Transcript

lights everywhere in HS2, as always, has got. Right, good morning everyone. Can I welcome you all to this morning's meeting? A good agenda, but relatively easy compared to some of the other ones you've had recently. Can I remind everyone to turn their microphone on each time when they speak and switch them off when you finish because the system will go down if you all leave your mics on. And please use the mic because if you don't use the mic I don't hear you at all because I'm into the loop. So it's most important if you want me to hear what you've got to say. Put the microphone on. We've got a relatively easy agenda, but we've got a few formalities first. My first one is to welcome Jaspal to his first meeting. Nothing to say on Jaspal. Peter Brazier's moved on to other things, better things I expect as well. Jaspal's come in. Jaspal, I hope you enjoy the committee. And can I welcome Darren Egleton, Head of Planning Policy and Compliance. I think this is your first meeting, isn't it? Darren? I think it is, yes, thank you. Right. Agenda item one is the appointment of Vice-Chairman. This is my job. And you will all know that we have a sterling Vice-Chairman who's helped me through the last three years and he's going to help me in the last year. And that's Robert Carrington. I'd like to ask him if he would continue. Yes, and thank you. And I thank you tremendously for the help you give to me in running the meeting. Thank you very much. Right, apologies for absence and change of membership. Chris. Thank you, Chairman. We have apologies from Councillors Collins, Culverhouse and Wood. And also apologies from Steve Bambrick. In terms of permanent changes, Councillor Choker has replaced Councillor Brazier as a member of the committee. Yep. Right, item three is declarations of interest. Are there any? No. Get back on to the iPad. Minutes of the previous meeting. Then there's two meetings. One was the 23rd, which was the one where the Chairman was elected. I think that's straightforward enough. And the ends of the 15th May. Do you agree that I kept the right record? Is there any matters arising from that? Peter, do you want to raise something? I think you said to me. Yes, thank you, Chairman. Peter Martin, Deputy Cabinet Member for Transport. Just observing the minutes of the meeting for the 28th of March, I know that the committee asked HS2 contractors a number of questions. I was disappointed to hear that the committee still hasn't had a proper response to those questions. I've got a meeting with HS2 Limited this afternoon and will certainly be raising it with them and writing to them expressing our disappointment. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you. And I'm sure it will be straightforward enough for us to write a reminder. Like the programme, letters don't arrive on time. And there was a lot of questions at that meeting. And I expect it is taking some time to pull the answers together. I hope they're doing that. And we will remind them that that letter is still pending. Thank you very much for that, Peter. And we'll put that in the minutes. Right. Is that the minutes agreed? Yes. Going on into public questions. We have one public question. Chris, the person is not here, but you're going to read out. Thank you, Chairman. The question is from Sarinda Marshall, who asks, I would like to see an increase in the number of trees on the streets of our towns and villages. I appreciate that the planting of trees in these areas is difficult due to the high number of services that now occupy space under pavement. I also know that people can ask for trees to be planted by the council in spaces they identify through the council website. However, the planting of trees in urban situations has so many benefits. Carbon sequestration, air quality, lowering of temperatures in heat waves and even reduction in antisocial behaviour. Can the council carry out a survey on our urban tree scapes, our urban street scapes to find out where it might be possible to plant additional trees? Right. I think the subject is trees, so that's Tom is over to you. But also, it's in streets and towns. So maybe, Steve, you might want to comment after Tom, just to add a little bit of bonus on that. Tom. Thanks, Bill. So I think we are always interested in looking at the available options for getting more trees in the ground as part of our programme. Very happy to look from a climate change and environment point of view at a range of options, including urban planting. Very much something we'd have to work with colleagues on in terms of viability. But I see no reason why we can't look into that. Steve, do you want to add on to that? Actually, yeah. Thank you, Chairman. You can – well, last year, I think we discussed this at this committee. There were some changes made to the provision for planting on verges and council land. So you can go on the council website and suggest locations for trees to be planted. There's a link on there where you can do that. And through our work with town and parishes and through community boards, there is an inappropriate location. There would then be guidance done in conjunction with relevant teams and through the local area technician on species that could be planted and where they would be most suitable. And that means looking ahead as well to make sure that as the tree grows, it doesn't impact on visibility and signage and those kind of things. And town and parishes can utilise the Buckinghamshire Highway Service for that, which has a – there is a fee which includes things like three years' worth of watering and maintenance. Or one of the changes made last year – and again on that same web page link – to town and parish who use suitably qualified contractors can actually apply for a conservation licence to do things themselves. So that's all on the website. It's probably best if that's the starting point. But it means that there's obviously tree scape aspects, there's planting aspects and there are highways, highways aspects. As we said, there's a whole range of guidance on what the best species are and what the considerations would be. I notice the questioner is pretty well informed because one of the biggest restrictions are services that are underneath the pavements and verges, but all that is part of the assessment that's done. But yeah, I'm happy to encourage suitable trees in appropriate locations. So that's the best start. Thank you. And going back to through you, when I was sitting in one of your chairs, we had an agreement that any tree that came down because it had to come down was replaced. And I think that policy still continues. You still have a budget to replace fallen trees that are ours on the verge. Obviously what we tend to get is a big spike after severe storms where a number will come down. So there can be a timeline, but there is a budget maintained to be able to do that. So over time, we don't suffer a significant net loss. Thank you. Thank you very much. Just one question. So that leads us very nicely into the next agenda item, Thomas, to tree planting. Over to you. Fantastic. Thanks again, Bill. And just to say thank you very much, everybody, for having us back. Very much enjoyed our last appearance at Tech. Lots of interesting questions. So hoping for that again. I think everybody's had the documentation we've circulated. We're just providing an update on the tree planting programme. Obviously, this is a very important programme for us. It was a manifesto commitment for members of the majority group. And personally, I think it's one of the projects that we're undertaking that really does cross over a number of beneficial areas. Not only are we helping get ourselves to net zero, but I think we're also materially improving the county and making it a more beautiful place by adding to the forestry. I'm just going to rattle through a few bits that I think are really important. I think, as I say, everyone's had the pack, and then I'll take any questions that anybody might have. So over the first three years of the programme, we've now planted 192,000 trees. This is about 35% of our overall target, and we still have another seven years to go in the programme. So we are very much on track, a little bit ahead of schedule, and this will have benefits, obviously, that start to happen immediately, but will roll out over a considerable period of time. So by 2050, we expect the trees that we've already planted to sequester about 6,000 metric tonnes of CO2, which, as a little bit of context, is about the same as almost 3,000 flights across the Atlantic to New York, so it's a pretty significant amount over the period. The way in which it's been delivered, I think, has been very much community-focused. So we're working with partners across the county, we're working with local schools, we're working with environmental groups, town and parish councils, and indeed, we get just residents in the areas that we're working getting in touch to say, Can they be part of the project and come and help out? And so I think it's been a really, really good project for engagement of residents of Buckinghamshire. As I say, I think it impacts the county, I think it makes the county better on a number of levels, and we've seen that recognised by individuals and groups across Buckinghamshire, and it really has been a delight to see how many people have come out and quite literally helped us get spades in the ground and get this project moving. It's a very efficient programme in that we are bringing in outside funding, so I think it's not only delivering benefits in terms of the environment, in terms of communities, but actually is also good value for money. We've managed to bring in about a million pounds worth of grant funding as part of the programme, which obviously lowers the burden on ourselves and makes our use of funds more efficient. And one of the things, just as a sort of personal note, that I've been particularly impressed with, and I do want to pay tribute to the officer team who've been working on this because I think they've done an absolutely spectacular job on what can be quite a difficult granular fiddly programme in terms of, you know, you've got to find sites, you've got to decide what's going in, and then you've got to get it actioned, and then you're subject to the weather and, you know, making sure that you're working with partners and making sure that we're keeping these trees alive. It's not an easy programme to deliver, but actually through all of those challenges there's been a particular focus on increasing the sort of diversity of what we're putting in and making sure that there's a bit of a historical link as well, including varietals that are native to the county, that give us a bit of history. We're not just going out and planting the same tree 192,000 times. And our work in Wing Wood recently, planting the community orchard nearby, we actually managed to put in 50 different varieties of Buckinghamshire and other local county apple, pear and cherry trees, which I think is a fantastic example of the attention to detail that's being paid to this project. And I think we are well on track. I think we're delivering something that the residents of Buckinghamshire appreciate that's going to help us in terms of our long-term net zero ambitions. And I'm very happy to answer any questions from the committee about our progress and to draw attention to what I think, as I say, has been an important manifesto commitment for the majority group. Thank you. All right, questions. I'll put them away and keep your hand up. Peter, I'll start with you and work around. Peter. Go on, Peter. Thank you. Yes, you said it's a manifestation of the majority group. There are others that support what's been what's going on as well, actually. And I'm really pleased to see what's happened in Wing with the 132,000 trees. It's worked really well. And I agree with you, our officers have done an amazing job there, and very quickly as well. And one of the good things about the way it's been done is that it will be properly maintained, which is always a problem with planting trees. So that's good. One thing you didn't mention is that trees have been selected to account for climate change to an extent. And that, of course, is important. The one thing I'd like to raise is trees in general. And so, you know, we're talking about planting trees at virtually every planning application that happens. And there's always a condition that they're replaced if they fail. That doesn't work so well, I don't believe because the the management of those trees tends to fall to one side because you get a management company taking on the site to begin with, and then passing on responsibility, etc. And, you know, we're talking about a lot of trees in that circumstance. So is there anything we can do, do you think, to improve the way that those trees are maintained and to do the job properly? Yeah, thank you, Councillor Cooper. First of all, I completely appreciate that we have support from across the chamber, as it were. I'm talking about a manifesting commitment more for the purposes of holding ourselves accountable on that one, and to say that we are delivering. You're absolutely right in terms of maintenance. It's incredibly important. It's why in the projects that sort of we're managing directly, that we're working very carefully with partners to make sure that happens. And I think we've seen good success on that. The point you make about planning and maintenance of trees that are conditioned in under planning permissions I think is a very fair point. I don't know if the office team have anything that they want to comment, but I'm very happy to take that up with my cabinet colleague for planning and just see if there's anything we can do to tighten that up a bit. My knowledge of that area is not good enough to give you the answer directly, but if I have a word with my colleague Peter Strachan, we'll certainly see if there's anything we can do. Thank you, Tom. So the standard planning condition, as you'll be aware, Peter, within five years if a tree dies that it's replaced. And the planning enforcement team are there in order to be able to enforce the compliance with planning conditions. It is a reactive service in that we would respond to complaints about those matters. So there are areas where trees are dying on new sites and the team can pick it up. We're also in the process, as part of our One Uniform program, our in-house database system of reviewing our overall planning conditions to make sure that they align across the whole of Buckinghamshire. And we are in the process of reviewing all conditions and that will be one of them. Thank you. I'll read you the names I've got in case I missed the hand. I've got Michael, Ed, David, Mick and Robert. Was there anybody I missed? No? Fine. Right then. Mike, Michael. Thanks, Chairman. As a matter of reading through here and it's Stoke Hammond Parish Council plantings and trees and it was acknowledged there. A couple of the three parishes that I sort of represent have planted trees and sort of quite a few number hundred and odd each parish. They did it up after the year before and they learned a very good lesson that you've got to maintain them. And last year they, learning from that, they planted a similar number and they've got a management thing through to water them. But the actual summer helped. Are all of those trees from the parish councils have planted in these figures? Because if not, I think it's quite important that even if we can't enroll them into our figures, it is known that the county as a whole has implanted x number more. Thank you. David Johnson, climate response team leader. So the figures that are included in this presentation specifically referring to the local authority tree scapes fund. So that's where the Stoke Hammond trees come from. If there are other parish councils, oh yeah, sure, sorry, I apologise. So the figures within this presentation are from the local authority tree scapes fund. So if the parish councils that you're referring to are planting under their own initiative, they may not be included within this figures, within these figures, but we're very happy to check that, perhaps put out a call to parish councils that they could give those numbers to us and add them into the figures. We're more than happy to take an action to do that. I think it's quite important just to give an overall of the county that a survey is made of parish councils and other organisations that have planted trees. So we've got an overall irrespective of whether we can take credit for it or not. Thank you. Tom, do you want to come in? No, well just say thank you very much for the suggestion. We'll take that away and have a look at it. I don't want to give a commitment because I don't know what the practicalities are at this stage, but absolutely I think it's important that we recognise that, you know, there are a lot of organisations that are on this journey with us and are also helping to improve the county and I would give my thanks to any organisation, whether it's part of the programme or not, for helping us get these trees in the ground. One thing we do recognise that the figures that we're talking about does not include HS2. HS2 are outside of that and they've got a much higher fatality rate. Right, Ed. Great, thank you chair. Let's start with the only compliment I'm likely to make, so well done on what you've done so far, and then heralding that. We're putting in about half a million trees eventually and we actually need 500 times that to cover the carbon emissions of the people in Bucks. I mean it's really a drop in the ocean, so how can we accelerate it and get it going? In with that, there's absolutely pointless putting in lots of new whips and trees if we're going to allow trees to be cut down. We have got to change the way we are protecting trees in this county. We have the Buckinghamshire local plan coming. We could now be putting in that in actual fact we're going to protect our trees, stop development that's going to actually chop them all down and require moving, and moving is possible of a tree of any size. So can we now bring that into everything we're doing on trees? I mean you'll have seen in the example of my own planning application being rejected, that a planning application that doesn't actually break over one little leaf and doesn't look like, totally environmental, it doesn't look like what's on the street we won't allow, but will allow developers to go in and trash orchards and cut down trees in all sorts of places to let them put development in place for non-environmental homes. HS2, Bill mentioned as well as he sort of did the intro, we still don't have those figures on HS2 from how many trees they've trashed, how many they've moved, and we need to get them. Again, it's part of the overall thing of what we're doing on trees and I know Peter's pressing for it. And then you talk about our long-term net zero ambitions, we do have, and I know you're fed up with me saying this, but I'll say it again, that we have a commitment to look at 2030 and whether we can get there subject to resources. Now clearly part of that is the offsetting by the number of trees we're planting, so could we look at that and see if we've got the resources, particularly maybe by accelerating or expanding what we're doing on tree planting to offset the council's emissions. And let's keep the conversation around trees, not your application. All right, you'll see. I'll leave off that particular subject, Bill, don't worry. No, a series of interesting points. So in terms of acceleration and the comparison between the number of trees that we've planted and the number of trees that we need to plant to completely offset all emissions in Buckinghamshire, this is not the only measure that we're taking as part of our efforts to reach net zero. So I think that's a comparison you could make with any individual component of doing that, although I appreciate the point that there is the pressure to get on and do it. I will be taking any action I can to accelerate this programme, simply because I think it's a very valuable programme and it benefits the residents of Buckinghamshire. So anything I can do on that, I will. Tree protection, I think, is probably something that falls more on the planning side of things. I would obviously encourage the protection of trees, particularly older, well-established trees in the county. But again, I don't want to stray onto the turf of my colleagues and I don't have the expertise on that. But generally speaking, I think everybody at climate change and environment is for the preservation of trees that are already in the ground. HS2, again, I think Peter is doing excellent work with HS2 to try and hold them to account. They are a difficult organisation to work with, to say the least, but I'm very confident in my colleagues' ability to get to the bottom of that one. In terms of when we're going to reach our 2030 commitments, I think we did talk about this at the last one of these sessions. We are always looking for ways to get to where we're going quicker, more efficiently, and in a way that benefits the residents of Bucks. All I would say at this stage, I think, is that we are actually very, very close to meeting our 2030 emissions reductions targets already five years ahead of

1. So I am fairly confident that actually in the not too distant future, it's not going to be a question of whether we can get there early. It's that we will have got there early. I know we've had a bit of a back and forth in terms of commitment of resources to looking at how we can do that more quickly. I'm afraid my view on that hasn't changed. I think those resources are better spent actually trying to get us to our emissions reduction targets rather than looking for auditing everything that we're doing to see if there's anything we can do better on that front, because I think that is a process that happens naturally anyway. Whenever I'm talking to Cabinet colleagues, I'm always impressed actually by how much they're taking this into account. It's easy to get siloed into your particular brief. But it is something that I think we've been quite successful as a council at having these cross-portfolio strategies in place that do keep emissions reductions in the minds of Cabinet members as they're going about their day to day. And I'm always appreciative colleagues for that. Sorry, Thomas, you talk about the amount of resources required to produce that report. How much are those resources? What are you talking about? What's the effect on our budget? Well, I don't have a precise figure for that. But given the position that all local authorities are in in the country, everything is a difficult choice at the moment. And I don't want to direct any funding away from the programmes we have in place to achieve what we're trying to achieve at climate change and environment. Because frankly, we've got a lot of very successful programmes and this is one of them. And I don't want to, you know, divert money away from successful programmes like tree planting in order to undertake a slightly speculative exercise about things that we may possibly be able to do when we could just spend the money on getting on with it. You can't be bothered to do back of the fact packet calculation on how much the report would take either in terms of hours or money. And you've got your answer. Thank you. David. Thank you. My question is a sort of a broader question. We live in an increasingly uncertain world. And there have been discussions raised in the national media about food security. And I'm just wondering whether it might be appropriate to think through what our tree planting strategy is, with relation to any plans we might have for food security. There may be a trade off, we need to think that through. I noticed some fruit trees have been planted, which is a good thing. And I'm supportive of the programme. What I'm unclear about the programme is going to build
2. So plant 543 trees, 1000 trees, I don't know how many trees we currently have. So I don't know really how much extra that is, or how much land it would take to plant 543,000 trees, but there must be some sort of trade off with food security. And I would encourage officers and cabinet member to think about that too, for the longer term. Thank you. Yeah, I completely agree, David. I think I think food security, you know, almost as the other side of the coin from energy security is a conversation that we're having naturally at the moment and is incredibly important. Bucks does have a mixture of sort of almost, in layman's terms, sort of park land and agricultural land. So there is space to do a lot of this tree planting without compromising agricultural land for food production. It's very much something that's in my mind at the moment. I think I'm very much on the same page as you in this. It's, you know, that food security is incredibly important. And, you know, I've got, I can't say I've been lobbied by some of our members of parliament, because they're all candidates now, they're not members of parliament, but almost every time I talk to Greg Smith, in particular, I get this point made very clearly to me about the need to protect and preserve our agricultural land. And it's very much something that we've integrated into the programme. As you say, we've got, you know, we can do a bit of both on this in terms of planting things like orchards. And that's something that we'll look for the opportunity to do more of as we go through, but absolutely really important point. And of course, is getting that right balance. I mean, back in the days when I was farming, you farmed right out to the hedge. Now you've got a very wide hetland all the way around with wildlife and wild flowers in order to help our natural wildlife right there. It's getting that balance. And I think that's what we're trying to do within bucks. Me. Thank you, Chair. Well, this is a report I always look forward to seeing on this committee. I remember the first time sitting here and getting the report and seeing the ambition we had to plant a tree for every person in Buckinghamshire. I thought that's never gonna happen. But you know, over the years, the reports come in. And each time we've made significant progress. And right now 190,000 plants. Okay, they won't all survive. But you know, there's attrition in all things. And Thomas, you said the represent value. So I've just done a quick calculation just to check that you were right. And it comes in at £4.70 per tree. Thereabouts, we don't know what's left in the budget. But if we'd spent the budget so far, and we probably haven't, that would make £4.70. Now I think that does represent value. I don't think you can buy a whip for that privately, can you? So we're actually doing it, doing it well. Buckinghamshire is known for its trees. So I look at this project in isolation, all the other things that we talk about HS2 and all these, they're all separate projects, this stands on its own merits. And we're actually delivering it. And I'm fully confident now that we'll deliver it in a timely fashion. But I think this committee should hold it as one of our tasks going forward to hold Thomas and the and that particular portfolio under pressure to keep the momentum we obviously have right now. So I mean, it's a it's a good story. And keep up. Thanks. Well, thank you, Mick. But I completely agree with you on the point about, you know, the role of the committees like this is, is to hold us to account is to keep pressure on us to make sure that we deliver. I'm determined that we do. I have to say we can only we can only deliver because of the fantastic team of officers that we have, who are implementing this program. And I must admit on this particular one, I very much have had a golden inheritance. Gareth Williams is the person who's really spearheaded this project and pushed it forwards. And a lot of the trees that we've already got in the ground were done under his watch. And he's really his commitment to making bucks a better place. And to making sure that we are taking a sort of diverse array of actions in order to meet our net zero targets has been a bit of an inspiration to me coming onto this council back in 2021. But but really has driven forward our agenda in this area. And not many politicians are as lucky as I've been to come in and find something so well set up. So, you know, I have to give full credit to Gareth for the fantastic work that's that's taken place, particularly on this project in terms of leadership. And then of course, to say our officer team who are day in day out out there delivering the only thing I would ever so slightly disagree with you on is that in terms of the 192,000, one of the things that our team has done really, really well is is put in place, what we need to make sure that when those trees are failing, because obviously, not every tree you plant is going to take that we are replacing them. So we shouldn't see that number rolling back, we are going to make sure that we keep up to that level. But, you know, I look forward to coming back to the committee and I hope to have more good news to report in the future. Thank you, Robert. Thank you very much chair and Thomas for a very good report and for answering the questions. I'm apologize, I got a number of questions sort of in free strands. Strand one being carrying on Council Watson food security. I just really wanted to ask what is the council's policy when it comes to tree planting on farmland, because I think as you as you will be aware that all farmland is graded on its productivity grade one being the most fertile sort of in the east and Norfolk places like that, you get 234 and so on. I know most counties I think when particularly when it comes to planning building houses, anything above grade three, you don't touch. So what is the council's position on planting trees, because trees are like any other crop, unfortunately, they need well, not unfortunately, but fortunately, they need the best quality land as well to grow. So what is sort of the trade off and what is the council's position on what grade land is planted on? I'm sorry, I'm aware it's quite a technical question. So I think a rich answer probably suffice. And then the second strand is on grants. So you mentioned using acronym bingo latf. Do you know if the council is also claiming money off countryside stewardship? So for that you have your mid and higher tier agreements, which offer quite generous funding per hectare on planting and maintaining. So would you know if the council is taking advantage of that? And if not, this could be quite a useful funding pot. And also on the granting, I know has been asked in the past regarding tree tree nurseries. I know the council doesn't have any but there's been recent announcement that the government has a new grant with a third round of a grant called tree production capital grant, where they give up to up to 200,000 pounds to encourage nursery so to speak. So another one is the council doing this and if not, this might be quite a good one to look into. And then the final strand is on maintenance. So you mentioned in page 26 of the pack that the council has agreement with a number of contractors. So I really just wanted to know, how does the council monitor this? Because I can't remember who it was, but one of my colleagues did mention the need to make certain that the contractors are behaving themselves and doing as they say. So what sort of systems does the council have in place to make certain this is happening? And I will shut up now. No, thank you, Robert. Excellent questions, to be fair. On the food security point, as I said, David, I do think it's really important. I think we will reflect the kind of land that we're using in terms of what we're planting. So if we're, I'm not gonna, I don't know off the top of my head, if we have a firm cut off in terms of what grade of agricultural land we would use. David may be able to come in. Yeah, no, exactly. I'm turning to my office. Thanks, Alex Beckett, climate change programme partnership manager. So we're beholden in some ways to the to the expertise of our agricultural land managing agent who goes through a screening process of all of the available farmlands that we could possibly use for the programme. They do select lower grade agricultural land to put forward to the programme. But there is a, you know, there's a there's a balance, there are interested parties looking at what what that farmland can possibly produce. So we've got those who are interested in putting large scale battery storage, solar PV systems on on the land. And and it is a it is a fine, fine balancing act between kind of food security, energy security, and progressing, progressing tree planting. But generally speaking, we do only select lower grade agricultural land. Thank you. Yeah. But I do. I absolutely appreciate your point. And I think we will very much take that away with us and maybe have a look into that last report back to me on that so that I can maybe give you a fuller answer. In terms of grants, again, I'm sort of off the top of my head, I don't want to go in, I don't want to go through what grants we're participating in what grants we aren't, what I'm always happy to do is take a steer from colleagues, and certainly from the committee. If you think there is something that we should be looking at, what I might do is take away the ones that you've mentioned here. And we'll have a look at them. And we'll obviously we'll come back and save if what level of funding we have received from them. And we'll have a look at whether it's whether it's viable for us to do so on other things. I don't know, again, unless unless the officers know off the top of their head, but I know that's quite a complex bit of this. Thank you, we've looked at the countryside stewardship grant scheme. And we consider that the England woodland creation offer offers a better grant level per hectare for creation and maintenance going on for for 10 years. So if we if we sunk a lot of efforts into securing countryside stewardship, we wouldn't be getting the value for money, essentially, that's being offered by UK. Yeah, and as I mentioned before, one of the things that I quite like about this program is actually that it's very efficient in terms of its use of money. The last thing you mentioned was maintenance and monitoring. So in terms of maintenance and monitoring, and the way that that feeds back to you guys, in terms of colleagues and committee and the public is through the numbers that we're putting out. So essentially, we're working with contractors, they are reporting back to us, we are then obviously adjusting the number that we're giving out, based on what we're receiving from them. So if there were to be, you know, a significant failure, that would show up in the numbers that we're we're publishing, you know, this is not that number does not only take up. So if there were some significant losses that that would be made available, as part of this reporting process, and a lot of the partners we're working with, they are sort of very well respected. And organizations like forestry, Forestry Commission, forestry, England, I never get that one quite right, forestry, forestry, yeah, for wing, you know, you have a fantastic reputation for this kind of thing. And, you know, do this work across the country. Again, though, if there were any suggestions from the committee about how we can do that in a more robust or detailed way, always happy to hear. But just one question, just to check, do officers do annual visits or regular visits to the sites? Thank you, Robert. So we were regular liaison with our maintenance contractors to make sure they're doing what they what they do. We also occasionally check those sites ourselves. Our contractors do bi monthly checks on existing sites and feedback to us in terms of that mortality rates, with photos of sites raising any issues with us and feedback. So we are, as an officer group, confident that the contracts are doing what we're what they're supposed to be doing in terms of that maintenance program. And just to sort of put in the focus that the contracts we're using to maintain aren't necessarily the same people who've done the planting. So there is no sort of inherent self interest in reporting to us that everything's fine if it isn't. You know, we've set it up so that the incentive is to report accurately. All right, I think we've come to the end of the questions. Thank you very much, Thomas, for your report on trees. It is good news. I like the words of me that it's good to see the number of trees being planted. As I had something to do with the start of this policy, it was recognized at the start that whatever we put together had to be achievable. We weren't going to go for something that was pie-eye in the sky that we would give up in the first year. This is something that is achievable and has been achieved and is continuing that, and that's the right level to work on. So well done, Tom. Thank you. And Jilly. Sorry, Jilly. Right, may we move on. Item 7 is parking services. Steve, it's good to see you back. I hope you're well and I look forward to your report. Thank you, Chairman, and morning to members. I'm hoping the slides will come up on the screen, because we were asked to bring the update report to you. So went via a slide deck, but it is obviously in the printed pack, but hopefully will appear, otherwise it'll be hard for me to thread comments to the appropriate screen. While we're just checking on that, the purpose of this is to give some background on parking. We recently at cabinet adopted the parking strategy, which is the forward lock, and also just pull out some of the the key issues. So we do have it on screen. That's good. Next slide, please. I think what's important to say here is this is a service that's been under considerable change for a number of years. So before unitarization, parking services were split between, in terms of their own operations, between different councils. So car parks were the preserve of districts and the on-street world came under county. That all had a mixture of arrangements, but typically was outsourced. And so post unitarization, the team have come together and are in-house. And so all parking services are dealt with under the the auspices of Buckinghamshire Council. And through time that has meant bringing staff on board and making some changes in how they're structured and how that operation happens. But that's the broad background. If you go on a slide, please, it's worth saying what do we do? Well, parking services obviously, as I just said, covers the whole of Buckinghamshire and does all those things. So managing parking provision, including the enforcement of it, embracing new ways of achieving enforcement through things like moving traffic enforcement. And that will be picked up in a thread later. And then managing the network through traffic regulation orders, developing EVM structure, because we're talking about that later. And of course, it does generate an income through that parking, through those parking receipts and permits to support the service delivery. I do just want to make two little points here. One, right up top, that this traffic regulation order point is really important. It means that the powers we have as a council and as a parking service, we can enforce against those traffic regulations. There are certain things and offenses that people see that are only the preserve of the police to enforce. And so as we work with them, I do often receive queries from members and members of the public to say, can we do something about this and where our powers end, because there isn't a regulation in place, that we do have to look for the police to help enforce that. And just to give you a scale, a sense of the scale, if you were to put all our regulated orders areas together, all the double yellow lines and things that you see end to end, that equates to about 426 miles of length. And in total, we have about 18,400 parking bays, roughly 11,000 in car parks and the rest off street. So there's a lot of involvement in parking throughout the county. And why do we do it? Well, those four points are really important. It promotes safety because if people are parking correctly, it has a big impact on adverse impact on road safety, reduces congestion. And obviously we can use, and we'll pick this up, I think in the parking strategy work comments, we can use parking to help manage behaviors in certain ways, including sometimes people would feel it would be better to take an alternative option and support the local economy. Next slide, please. So while I've mentioned finances, you can see the financial position. It is, and I've said this before, COVID and the consequential and existing changes to people's travel and working habits had a big impact on parking revenue and what parking provision is required. I do think it's worth saying, because we're just conscious of members of the public, for some reason, and it may be a budget, we need to ask the question again, in public sector accounting, all these minuses are actually the incomes and it's not saying there was a loss. So just to be clear, the budget out turn of off street income for 23, 24, we're budgeted for 8.6 million due to come in. It's not a minus figure. Anyway, there is a shortfall against the budgets. COVID recovery has brought our car parking income back to a certain level, but it is not the level. You can see the difference even in 2019, 2020. It has not come fully back. Like I said, a lot of people are now working from home and aren't necessarily parking for the day to go to work or indeed parking to commute into London for work. So we've had to manage that return and you can see the financial impacts of that on where we are with the budget and the MTFP. Next slide, please. Just to try and indicate the finances a little bit more based on this utilisation, you can see on this chart income and expenditure by area. So you can see the blue line is the expenditure and the income line is the - I am colour blind, I'm not sure what that is, I'm going to say green, but the not blue one. And then you can see the - see, that's why I have fantastic deputies. And then obviously you can see the surplus line. So that's just a summary of that. And again, you can see in those boxes at the top where that income is derived in terms of car parks and what's enforced. So that's a very quick overview of parking and its finances. Next slide, please. You can see and I mentioned that cabinet passed the parking strategy in February and I'd encourage anyone to go and watch the webcast of that meeting where you've seen the debate. We had to develop this and try and bring this very changing service together in a way that is meaningful for people because parking is such a public-facing endeavour for everyone that I think people need to understand what the future looks like. So this is our vision, it does give reference to our climate change and their quality strategy, our regeneration strategies, the EV electric vehicle rollout plan and the local transport plan. Next slide, please. And of course it picks up the council's corporate plan, but what we're able to do is bring this overarching strategy into five key priorities or areas. And that's because we need to look forward. Technology is changing a lot in this space. We've got to consider the financial aspects and the charges and the impact of that. We've got to consider what effective enforcement looks like and where are car parks, what state are they in and what kind of usage do they have. Next slide, please. Yeah, here we go. I don't know if that took a while to come up because it's graphic. So they're the bits, they're the priorities and then look into the future that are in our strategy. Next slide. The first of those is technology and innovation. And technology and innovation is really important because there's big moves in the space. Now that, as you all know, you can track where you're going in a vehicle, you can see where spaces or assets and things are available and we need to make sure that our parking service can reflect all of that. On this page it does highlight in that lower box the national parking payment platform and that is something that we are beginning to trial and that will mean you may be used in Buckinghamshire to paying by Ringo if you choose to pay by Ringo, for example. The parking payment platform will allow you to choose which provider, which supplier of those services you want to use when you park in one of our car parks. And that will mean there should be some competitive tension around the fees that they charge for that and also just make it far more convenient for you if you use the one you like to use. I do think under this page we need to mention the machines and we do highlight that as a challenge later. This strategy does two things regarding machines. It confirms that we maintain, for as long as is economically possible, the use of cash in our machines, in our car parks. But that is a declining position that means we will over time transition towards cashless payments. And the reason for that is the cost of the maintaining and introducing the cash machines, and it's usually either the paper mechanism or the coin mechanism, they account for about 65% of machine failures when you find a machine out of use. We will over time move towards that position. Many areas of the country have gone much quicker, but we recognize it's a convenience to people where the cash payments are in place. We do that by utilizing spare parts from other cash machines to put them in, because a lot of them are obsolete, to keep machines going. And it might be we have to move some of the cash machines around, so where there might be two or three machines in a car park currently that take cash, if one falls in another car park we may move that so there's one at least in each. We always try to keep multiple payment methods in a car park, so that would be cash, contact with card, or sometimes card by putting in the pin, and Ringo as it currently stands. So we never want to be in a position where there's only one payment method, but that I know often causes, about a cash point, a lot of queries. So we will move to cashless, but we are doing everything we can to maintain cash for as long as possible in the car parks that it's in. But I have to be frank, the cost of replacing all machines would run in the millions, and the cost of maintaining them in hundreds of thousands a year. So we're going to keep it going for as long as we can, but ultimately we don't have the resource to replace with cash machines. We're going to mention moving traffic offences later, that's where you see things being monitored, movements being monitored by camera. I am often asked just in this bit while we're talking about cameras, why don't you use ANPR in your car parks? We as a local authority are not permitted to do so in our own car park, so we cannot use ANPR. I would continue, I've spoken to DFT ministers about this before, I would love for that position to change, so we could use that. It's used in private car parks very effectively, but unfortunately we are not shared with the same powers. Next slide please. Parking charges, I showed you earlier the the financial impact of what we do, and parking charges have a real influence on the type of parking that happens in a particular car park. Long stay, short stay, how that tariff is structured, that in turn has an effect on place and on the economy. So for example, are there limitations and is the tariff set to allow bay turnover for businesses with people parking on those short spaces of time? We know that we do look at other authorities to do some benchmarking, to understand where the prices should be set. Right now this is talking to you about the parking strategy, which is different to the fees and charges changes and the hours of control changes that have gone out publicly for consultation in recent weeks. So this today won't cover that, but of course this all plays a part in doing charges. And I will say the next stage on parking charges, once hours of controls are set, and I said this during the budget scrutiny session, will be to go out on community board area basis and talk to local members about how the best use, without deteriorating the financial position, what the best use of the car parks would be in an area and a place. So you might want, for example, a long stay car park to be car park A and a more short stay one to be car park B, and you want to make sure the tariffs are set to achieve that, and that work will commence later in this financial year. If you see down the bottom, the other ways that we do it, we do work with town and parish councils who can, if they wish, provide help fund periods of free parking to the user, and we'll continue to do that. And of course you can see our approach to blue badge parking to make sure that's clear, and some recent changes have been made on that. Next slide please. Enforcement is something that also fills my inbox quite regularly, and I'm going to give you a headline figure up front. Last year we issued just under 47,500 PCNs, and they flowed out of 261,000 enforcement visits across our network. So whilst we have had a challenge in recruitment, and that in itself, frankly, has flown through, followed through into the budget position, it is certainly the case that that team are still undertaking a lot of visits. And we do that because everyone needs to make sure they're not overstaying, we need to make sure that those regulations are in place, remembering a traffic regulation order can only be put in place following a legal process consultation. So if that's been determined, the regulations should be there, then we enforce against it. I think what's also worth saying in this public forum is some of these enforcement visits aren't someone in a high vis with a clipboard or a device. And we do, on the technology piece, we are upgrading the technology used by enforcement. We do utilise people on two wheels, on mopeds, who will go through and do an observation, and if someone is in contravention, then they would receive a ticket, and if there is no contravention, that person will move on. And that allows us to rapidly deploy and deploy on what we call an intelligent basis, rather than a rotor. The last thing we want to do in enforcement is say, oh, we know he or she comes along at three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, so we'll behave at that point and no other. We are definitely targeting hot spots and putting as much flexibility as we can into that to make sure that those visits are done on a non-predictable basis and that tackles the compliance. Next slide, please. Parking assets is very simply where our car parks in effect, and as I said, there is a review of that happening during this year to look at the estate. We're sitting in Aylesbury where we made a change in year to close Hamden Helps because of the condition of the building, particularly following fire caused by such behaviour. We are able to do that because there are sufficient other parking provision in the immediate vicinity, and of course, that means that we will have a different use for that car park over time. The review doesn't mean we'll be closing all car parks. Clearly, it means we'll make sure some may be repurposed, some we may have to spend capital money to improve, and also the experience of parking is picked up here. We've had the unfortunate situation in the last year where we've had to change the overnight hour arrangements and the security arrangements in Eastern Street car park in High Wycombe due to some issues with that social behaviour, and that has meant we've had to spend some capital money on that, but that because we need our car parks to be a safe, and I'll say, well, a safer environment within which to park. Next slide, please. So looking to the future, I mentioned what will be happening on discussions on TOWIF. We'll continue to roll out the technology such as the national parking platform, and we'll continue to look at where there's new innovation in the market, what else can we incorporate into the parking service as we go forward. Next slide, please. This might be slightly out of sequence, but because then we pick up some of the other parking elements. I do bring here, Chairman, the updates on the roll out of the electric vehicle action plan, so this is just a quick summary about where we are now. You may have noticed. Next slide, please. I think that one was self-explanatory. If you go to progress to date in the second half of this slide, that's probably the best thing to do now looking at time. A 40% increase in our publicly accessible charge points, and we've recently announced real success in getting external funding from government to be able to roll out additional parking bays and on-street parking charging. Next slide, please. And they are captured at the top there, so just under $2 million of funding from central government to be able to deliver, we think, at least 900 slow charges. That's on-street. That's people who don't have driveways, particularly to charge on privately. And we recently put a call out to seek site recommendations for that, and 40 fast charging points to go into our car park. There is some match funding by the charge point operator when that installation comes that obviously boosts the nearly $2 million we receive from central government. And the funding for Levi will be split in the ways linked there. So this is the off-street parking work, is 50% in rural areas, urban areas, 30% in rural and less viable areas, and 20% is based on recommendations that we receive from others about where we might need to put charging. So we're at the point where we'll really ramp up. We went into the electric vehicle charging plan wanting 1,000 publicly accessible charges. We were, as you saw from the graph a moment ago, we're on track to manage that uptick, but this would take us way beyond it when we get this delivered. And, of course, we're rolling out some of the trials in the gully charging as well in Wendover. Next slide, please. I've probably covered some of the enforcement, but, yes, if we go to this page, we do still have five vacancies, but this is an area where we're targeting an increase in headcount in the year because the way the permit scheme works is the costs of the enforcement will be recovered. So there's no net cost to the council in doing that because we recognize how important enforcement is to members and members of the public. I think we've covered most of that. It is just worth saying, and Kevin, who's in the room, or Richard, as officers, may talk more about the comparison with other areas, but we do have a very good record that where we do enforce, we have fewer PCMs challenged than other areas. Our CEOs, that stands for Civil Enforcement Officers, the parking warden, you might know it as, they make fewer errors, and, therefore, we have a relatively low cancellation rate. So if you do get a ticket here, it's usually well evidenced and up for good reason. Next slide, please. This is back to the payment machine point that I think I spoke about earlier. It is worth saying, since unitarization, we have spent 280,000 pounds on new machines as well. So it's not that it has not been starved of investment, but the technology that we have is coming to the end of life and there's a really important statistic in here. Part of the recovery from COVID, not only on patterns and timing of parking and how frequently they park, it's that point, the second bullet point, 79% of customers who paid in cash pre-COVID have transferred to a digital method and have not come back. So cash is a massively diminishing option for payment method in terms of its value. So for those reasons, I refer to the comments I made earlier. Next slide, please. I think it's the last one, moving traffic offense. I want to make one really, really, really important point here, and I've made it before and I need to make it again because on an almost weekly basis, someone says, why can't you stick these on our bridge? And there are some grade one listed build structures that I want to protect. When we applied for these powers, we wanted to be able to enforce structural weight limits. That would allow us to enforce a three ton limit. That's the protection we need on things like Marlow Bridge. In between applying for the powers and the final legislation and powers that we've been going through, government took away structural weight limits from the powers. We only have environmental weight limits and they kick in at seven and a half tons. So when we hear other authorities have got cameras on bridges and are enforcing it, that's true, but they're only enforcing, and outside of London this is, they're only enforcing environmental weight limits. I want to say publicly, I will not accept a seven and a half ton limit on Marlow Bridge because it would adversely affect the structural integrity of that bridge. It must be the three ton limit it is. If we get the powers, and I've continued to lobby government for it, to enforce the structural weight limit, we will put the cameras on to do it. But if I only enforce environmental, that means anyone in a five, six ton truck would be, would in theory, could attempt to go across the enforcement powers. It's come up locally because another bridge and another authority locally are enforcing their environmental limit, but clearly they don't have the restriction we do. But that applies equally across the county. I want to make it very clear. If I could, if we could enforce structural weight limits, we would do it. We do not have the powers. That said, what we are enforcing under those powers are right turns, going into, doing no entries, going into yellow box junctions, and there's a table there to show you the big point of this is to try and change driver behavior and achieve some compliance by no longer doing the movements. Okay. So some of these sites where people going up and down or parking in a box junction, they're almost while trying to make a turn. The whole point here is the camera will be in place until it effectively does itself out of the job because driving behavior has changed. So we have a number of phase one sites out. There are some that will continue to come on stream and coming later, having had conversations with local members, there are, there's a list of phase two sites. It is worth noting that Councillor Sullivan will ask me about Bangers Road, north and south, because sometimes where a seven and a half ton weigh limit is due to go in. That program may change if there are other street work impacts in the area, which may be the case there. So, but it's good to have the, the ability to enforce on, on this level. I'll remind everyone again, it is notified in advance, your first offense, you receive a warning, do it again, you receive the fine. So this isn't catching people out, you know, for the first time, the, the, the rules put on us, let us do that in the first six month period of it being live. So I think it's fair. That's the end of my presentation chair. I do have, as I said, Kevin Goad in the room and Richard Barker. Thank you very much. They were very full and interested in the report. Thank you. I will ask for hands in a minute. Bear with us. I welcome this morning, Councillor Stuart Wilson, who's come to ask a question. Stuart, come to the table, ask a question. You know the rules, ask a question, but you can't take part in the debate. Okay. And I'll take hands while he's asking questions. Thank you very much, chair. I'm here as ward member for Woburnsbourne End and Hetzer. I very much welcome this parking review coming forwards as Councillor Broadbent and Mr Barker will know. I've been chasing this for some time, so delighted to see it. I really think it opens up a lot of opportunities for us moving forwards. And in, in many respects, my role here is to put our area forward as a test pilot, guinea pig, whatever you want to call it. A couple of points, really, that I'd like to say. So I think one was we've seen the what and the how, and I'm quite interested to learn the when. And Councillor Broadbent made the point about looking at the car parks and reviewing the car parks. We've certainly got one in our area that is, I think, a non-revenue earning one. I think I've trailed everybody around it, and we'd be very happy. I think the chair of our parish council has written to Mr Barker, both in terms of getting that car park devolved, which Wickham District Council were going to do. And likewise, on enforcement, our parish council took part in the pilot scheme that Wickham District Council ran, and we'd be very much happy to be at the front part of that programme. One of the points that Councillor Broadbent made, and is in the report, was engaging with ward members and community boards. And I'd very much welcome that. I would, I think it may be workable through community boards, but I would like to understand whether or not it's possible to do it on a ward-by-ward basis, as we do with the assets team and with the local area technicians. I think that would be really, really useful. My ward would probably take five minutes, quite frankly, because we only have two car parks. So it'd be short, some might be longer. Question I wanted to ask beyond offering ourselves forward as the pilot area for car park utilisation and enforcement purchasing, was school streets and under the MTE provisions. I get a lot of questions from people around our primary schools about the possibility of school streets, and we get, have one particularly tight area that I've dragged various officers and cabinet members down. And I'm interested to note that councils like Surrey and Kent are very actively engaging with school streets where TROs are put in place for a very limited period of time on each day, Monday to Friday. And there are exemptions for residents, deliveries, emergency vehicles, waste lorries, et cetera. And whether or not we could actually look at introducing school streets, I'd certainly wish to be a test pilot for that one as well in Woburn Green. You can do it under an experimental traffic management order for both trial and consultation to see whether or not it works. Other county councils seem to be engaging very much with this programme. And I wonder whether that could be added to our programme of work. So I will leave all of my points and questions there, if I may. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you for that. Quite right. I know you do, you engage on parking matters. As I said, on talking to local members about place and how car parks work together and what that might mean in charging, I'll do that later in the year, be post-summer. The reason I'm suggesting it's done on a community board area is almost because of what you said. Some wards are really small and don't have many car parks. But you could imagine in an area, in our towns in particular, there may be a crossover. Aylesbury would be a great example. So that may be too small an area. So we'll start at community board level. If there's particulars in an area beyond that, I think we'd want to pick that up in the discussions. In terms of town and parish, this is now adopted. So I know Julie, who authored this report, who heads up the parking services, working on being able to finalise how you may bid in, engage in, to talk about localised enforcement. Kevin will probably be able to give an update. But I would expect that to be out in a few weeks, I'll go for, in terms of being able to brief that out to community boards. Kevin's nodding, so hopefully you take that. And school streets is not something I've currently progressed, because we've prioritised play streets, which is a very similar setup, and can be set up with community groups. And we have run some of these successfully in the county already. But it's a play street session that allows children of all ages to do it, and could possibly be done when you can do it at different times of day. I'm aware school streets is happening elsewhere, but it's not something that I'm currently progressing, because we're trying to get the learning out of play streets, to say how does that best work. And of course, one of the big challenges, and Sari would tell you this, is not all areas would be suitable, because you can't close a main thoroughfare, because you'd just be displacing traffic everywhere. But please do go and have a look at play streets, and maybe that's a way of trying to trial a, in the kind of area you're talking about, you could potentially go and look at the prospect of a play street at an appropriate time, that maybe it's the end of the day, or something on the schools coming back. And there's a link on the website to be able to do that. Okay, thank you. Right, any questions? Louisa, we'll start with you, and I'll take other hands. Thanks. Just whether this, I think this is appropriate and relevant. I notice in my ward, we've got four country parks, so looking at the parking charges, obviously it's quite profitable, because we're very popular and overused down in Langley Park and Black Park, but it's been brought to my attention, an issue with the parking charges. For the country parks, there's a set fee now of naught to three hours at four pound twenty. So it's been brought to my attention by some elderly residents and local people, that if you're parking, there's a bit of a, you've penalized a little bit, if you just want to use the car park for an hour, or even two hours. And obviously coming towards closing time, if you enter that park two hours before closing, or one hour before closing, then you're deterred, you're forced to pay the four pound twenty. Am I right in hearing from this strategy then, that I could put that as a community board item to discuss? I have made inquiries to parking services on this recently, to say is there any way that we can re-look at that, or revisit those parking charges? Are the country parks separate from this strategy? Are they their own setting on pricing? And I say that's a bit of a bit of a quark, and a bit of a detriment to locals that want to use one hour or two hours. Thank you for that. You have managed to do the question to identify that there's a slight quirk in the setup, where our parks parking falls outside of this, because it sits with parks. However, Richard Barker's corporate director picked up both pieces, so it's probably right I ask him to respond directly to you on that. Yeah, thanks for the question Louisa. That's exactly right, so country parks charging falls part of Councillor Clive Harris's portfolio responsibilities. The charging arrangements that you've outlined are correct. I think there is an up to two hours charge for the country parks, but that might have changed recently, possibly as part of the recent change. Not to three hours for £4.20, three hours plus £5. Tim, is Mike out of here? Sorry, yeah, not to three hours. As I say, less and less decides change from last week. Not to three hours for £4.20, three hours plus £5. There's no even breakdown to allow for when the park closes, to allow someone that enters an hour before closing to pay for an hour. Yeah, yeah, so appreciate the point. Was that Langley Park did you say? Yes. Yeah, sorry, yeah, okay. So I'll take that back with the portfolio responsible and we'll get back to you with the written response. Okay. Peter. Yeah, I'm interested in changes of habits when it comes to charging electric vehicles. Now that the vehicles coming onto the roads now very often have a range of 350, 400 miles, my impression is that the habits of charging will change. So where it was only a year or so ago that people were charging on the run or needing to charge on the run, these days that's not the case. So very often you can charge at home for less than 10p a kilowatt, whereas if you charge out on the road it might cost you 80p a kilowatt, so there's a big difference. So really my question is do you see a change in the need for the big charges, so the 150 kilowatt plus charges, or do you see them declining in the future? I think there is a need for home charging and I think that's the way that most people with electric vehicles are going and most of the charging they do is by that method. And I can tell you from my point of view I use a public charger for my electric car probably once a year. So that brings me then back to the whole question of charging in streets where people don't have a parking space. Now I know we're into an experiment, I hope it's more than an experiment now, in terms of providing channels in pavements etc. So it leads me on to wonder about how quickly we can get that rolled out so that people with the more modern cars can indeed charge at home. So there's two things to that really, one is an opinion and the second is time scale for home charging. Well thanks for the opinion, I do get the opinion of DFT and they do do the modeling. So one of the reasons and why I highlighted the two million pounds just under that we secured from government for the rollout of chargers, 40 of those were fast charge points in car parks because I do think there's still a need for someone to be able to access car park but they're not going to necessarily park all day but with a faster charging they might be a couple of hours they'll get a reasonable amount of charge back in. But 900 and we said at least are off the lamppost or bollard style chargers and then I gave that split about urban rule and the like. That is recognising what I think you're saying which is people are generally going to charge at home overnight on a more of a trickle feed which is what that would be. I do think and the paperwork mentions it, there's then a need to look at and we know this because the market asked the question for ultra rapid charging where you can swing in almost you know and charge and do a visit for 15-20 minutes on a really fast charger on major truck roads. So we have a plan to try and deliver along all of that to accommodate the changing nature of charging however your opinion comes or DFTs. But at least there's money to do that so we are we are now rolling out or working up to roll out those lamppost and bollard style chargers. 900 which is a big fillip. Okay moving on Michael. Thank you Chairman. My question is two actually. Hampden House you mentioned we've closed it as a car park. Is there any cost implications there? Because I'm not sure I did know and I've forgotten some time ago the actual arrangements for leasing or anything or whatever it was Hampden House so we although we've closed it it's not any ongoing costs for payment of its use that we're not using. And the other one I'm quite ignorant on charging and one of the villages that I represent on the EV's are having four charges fitted in their car park. What's to prevent because it's again it's a there's a lot of on-street parking so the need for electric charging is necessary. What's to prevent somebody coming home at four o'clock and putting their car on that car parking knob and leaving it there for the rest of the night after it's charged and not moving it? Is there a sort of some way of policing that these on-street charges are only occupied for the length of time it takes to charge the cars? Yeah thank you Michael it's a really good question that I should highlight. So for these 900 on street we they will be accompanied by a traffic order that makes it a parking bay. Now it's not a parking bay for an individual but it would be a specified parking bay for the purposes of charging. Now we'll always have the problem for now of ICE vehicles, internal combustion engine vehicles, trying to block on the car park spaces. I'm looking at Kevin I don't need a TRO overcomes that yet. Yeah the TRO can be used so you dedicate the bay as an EV charging point only and therefore you can limit the amount of time that an EV can stay on that bay and charge without getting a ticket. Any vehicle that's not charging in that bay can be issued a penalty charge notice. So how you define the traffic order prevents non-electric vehicles parking there and limits the amount of time that the electric vehicle can charge for. The trouble with the triple charger is seven to ten miles an hour in terms of so we will probably need to make the stay at least four to six hours to to get any benefit out of charging on it. That's the limitations on on-street charging at the moment Michael. To be perfectly honest the the village that I'm concerned about is Brill which is sort of in how will we how who's going to police that time limit on there is it down to the parish council or is it down to us? It will be down to the parking civil enforcement officers so we will go out on patrol and issue notices accordingly. Okay and it's something I should have mentioned in the part we do now enforce seven days a week and into the evenings. Very clear message needs to be said but that's for on street. I think you also mentioned maybe village car park we've got no jurisdiction over that right because that's assuming the village hall or the village owned the car park we can't force on non-council land. So would the village hall of would the parish council have control would they be able to police it themselves and have any authority control over it and they there's various ways they could do that but it wouldn't be a council endeavor. And on your first point about Hamden House obviously there's there's the state of the the infrastructure and the ongoing costs. Car parks actually pay business rates for start and you can you have a short period where you can have an exemption from that but then we are seeking to repurpose the asset that's let's use that phrase one way or another just try and secure an income to offset security costs and just general maintenance costs. But we've done that bit of work and it's still a significant savings parking. We did have an income stream for that car park there were some permits but they were able to be decanted to a different car park. Richard do you want to say any more on that? Yeah thanks Steve just just to be clear so the car park was generating a net cost effectively to the council and being operated as a car park. Part of the reason Steve's alluded to earlier there's a lot of provision in that area the quality of the car park was very poor we had anti-social behavior issues as was mentioned. We have got a meanwhile use of that car park happening now since it's been closed there's a public car park and that involves the storage of cars vehicles for a car dealership and that's an arrangement that property colleagues have entered into so there's now a net financial surplus to the council for that meanwhile use long term as you mentioned there's a lease arrangement on the site and we'll need to think closely in terms of how that potentially plays forward as part of the wider regenerations ambitions for Aylesbury but in terms of the here and now there is a financial net income for the council for the use of that asset. Okay Mick you're next. Mine's just a bit of clarification really Steve um on page 38 it gives the expenditure and income for each each area and it's very notable and you may have answered this in your document sorry if you have I may have missed it Aylesbury is under performing all of the areas quite significantly um what's the underlying reasons for that well of course under this there's a car park by car park uh assessment so you can you can imagine here that a car park like we were just talking about that suppressed uh revenue because it wasn't it it wasn't the best car park to go in parking so revenue was down there was very high cost um then you could see you don't get that differential there's also the type of parking so some historically in wickham a lot of people would park um at quite quite a high tariff to go to london for the day um and so that that clearly they're just taking it one parking bay but paying a bigger ticket um so one of the bits of the review that we're doing is to go through car park by car park to understand that i mean there is still a um a bit of a surplus but clearly it'd be better if that was um for from a overall council point of view if if the difference was as great as replicated in wickham and chilton's but there are car parks in wickham that that across the area but also in ailsbury where we have to consider an overprovision and how high the costs are um and maybe why people aren't parking um in certain areas and that's something we'll flesh out during the year um as we do the review but it's a really good spot there's you know is is there an opportunity there and the graph would suggest as was not that different to the other areas so maybe we can um but we've got to be mindful of making sure there's enough provision to achieve all the aims we have in parking uh within the town as well and uh the word surplus is used here but this is you know parking parking surplus goes into the maintenance of those car parks goes into the running of the service do you want to add anything more gavin i don't i don't think so i think the principal point is that you know there's an oversupply car parking across the county and therefore certain car parks perform better than others i think what we've got to do is look at the profitability issue in terms of ask the question should this car park be disposed of or are there alternative uses for the vacant spaces in those car parks so warden street for example could you provide other services on the top two floors which are very rarely used so i think part of the strategy has to be should you dispose financially or could you find alternative use to put that car park back into either a net benefit or or or cost neutral benefits so the strategy goes very widely in terms of make it work as a car park make it work with something else before you think about disposing it because there are also car parks that are a community benefit and you wouldn't want to remove the car park even irrespective of making a profit because it actually provides a wider community benefit and that's when you get some discussions about wider region opportunities okay right just yeah thank you for the presentation steve it's very informative i just wanted to talk about parking enforcement i had a recent drive around with one of the enforcement officers in denham to highlight some areas that were problem areas so that was very helpful but i did notice that there are as you mentioned there are vacancies and it's 43.75 civil enforcement officers for the whole county and as it's cost neutral do you think that's enough or should we get more um are there challenges in recruiting them that was my first point and the second point i know you mentioned about having the times of enforcement randomized but in in particular areas like schools i think it needs to be at the obvious times so is there flexibility on certain areas to go at the time when there's most issues thank you yeah good and i'm really pleased to hear you've been out of one of the the officers to see the work that they've done i'm probably going to let dominic add a comment in a minute so dominic barnes's portfolio deputy uh has taken on a lot of the mantle of parking and particularly with enforcement so he'll probably can come back on the the intelligent piece rather than randomization part of uh of the enforcement but yeah you're right about the recruitment challenge there has been a there has been an ongoing challenge um that continues but i also mentioned um we are reaching out far further to try and fill those spaces and we've got another 10 um expected in years so i'm aiming to grow that from the the establishment 43.5 upwards so we can emphasize more on the enforcement services it's worth noting they do other things as well sometimes and that's why we do need some some more so for example at christmas when we may do parking suspensions all through the year where there may be parking suspensions due to events or works happening they get involved in putting out those suspensions as well and i i want the parking enforcement team to have enough people enough resource and to be able to cope with that and maintain uh the levels of enforcement that you and members of the public would expect but i'm going to ask dominic's comment on the intelligent enforcement piece because he's done a lot of work on that thanks stephen just well thanks for your comments and i'm glad you found it beneficial with going out with the enforcement officers i think it's important for all members that obviously members and members of the public are our eyes and ears so intelligent enforcement is what steve's alluded to um and what we're ultimately trying to do is behavior change and i think what we've talked about in the past is i think steve said if if if residents know when the enforcement officers have come they'll the behaviors will change which are great but then they'll slip back and what i would encourage all members to do and all members of the public to do is to report it on fixmystreet with a caveat on this we're not necessarily going to be able to get and deal with that enforcement at that particular time i'd also encourage and probably can fill the offices looking at if members of the committee want to go out with enforcement officers don't jump at once it's very valuable intel for the officers to see areas that they may not know about and by reporting but i think it's one of those things where you know i think steve's alluded in the report is our job is not to issue pcns our issue is to change behaviors so people part legally pay their fees and then we have high streets flowing people can go to school without being blocked those sort of areas that's what we're trying to do if i can just top that off to you right schools for example um you can be sure that every day there's enforcement officers around a school somewhere so the intelligent piece is where are most events happening and when we take that data and say that's what we've got to target and of course every school will say we all want here but um that happens well during that time uh on a daily basis okay thank you very much interesting question uh steve your final oh steve thank you chairman thank you steve for your report which obviously you know i've been anticipating for for quite a while so very welcome um some of the questions i was going to ask have already been asked so i'll try and keep it to uh enforcement um issues i'm i mean very pleased to sit to see how well enforcement works when it happens so there's been an outcry in high wickham about people getting tickets or letters because they've driven down the bus only part of castle street so well i've always done that so yes but you've always been wrong so i mean it's really having an effect um and that's great what i desperately need to see now is is um the same happening with parking in uh in my ward for example and it was um interesting to uh everything i've heard so far i'd be interested to know whether you think that bringing the parking enforcement in-house is better than the arrangements we used to have as you know it used to be a wickham district council and we used ncp for enforcement there's a perception amongst the public that um enforcement's gone slack since the ncp boys have gone and you're less likely to get a ticket now in residential areas not in in the town center the town center enforcement's still there um that's just a public perception uh i don't know whether it's correct um but i am interested to know how as as you've already been alluded to how many enforcement officers you think we should have um to to cover the area and the other thing i really wanted to to bring out was um this demarcation between enforcement that we can do and enforcement that has to be done by the police so residents get frustrated with the ping pong that takes place in both directions so they'll contact the council and be told that's a police matter but also they contact the local police about parking in their street and they're told that's a council matter um now in totteridge on totteridge road as you probably know we spent i think eighty thousand pounds having w lines painted um where people were parking dangerously the local residents that like to park park there actually took a uh a petition to the high wickham town committee to try and get that overturned because they like parking there uh they failed and the yellow lines were painted but people still park there now because there's a perception that they're not going to get a ticket um so i understand that if you park on yellow lines that's something our enforcement officers can deal with what about if you park on the pavement what about if you block the pavement what about if you park in the mouth of a junction so that you create a danger to traffic is that a police matter is that a council matter and more to the point what are we doing about having a bridge between the police and the council so that we don't get this ping pong so that there's a line of communication where the civil enforcement officer might say yes okay i can't issue a ticket for that but i am going to pass that on to the police thank you okay thank you thanks so there's quite a lot in there um i didn't i didn't have parking um pre-unitary um so all i can say is we've had as i said at the start we've turned this the services on change a decision to bring it in house predated my involvement um so i think we're managing to make real improvement in in the service it was certainly challenging to bring different groups of people and different arrangements who've enforced different types of parking all together at once but um the team are working through that and the team is growing and i mentioned 10 extra officers as the target this year that should give us the capacity to uh continue boosting the enforcement in the way that we want to hi wickham um and i don't have a breakdown by award but you know hi wickham out of those 47 and a half pcns issued last year accounting for 14 000 of them um and so a fair number uh went out there for totridge road in particular if there's a wn along with the tro we should be enforcing it it should be on the um it should be on the enforcement list don mentioned earlier about reporting on fix my street one of the first comments you may get back is what evidence have we got have you have you identified a pattern now it sounds like you're saying is every day but in some instances it might be there may be a pattern that we can make sure we're aware of so the visit happens at appropriate time let's take school examples no but the issue outside of school probably isn't there at 11 o'clock in the morning like it is at half a state um so we've got to make sure we target the visits right so if you think there's particular areas and i'm going to say just pass that on to to kevin for that or me um and then the last point you you you mentioned things like pavement parking parking on junctions and and the um the link to the police pavement parking is a really interesting one about i want to say just over a year ago 18 months ago the government asked us for views because edinburgh for example can permit pavement parking because they were awarded some powers to be able to do it and so dft are in the same way they did for moving traffic fences we're supposed to be considering awarding us powers for pavement parking we contributed to that response we still await response apart from dft that suspect isn't going to come in the next few weeks um but that is something that if we're able to enforce it we could we can't enforce now however it's worth saying verge extends do you go where there's a traffic regulation or it doesn't stop and start at the width of that yellow line you know if you've if you've parked on the yellow line on the verge think well i'm on the verge or the pavement here it can extend and we can enforce that junctions well a lot of them um will have regulation orders a lot won't so it will be very much context specific about are they parked there if someone thinks it's a real road safety danger one obscuring junctions and so on then they must go through to the police and and continue to make that point there may be one other technical points but kevin you talk about how we liaise with the police uh on these matters the bridge i think steve mentioned yeah we we have a relationship with the police where where we identify particular issues that are long running like running vehicle sales companies parking on footways we actually work with the police to do target enforcement with them we need the police present to actually support us but the issue about pavement parking in particular must not park on the pavement in london and edinburgh in the legislation should not park on the pavement is everywhere else in the uk so it's a little bit like the reverse of pedicabs in london pedicabs aren't licensed outside london they're licensed so the law and the legislation is a bit crazy we don't have the powers as steve says but generally if we have put in if we have parking controls on the highway we can enforce against them that includes locations where we have parking controls which specifically references pavement parking is not permitted in those controls but by and large large tranches of the authority do not have parking controls on them which is why you see lots of pavement parking particularly in most like estates the we can ask the police to remove those vehicles where they cause an obstruction because the highways code always also says you should not drive onto a pavement apart from the pavement you have to drive onto it has to drive onto it but the only people that can enforce that is the police there was one other thing chair you mentioned blocking driveways we did nx and powers again about 18 months ago and have done that in wickham where people are parking over people's driveways we have then removed vehicles so there are some instances where we will use the powers we've got to do that um when they've hemmed someone in at home but we need to know about that okay and i was moving on so make it a quick one yeah it's a very very quick one actually um at the end of the last year we passed the motion saying we're going to encourage to the reduction of idling in the county and one of the issues was looking into what we could be doing in car parks with signage have we done anything what are we intending to do um so we have written out to as we said we do to all our contractors and people they're saying um it might be about not idling so that's gone out through all the workforces that we have direct control over um through the uh through that process and part of what we've said uh about signage is if we are um if there's a way of putting something because the signs we have to put up in car parks are fairly regulated in terms of what needs to be on there through the changes that are out of public consultation at the moment there may be new signs and then we can maybe affix something to it but i wasn't going to do that on signs that are going to be removed but i haven't got that finalized yet frankly because we haven't made those signage changes but it's there but what we have already done um as we agreed is make sure that our supply chain are reminded and we'll do that again and i've raised it with actions about the bt and the highways alliance meetings to give it the focus at the senior management level sets is really important we can't have people idling when they're out working on network unless they need it going to keep the hotbox going to the tar whatever obviously um but so we we've done some of it we will i'm mindful of what we agreed to do okay thank you very much thank you very much for a very interesting uh subject while they all are but and maybe move on into a gender item eight um i'll start this one off myself uh you'll see that this has got written draft on and that's for a very good reason because i want comments from you as well this is the scope that we have put together for the working group that's going to be meeting from now on dates to be arranged and membership to be arranged uh if you want to come on this i know we've had two people come forward um so if you want to be part of this scoping um working group um you can see why we're doing it we've had a lot of flooding in this county we do do a very good job in sorting it out and i'm sure um maybe jill you might want to pick up something in a minute but because of the situation we thought we would look at this to see if things need to change at all to uh because we're getting more floods than what we used to um is it time for doing something different a little bit more so we're looking into this you can see we're not the only people responsible here we work with environmental agency highways anglia water buckinshire river drainage board turning parishes and and of course not forgetting the farmers uh riparian ownership of the of the streams going through the fields clearly i don't know if you want to say anything but this is really an introduction uh a report to say this is what we're going to be looking at if you feel this is interesting you want to become part of it have a word with chris or put your name forward now if i get too many allow me to trim it down um jill i know you want to say and then i'll come to stuart because you want to ask a question as well doing uh thank you very much mr chairman well i i very much welcome this piece of work um and i'm very happy to help with the group and put forward my experiences that i've had over the past three years of working with flooding within buckingham share um i think um it from what i can see there's the scope of this is working with um local groups which i think is one of the areas that's missing in buckingham share there are some very good local groups especially in marlo and um there that we could very much showcase and how that works well but i think that there are lots of groups um that need to be formed flood groups we need flood plans for areas and one of the um we have what's known as project groundwater and and uh one of the plans for that is to is to create flood groups so perhaps that's something we can work in conjunction with this scope of work okay and of course those who live around the child funds you know will have special problems there with um sewage entering the water systems and everything so it's got a wide remit stuart do you want to come across and ask your question i'm it didn't mention at the beginning i've asked robert to chair this one this is our third working party and we've alternated through the through the term it's worked really well and you know last year i thought it'd be very good for robert to do it and he's willingly said yes stir thank you very much chair allowing me to speak on this matter um i represent a ward that has the joy of one of our very rare chalk streams the river y and the river tems our major english river running alongside it and therefore we are subject to a lot of flood issues and particularly this year the royal borough windsor maidenhead recently uh less than two weeks ago hosted a session um in cookham and that included members from the environment agency and tems water as well as lots of community representatives and members of our community attended what became very clear through that and a lot of the work we looked at about the recent flooding in our area was that water was held up from cookham through to marlowe and impacted both my ward and councilor watson's ward in in the abbotsburg area so we had a big impact and it was very clear that there was either a conscious decision to hold that water there or an unconscious decision which had a material impact on um on our wards and um i wanted to to draw that to the attention and and hopefully have that included perhaps in the scope of this review because i think it's there are decisions being taken either upstream or downstream that are having a very material impact on wards in buckinshire perhaps by authorities outside of buckinshire i think that's very concerning and we should get below the behind the facts of that and although i'm not a member of this committee i would be very happy to participate in the rapid review um as would members of our community in the ward if that was um feasible because as i say we are a river-based ward but i i make that offer um if that was um uh feasible under this consideration so thank you can i take that in a way so it never looked at i mean maybe if we if i i don't see any reason to include in what you've mentioned down at cooker um when we're doing that item you can be part of that to give us first-hand information but really the membership should be from this committee but there must be a way of getting you in on and particular item robert you're happy with that yes any comment to what's written in front of us michael thank you yeah following on there from councilor um wilson's comment so i think we've got a similar issue with on the west of the county of namely the villages of um shavin and ekeford worthingall oakley which are all on the river ray and that i have no doubt in my mind that that the water the flooding in those parishes is due to the water being held up um in oxfordshire so that it doesn't flood botley and because they do put the wares across to stop it yeah draining out so i think there's a genuine um need to look at the water being prevented going down to the river tems all right well and we've taken note of that michael i mean yeah sorry before i go on just on that subject to bring bit of context i'm a user of the tems in the canoeing capacity and i used to be secretary of the tems are the canoe league in all the years i've done that in the past i've never seen a year like this year so if you look at the warnings on the tems they have a red river warning not suitable for navigation if you look from from the title to the top teddington where it becomes tidal right the way almost electrolyte it was red all the way so i think if we're looking in silos at our little bit of the tems each person on the way down will suspect that somebody on the way up is holding water and in fact they're having to control the flow walk because the exceptional downpour we've had over the last period and it appears to each person on the way down the tems that they're the ones getting the impact well when you look at it more widely everyone's getting the impact so it's just to put in some sort of context that it's not isolated to particular areas it's been the length of the tems has been suffering i i hear what you're saying i mean this is more to be looking at more to do with flooding where it shouldn't be water not where the water should be in the rivers um but i'm there's no reason why we can't look at that and incorporate when you do working parties and you're looking at the subject it turns up and then it don't return for two or three years so i don't want to miss it but we'll see if we can incorporate that into it part of the the ownership of this is tems water and anglia water and we want to bring them in and find out what they've done we we inquired two years ago about um sewage in the water we want to find out from them what they're actually doing and had the best of press lately and um you know so there will be a lot of questions and a lot of work in this uh if you're interested in coming on see me see chris or at the end of the meeting but that's the sort of thing we're doing here thank you for your comments and it will be an interesting one and when robert takes it to the cabinet later in the year um cabinet will hopefully take it on but of course it will be up to the new council to um work with it everybody happy with that thank you uh final uh agenda item is work program you will see from the work program that um some ideas come in and we've added them in along the way um and we will have got a busy last year of this council uh within this working within this committee um if there's any comment chris go on yes thank you chairman um since the agenda was was published just one change to highlight is that the ev action plan report has been brought forward to november's meeting and the climate change annual report has been moved to february 2025 meeting okay but all committees will be very interested and will definitely work in their two hours worth some more so with that i would say thank you very much for your attendance it's been a really interesting meeting a lot of um information exchange robert you want to say something date for the next meeting is thursday the 12th so uh a very lovely summer i don't think we've had it yet but uh all the best safe journey home and thank you very much for your attendance