and I'm not saying that would work, but interested to know a bit more about that. Plaudits for the estate recycling improvements, honestly, really, they, they are great and we work with you on the handover about that as well. All I would say is can we have some more? There's more to do on the handover. And then lastly, on the, on the slide that talks about could do more and one of the things there is recycling champions. Yes. And as you know, I'm his recycling champion, so would it be possible to do a refresh on that? Yes. Yeah, okay, thank you, that's my question. Can I try and whiz through those before there are more questions? I'm wondering if Councillor Hayes' questions might cross over some of those things. I'm just, I'm going to struggle to remember all the questions. Oh yeah, go ahead then. There's a lot of questions there. I mean, so the one that stands out is about the NLWA. My straightforward answer to that is yes, 100%. I'm not going to mention the elephant in the room either, but they do, I mean, Christina was at a meeting yesterday around all the comms and engagement and outreach work that they do. It overran because there was so much to get through. There's an awful lot of work that they do to promote recycling, to promote waste minimisation, to work with community groups. And I think, you know, there's a lot of resource there as well, to be fair. But yes, there are 100% on this, while still having to deal with residual waste. So that's the elephant. The question is the recycling rate, I would say that in terms of the fluctuations, the recycling rate as a whole is flat. I don't, I wouldn't accept that it's going down necessarily, but I do accept it's not going up in the way that we want. We do report dry and wet recycling separately, but I think corporately we tend to focus on the combined number, but those two figures are reported separately. I think we're pretty good at sort of wet recycling as well, it's just there is less of it, there's less garden waste to collect because of the nature of Islington, the fewer gardens with the garden waste to collect. So our organics recycling rate historically tends to be lower than Bexley or other, for example. But the dry recycling rate I think is a mark of how our services are fundamentally quite good and the people who are engaged in those services. Shoot recycling scheme, early days we've identified I think four or five estates where we're going to trial. We're basically looking to see what processes do we have to go through, what issues do we have to cover off, were we to close down refuse shoots in terms of the impact on residents, equality's impacts and consultation and that kind of stuff. And also what are the outcomes of actually doing that. So that's going to go forward over the next kind of six months or so and we're working with Billy Wells and housing colleagues on that. Recycling champions, we have tried to sort of engage recycling champions and we are going to have a refresh of that. We're working, we're going to talk to, there's a number of other colleagues within local teams and other teams who are doing similar kind of volunteer programs. We're going to get together with them, learn lessons from them and we do want to have a refresh of that and get more people on board. Christina, because you're leading on that. Just wanted to add that also after attending the NLWA meeting they are really keen to support any champion scheme as well. So we are looking to work with other teams and other parties on this. Just wanted to add that. Thank you very much. But yes, again, a project sort of in progress, we will be putting signs on lumber stores directing people to their own places and we want to try and get some on estate reuse going on as well if at all possible. Thank you. I'm concerned about the time now. So Council Champion is going to come in briefly and then I'll take the rest of the questions. Just very briefly, I think we all know that North London Waste Authority is us, so the board is 14 councillors and my experience with the office is they are very responsive to what we want to do. And there's a massive push to reduction as well as recycling. I think the other thing, the only thing that might be slightly confusing, Matthew, I think these figures within the Waste and Recycling Report might not be updated to 26.8. And I think they might have been revised since then. Is that right? Take that away. The 23-24 figure I think was 13.4 and the first quarter this year is slightly lower than that, but yeah, it's 27 point something or other, so apologies. I think it's referenced on the first slide. Yeah, there was a category of waste that was allocated in a different way. So the slides have the most up-to-date figures, Gary, rather than the report. Thank you. Councillor Hayes. Thank you very much. Again, I had several points, but I'll try and be concise. Certainly, I'd like to say on the Finsbury Estate, the work that's been done to improve the recycling area there is phenomenal. It's transformed an area that is a real eyesore into somewhere that is fantastically better. I have some real concerns about the chute closure. I wonder whether we could invite you to come back for a future meeting once you've had some of that engagement. Certainly on a number of estates there's already issues with refuse just being left in stairwells. And my concern would be about a rise of rodents, fire and kind of public health really unless it's very carefully monitored. I mean, it just feels of all the things we could be doing, it might be something that creates a lot of kickback and puts people off rather than encourages people. So my question was a bit about how much work is being done with tenants and residents associations, with staff working on the estates in relation to that. A minor point in the circular economy plan on page 60, there's reference to adult learning, council-run community centres. But it just strikes me that a lot of people will be attending non-council-run facilities, particularly some of the faith groups and some other community organisations that are heavily used. And it would be good to broaden it out to engage with the broader voluntary sector. I was very interested in the estate reuse point and it seems like a really good idea and again it would be interesting to understand the learning. And then my final points were on the could do more list on contamination because that does seem to have risen and you might say it goes up and comes down again. But I've also been reading lately that in winter the rain gets in, makes all the cardboard and paper soggy, it sticks to things, then it can't be sorted properly. And I think if people read that, that's a bit disheartening unless you're very obsessive about recycling, it could just make people think, oh what's the point. And on resident engagement it's just what do we think the barriers are. I'll let you answer those points as briefly as you can. I think your comments about the shooting trial, that's exactly why we're doing a trial rather than just saying where we can we will close down the shoots. Because clearly there are lessons to be learned about how we go about doing this and also whether it works. I mean it's been done in a number of other local authorities, unusually we're not the first to be trying this. It's been done in many other local authorities and there's lots of case studies where it's been managed well and it's resulted in increased recycling rates. Because of course throwing your rubbish down the chute, if the chute is not blocked, is the most convenient way of getting rid of your waste. We actually do have a couple of estates in the borough, you mentioned about chutes for recycling where there are dual chute systems and one is for refuse, one is for recycling. They work reasonably well and in hybrid quadrant estates some years ago we actually swapped out the low rise chutes for recycling chutes. So there's various different ways we can approach that but it's a trial and we want to learn lessons. I think similarly with the estates reuse scheme as well. We want this idea of having on estate reuse, a segregated area now and must offer potentially reusable items which residents can use or maybe an on estate kind of community organisation. It might work, it might not and we want to try it out and see what kind of impact there might be there. Sorry, engagement, engagement, I mean sorry, yes the barriers to engagement. Barriers to engagement, I mean resource, being able to be able to sort of actually get out there and have the time and the people to sort of go out and do that. At the moment, Christina is one of three estate recycling offices and part of their role as well as implementing these improvements and managing those projects is getting out onto estates, knocking on doors, going to community events on those estates, TRA meetings, carriage court the other night and various other meetings but we get out there engaged to the extent that we've got the resources to be able to do that. I suppose the reuse events that Barbara has been managing, a lot of the reuse events that also been said has been involved in a few of those. That's another great way of engaging with residents, getting the public along and sort of getting the message out there. Very important. We work with the comms team as well, obviously on all sorts of communications events. The newsletter, a good point, goes out to about 8,000 recipients every month or so and we get really good engagement. But there's always a lot more that we can do through schools and getting lots of ideas. There's lots of areas that we try to reach out to people and there's so much more that we would like to be able to do. Okay, back on the contamination issue. Can you write to them about it? Thanks. Councillor Russell. Thank you. I just wanted to find out a bit more about the trial of food waste on Holloway Road for the above shops. I have to declare an interest. I live in a stretch of street which is waiting for that kind of food waste collection to come and I'm very very keen to have an opportunity. I've been recycling my food waste for years and it feels very odd not to have the possibility of doing it at the moment. So I wonder what the time scale is for rolling that out. I want to praise you for the accessible recycling bins. Now you describe them as being for children and disabled people but actually they really help older people as well because a lot of older people say they find it really struggle to lift the waste up and get it into the high things. So given we are an age friendly borough, just hoping that you will consider rolling out many more of the accessible ones because they're helpful to someone with a bad back. There's lots of reasons. It's not just people who use a wheelchair or a mobility scooter who need those accessible recycling bins. So if we're looking at different ways of getting the rates up, hopefully that is something that you will be thinking about. So sorry, that was the accessibility, can we have more of that, food waste and I had been going to ask about the, no not the shoots, what you were just talking about, the contamination rates but you've answered that. So it's just two questions. So accessibility, great, I mean we think they're great as well and we have, I mean it's part of our internal procedures that we try to incorporate those into all of the improvements we do. At the very least where there's a facility with three or more bins, we try to make sure that one of those is an accessible bin. And we've also incorporated a requirement for that into our new build guidance and into our new planning guidance that we're redeveloping at the moment. So yes, that is being integrated. The food waste trial along Holloway Road, so you know broadly that was successful. It's a model that won't work on all main road and sort of flats above shops kind of areas because of the pavement widths. I mean there are stretches within that Holloway Road stretch where we haven't been able to place a bin because of the pavement width. But part of the re-London trial that Pawel talked about and the other two boroughs, they included food waste in their trials as well. And they used some different kinds of containers that had smaller footprints and smaller capacity and took up smaller space and so on. So that overall trial had a wider reach than purely the sort of how to improve recycling within Islington and there's lots of lessons that we can learn there. There will be different models that will fit different parts of the borough. In terms of time scale there's a legal requirement to provide food waste collections for all households from April 26. And we had confirmation today from DEFRA that interim some transitional funding from DEFRA is to be announced towards the end of this financial year. Towards the end of the financial year applicable for this year and for next year. We don't know how much that will be. We already have some capital funding that has been allocated for this. So all being well we should be able to work on this through to April 26 to ensure that this service has been rolled out across the borough. Thank you so much. Can you turn your mic off? Thank you very much. Councillor Boswell-Kwashi. Thanks chair. I can't congratulate you as well as everyone has said. It's really amazing to hear this positive feedback. I want to just touch on the AI because that really fascinated me just that little segment there. And is there anything more that we can use that artificial intelligence to help us to actually work on our comms and to get residents to be more engaged? Because I think it's one thing to recycle and reduce, reuse etc. But I think on the estates there is that thing of where we are missing a bit of a trick. Because there is more people that live in a household. So it would be nice to see what more can we do with the AI. I don't know if you looked into that AI bit but it was brilliant so well done. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know, the AI system I think has got real potential in terms of that particular trial because it's feeding into a camera system. It's taking those images and processing them without having to have any input. I think the next step for us is really about better use of data. There are multiple sources of numerical data, tonnage data, vehicle movement data, schedule data and all sorts. And I think that what we need to do better at is to use people, probably initially, to process that data so that we can identify if we can link tonnage data to collection schedules and vehicle movements and bin weighing on vehicles. Then we can start to identify where people are recycling more, where people are recycling less and try and target those areas. AI is probably a step too far for us in that field. But was there anything else? But for the Lixo system, I think that AI is great there because it's processing images in a way that AI is perfect for that. Hopefully the funding, extra funding, you'll be able to expand your team, maybe. I'll take that. I cut off Councillor Hayes and she wanted to just ask about contamination. Do you want to just quickly ask about that? Yeah, it was just really whether, given that it rains every year, do we know what the reason for the rising contamination is? Thank you. I don't think that wet paper and cardboard is a significant issue. It's not something that's been fed back to us by NLWA, by BIFA. So we do have a lot of data from, so there's regulations that require that when we deliver recycling to the MRF they have to do a set amount of sampling in a particular way. So they analyse samples of the material and we get a lot of data back in terms of what the material is in that sample and the specific items that are leading to the contamination. Top items, black sacks containing whatever, but black sacks, textiles, food waste, and food waste of course is particularly problematic because it can cross-contaminate other materials. So there is a lot of data coming through. We're having to scrutinise it a lot more because we're not 100% clear yet to what extent there's an increase in non-recyclables and to what extent it's about the actual method by which the sampling is carried out. Thank you. So I'll just quickly go over to Chris again. Go ahead. Thanks. I think this is really relevant because I live in a shop house. I live in a flat above a shop and I live five houses off of Upper Street. I wasn't aware of the Upper Street trial which would have been interesting, but I found a way that works for me in that I found an estate recycling bin that I just walk to and put my things in. It's not that far. And I think people in shop fronts need not maybe estate bins but bins they can walk to. We don't really want the rubbish to collect in front of our house. My payment is $1200. It's too narrow on Cross Street and there's nowhere I could put it. So I don't mind walking a little bit to take it somewhere. And I think I recycle 100% and I'm very clear about contamination, washing out the food containers. But a lot of it is like plastic tape on boxes you have to peel off. It's a lot of work. Contamination is an issue. But for me in a shop front, I don't do food waste because I don't know how to. I can't do it. But my food waste isn't big. I wouldn't have sacks of it. I'd have a Tupperware. I'd just keep it on my sink counter Tupperware and then I would dump it somewhere on my way to work somewhere else. If there were sort of small bins somewhere that we could dump these things into for shop fronts. And the thing is then we can do it on the day that suits. It's not like on Wednesday. If it's a place, we could do it on Friday. We could do it on Monday. Just not so that they could be parked around. And also if a parking space is taken away, you can have a place to put some bins. Thanks Chris. That's great. Thank you. So if you turn your mic off then Matthew can answer that as quickly as anything. That's exactly, the trial on Holloway Road was precisely what you just described. So communal bins are hopefully convenient sort of locations along the main road that you can come and use at any time when it's convenient for you. So unfortunately it's not on Upper Street. Currently the trial we did there didn't include food waste. But as I say we will be rolling out the service over the next year or so. That will include Upper Street and any other areas with flat spot shops. And the trial was just between Cross Street and Hybrid Corner. So maybe that's why you never heard about this. Because we didn't go to the Cross Street. And we tried to put the bins in the carriageway, in the parking spaces. But yeah, we need another 10 minutes presentation on that. Really thank you so much. You've waited a long time and a really good presentation. And thanks for answering all the questions. And especially thanks to the members of the public that have asked good questions too. And Mercedes. And Mercedes we're finishing now. We're closing the meeting. Thank you. I just wanted to say it might be an idea because the challenge of the shops, the flat spots of the shops is quite important. It might be an idea to have movable bins that are timed within the timeframe. So for example you can put something in there, kind of like a truck, on a parking space where it gets collected from a particular timeframe. And then it's not there stopping the traffic and stopping the pavement. Just a thought. So can the committee agree the work plan for January and ongoing? Thank you so much. And thanks everyone. Everyone's worked really hard. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Have a great Christmas everybody.