Transcript

Sir Wayne and I'm sharing tonight's meeting. We're not expecting a fire alarm test this evening, so if an alarm is sounded, please evacuate the building. I'm not going to ask everybody to introduce themselves, because we will by now know who we are, but when you first speak, if you can identify yourselves, that will help with the recording and help Sammy in terms of the recording. of setting that all up. Apologies for absence. I've had apologies from Councillor Chaudhry and Councillor Kubica and apologies for lateness from Councillor Nanda and Ibrahim. Any other apologies that you're aware of, Sammy? No, there are no substitute members. Any declarations of interest? No declarations of interest. Can we agree the minutes of the previous meeting? I'm going to deal with the Chair's report a bit later on tonight, really in the interest of helping various people coming tonight with their personal commitments and as far as public questions are concerned, again, if there are any public questions, we will deal with them a bit later on tonight. in order that we can make a prompt start. There are no items for calling. I'm going to be making a slight change to the agenda running order. In order to try and accommodate people's personal commitments, we will take part of C2 first, which is the net zero carbon accelerator scheme. intention will be to finish that at about 8 o'clock and then go on to the annual presentation of the Executive Member for Equalities, Communities and Inclusion and that will have the advantage of, I would hope Councillor Nanda and Councillor Ibrahim being present for that because I know that they have got matters that they will want to raise. So without further ado, if we can move on to item C2, presentation number 2, net zero carbon accelerator scheme and I think that's Caroline and Matt that are the lead officers for that. in order that we can't do that. Thank you. Shall we introduce ourselves first, Gary? Yes, please. Hi everyone. My name is Councillor Santiago del Bradford. I'm Deputy Leader of the Frizzington Council and Executive Member for Inclusive Economy, Culture, and Jobs. Hi everybody. My name is Matt West. I'm the director of Housing and Property Services. Nice to see you all tonight. Hello everyone, I'm Lucy Lyons. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Kestrix. We're a start-up working with Islinton. So I think the reason I wanted to bring this to you today is because I think this kind of exemplifies some of the best practices we have when it comes to progressively human. So the Net Zero Carbon Accelerator Program is a program that was funded by our affordable workspace money, so money to get when we don't take all the workspaces, they're going to put it into a pot that has to be used for kind of re-influence in some ways, kind of similar to Section 106 and SIL, and then also the Carbon Offset Fund. And we want to do a really ambitious project, and that project was getting supplies into our council supply chain. I think we can do a million kind of trainings and meetings with small businesses and things like that, but I think the thing we've heard from the market and from businesses is not just about us being open and kind of making our procurement systems more open and more transparent, it's also being transparent with the businesses about what we want. So it's not always just the market coming to us and saying, here's what we can provide, but it's us going to the market and saying, here's what our needs are. So the Net Zero Carbon Accelerator Program was kind of the pinnacle of that. We basically created a program where we spoke with officers, we're going to hear from them in a second, about what they needed from their portfolios, and we went out to the businesses and entrepreneurs to say, here are our needs. They went away, developed some ideas and programs and also pulled together some businesses that could help. Then we had a Dragon's Den kind of style meeting where we had different businesses, small businesses and entrepreneurs kind of pitch their ideas to us as a council, and then off the back of that, the idea was that we then procure those businesses. And I think the key thing you kind of think of businesses is not just the procurement monies, but it's also the idea of having a council on their books. Once you've been procured by a council in one place, you can be procured by any council across the country. And so for some of their businesses, it was about kind of getting their idea to be used on large scales to get other contracts. For some, it was just having a council to be proof of concept. There were those businesses that said, until we can kind of do this at a scale that a council can provide, no one else will take us seriously. So in many ways, we just wanted to be that front door to allow that. And I think what we've got in front of you is one of those success stories. Thanks, Councillor. So the programme was organised by the Startup Discovery School. And I think the real focus of the Startup programme was to really concentrate on local start-ups, ones that had connections to Islington, but also start-ups that were underrepresented in the business world. So these weren't just small businesses coming up that we were trying to encourage. They were ones that weren't perhaps represented in the current market as well. So there were lots of different aims. The Dragon's Den events were really interesting. There was a number of really interesting products, lots of which I thought were interesting, but couldn't work for Islington Council. So we met with the start-ups that felt most closely aligned to different service areas, myself and various other offices, and took some time to sort of explain what we were looking for, how we could make that work, how we could really fix it up. And I'll hand over to Lucy, really, and sort of get questions, because I want her to talk a bit about Kestrix and what they've done for us. But it's really nice to say that a couple of weeks ago we had drones flying over some of our properties. We'll be providing reports to those residents to see whether or not they want to decarbonise their homes with the knowledge of what they can do, and we'll be providing that using the green start-up money to prove that concept that with knowledge our residents, private residents in this case, can decarbonise and have a route to that. And we've got a lot of support behind that in terms of the net zero carbon work that we're doing, linking them to grants, linking them to planning documents that are coming out. And it's a really nice, really exciting piece of work, really nice to work with the start-ups as well in terms of then engaging with us and teaching us a little bit about what the private sector is like as well. So with that further ado, I think I'll probably hand over to Lucy, let her tell you a little bit about Kestrix and what they've done for us, and really give you a chance to ask some questions. Thank you, Matt, for the introduction. So what I'll do is I'll just introduce Kestrix really quickly. I'll share then a little bit about the work that we're doing with Islington Council, and I'll try and focus on sort of the problem that we're trying to solve and indeed paint a vision for how we see the scaling across the council, across the borough. So Kestrix is kind of like the Google Maps of heat loss. So we commission thermal imaging drone flights sort of 30 to 50 meters above whole neighborhoods, and we map and quantify how heat escapes from buildings and then use a blend of machine learning computer vision to actually generate an indicative retrofit plan. So it's sort of like the energy survey from the sky or for residents, the energy survey in your pocket. It's basically a way for a resident to see in a visually engaging manner where are the heat leaks in my home and what can I reasonably do about it. So I think we're trying to solve a broader systemic problem at Kestrix, which is that we have a massive retrofit challenge on our hands, a massive infrastructure challenge. In this country alone, to reach net zero by 2050, we need to retrofit 1.8 homes every single minute, and obviously we're doing just a fraction of that. So there's a lot of things that need to happen here. We need to align financing. We need to obviously build a workforce. But one of the issues systemically is that a lot of people who live in homes don't really understand how this problem connects to them. So we got thinking about this at Kestrix, and for the majority of our two-and-a-half-year life as a company, we've been working with social housing providers, helping them plan, price, and verify retrofits at scale. But we came across a really interesting paper from the University of Plymouth that said a resident, in this case an able-to-pay private resident, is five times more likely to invest in retrofitting their home when they see a thermal image. So we sort of thought, if that's a thermal image on a paper report, what if it's a dynamic 3D thermal model annotated with thermal anomalies and advice about how to retrofit your home? I think that, especially layered with financing options for retrofit, could be a really powerful tool for motivating people to do their own part. Obviously, there's the financing question, which we're not solving with this trial, but it's even more than that, right? It's the invasiveness. It's the fact that people have to traipse into your house with muddy boots. It's the noise. But if you give people a clear sense of what actually needs to happen, it doesn't seem so scary anymore. So this is really the concept we are trying to prove. At Kestrix, we have flown drones over thousands of homes for over 10 different social housing providers and councils, but this is the first trial, which is involving residents. So we picked a very small subset of homes in Nags Head. We flew the drones over them about two weeks ago now on a cold night. And at the moment, we're in the process of basically performing the 3D reconstructions for the homes on the thermal overlays. And the result will basically be 100 private residents in Nags Head getting their 3D heat loss models. Now, I think the hypothesis we're really trying to test is how do residents like this? Is this something that they're engaged with? How does this compare to prior outreach that's been done around retrofit? Obviously, in this case, we're not necessarily providing residents with a financial pathway to retrofit. So it may not necessarily convince 50 out of 100 people to retrofit. But the hope is that, especially if this shows higher engagement, it could be a channel through which to potentially deploy grant funding in the future. It's maybe getting ahead of ourselves. I think, though, at scale in Islington, this could be a really powerful data set in the future. I think there's a resident engagement angle. Imagine if everyone in the borough had a 3D heat loss map of their house and understood what's available to them. But also later for the council housing, I think there's a real problem with EPC data. It doesn't really tell you what to do. And then, indeed, once retrofits are finished, it's very hard to track progress towards net zero. So we really hope we can prove ourselves with this pilot. And, yeah, I think it's been really fantastic working with Islington. I live just up the road. So not being from the UK originally, I feel very patriotic about being a resident here. I'm working with the council. So, yeah, I'm very happy to hear any of your questions. Who wants to go first? Ernie. Excellent. Thank you for those presentations. If I can just go back and forth in terms of what the council operates first. When it comes to businesses, it's amazing to hear the success stories and their journeys as well. But it's much also about the businesses that don't succeed. And, in fact, you need numerous failures or people that try before you actually get something that really kind of pushes through. So just going back in terms of, you mentioned that there was kind of like a filtering system that happened to kind of really allow the ones that had the most promising bits to go forward. How do we make sure that we are open to kind of those failures that potentially actually might turn out to be the unicorns of the net zero acceleration? And then if I can maybe go to a unicorn of net zero acceleration. And, again, the unicorn quite widely based there. But just kind of thinking about it's great to hear in terms of what you're creating in this for Islington. But I'm more interested in terms of how is Islington Council kind of enabled your business to function? So what are the things that they've provided for you to be able to operate beyond in terms of what you were doing before? Yeah, thank you. Sorry. Last part. Just, yeah, last part first. I think Matt referenced at the beginning, to have Islington Council kind of on your deck saying we work with Islington Council is amazing signaling to other councils. It's really hard to win you guys as customers. But I think there's a sense of trust. So that's enormous for us. And I think it has even more gravitas once we complete the project and develop a case study, which we're definitely planning to do. I think the other piece is the more customers you have, the more investment you attract, particularly for AI-driven solutions like the one that we're building. We unfortunately need quite a lot of investment because it's really hard tech to estimate a heat transfer coefficient without it being an internal temperature. So it's a real flywheel effect, but it starts at the customers. You know, unless you're a three-time exited founder, if you don't have customers, you don't have investment. And if you don't have one customer, you don't have ten. So it's really about that. In terms of the question around what we did with the people that didn't quite get to a contract, there was lots of work. The Startup Discovery School was really about bridging that gap between there was a bunch of offers on the table from the start-ups and there was a bunch of requirements from the council. How do you match the two up? So sometimes it was that the offer wasn't quite baked well enough. Sometimes it was that it didn't quite meet what we needed. Sometimes it was just not a thing that the council would pay for, but we were able to direct them to, say, first-year contractors or other lines of business. So there was a range of responses, but I spent quite a lot of time with other officers on the programme, sitting with start-ups, going through what their offer was, unpicking the slide deck. I mean, we had several meetings, didn't we? It was like, I'm not so interested in that bit. I am more interested in that bit. That bit is something we would buy. And tailoring that some of those start-ups have gone away to re-work their offers. And the offer to them to come back and have that conversation is always there. And, you know, they've got the connections now, so they can come back and say, well, we've got a revised offer. Some of them, it was just clear it wasn't a council thing, but we've tried to direct them where possible to where it would be appropriate, where it would be something perhaps straight to the line of business. It was definitely a financing model that I spoke to that was more going straight to our businesses. So signposting them to, like, those was more important. But, yeah, it's just hard work and working out what the best route to direct them, trying to make sure all of them had the best experience and got something out of that programme, even if it was your product needs more work, your product needs designing. I should also say, and I should have said at the beginning, as well as Kestrix, they can't be here tonight, but Anson Walls, we've got some pilots going into one of our libraries, the WRC. So they do a net-zero carbon electrical heating system, which is meant to be very, very efficient. Obviously, the techie in me said, OK, if it's that efficient, let me have a look at it. So we're going to put it in a couple of our buildings and have a look and see whether or not cost-wise, performance-wise, it stacks up to what it looks like on paper. Could be a really useful tool to go out there and decarbonise some of our homes. Well, thank you, yeah. I mean, this is really good because it's so important to decarbonise residential properties in Islington, you know, get money, people wanting to invest their money in that. And you said that people who have a thermal image of their heat loss are five times more likely to invest. Do you have any examples of, you know, having previously got people to invest? Or is this, you know? So it's a great question. We don't yet. We did do a study with the Energy Systems Catapult, who developed the user-facing interface with us. We surveyed something like 20 residents before, basically, before seeing Kestrix and after seeing Kestrix. And I think their confidence score, which was just basically how confident do you feel in your home's retrofit pathway. I have to look at it again, but I think it went from five to eight. So there's some marked improvement there. Because, though, this is the first time we're deploying the technology on private residents, we don't have that data yet. However, that's another one of the reasons why it's so meaningful that the council decided to work with us. Because not only is the council willing to work with Kestrix, the council is very engaged. So we've had two brilliant, one brilliant project manager who's very focused not only on getting the drones safely above the buildings, but on, so what, after this, what are we asking residents? Are we interviewing residents? What are the outcomes that we're looking for? What makes this really a success? And I think that's very important for any, yeah, council working with a startup is sort of working together to improve the return on investment and whether it meets the objectives. So, Chair, thanks for coming back. So you've got, you're waiting, you've got results from imaging that you've done. And how long will it take before you can get a result on, see a result on investment and stuff? So at the core of Kestrix's technology is an algorithm that takes 2D images that the drone captures, one during the day and one at night, and basically turns it automatically into a 3D model and paints that thermal image on top of it. So there's a lot of kind of technical steps in there. What Kestrix has been doing the last few years is building an automation pipeline that makes that process almost instant. Right now we're still at about 15 minutes of manual processing time per property. So we've had to sort of stagger Islington with about 9,000 other surveys that have been ordered this year by other customers. So that said, this project, because there's such an amazing case study opportunity, is definitely a priority. So we're, I believe, doing an onboarding next week where we're going to have the first models available for viewing, and then we're going to distribute them to residents sort of in a staggered approach throughout the spring and summer. I think that will also allow us to collect lots of data and feedback rather than putting them all out at once and then getting lost with what people think. Just following on from that, while we're talking about the technical issue with the screens, the other thing we've done is put in place, we've got grants and things for private residents to develop their own properties. And that's had some decent take-up, but we're really making sure that once you've got the Kestrix model, once they know what they want to do, if they want to take up those grants, if you're eligible for them, we're streamlining them to those and making sure that it's as easy. So our enablement team are sort of working up behind this to make sure that it's as likely to succeed as possible. It's a really interesting project that you're working on there. I'm fascinated. I probably would ask more questions after, and I will find a way to get to understand the work that's around there. My first question is that, do you invest where you kind of gather a little bit more information outside of just the, you know, can you see a position that you're gathering other data that could be quite relevant for us as a council? So, and just to follow up on that as well, how are you planning to share? Are you already planning to share, or is that an agreement that those data are going to be shared with us as a council going forward? Is that a contracted agreement? And if not, who else will find those data valued? It's a great question. So in the first year, we have a hundred logins for a hundred residents. And then we also have a login for the council where you can see every home, basically from a bird's eye view plotted on a map. We're making that all available without extra charge because we really want the council to engage with it and see, you know, how else is this data used? I think holistically, though, obviously there's retrofit advice and there's a thermal image and it's visually engaging and interesting. But what Kestrix really does is we train algorithms to pull information out of images. So what that means is there's a 3D thermal model, but there's also a U value for every window, wall, and door. So that's a measure of heat transfer, which means that you can look at an entire property and say this is the overall space heating demand intensity of the property, which in English is like the rate at which the building is losing heat. And that can help you see whether the EPC that's lodged in that building is, you know, three bands off or kind of in the right ballpark. So I think for the council for tracking progress on net zero buildings and perhaps verifying data that you already do have, it could be really interesting. Going one step further, though, we don't brand ourselves as an asset digitization platform, but by virtue of doing a heat loss calculation, we have the 3D thermal model, but also just a normal 3D model. And to calculate heat loss, we recognize surface materials. So I remember one thing that we spoke about is Islington had done some really interesting work with UCL on sort of creating a digital twin of Islington. It almost seems like if we were to fly drones over the entire borough, you could have another version of that, but with materials automatically recognized, which, you know, then you can start to understand, and we don't do this automatically yet, but if the council wanted us to go there, we could develop tooling to understand the embodied carbon of a building. We could develop tooling to see, okay, what's the demolition value of this building based on its supposed material makeup. You know, we get dimensions of windows, walls, roofs. So if you want to understand, okay, as the council, we want to do a massive triple glazing campaign across this entire terrace street, you could see, okay, what's the exact square meterage of glazing that we need. So I think it becomes really interesting when it's applied at scale. That's also when it becomes quite cost-effective as well. I hope that answers your question. Quickly. Quickly. And I guess, again, putting on a little bit more of an entrepreneurial eye, that you've obviously won Islington's sort of support, and they are supporting to kind of get that going. But do you, from, I understand you running a business and being into print about, but do you see a situation where you're actually thinking, maybe the council could actually do this themselves? I don't think so. I mean, if the council could, I mean, perhaps the council could acquire Kestrix and then we could work within the council. But it's, you know, there's a lot of technical challenges here that require deep specialist skills, you know, in 3D reconstruction, machine learning, computer vision, physics, building physics, radiation physics. It's kind of a lot of, it's taken us a really long time to build the team to do it. Islington is part of the greater agenda, just to say. Thank you. I just wanted to ask if it measures what the specific solutions are. So I think it identifies it and there's a 3D reconstruction. But does it measure, and I guess from the, is it Nags Head that you did the recent one with private residents? So, yeah, does it measure what the specific solutions are? Does it identify the problem? Because my concern is if it does, but we don't have the infrastructure to retrofit or, you know, private residents are like, well, now you've told me that what's wrong with my building, I've got no money to do anything about it. I'm just concerned about that outcome. And also, was there any confounding variables in terms of Nags Head? Because I don't know if it was on top of businesses or if it's just private residents. Was it all the same kind of properties that you, yeah, looked at? Yeah, just on the properties, it was mostly the same sort of properties and it was not on top of businesses. It was kind of in a, I guess it's a Holloway Road and then another street, which now his name is escaping me. But it's sort of an enclave. So, and yeah, so we recommend retrofit actions. So we say, this is your problem, you should do this, but maybe I'll pass over to Matt to talk about the so what. Yeah, so it was a very conscious decision. We have very good data from the UCO report on our stock. We have a strategy for our stock. As part of the net zero carbon work stream one, trying to decarbonize all buildings in the borough, the traction we were getting on private stock, uptake of grants, people retrofitting, was slow. When we had the special scrutinies, the feedback from residents is we don't even know where to start, like private residents was, we're not sure where to start this process, let alone the hurdles of how we afford it, how we get builders for it. So, the plan was if it's five times more likely with a scan to retrofit your home, let's scan a bunch of homes, let's let a larger number of homes, so we've got a sort of control, link those to make sure we promote, using it as a promotion tool for the councils, net zero carbon opportunities like the grants and the green directory that we've got and then seeing whether the Kestrix reports make a difference. So, the idea was it's very, that you've got a problem but you've got an opportunity. It's all about your home could be warmer if you double glazed. Your home could be warmer if you insulated your loft. Don't just take my word for it. Here's a picture from Lucy's team showing the heat loss. You might want to think about, you know, insulating the loft. By the way, here's Eloise from our Green Economies team. She'll take you through how you apply for a grant. She'll give you the green directory if somebody can come and do that. So, we don't do it for residents because it's a private residence but we help them along the way armed with that information. That's the plan. It's very much to see whether or not we can increase the uptake in that area rather than rubbing the social housing side for change. Okay, final question from me. If this pile of works, presumably the idea is that there is an increase in the volume of retrofitting within Islington. With that in mind, what thought have we given to how we can support local businesses who might be looking for contracts? To do retrofitting because what we are looking at in this scrutiny is Islington Pound and how we can best use that Islington Pound and best support Islington economy. So, what thought has been given to how this project maybe integrates with other projects that we've got running? So, I may defer and I can feel her eyes pouring into the back of my head. Caroline Wilson's behind me. So, we have the Green Directory which is a list of Islington businesses and local businesses that do retrofit, that are interested in doing retrofit. It will be published for our residents so if you're looking for somebody, here's a directory of people locally that want to get involved. And it's really trying to link it through to all of the other good stuff that we're doing to help private residents decarbonise but doing that with a bit more focus, a bit more of an understanding of what they can achieve in their homes. I don't know if I've missed anything so I'm just going to turn around and see whether Caroline's frowning at me or not. I think just on that again, something to think about for our review whether we are doing enough in terms of promoting our retrofitting work how we can best communicate to our residents what might be out there for them and how they can support Islington businesses with this work. Unless there are any burning further questions what I'd like to do is thank Lucy for coming tonight. If I could share. Sorry. Just to make two quick comments. The first is just hopefully this gives you a good example of how Islington doesn't just have like innovative practice but can be a driver of innovation when it comes to businesses and procurement and how local government has a role in driving innovation locally. A. And then B. I think a massive thank you to Matt and his team because it's one thing doing this programme but it takes a council team who's willing to meet us openly Matt to put a lot of time into making his project work and getting Kestrix done and get to a point where they're supporting Kestrix and a lot of staff time within his team to make it a success. So I think a huge success not just from the procurement team but also from Matt to make it possible. Thanks all round for everybody's hard work. Thank you Lucy for coming in. We will be coming back later on tonight to further aspects of the overarching scrutiny that we are doing but what I'd like to do now is move on to item C1 the executive member presentation. Obviously Matt and Santi welcome to stay. I have a funny feeling Santi you'll be back for more. Lucy I know you have to go but thank you so much for coming in. Okay we're just getting the presentation up on screen because I think you've got some slides. I think three slides was the or thereabouts was the plan. We love a high level slide deck here and I'll ask you to confine yourself to ten minutes. You're a proud. You're a proud. Alright everyone so this is my annual report on everything in my portfolio just to remember that I report on libraries, BCS and the community centre asset review to Councillor Jackson's committee. So what I'll be talking to you about all the slides have vanished anyway. What I'll be talking to you about is broadly four things. I'm assuming everyone has read the report that went out with the second dispatch. I'm going to talk about the Access Islington Hubs, the Bright Lives Alliance and coaching, equalities and sort of community cohesion more broadly and I'll work with refugees and migrants. I am not going to go through the report word for word and statistic by statistic. What I want to do is pull out sort of key themes, important information and kind of trends. So I'll start with the Access Islington Hubs. So look, we're already on slide three which is great. So I'll go to the next slide. Oh, I've got a clicker. There we go. So that's what I want to talk about for a couple of minutes. So you know we've got free hubs and you know broadly what they do. Just think about the sort of tiered service that is offered there. We've got the meet and greet sessions. We see over the last 11 months of data that you've got, we've seen about 36,000 meet and greet sessions. Think of that as very transactional queries. It's the kind of stuff that you can be sorted out, first contact resolution. It's a lot of signposting. It's sometimes document dropping. It's advice on what things people are eligible for. It's the kind of, let's say, easiest sort of interaction and we have a lot of them. The next level of support we call this service support. We've seen about 7,000 of those over the same period. It's transactional but it's for those people who can't self-serve if you think about it like that. So the people who need signposting, who need help with documents but maybe they need to sit down with someone face-to-face rather than just be pointed somewhere or given a form to fill out. And what our staff do there is sit down with people, help them fill out a form but then actually try and empower them. So show them how to use their own device, things like that. Then we have our connector sessions. We've seen 2,200 of those over the same period. Remember, this is the big sit-down. You have an appointment, very holistic, relational support. The key feature of that is our staff, our connectors, case hold. They do follow-up. So yes, if they signpost you to other places, they're going to do follow-up. But the themes I want to pick up for you are, look, the meet and greet sessions of which we have 36,000, half of that is housing. Right, so that's transactional housing queries. We need to think about how is housing operating such that we've got 36,000 people coming in with transactional queries. A lot of it is document drop. A lot of it is general information and signposting. So again, let's think about our comms. Why are people needing to come into a hub to be signposted? How else can we get that information out there? The service support, that's the next level. We've still got a lot of housing. It's about quarter housing. It's a third parking, which is interesting. That's people getting tickets and getting conflicting information and being confused about, I mean, probably, I put myself in that kind of, being confused about how to get a permit, how to get a visitor. So again, a third of people coming to get reasonably high level of support for parking. That probably, we need to look at that. And 40% are coming for council tax. And again, it's because they're coming in, they're being chased for council tax, maybe they've got conflicting information. The connector session, money is overwhelmingly the presenting issue. And we've got data, you can draw out the data. The most prevalent ward for money is Caledonian Ward. The most prevalent ward for housing support is Tollington. The key feature is that people are presenting with concerns about money or housing issues, but there's complex intersecting other disadvantage there. There's, you know, whether that be debt issues, whether that be poor health, whether that be people living with disabilities, whether that be people experiencing loneliness and isolation. The other thing to notice there from the data in the report is that the northern hub in Manor Gardens gets loads more people for connector sessions. It's a lovely space, it's really nice, there's a garden outside, and, you know, what I want to flag to you, which, yeah, the things to flag, what I want to flag to you is this needs to inform do we need to move our south hub, because that's not getting the footfall, that's not getting the pass-through traffic, people are obviously not finding that comfortable and sort of nice space to be in as they are with Manor Gardens, so that is something that, you know, keep a watching brief on, we are thinking about finding a more suitable space. The other thing I want to flag for you is, on page 13 of the report, is this stage zero approach, so all of the skills and expertise of our connectors we're trying to bring to bear on the complaints process, so, you know, we have the stage one, stage two, well, the idea is now stage zero, so you get someone who's dissatisfied, you get them to work with a connector, you hopefully avoid the full-blown, expensive, time-consuming complaints process, and you actually get some intel on what are people's real issues and why are they having to, you know, be fit, why are they getting churned through a complaint system, what can we do better, we'll have higher resident satisfaction, it will save us money, so again, that's something for this committee to track, next time I'm sitting here, ask me how that stage one concept is going. The other thing to say, briefly on page 15, is that this must be the highest level of resident satisfaction for these, for the hubs of any service, right, it's 99% would recommend the connectors 4.89 out of 5 overall satisfaction, these guys are doing really a tremendous job, and I urge you to look at the case studies to see the sort of complexity they're dealing with. The last thing I want to say about the Access Islington hubs is on Friday the member referral process is going to go live, so at the moment we've got a member inquiry process, you know how to do that, we're launching member referral process so that when you get someone come to your surgery or you interact with someone who's presenting with quite complicated needs, you will have a different email address and that will push them through the sort of hub model, so you know the example is if someone comes to your surgery, they're coming with rent arrears, food insecurity, eviction threats, you can use the member's inbox to get them to the right services straight away and you will be updated as the referring counsellor, so Arizona is drafted, what's the difference between a member's inquiry and when should you be using the member referral process but please again this is something that I'd like you to use and give you feedback on. So next slide, that's me, Bright Lives, the Alliance, Bright Lives Alliance and our coaching work. I want to flag a few things, so the Alliance is just this collaborative partnership amongst BCS partners, our people we commission to provide services, the NHS etc to provide the seamless journey for residents across different access points, sounds a bit complicated, I think it's just if people go into a GP, if they go into a library, if they go into a hub, if they call up, there should be a wealth of services available through effectively like it's one front door even though it's actually multiple front doors. I want to point you to a couple of things in the pack, page 18, have a look at the test and learn model because I think this is really a good indication of the approach staff are using. So the example is they've got a project where we've realised that obviously people accessing food aid unsurprisingly have wider needs. So what you want to do then is train the staff and volunteers who are in those spaces, food bank type spaces, to have more relational conversations so that then what you can do is provide holistic support to address underlying issues and you can do it earlier and it's another way to stop people falling into crisis because you're identifying early indicators of complex need. There's a couple of other examples I haven't got time to go through. Another project is this Making Every Adult Matter which you'll find on page 21 and that's the council joining this nationwide network so it's across England providers, commissioners, experts, sharing knowledge, sharing data with a specific aim of trying to help people from marginalised communities facing multiple disadvantage to have a kind of very coordinated and joined up approach and and sort of to understand nationally what needs to change across systems to make things improved. Finally I want to touch on Bright Lives Coaching. Over the last 12 months we've seen over 500 people coping isolation and anxiety are the top presenting issues. Broad range of referring agencies which you'll see in the pack. I'm really pleased to tell you we're having sessions all over the place in different community locations wherever you want to be seen you will be seen you remember at my interim report I said I was concerned that you know we were referring all kinds of people but we were seeing the take-up to be disproportionately amongst white residents that seems to have gone and I'm really pleased to say that actually across all sorts of people of all different backgrounds we're getting people are being referred and taking up the offer. Very small bit of longitudinal data which shows a positive kind of outcome from this more detailed independent evaluation I'm expecting to get in Q4 so you can ask for that next time you see me. Again the people who go through coaching give very positive feedback. So let's move on to equalities. I want to talk about our community events. You know we run a lot of events throughout the year. Yesterday was International Women's Day which I want to highlight because it's an example of a slightly new approach where we're trying to empower our providers our BCS organisations to do things in communities rather than bring you know always be the council doing events. So yesterday's event was brilliant. The Maya Centre came in they brought their women with lived experience. It was a really diverse audience. Councillor Pandell was there, others were there. You know there was chair yoga, there was lovely food, there was reiki, there was speeches but it was a really nice setting colouring books for kids to come along to. And we did the same thing you know we worked with the Black Cultural Centre. They put on a day of events where Councillor Pandell and I are going to be on a panel at school. So it's about going out helping our partners to kind of do those events rather than doing it all here. I'm really pleased to say many of you came to the community cohesion event that was pulled together here in the town hall after the racist and Islamophobic riots. What we heard from people is we want more community cohesion events. What we've done is secured some funding from the government. We're going to run seven community cohesion events in the community in May. We've got the money. We're already working with community centres to do that. So that's a very good example of you told us you wanted this, we're doing this. The Black Cultural Centre is a great good news story. The pop-up model is working very well. We've got our second providers in there. Please look at the data that shows you the footfall on page 37. They're doing a great job of getting people in. And this is a model where the council has provided a space. The council covers the rates and the utilities in exchange for social value. We are not paying the providers for the tremendous work they're doing. I will touch very briefly on the Black Men's Mental Health Project just to say you know what that is. That's one-to-one mentoring for students in schools. It's therapeutic sessions in community hubs for older young adults 16 to 25. and it's the Barber Shop Barber Round Chair Project. So far some good indications of impact around reducing persistent absence, reducing incidents of serious youth violence, and also sort of just judging by the demand. We feel like well it's going well because we've got more and more demand. The fourth limb which was about trying to challenge structure inequalities in our partners. I feel like that's probably not our role. It's hard for us to demonstrate impact. It's not going to be Islington Council that stops the police from being institutionally racist. Let's focus on sort of what we can do which is get more barbershops. We've got 15 barbershops in the project. Let's get more. Let's see if we can get more funding from the VRU around the therapeutic sessions and roll out the mentoring for children across more than three schools. Public toilets I spoke about last full council. It's going well. The strategy will be published very soon. The strategy is around a better provider for the automated toilets, the changing places toilets for people with disabilities and getting our businesses to sign up. That's not easy. I'm a councillor in Arctuary. It is not an easy sell to get businesses to provide toilets to members of the public. We will keep working hard to try and sell the message of make the town centre accessible, you'll help yourself. It's not easy. You will understand the reasons why it's not easy. Finally, I know I'm running out of time. I think I'm doing okay. It's 13 minutes, but I have to talk about this because we're doing the Borough Sanctuary grant. It's gone live. The application deadline has passed. We have had, which is not in the pack, 96 applications for a total of 3.4 million of funding. The decisions will be being taken over the next couple of months along with those who, you know, have got lived experience. As you know, our 18 panel members with lived experience. I'm really confident we're going to make great funding decisions. We've asked for the projects to be delivered in the next two and a bit years. In an ideal world, you know, this is money from central government, this 500,000. In an ideal world, we will do Borough Sanctuary grants phase two because we'll go after more of that resettlement money. We'll have another pot of money. We'll learn from this iteration and we'll do more. My objective on our Borough Sanctuary work is to go really large with comms. I want, you know, I want billboards on upper street. I, you know, I want Islington Council employees volunteering in refugee and migrant charities and organisations. I want every resident to know that we are a Borough Sanctuary. You know, I'm hoping in the next couple of weeks, I did an interview in the Guardian. I'm hoping that's coming out. We are really, I mean, the work that we're doing in this space is sector leading. And finally, just a word on supporting destitute migrants. And this is something that maybe people don't know about. The central government do not provide money for us to support people who don't have recourse to public funds. It's a complicated area. It's expensive because of growing need and growing complexity of need. We've had some big influencing wins. We've got the Kings Cross hostel will be closing next month thanks to, you know, the work of councillor staff and other officers to highlight that we don't want people living in degrading conditions. I would like to reassure you that we are not saying that we don't want asylum seekers in Islington. We do. And we're lobbying the government to keep the most vulnerable of the residents in Islington so we can provide the support because we know that we provide the best support to people seeking sanctuary. We also, which you'll know about, we had a success in the extension of the move-on period to 56 days which we already hear from housing colleagues. It's making a tremendous difference. You can't help people in three days. You can help them in 56. So, just stop the clock 15 minutes. I've done my best. You did your best and thank you for looking through things so efficiently and quickly. Questions? Thank you very much, Sheila, for this. I don't know if you're buttering me up with all that talk about talking to my spiritual way. I do want to put on record it is very welcome to have a report that actually talks about refugees and migrants and particularly the work of the No Recourse to Public Funds team because normally what we get in our scrutiny papers is one or two lines that's usually around cost of temporary accommodation. So, to actually have something that sets out exactly what you're doing is actually quite helpful because I think we're not very able to scrutinise this area because it falls between different scrutiny committees. So, I particularly welcome that and I want to start with that because what I'm going to go on is through a little of a gaffer in terms of what is not here. So, it is accepting detail. So, I was a little bit intrigued as to why under equalities in particular LGBT work is missing considerably. And obviously, what we know with the LGBT community is we in the past have done a lot with London Metropolitan University, Union Chapel. We've just come out of LGBT History Month. There was a big issue around pride. We also know issues around to do with hate crime and also around wanting to do a lot more in terms of culture in the borough. So, my question is, number one, why wasn't it included in any of the equalities report? And second, in terms of what more are you doing to work with colleagues from other directives, whether that's Councillor Weeks in community safety, whether that's Councillor Bell Bradford as licensing chair as well. I'm particularly interested in this in terms of the cultural. But, yeah, just a little bit of kind of why was that not here considering this report is so large? Yeah, I'll start with the second bit first, which is to sort of reassure you about the work that's been doing and sort of just maybe I'll just touch on four things that we have been doing that I think are really important so that you can feel confident that the work is being done, even though it may not be in this report. So, the first important thing we do is that we fund LGBTQ plus community groups in the borough to do work and we provide them core funding, so not just relying on small bits of grant funding here and there. So, Forum Plus are an independent charity. They work to promote equality and improve the lives of people across Camden and Islington. We give them core funding. Islington Mind, you may have been there, they've got a dedicated mental health service for LGBTQ plus residents and they do really tremendous work and we preserve their funding as well. We also host events, so, you know, again in our events calendar, particularly in Pride Month, but across the year, you know, we had a big launch of LGBT, the anomalous space, film showings, pay what you can, theatre events. It was at the King's Head, also around specific intersecting groups around discovering South Asian history, 30 years of Club Kali activism, so lots of high profile events. We also, in terms of kind of being visible work, of course, we raised the flag, important Pride Month, Transgender Day of Awareness and we also, for the first time last year, had our, for the first time participated in the Pride Parade, which was amazing. We had a float. We marched with all the other local authorities, it was a really wonderful day and I think that tacks onto, we have a very, very strong colleague forum and I think that just touches on, I think, what we'd like to do in Equalities, which is sort of bring the internal and the external work a bit together, you know, we've got 5,000 employees here. It's really important that we march in Pride, it's really important that we have a, that we put on events for our, and, you know, actually the same around refugees and migrants, I'm really keen to have people who work for the council, who are, who have experience of seeking asylum, tell their stories. So, we do the work. Why isn't it in the report? Council staff, I mean, you know, we've done so much work, you know, Refugee Awareness Week and Black History Month and Disability Awareness Month, I mean, I don't want to give you a 300 page report, but let me give you my assurance that the work is being done and I'm happy to, I'm sure I will come back to this committee to give an interim update and I'm very happy to have a special focus on that, on that piece of work. We'll take it in order from my far right on that side of the table. So, Councillor Clark and Councillor Jackson. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I mean, I, I think this is a brilliant report and I've, I've actually directed the chair of the JOSC of the Joint Health and Overview Screening Committee for five boroughs in the north central London area for health to this report because they've got a special meeting coming up on, on mental health. But, I've just noticed, I know you're going to say that, you know, better lives, that's the service we provide in Essington for people, the drug and alcohol issues. But there seems to be no mention in this report about it and you're probably going to say, it's to do with a different portfolio, you know, health. But there's a lot of referral services in this report that go across different, you know, different portfolios. So, I'd like to, I'd like to think that people are getting, you know, referred to the Better Lives Programme in terms of this road, you know, to get help with drug and alcohol issues, you know. Because you talked about wellbeing, you know, that Manor Gardens is like the hub that people are going to for wellbeing. But I'd like to know, I'd like to think that all the hubs were, you know, aware of this, of this service. And then I also noticed that Camden, there's a case study, you know, where someone from Camden is being helped and it's really good. And as a councillor, I know I spend a lot of time helping people from other wards. And it's, I'd be interested to know how many people are coming from other boroughs, you know, to get this help. And how are you going to work with Camden to make sure that they, these people are going to get directly to Camden and get help, you know, in that way. So, yeah, I think they're my point to the Better Lives, the Camden, the other boroughs getting, being, you know, because it takes a lot of people hours looking after all the issues you're talking about. So, you know, we can't be doing Camden's work for them, you know. And the other point I want to make is about, you know, the coaching is absolutely brilliant. I think that's really good. And that there's certain community centres that you list. But how do you decide which community centres are the ones where people go and get trained in the coaching? Yeah, thanks, Tricia. So I've got three questions there. I'll do my best to answer them. So the first one about are people in the hubs aware of, let's say, substance abuse support. The answer is absolutely yes. That's the critical thing. And not just substance abuse. People who need substance abuse. So I'll give you one example. People often present in crisis with gambling. And so gambling aware will go around to all of the hubs and people. So people will be instantly referred in to those. That's the coaching. There's also, remember, people who come for connector sessions. So that is, someone might come and present because they're facing addiction. But because, you know, the phrase used in the report is connectors use their professional curiosity, which I think is a nice phrase. You just establish a relationship with someone. You find out that, yeah, they do have a problematic relationship with drink and drugs. So they will be referred. Crucially, they won't just be referred and then you're left to it. They will be referred and that case will be held by the connector. So, yes, I'm confident that all of the hubs are aware of, you know, I think there's a diagram in there which shows a circle and all the different VCS organisations around it, which, you know, are exactly, exactly as you say. Yes, look, it's resource intensive. We can't pay for this for Camden residents. You're absolutely right. And we are, this service is for residents and residents. It is expensive at the point of delivery, but this is for, this is, the idea is to capture people at a point of crisis before they've fall into needing, you know, high level statutory support, which becomes very expensive. So, you know, I've given you 11 months of data. Difficult for me to be able to say yet how much this is saving us. But, you know, I think it will be a vast amount of money if you can stop people from getting evicted and then having to be provided with temporary housing, which we know is very expensive. If you can get someone back into work, you know, you will save, you know, the council and other institutions a lot of money. I take your point. The case study perhaps is ill-chosen because it's a Camden resident. Yes, that is not our intention. And the other thing you said was about... Yeah, so I think that's driven by... So, the referring... So, the Black Cultural Centre will make a referral and then the person who's been referred because they've made a connection with the Black Cultural Centre may want to have their sessions there. So, it's very much driven by resident, you know, demand. They're still relatively small number, 500 people over 12 months. So, people can choose and they will, you know, if they've been referred by Colin at the Brickworks, they might like to be at the Brickworks. So, it's where they want. And, you know, we're a small borough so we can really accommodate where do you live, where do you feel comfortable, have it there. And also, perhaps, because our Manor Gardens Hub, which can offer support in 18 different languages, that might also be a driver. So, you know, members of our Somali community can access help there in their own language. Thanks, Jack. My question is just mainly on the point that was made by the Community Connectors. I think it actually stays on the report that we're only collecting 54% of the data of those cases. And there's a rollout that's meant to happen in April. I'm reminded that whenever we do rollout things like this, they're not always going according to plan, but obviously we are putting them on our queuing already system that we have, which is the queue management solution. Every connector needs to go on, needs to use that in terms of logging the data. Now, my question is, do the current team, are they trained enough? Are they trained to be able to use it as of now that we're rolling in April? The second part about that is, do we have, do we actually think what we're putting them on is the right solution? Or we could have done something different? If something different, was there sort of have a cost restriction to that? Because I think this is quite valuable data to follow through the lifeline of some of these things that come in. If we're only capturing 54% and everything was kept manually before, and now you've seen opportunities to capture more, I'm thinking, does current system work? Are the people trained enough to be able to use it as of 1st of April? And if not, were there other exploration of our other ideas of what we could have done differently? Because I think it's a great opportunity. It's sad that we're already capturing 54% well, it's not. But it's just what it was before. So I'll say something about the level of data we're capturing, then I'll maybe ask Raj to come in on the changing system. Look, these are people we're trying to help at a point of crisis. They give feedback if they want to give feedback, if it's appropriate for that conversation to be had. You can't force people to give feedback and actually, you know, given the sort of complexity and multiple disadvantages that people are often experiencing, you know, it's not always appropriate to be, and now, how did you feel about, you know, so that is definitely part of it, that the connectors who I've met and who do such a great job, they are extremely sensitive to that. So we can't force people to give feedback. As to, but we do want better data. I think I've given a result of a survey involving 20 people. I know that's very light, but we do have an institution that's doing independent research, which I'll have for you in Q4, so hopefully at my next report. But I might just ask Raj to say something about the systems. Yeah, purely the simple reason for only capturing that 53% is because the system that we have got now only went live partway through the year. So prior to that, Councillor, like you say, we were capturing that information manually, so we're now able to capture that via the system that we've actually got, and that will continue. In terms of the training, all staff are trained from the point of go live, all staff are trained on how to use that system, and it is now being used consistently. So when Councillor Chapman comes back with a report for you for next year, she will have a full year's data that will be on that system. Thank you. And thank you, and thank you, Sheila, for that presentation. And my comments are largely focused on kind of the look ahead that you provided on page 31. And on the next steps, it says the ambition for the Equality Service moving forward is for the Council to fully embed equality, diversity and inclusion activity across all functions and business areas. And this kind of stood out to me, because I, at the time, became a councillor in 2021, and I was referring back to the challenging equality strategy, and I'm sure not everyone will have it up, but I do. And it's page 24. And it says, we're going to equip senior leaders to embed equality, diversity and inclusion principles into practice across the organisation. And then I just did a quick control F for embed, and it talks about cultural competence, awareness and inclusivity will be embedded across the workforce to educate our support staff. And I think you can probably see where my comments are going. Can you, in 2021, when we were trying to do the challenge and equality strategy, and we were trying to embed equality, diversity and inclusion in the workforce, why are the next steps in 25 looking ahead, still trying to embed equality, diversity and inclusion in our workforce? And maybe you can just give us some context about where some of those challenges have been, or those failures have been, why you feel, and I trust your judgement, you work in this day in, day out, we still haven't managed to embed that EDI in our organisation. Yeah, I'll say a couple of things. The first is COVID, so I suppose you had challenging inequalities, the work done to produce that report kind of was pre-COVID, then we had COVID and the whole organisation had to pivot towards a completely different model. I also, that challenging inequality strategy was before my time. What it does is paint a very stark picture of inequality across the borough very well. And actually, when I think about do we need to do a wholesale refresh of that strategy, I'm not really someone who likes to just keep doing and redoing strategies. So, you know, this is something that I would like to take members' input on here and elsewhere. I'm not sure what good another 30-page strategy is to update. If you want one, we'll do one. But I actually think that rather than even, even the language of challenging inequalities, I'm not sure what that means. I'd rather sort of move towards equalities and community cohesion, you know, we've, and also, you know, we've had a, we've been having some very interesting discussions around what should our key missions be, where they should be about ending poverty. And if you take steps to end poverty, you will inevitably be challenging inequalities. But I think the thing is, Islington will always be a place of very rich people living in very expensive houses and a very large number of people living in different forms of social housing with facing multiple disadvantage. You know, there is limits to what a local authority can do to alter those levers. Challenging inequality or just, you know, helping people when they need it in a culturally competent way and making sure there's a, you know, that, you know, as we do, let's say, with the accesses LinkedIn hubs. Remember, I flagged you before. We want to make sure that the people taking up these services, which work, represent our residents, they do. You know, we want to have targeted interventions around black men's mental health, which we do. We've, you know, set up a Somali task force that's very targeted. But my feeling is that actually we really want to open up people to our universal offer. So, of course, you have targeted interventions. But actually, it's about supporting all of our residents. And actually, that's why I think the refugee and migrant work is so important. It's not tackling inequality. Helping refugees and migrants is actually making the borough better for everyone. And so I feel like the approach should be slightly different. I do want to, you know, when I picked up the challenging, when I took on this job and I picked up that strategy, and I thought, this needs a refresh, it's pre-COVID, you know, not much, you know, I can't say that we've made much progress towards, you know, doing the things that that strategy pointed to. I just don't think another strategy is the right idea. So, you know, we can think about what the KPIs should be. I'd rather not kind of, you know, and there has been challenges around staffing and resourcing in the equalities team. And, you know, we have had to keep, you know, we've had to keep the equalities events and the sort of bread and butter work kind of on track. So I think that's a piece of work for us to think about, maybe through a task and finish group. Yeah, thank you for that, Sheila. And I think there's lots that you've said that I agree with, which is why I think if you're able to, there's two questions I'm going to throw in there and if the chair allows me, because what raised my eyebrow was a line in here, talking about co-producing a new strategy. So maybe you can give us some context of what that strategy will be and how that differs from the challenging inequality strategy. In your answer, please, if you go into, because the challenging inequality strategy came out in 2021 and conscious that we were still in the effects of COVID, but it looked to be a very forward-looking document and so kind of casting it off as a COVID-era document and something that we know may need to do that and I'm just wondering what are you using as a guiding principle for equalities as a council? And my final question is this more in your, I know you've taken on this responsibility in the last year but I just wanted to, I realise you do amazing work and you've heard me speak in this chamber lots about being born and raised in Islington and I come from many intersecting identities and I just wanted to get your reflection on what's been your biggest challenge in this role, both internally and externally and maybe that can inform, you know, whether it's further scrutiny or we just want to understand kind of what challenges are you facing externally and I'm sure I know what some of those external pressures are and a la Trump and some of the cuts coming from central government but I just thought you could give us more context because I didn't really get that and I just wanted some of your personal reflections but more importantly it does say in this document that you're going to co-produce a new strategy and I just want to know, I know we both agree I don't think we need new strategies, I'm tired of strategies and I just want delivery but I just want to know what that strategy that you're co-producing is going to be, thank you. So that line should have come out I don't want to co-produce a new strategy? Unless there is overwhelming member direction that you would like to see a new strategy, I don't really think with the resources we have that that will take us forward meaningfully. So what I'm saying to you is I should have struck that out. I don't want to co-produce a new strategy. That was always kind of on the forward plan it needs updating, I don't believe that's the right use of resources. In terms of a guiding principle and maybe I'll try and think of an example. Yeah. Looking at the work we've done, the Somali task force work we've done, I think that's been a sort of reactive, good piece of reactive work to address a specific problem, to address a specific need in the wake of a terrible tragedy in particular communities. I think that's a good piece of work but I would say a guiding principle across equality should be removing the barriers that people face to accessing the universal offer. So you can fund, you know, so you can fund a youth group for a particular section of the community but actually I would like all of our young people to be using our youth hubs to be going to some adversity, to be going on our apprenticeships and if there are specific barriers and this is where it comes to equalities for particular groups, for particular marginalised communities then those are the, then my guiding principle is what can I do to remove those barriers. The same thing, you know, when I was sharing a children's scrutiny around persistent absence, you know, it's a kind of holistic approach. How do you help that child get into school? It doesn't need to be well we're doing this, you know, particular intervention for this group or that group. It's, you know, here's a kind of, here's a universal offer and what do you need to be able to access it? And in terms of final, what's the biggest challenge in the role? I mean, constrained resources but I think that's led to us being quite, you know, imaginative. So putting the Access Islington Hub in Manor Gardens, you know, that's a space that we rent from them. We've been very, you know, imaginative about bringing partners in, making it really nice, working with different BTS organisations. Yeah, if you have more money it would be, you know, the Black Cultural Centre would be bigger. You know, it would, I would find that that's something I would love to have a much bigger, bolder Black Cultural Centre. It makes us innovative. It means, you know, whenever I've gone there, I've been there loads of times, I know that you have too and, you know, the people that are in there will say, well actually in some ways it's great because it always feels full and it's always got that really nice sort of cosy feel and, you know, it's actually a space that's working really well. I suppose the level of the rising need, so, you know, we look at the, I gave the example of people without recourse to public funds. We're currently supporting 47 families who don't have recourse to public funds. That's costing us a million pounds a year. We do not get funded for that. Those will be families with a great deal of complexity so that puts a strain on our school system, on our, you know, on our other systems. There's also, you know, Councillor Jackson knows this is within my portfolio although not here. You know, what I've come into is an ageing community centre portfolio that presents its challenges. They're not, it's not fully accessible. It's not, you know, it doesn't look and feel the way I would want it to. So, yeah, it's a challenge of money but I think, and the same can be said of our VCS organisations. We are one of the most, if not the most, generous local authorities in terms of the grant funding we give directly to VCS organisations. That's a decision we've made. Other local authorities don't do that but, you know, we have to move forward in a way that's sustainable and to think, well, yes, we can provide grant funding but we can also provide space, networking opportunities, help you kind of have efficiencies by bringing together your back office functions, help you with grant rights. We can do other things but we have to make sure that you are financially sustainable going forward. So, yeah, the constraint is money, the impact of austerity and, you know, we have, what, the second highest number of children living in poverty. We have the highest number of unaccompanied minors. That's a huge need. We're a small place and we're a place that has already had 14 years of austerity. Hi, Sheila. Thank you for your report. I kind of, it was quite high luck. I was quite happy to read it but, and I don't want to put a damper on this but obviously I will. In terms of the hubs, I'm really pleased about the hubs but I still, with the community that I'm dealing with and the women that I'm speaking to this, still sections of the community that I still haven't heard about the hubs and as we know there's a lot of the community that is not digitally aware and I was wondering how can we get this offer that is universal because obviously we're never going to be able to stamp out inequality and I do believe, I believe that even if you get to eradicate poverty it's still not going to get rid of, well, it's not going to eradicate marginalised communities that are still not able to access these hubs because of the inequality that they feel if we go back to what happened in obviously the riots, there's still a lot of Islamophobia out, there's still a lot of racist, people still feel unsafe walking down the street so they're not going to access these hubs. So how can we get these hubs out there not just digitally in terms of, I know you're speaking to the VCS organisations but have we gone to Mohammed Khosbar, does he know about these, can he promote it? When we have our prayers on Friday, not only did the Muslim community go there, lots of communities go there to get food packages, we need to have it out, you know, the community hubs are there because there's a lot of people that still don't know about it and that's how we're going to eradicate inequality when we can get our services out there for everybody to access, not just people that can maybe read the English or there's communities out there that are being missed and I just, I am a bit concerned about those communities. One more question, I know it was before you took over but last year we had a session on Muslim women feeling safe and there was, we had like a round table event and I've never really got any feedback about what happened. I know we've kind of created safe spaces, safe havens and swimming sessions but since then I've not had any feedback at all so I really would like to know the progress from that. Alright, Councillor Pandell, there's a lot there but I think I can give you some reassurance. I hope I can. So, the question you've said first about challenging inequalities is about making sure everyone has equal access. That's exactly the point I was making in response to Councillor Ibrahim's question about my priorities. It's about making sure everyone has access to all the great things that are there including the access Islington Hubs. So I'm well aware of certain communities for whom English is not a first language and for whom maybe going to Manor Gardens isn't a comfortable experience. So I'll tell you some of the things that we're doing. I'm working with Islington's Faith Forum to do walking groups so that women can go guided on a walk from Muslim Welfare House to Manor Gardens to actually get with volunteers to actually make that experience comfortable because I'm very well aware that even though those two places are actually going near each other if you don't feel confident making that journey you're not going to make that journey. I'm going to be at the community iftar at Finsbury Park Mosque with my hands full of pamphlets. So it's about us going into those spaces and sharing that information at every possible opportunity. And I go there a lot as does Councillor Wolfe but now Councillor Weeks. We have a good relationship and absolutely Mohamed Cosbar can be pointing people in this direction. And I think we have got as I say 18 languages at Manor Gardens so we very intentionally are reaching out to communities so that they can come and access support in their own language. The other thing is about accessing the universal offer and something I spoke about at the Maya Centre run event here yesterday for International Women's Day. Whenever we're interacting with someone for whom English isn't a first language on whatever issue I think it's about us officers being aware to signpost to people you can get help with English as a foreign language and actually how would you like to do that? Would you like to do that in community groups with other women? Would you like to do that whilst cooking whilst sewing? How is it going to work for you? Because actually long term to really thrive in Islington you want to have a good level of English so how can we help so? Getting people physically to a space in a way in which they're comfortable helping people access free English lessons in a way that suits them yes working with our community partners and you know Finsbury Park Mosque Amazon Welfare House are our BCS organisations that we grant fund so you know our leaflets can and should be in those spaces you talked about digital awareness so you know part of that is there are some let's say older people who are perfectly capable of becoming digitally you know savvy and so that's why the service support sessions at Access Islington Hubs are about showing people how to use their own phone because you can empower people if you can do that for those you know for those people who for whom English isn't a first language that is going to be a struggle and that's why there are people available to help in 18 different languages but that is also why I am always encouraging people please take up the excellent adult education offer because that long term is the way to get support the other thing you asked about was the Muslim Women Feeling Safe roundtable discussions you had I will follow up on that that will sit with Council of the Week because it's about community safety but I'll certainly get you an answer on that Thank you Chair and thank you for the report as well I feel I'm probably going to go to the first item that you had which was on the hubs and you mentioned about kind of looking at the future of Islington South Hub what would be great to know because we are potentially looking at considering moving it to somewhere else how much did it cost to start up the Islington South Hub and what was the process of figuring out the sides for it previously and if we are looking at moving it to somewhere else how is that criteria and framework going to change to make sure that we choose the right place if we're going to change it and I do have a second question but I think if we can take it one at a time I'll take that one first so I think of the three hubs you know the approach was to be very you know cost efficient right which is why the central hub is located at 222 and the south hub is located where it's located in our building you know it's the hub at Manor Gardens that has been more costly because we have rented a space that you know isn't ours and we've had to we had to spend some money refurbishing it and that was you know a decision taken just before I came into the role but you know I was slightly worried about that you know Amraj knows this about taking on that cost but it has proved to have been money extremely well spent because of the footfall so in terms of a pound amount how much did it cost to fit out the library I don't know the process would have been looking at you know you want them spread you know across three areas you want them located next to near to transport hubs which is why 222 is where it is Manor Gardens is on the Holloway Road with all the buses you want them fairly located to areas where you know there's going to be high need and you know in two out of three instances well there's a council owned building there that is accessible and can be used so I imagine that was the process in terms of finding a new space we what I think has worked really well I think has been proved by Manor Gardens is if you can do it in a community space in you know a strong partnership with a good VCS partner then that is a really successful model and so that is something I would be looking at and be really careful about you know making sure that it's as I think they all are extremely accessible in all sorts of different ways so you know but it is you know we are one of the key challenges is cost it does cost more to you know make a space as lovely as Manor Gardens is so that's not a next month project that is you know when I'm here next year to give an annual report you know ask me about it I do thank you chair and again if we probably get that number for how much it costs to set up that would be great so my follow up question is on the 2026 Islington Together delivery plan I was just looking for in terms of what our goals are and I think that one that meets this executive criteria most is the business experience satisfaction where we're looking to get it's not in a report it's a separate thing so it's I think we're looking to get 85% satisfaction and I was just looking at the numbers that we've got here which seem to be really really positive in terms of residence experience satisfaction but I'm also noticed that going back to what you said about the feedback that the residents do give it seems to be really really small sample so what are we doing to essentially encourage a larger sample and how does that also feed into the residence experience satisfaction as well well I'm delighted to say that the resident experience thing of which you're talking doesn't fall within my portfolio this is the experience that residents have when they access coaching or when they go to a hub so that I will let Raj just say something briefly because it doesn't fall within this evening's work about resident experience is determined just if I can follow up on that what does fall into the Islington Together delivery plan from your portfolio yeah so so the kind of empowering people mission overall this is where Councillor Chapman's portfolio predominantly sits the bit that is slightly separate is our access Islington call centres which is the telephony side of things and not the face to face one of the things that we are doing albeit not kind of part of the hub is we are actually transitioning the sort of same satisfaction collection from the Islington hub into our telephony services there's also a piece of work going on where we're actually looking at using because what happens is residents will call us we'll ask them if they want to leave some feedback with a few questions and they'll say yes of course but as soon as they finish the call they'll hang up so we're looking at lots of different ways including things like whatsapp text messages in order to gather satisfaction data so we can be consistent across different channels but that's the kind of telephony channel the access is linked satisfaction model works really well and residents are really keen to leave us feedback once we've dealt with their issues and I think if I had to try and summarise I'm trying to remember it my bit empowering people of the Islington Together plan I think what it gets to is having a thriving network of community spaces across the borough that are financially and environmentally sustainable and allow people to access early intervention and prevention in a culturally competent way in their locality working with a sustainable and empowered VCS community sector I think that's what it says Thank you I think the point about maybe the South Hub needing to reflect the Manor Gardens Hub a bit more in the role of non-statutory services for people from complex backgrounds is well made so I will leave that there I would like to ask a bit about the Black Cultural Centre page 38 if your report refers to lots of lessons learned and we'll be looking back in terms of local authority it's a pretty punchy turnaround so when do you think you'll have some of those lessons learned have you got some early ones already what's the plan from November this year because that's soon come as we know and if I may my second question and then there won't be any more I was delighted to read on page 40 about the kind of popularity of the scheme there about the becoming a man programme and you're kind of overwhelmed really with referrals and it strikes me in this early intervention kind of cross silo way of working how can we identify other money from other parts of the council other portfolios external funders I don't know like how I mean I love to read to read this and it broke my heart because I just thought you're obviously really hitting a need there and people are responding well so what are we doing for these you know people in our borough who are benefiting sorry that I'll take that second bit first the becoming a man of the council we've rolled it out across three schools in the borough and obviously I'd love it to be in all schools in the borough we don't have funding for that at the moment so I'm thinking about do we have it rotate through schools you know the second limb of black men's mental health project which is the therapeutic intervention for 16 to 25 year olds that's funded by the violence reduction unit and so that's helpful so we have gone out to try and find different sources but and you know and the barber chair project that relies really on you know those barbers 15 of them have become our ambassadors it does you know that's low cost to do what we need to do there is have more comms around you know like we do safe havens I'm thinking about do we need to have badges in barbershop just to say you can come and have a conversation you know to drive people to that resource yeah it would be lovely to have one-to-one counselling for young black boys across all of our schools but there isn't the money to run that so you know how can we learn from it and I guess how can they empower the schools to run you know to facilitate therapeutic conversations to embed the counselling practice from the practitioners so that it becomes part of the school's practice I guess it's a transfer of knowledge I mean not that they can offer one-to-one therapeutic support but you know having conversations and sort of being more relational and more inclusive you know you would hope that there is some that it changes the school but yeah I take your point and we're all you know the teams are always looking for additional funding and it has been a challenge you know there was a question mark hanging over is that piece of work going to be able to continue but it has been safeguarded for the near term the thing you said what have we learned well we've learned the pop-up model has been really successful just in sort of generating a lot of buzz and being able to have different types of organisations there they actually all happen to be all four of the pop-ups which I was just reflecting on yesterday are all female led which is terrific and what they've done those four leaders of those organisations is they've networked so well themselves and even actually as one pop-up rolls off and the next pop-up rolls on they still work in collaboration together so two key lessons learned I think the first procurement process was I think just too local authority like here are our metrics this is what you've got to do this is what you've got to provide us with and actually I think it put a lot of people off or it wasn't a kind of supported process we changed that when we decided to go with a pop-up model and we ran kind of workshops to say to kind of help people put together their own pop-up bid I mean it's been phenomenal the first people that were in black history studies you know they went in so it was an unknown space it was during the winter they just had hundreds of people walk through the door they've done such a great job so I think what we've learned is kind of and you know they don't have the longest track record of delivery so I think having a lighter touch due diligence process you know giving people a space for a shorter period of time enables you to be able to say well we can you know we can take a bit of a we can give people a space for a short amount of time we can take a bit of a risk on people see what happens and the council has not led what people should put on in those spaces and they've been able because of that I think to be really reactive to what people who come in want so you know black history studies yes they did you know they screened films and they had talks but they also put on sessions around health and well-being about you know endometriosis black women and menopause you know it was a really really broad offer so what we're thinking now is do we want to prolong the pop-up period because we do have organisations coming to us saying oh this has gone really well I'd quite like to be part of that I could do a pop-up for X and well you know people who've done been a pop-up early on do they want to come back so we extend the pop-up period do we instead of you know I guess the thought would always be we'll find a long-term provider that would be a long-term provider but actually should it go forward on more of a sort of coalition basis so nothing is kind of settled as to what it will look like but it will certainly be it won't be a typical local authority procurement do X Y and Z it will be it will be very you know the people who've you know the four women who lead these organisations you know they've got so much to tell us about what's worked and how the food works and you know what they're going to get pavement licences in the summer working really closely with Arsenal because of course every time there's a match five million people walk past the black cultural centre so a lot of learning from them which we're still gathering we've got the data for the first set of for the first pop-up and we'll keep collating it but I think I quite like the idea of a coalition you know a group of providers giving us our black cultural centre offer yeah and then we're going to move on just quickly on Manor Garden success I think despite it being about a lovely garden it is because there's been services in there for years and it's so well integrated in the community just saying from living around the corner and in terms of just food for fall in looking at a new location in the south of the borough if that could be replicated with a provision that already exists whether it's a youth provision like Lyft I mean I don't know the logistics or financial viability but everyone knows Lyft everyone knows the people there their children's probably gone there and so I think yeah that would be quite yeah a beautiful thought my question is I think how is the data triangulated across all departments from the access hubs for example there's 45% of housing queries how is that fed to the housing team to improve the resident experience and I think when it does come back next year it will be really good to really see how that is fed back into the different departments so every year we're not seeing the same volume because it's clear that the access hub's really successful and the people are going there I think there's just got to be some sort of maybe accountability from the different departments in terms of making that resident experience much better and is there quarterly meetings between all the directors sitting in the room with the you know exec members talking about what some of the common themes are I think that's probably a wider piece of work that really should kind of start happening yeah yeah thanks councillor I absolutely take your point about certainly find a space that people are already coming to in large numbers and that's where you put the hub so that is the space we will be looking for that's accessible and easily you can get to easily on transport so noted we'll see what we can do I might let Raj come in on the data I would just say one thing which is that obviously in the access hubs the officers that are you know they are housing officers there so it's not happening you know when the connectors are or whoever if it's a more transactional inquiry are helping people they aren't themselves the housing experts so they are always going to the housing department so housing will be aware that you know half of the transactional queries are housing related or you know how many of the connector sessions are housing related but in terms of how our systems are working hopefully Raj can say something on that thank you councillor so the answer to kind of that collaborative working is yes so the access as LinkedIn hub meets regularly not just quarterly but almost on a weekly basis with colleagues from other departments and directorates and services so whilst housing is obviously a major sort of stakeholder in this that the regular feedback is provided to all council services where we get residents coming in to access those services so there is regular feedback there's regular reporting what we are doing with the hubs is we are continuously monitoring and you know continuously improving that model so for instance if I use an example that we get residents coming in about a particular service that we don't have set up that we don't have a pathway set up for in the hubs we will then speak to those services and provide them with that information that residents are coming in asking for this service can we get something set up and as Councillor Chapman has already mentioned in terms of how we actually we don't just pass people on we do the kind of follow up so we will refer in to service areas like housing and other areas but equally we'll follow up in terms of what's happening with that with that resident at the same time so there's a lot of collaborative working across the whole of the council especially with housing but equally with other services as well and we will continue to build on that one of the key things that we also focus on is what are the lessons that we can continue to learn as we provide these services what are the things we can fix so if residents are coming in asking for a particular service to be done in a certain way can we feed that back and let's look at how we can improve that service and build on that as well Just to clarify that multi-agency work so I do the housing connectors will speak to housing but more of having everyone in the same room and seeing actually how can we work together across departments within that multi-agency instead of it being more isolated but I don't need an answer Thank you Councillor Chapman for presenting and thank you for everything that you have contributed great work done and we very much look forward to the update next year Thank you so whilst we're getting ready for items C1 the remaining presentations just a few very brief updates from me we'll take the first presentation first so if we can get that loaded up firstly I circulated an action tracker around it's fair to say no updates since that tracker was circulated there will be updates officers that are listening and executive members that are listening I will circulate some updates in the next 14 days I've been in touch with Paul Clark today about proper updates and if I'm not satisfied those officers will be at our next meeting providing all updates because when this committee asks for something we get it Scrutiny review phase 2 kicks off next week thanks to all of you that have volunteered to take part in that and I will bring regular updates to this committee the final evidence session after tonight will be a virtual session Sammy's just gone out of view at the very moment have we got the date for that session yet brilliant so either the 14th or the 17th of April we're then going to need to start work on recommendations in actual fact I'd like you all to start working on that now so if you can get your thoughts on paper email them to me what I'm looking for are some initial bullet points on what you've taken away from the evidence that you've heard and what you'd like our recommendations to focus on it will be really helpful to have those in the next 40 days so that yourself and you can start thinking about the shape of the recommendations and we can have a structured discussion about them finally you will note that there are no representatives from Parkview here just to assure you all that there has been a full response to their queries I approved the response and I think it dealt adequately with everything that they asked so those are the updates from me on to Islington anchor institutions you have introductions and then on to the presentation thank you chair I'm Caroline Wilson I'm the director of inclusive economy I'm Peter Hallup the assistant director for procurement and supply I'm Melanie Rose the director for IT and digital services we're just going to give you a short presentation we'll fly through on the assumption that you've looked at it but just to give you a flavour of the work with the anchor institutions that we work with in Islington there are 12 of them and we have three work streams one focused on net zero one that's focused on local employment and this one which is focused on local purchasing Pete leads the work with the anchor institutions so he's going to talk you through some of the things that we've already done over the last year thank you so just to really reiterate from where Caroline picked up the session there on the screens you will obviously see the list of different anchor institutions who we are working alongside these are institutions deeply rooted within the borough who came together as part of the anchor institution network and specifically on this area around supporting local business through procurement as a work stream they were deeply committed to making a difference to this borough and really improving things for local businesses that said they came together from very different places in terms of where they were up to in terms of their own development and in terms of what they had done already consequently that meant we had to do a lot of grounding work to really pull that together we started off as an initial group pulling together a list of where we wanted to be in terms of actions I think we were incredibly ambitious in terms of what we wanted to achieve I think we initially came up with something like 400 odd different actions which we would like to achieve and obviously that had to be scaled back to something which we could realistically deliver so we decided to break that down into short medium and long term actions the short being the initial six months the medium being the next six months and the long term actions being the next 12 months as you can imagine that was quite difficult in its own right coming from those different places those short term actions were really about a common understanding to be honest we had to form that baseline we had to sort of clear the ground if that makes sense in terms of actually what we wanted to do so some of those focuses were actually understanding what social value even was for different organisations and how that sort of compared one to the other it was around sort of sharing that best practice talking about what business engagement meant and really sort of working out what those common aspirations were and how they fitted together in the next sort of medium term it was really around sort of taking it on to the next step so sharing some initial case studies I think we've lost the screens but I'm carrying on regardless I'm afraid otherwise we won't do it within our time slot so and it was really sort of identifying what may be some of those barriers that we are going to need to do and where some of those areas of growth needed to be and taking that on further we sort of moved forward to our long term aspirations from having sort of cleared the ground and put those initial foundations in we've now started building where we really wanted to be moving into the long term so that really took us to the focus on actually how our organisations needed to work together and how some of the things needed to change to achieve that so that was talking about actually how did the different governance mechanisms work across our different boroughs could we bed in into all of our procurement practices some commonality around how we were going to look at award criteria and what that really meant for us could we really enable local businesses and how we could take that forward in sort of a collaborative culture across those different organisations we are talking about organisations from a vastly different set place in a way in terms of how they work together you know when you're trying to take the NHS to compare that with how the council works but then to take that into areas like the Arsenal and actually pull those organisations together with some degree of commonality in terms of how we might look to reduce barriers we then sort of developed some ideas around forward planning of where we want to go next with some of these ideas so if you like we've been working through this short medium and long term action plan really to make sure we come to a common place to be able to take it to that next level and really bed in some of the things we might be able to do within the borough and really support some of those local businesses so there has been a phenomenal amount of work to get there and a couple of things which have been very well include our meet the buyer session which we had in May that brought together 43 local suppliers against 13 different buyers so obviously we had our anchor institutions but we brought together seven big contractors to really work together to work alongside those 43 smaller businesses to talk about what we could do how we could turn things around how we could make things better how we could make that positive outcomes so that was really about bringing construction as one of our main themes because that was our focus area in terms of what we wanted to do and really take some of those positive ambitions and drive and things we wanted to achieve and we had information panels within that we had support networks we've worked ways of actually communicating with one another to try and really work together as a group holistically to try and see what we can do and make things different for the future we then sort of took that on a step and we've got workshops which have happened we've used the example of the action for race equality network which we did that really looked at how organisations have the chance to maximise their opportunity we really talked through with those smaller businesses how they can get their bids right so that they can actually win opportunities within larger organisations and what that might mean for them and how that can help them grow their businesses and have real chances of success for the future we also talked around how we can build it together collectively and how we can make sure that we put the right resources in front of those businesses to enable them to be able to take matters forward if you're excited by these things you can watch the full recording the whole thing's been recorded so you can actually go through all of those sessions and see the real detail about what we're talking about here and obviously we can make lots of that information available for you in terms of those initial action plans which I was talking about we've got dashboards for each of those organisations which we can share with you outside of this session today so that you can really see how each organisation is doing and compare them and look at actually what the progress has been and what that means for each of those organisations there have been many many challenges in getting everybody to the same place and actually really working collectively has been a phenomenal experience for us we've learnt from one another we've learnt good practice from one another and how we might actually be able to take things forward one of the great bits of work which we've done alongside this is the construction directory which we've mentioned on one of the earlier sessions which really gives an opportunity for smaller construction enterprises to really be seen and to have that kind of public face if you like to show how they can be exemplars of great practice for the council for all of these other organisations but for the wider public at large who may want to use them within Islington it helps us really sell some of the aspirations around what we wanted to do and what we wanted to achieve they can talk about all of the things they are committed to as individual local organisations and their local business nature and in terms of what they want to sell back to us and what makes something very different for them they have the opportunity really to advertise their services in a portal which is very very accessible and local residents are clearly very interested in and it helps create some of that element of dialogue if you like between big organisations and the small but also down to that sort of more local level I would just to say to finish up on that the Islington construction directory we circulate that as part of the planning process where we're asking large developers to use local supply chain we promote it as Pete says on our Islington portal for residents if they're doing small scale retrofitting and we're using it as well with the anchor institutions and it's a continuous process to kind of make sure that the directory is refreshed and kept up to date and we're funding pending we're looking to expand it to be so construction is a bit of a misnomer because it includes things like catering and security and stationery all the sorts of things that you'd need on a building site but we also are looking at potentially doing one which is around professional services because again that's an area where Islington has a market strength there's lots of local SMEs in that space and it's also an area that all of the anchor institutions will be using across their services so if we can promote small accountants and small auditors and people who are engaged in sort of green economy work that's an opportunity that we're exploring at the moment happy to take any questions chair this is really important what you're doing you're really doing groundbreaking work on procuring and helping local businesses and as you can see in those papers you've got decisions taken by the executive and there's hundreds of procurements going on all the time in the council and I'm just I see you have some sort of lunch and meet thing with officers across the council and the question is that is it is this work being transmitted across the council as a whole because it's very very important you know that you share all these skills and that people are trying their best in every department to procure locally and thank you very much yes we do promote that we've promoted it in a number of ways so firstly through Pete's team whenever his category managers are talking to commissioners in the various departments and making sure that they always have at least one local business on their bidding list and we also promote it through the commissioning board where we challenge people to ask can this be procured locally and then finally I would say that we also are using the new procurement act as a really useful kind of I was going to say burning platform but really useful kind of accelerant to that conversation within departments to say you have all of these new transparency requirements but also there's lots of social value in there and there's a big emphasis on local and SMEs within the procurement act so it is a continuous dialogue and I'm not suggesting it's perfect councillor court but it is continuously reinforcing that message within departments so that could be one of our recommendations couldn't it that the other you know all departments of the council work through this inclusive economy team to just check out just check whether they're doing the procurement process in the way we would like it you know a clue for possible suggestion I shall send it to you thank you thank you for that presentation as well so I think the isn't compound doesn't just belong to our local authority it belongs to the anchor institutions as well and forgive me for my naivety here but does the procurement act also apply to our anchor institutions and if it does how are we working to gather again potentially we spoke a lot about using the portal and how we can actually encourage small businesses to access this in the bidding will they be able to do the same thing with the anchor institutions and what kind of work is taking place around that so in answer to the question the procurement act applies to all public sector bodies so it hits ours it hits the NHS it hits the universities it also hits anyone who's directly working within that public area so people bodies covered by it as a prime example and so not so much a direct body in that way and we've really come together to understand what that means in terms of the procurement act we've been each doing a series of briefings to one another on our common understanding and how actually we can change the way we're operating we've all been looking at our own guidance our templates our procedures and our things which are really going to help us when we go out there and we try and do this better we've been trying to make things simpler we've been trying to find ways actively around reducing barriers which is one of our new duties and responsibilities which is quite a difficult thing for us to do in terms of changing the whole way we operate as an organisation but also commonly doing it if you like across the anchor institutions in answer the question yes absolutely applies to nearly all the anchors not quite those which are outside such as Arsenal it doesn't directly apply to but for the majority of the anchors which you see there yes it does and we're really trying to pull together that said those who it doesn't apply to they've actually seen some of the good benefit around what is within it and we're sort of trying to see whether we can learn from that and adopt some of those practices across the board regardless whether they were forced on us if you like in a sense by the PUNAC or whether we've done them voluntarily as a group together I would just add to that chair sorry is I mean one of the rules I think of the council led in that is curating the market and making sure that local suppliers are fit to win NHS contracts and those larger contracts so I think that there's an important role for us in terms of the economic development which Councillor Clark touched on I'm going to come to Jason and Bashir in a moment but I just want to ask a little bit about anchor institutions themselves is it the intention to increase the number of anchor institutions have there ever been any institutions that were anchor institutions and then cease to be anchor institutions or is the vision very much to concentrate on strengthening and deeper connections with our anchor institutions rather than seeking out additional anchor institutions so I think so no one's left the anchor institutions network although we did have a previous iteration of it am I right in saying that currently it was before my time I mean it was it was kind of a proto anchor institution network nothing compared to what we have now and do we want to expand it I think the true answer is yes to who and how quickly I think still to be decided I think the current thinking I have is that there's some cultural institutions that maybe play a part in this I think about some of the places like Sadler's Wells and it's kind of like big national national youth theaters as well national organizations that are based in Islington who play a similar role to some of these organizations we haven't approached them and I think we've kind of come in at the right scale because as we've heard it took a lot of work to kind of cohere everyone to the same place some people and depending on which stream took a lot more work to get into the same place and to where we are if I can put it politely so I think it's now we've kind of got to that position we've got the key targets then now step where we can say okay if you want to join on you have to do this level and here is what you can expect I'm going to go back to the data thing now you have the meat bio and the construction directory I mean clients understand how are you collecting data to actually see what happens for example the construction directories do we know how many of them has actually got a thing from the fact that they are on there or they're just a signpost it could be again this could help again further recommendation going forward and just to put a second question on there this is more in terms of again the data around what's the percentage of our procurement we set for SMEs as in we say this is the number we want to meet this target do we have that clear target to say because we know that certain there are certain contracts that is just the bigger players that you know whatever that would just pretty much take it anyway but are we in a position where we're now starting to say right this is the target we we're expecting to meet 20 or 30 percent or sort of do it if there is no number yet that's fine maybe again that could feed into some level of recommendation I know it is a difficult space to achieve but I'm mindful that we don't walk into a slogan points where people are now just ticking box because they're in the same rooms with us and meanwhile the contract is still going to the same people right so I guess I'm talking about those sort of data numbers now if could be clear because I didn't see anything on that on here So I think data is at an early stage and I think it's very important that we're honest about that in terms of understanding actually who we have as SMEs who we are working with that equally is at a very early stage so we have just started doing a big piece of work trying to really unpick who are our SMEs and who are not in order that we can build on that and actually understand what that looks like across the council and then potentially compare that across the anchor institutions so that in itself very very early days and the work has started and we are broadly looking at sort of local enterprises in terms of who is local we haven't set targets specifically on SMEs is the honest answer but I but clearly we have a new responsibility to understand who those SMEs are and we have a responsibility to break down those barriers to really enable them to join so I suppose in a way we're on the journey but perhaps are not at the point that you perhaps were hoping to see within the slides but we have just started to collect some of that early data in terms of who actually are the SMEs and really to unpick our supply base as a whole there hasn't been vast amounts of analytics if you like in terms of what is actually within that other than sort of very broad spend numbers so we're starting to do some of that more detailed work now. And to add to that Councillor Jackson in terms of who is accessing the construction directory it is literally a directory I think we have a much better sense of tracking those SMEs that are coming through some of the meet the buyer events and we have officers within the local economies team who will have an ongoing relationship with them to make sure that they are getting those opportunities. As Pete said I think we do need to do more around that data base I think the contracts register will be a really important analytical tool in that regard. I also believe that while we haven't set targets with the anchor institutions it's important that they feel ownership of it so I think that's part of the work that's been done over the last 12 months. And to your final point about people claiming pieces I would suggest that that is already happening that you know talking to the London anchor institution network they're claiming lots of female owned businesses and businesses that are owned by a global majority entrepreneurs and I'm not entirely sure how they're collecting that data and because you're not required as a business owner to declare that so it would be interesting to have that conversation with colleagues in the local in London anchors network to look and see how we could replicate it then at a local level and feed up as well. Are we using Is Islington Council using any of the constructors that are on our list? Yes we are. Thank you. Well I'm proud as an Arsenal councillor to see Arsenal up there. Probably the best anchor institution. There was a question I had which is around kind of the procurement pipeline and so I know having just praised Arsenal sometimes there's a lot of subcontracting that goes on so that one of their biggest contracts is with Delaware North companies and they provide a lot of hospitality staff on the day so I kind of wanted to if you're able to the NHS as we often know in order to fill gaps they go through agency workers and so I just kind of wanted to know if you're able to talk about how we make sure that we are in the entire chain that we're seeing and we're realising some of those benefits because often you know if you outsource as you do and then this council is very much around insourcing but these organisations do do outsourcing and I look at Peabody for example which works pan London and so I kind of wanted to see what some of those challenges are and how do we make sure that they are embedding some of that practice throughout their entire chain and finally there's probably a question for you Caroline. This portal so often as someone who was on the planning committee for two years we often used to be quite robust with applications and make sure that we reserve X amount of apprenticeships and other things. Are we using this portal and leveraging that as part of those planning conversations to make sure that you know and I'm not saying it's a nudge or a recommendation but we are putting that as part of our you know I know section one of six agreements and things like that so how much teeth does this portal have through that planning process and I know there are some colleagues on this panel who are also planning committee members so I'm sure they will feel empowered by your answer in maybe suggesting that. Thank you. My side chair apart from this committee planning committee is my favourite committee because they get me all those levers and so we absolutely track all of those apprenticeships through those large developments. Pascal who works in the team does an amazing job where you know developer will come and say oh you know we know planning committee said 65 apprentices but you know we'd love to do 65 but there's no mission and Pascal then is able to say well actually in this package of work you can get 14 in this package of work you can get 17 and he's really excellent at getting our money's worth out of those planning consents. Am I right saying Pascal is funded by developer contributions? It's also funded by a planning committee and so that's a really amazing kind of leverage that we have and in terms of the construction directory we do encourage the larger developers and we set targets within that in terms of making sure that they're able to access those tier 2 and tier 3 contractors and some of the work that we were exploring which is interesting is around prompt payment because sometimes the tier 3 contractors will talk about the fact that the big boys who have all of the money actually have like a 90 day payment kind of horizon for those smaller enterprises and that really puts pressure on kind of cash flows within those SMEs. So I think there's more work that we can do with those local construction suppliers absolutely. Did I answer all the questions? Yes, there was a initial question about contracting, how do we make sure that some of those big anchor institutions are realising kind of some of those benefits throughout their entire pipeline and those chains? So procurement forward plan pipelines are at different places shall we say across the anchor institutions and it's something we've all recognised including our own which is definitely not where it should be and we have some work in our own house if you like to really resolve that and get the systems right to be able to enable us to go out to those local businesses and really let them know what's coming up and what's available for them. We're not so bad at the really big contracts, we're not so good at the smaller ones and so there is work for us to do ourselves let alone as anchors across the pace. There is definitely a desire to try and pull together all of those different forward plans so that we actually understand what they all mean and how they can all interrelate and correlate together and the opportunities that might bring to us if you like to potentially make a massive difference to local businesses if we can actually get them all coordinated in such a way as we can work together to do that. But we're not quite there it's been the building blocks as we've said so far and getting everybody's sort of systems ready to be able to cope with that. In terms of the prompt payment stuff we are definitely getting better and the procurement act is going to help us because we are going to be able to for the first time actually impose payment terms which are equitable through that supply chain and we're planning to use that as anchors as part of the model. So we will have the opportunity for example if we set 30 days of the payment term to require that to go all the way down the chain for the first time. So that will make quite a big difference in terms of how we will be able to operate and that's something new for the future that we haven't quite done yet but it's definitely there and something which will make a phenomenal difference to those smaller businesses we think. Have you done anything to look at how we compare to other local authorities in terms of our approach to procurement and both in terms of policy and in terms of outcomes and then secondly just wondering if your work here with local businesses and encouraging others to use and the suppliers is that link to our business engagement work anywhere else in the council so I'm thinking of things like safe havens or our toilet strategy. I don't know if you could say anything about that. Thanks. Are we connected to other boroughs in terms of what they're doing and doing comparison? We couldn't probably be more connected if I'm honest with you. There's a whole series of networks and benchmarking exercises and things which we go through. So without going through all the detail which I can provide separately if that's easier, yes plenty. In terms of are we connected with other activities across the organisation in terms of what they're doing? Absolutely yes. We need to be. There's no other way of operating. Evidence given about that and of course all of our sessions are available online to watch at your leisure. I'm going to bring Melanie in now. Tricia. I'm sorry I know I've spoken already but the office of MIT hasn't spoken and I know on this committee we've often been looking at the number of agency staff we have in this council work you know on IT and the expense of it and we were talking ages ago about you know recruiting local people into our IT jobs and I just was going to ask her if that's happening. Would you be able to answer that? I can. Briefly because I don't want to go on to the presentation. The answer is yes. Sorry I thought about that. I joined council in June. At that point we had 13 contractors agency staff working within IT. By September we've reduced it to two. So we have significantly reduced our contractor sort of outlay. In addition to that we've hired from founders and coders who are an Islington based boot camp for facial enterprise for developers. One of those graduates has started with our applications team. We're working with three apprentices and I'm going to talk a little bit about apprenticeships as part of our social value statement when I talk about procurement more broadly. So it's a very big part of my personal commitment that the direction of travel will be within IT more broadly. Right. Social value in the digital category. So the digital category is a procurement category. So in effect this is something that is originated by procurement. But what I would say is that the items that you see here dovetail with the forthcoming digital strategy and effectively what we are here to do. So the underpinnings that you see here using cloud-based technology to modernise and reduce costs. Secure automation to drive efficiency. These things are already happening within the council. Strengthened our cyber security and defences. Again we've made significant progress on that including insourcing our cyber operations centre from previously outsourced offering. But I think what we're focusing on here is the extent to which we are seeking to drive social value and those wider links across the council through the procurement that we do within digital. One of the things I would say is that as I stated in answer to Councillor Clarke there, I joined the council in June. I think my sort of initial assessment is that this is an area where we need to make better connections across the council in order to realise those benefits. So there are lots of social value clauses in our existing contracts. It is something that the new procurement act gives us a valuable lever to drive still further. I know that you will have reviewed the slides already but one of the factors from the procurement act is not only to have social value and for this to be a high level of focus but also that there are a minimum of three key performance indicators for every contract that we buy. Within IT and digital this is really important because I do feel we need to drive the accountability of those suppliers much more than we do. You will all have heard at some point about an outage of one of our systems whether it's the parking system or the revenue system. These things do happen but making sure we've got the right recourse in place and that we're monitoring those suppliers performance and things like the security of their supply chain, their sustainability, what are they doing to contribute in those spaces. So while our cloud strategy is a good strategy for security for sustainability it also means that we are outsourcing a lot of the expertise. We're not building a parking system ourselves. We are buying it from market leading players but we need to manage those players effectively. Within this deck we are sharing some of the examples of social value in our digital contracts. So within our wide area network services there's a real cross section of things that you can see here. So working with local community organizations to deliver these inclusion pop-ups. Inclusion is a big part of the work I've been doing since I joined with Caroline, with colleagues from the library service about making sure we've got those connections in. IT by themselves aren't necessarily going to run or have the right links in order to capitalise on these kinds of benefits. So for me this is about making sure we've got the right inroads with the right services to make the connections that we need to get this value out. And I think that has historically been something that we perhaps haven't been as connected as we could have been. The other thing that we'll be targeting specifically in our digital and data strategy is sustainability. When I look at the climate action plan that currently exists, that's currently published, it's very outward looking, rightly so, but there isn't anything in there about the council's carbon footprint specifically as it relates to our digital estate. Again, organizations that we've got the right. Again, organizations that we work with, like Microsoft, have data dashboards where they can tell us what our position is, they can help us benchmark. We need to be getting more bang for our buck out of these contracts in terms of some of those support areas. You can see from our laptop refresh supplier commitment and our recent reprocurement of the estate parking and housing repairs applications. There's a range of benefits here. So some of it is inclusion, some of it is sustainability, some of it is access to technology and data. So inclusion is connectivity, it's also having skills. So we're trying to achieve a cross-section of those inclusion parameters when we go for these contracts. I think within the estate parking, it's also worth mentioning that there is also an apprentice that's being funded through that piece of procurement that we've done recently. So there's a much stronger link for me now with the procurement that we're doing within the digital category and some of the council's wider imperatives around sustainability, inclusion and other areas. In terms of the future, I think one of the areas where the new procurement act gives us a key lever is that better forward planning. I think running out of time to go out to market is not an acceptable excuse for not going to market and buying the same vendor again. It is a really competitive marketplace. We are going out and doing a lot more competition-led approaches to market, but it is worth noting that the cost of change for IT systems is significant as we further integrate IT systems and data. If I think about our resident experience program, that depends on cross-referencing information from a number of different systems using quite complex integration technologies. So if we're changing a vendor, we have to need lots of time. We've got to have a detailed and quite long ramp-up for making some of those changes because of the cost of them. One of the things that we are doing, one of the things that we are doing, and I think Pete's already spoken to this, the collaboration that we do with other local government organisations. An example is our Microsoft licensing agreement. We've gone into an aggregated agreement with two other boroughs in order to achieve better value with a concurrent contract with them. We also work with Lottie, but also the LGA, the Greater London Assembly, and we've got a lot of collaboration and power in our shared needs and shared statements. So, if I can just pick up on connections, it was a phrase that you used a lot in the presentation, that we need to improve our connections, we need to build our connections. Connections with whom, and what is your vision for where we want to get to with those partners, maybe in two years' time? So, in terms of connections, I'm speaking about the Council's wider ambitions. So, as I mentioned, sort of connecting with Caroline and Stephen and the Community Wealth Building team, connecting with Raj and some of the areas that Councillor Chapman was talking about, in terms of the qualities, communities and change. There's a lot to be done there around digital access. We heard recently, for example, that in the hubs, in terms of the volumes of people who are coming in and seeking assistance, digital assistance, we want to better embed people in our services with those hubs, people like user experience and people that can actually support and give much more practical advice about how to get online and use your phone and what you can do. So, the aspects around environment and sustainability, as I mentioned, this isn't necessarily as large as it could be in terms of benchmarking the Council's carbon footprint. This is something that I'm ambitious to do. I know that the Climate Pledge and Action Plan is being reviewed at the moment, so this feels like a timely moment to have that discussion. So, for me, it's looking for those opportunities across the Council, whether it's education in going into schools, whether it's sustainability, whether it's... I'm really happy to hear you mention about the kind of digital carbon footprint and how we could potentially do significantly better. Are you aware of any of our local authorities that already are there at the top of the game that we could potentially see where they are and accelerate and get there quicker? It's a really good question. I don't know if anyone is at the top of the game yet. From talking to Microsoft, who we've been engaging with to try and get this going, we think other organisations are sort of at the earlier stage. I think some councils are further ahead in their cloud journey than we are. We've still got some technology that's on-premise that's sort of sitting in spaces here, which isn't sustainable and can't be scaled up and down in the same way. The biggest question that I usually get asked, though, is the sustainability impact of things like automation and AI. So, the more data we store, the more processing we do. Yes, we are delivering efficiency benefits, but we've really got to understand in processes, but we've really got to understand what is the impact of that. I want to be able to answer those questions. I want to be able to understand how we can offset the potentially increasing footprint of some of these undoubtedly beneficial technologies. I'm just curious, having you here obviously, how do we really get the big players in the digital space to really deliver the sort of value that we're looking for, when it almost feels like we've been monopolised? We've clearly stated some of the stuff we can't even change because the change process probably costs us a bit of money. It's not that there's a competition out there. We've just got to play along. So, this is more of what fits into our work. How do we kind of get a little bit more? It sounds like we're slightly being detected right now, and some of them are legacy contracts. We've got their computers and we still continue, and it never stops. So, I'm kind of curious, if you were put in a position for us as members, or what others or leaders of the council can think about, how can we change the game that we're not just a victim of them locally? So, it's a great question, and I certainly wasn't saying that we shouldn't change because it's hard. It's just that we've got to be wide awake going into that, and although you might get a cheaper contract, you've got to weigh it up against the cost of change. But in terms of the monopoly or the duopoly that inevitably exists, I would say that suppliers aren't complacent in that space because the Procurement Act is driving this agenda really strongly. I mean, the fact that the Procurement Act ties us to very specific KPIs and very specific social value targets, we're agnostic, right? The expectation is on them to make good on some of these commitments. I mean, some of the examples that are given here, I think the irony is that we need to find the right ways and the capacity to take advantage of the commitments. It's definitely not that we're a sort of victim of them kind of being stingy about it. A lot of them are really forthcoming. It's about the sort of digital pop-up, providing devices to schools, etc. For me, it's about our ability to capitalise on some of what these vendors are offering. If I could just start, I would say that this problem isn't unique to digital, although I think it's acute there. I think across every portfolio, there are contracts where there are one or two providers, and we don't take A, we have to take B. And obviously, we're also at the hest of the market. If only two people come to us for our contract, we also don't have to take A or B or go back out. And I think one of the solutions is like sub-regional partnerships when it comes to procurement. I think it's much harder to negotiate with something like Microsoft if it's just us. If all the CLF boroughs, which are all the central London boroughs, all have the same requirements around what we want from Microsoft, then it gives us a much louder voice to achieve those things. And that's true in digital, but also other places. And I think that's where we kind of hit the ceiling of what's achievable in procurement as a single council, where we need to start thinking, of course, London councils, okay, what is the London council asking from Microsoft? We're providing the teams and the kind of screens and all the services we all take granted on our council laptops. Yeah. On the legacy technology point, if I could speak to that briefly, we do have a roadmap now for getting rid of those legacy technologies. And some of that, again, we've been beholden to kind of service decisions to kick the can down the road for lots of bad reasons. But I think we understand, or we're articulating very clearly, that having legacy systems, especially ones that sit on-prem or are out of support, not the latest version, they are more vulnerable to security attack or compromise. They are not as performant. I think our antisocial behaviour systems, M3 and Contender at the moment, they're sort of being near constant babysitting. So we do have a roadmap for those applications that is going to take us out only as far as 2026. And all the way between now and then, we're deprecating, we're reducing the number of those legacy systems and moving to more modern platforms. So I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit. As somebody relatively new to the organisation that's worked in other organisations, what do you think, as a corporate institution, in terms of maximising social value, maximising the Islington Pound, which is what the focus of this scrutiny has been all about, is there anything that you think we could be doing better? There's one thing that I would really highlight. Sorry, I can't forget to press the button. And this is something that I've been working with the Resident and Experience Programme and across services to do. I understand that historically people haven't always been able to get IDS support or involvement with buying a system. People have gone out and bought systems. We must have countless case management systems, CRM systems. These are all done with the best intentions. But, I mean, an example of where we've agreed not to buy yet another one, but to actually deprecate one that we had that was a legacy system and integrate its capabilities with other existing systems. It sounds really obvious, but where we identify a need in the council, especially if it is a resident-facing need, let's not further proliferate the portals, the contacts, the ways of working. We've already got lots of things where residents or our contact centre have to work between lots of different systems. And a case management requirement in one service may not be that different from a case management requirement in another system. We can segment data. We can segment workflows. So, for me, if I could make one suggestion, it's about ensuring, speaking to Peter and colleagues about this, that we are doing that due diligence. If a service pops up anywhere, taking a paper to procurement, to buy a system, they might have a brilliant business case and all the rest of it, but has that due diligence been done? And are we thinking about the resident experience end-to-end? What's it going to be like if you're someone in this system versus all the other areas or all the other workflows or contact that you might have with us? That's really helpful, and I think exemplifies what we're going to have to think about as a committee, which are the choices that sometimes have to be made in procurement between social value, impact on residents, impact on the Islington economy generally, and impact on our overall corporate delivery. Any final questions for the panel, if I put it that way, at all? No, I don't see any further questions, so thank you all for coming tonight and all your contributions so far to the scrutiny. And just really to reiterate to the committee, I really want your initial thoughts on where the review is going and just some thoughts that I've had tonight around the sort of things we need to be thinking about. What should we be prioritising by way of social value? What do you think we are doing well as a councillor at the moment? What do you think we could be doing better? How do we feel about insourcing, the outsourcing, balancing, of course, the potential costs and where social value might be gained? Firstly, by insourcing, and secondly, by outsourcing. So just some pointers there to think about. But I think in particular, to think about when we ask contractors for social value, what is it we actually want? What really matters to us as a corporate institution? What should we be prioritising? So that's, I think, really something to think about. And I'm going to make an ask, really, of the panel in particular, I think, Santiago and Caroline, what questions do you want us to help you with? So if you could think of some questions for us to address, because ultimately, there's no point in us coming up with a report if it doesn't help you to develop your thinking around what you want to achieve. So same ask for you. If you can get some initial thoughts, some initial questions, that would be great. I think all that's left now, the formal monitoring items, you've all seen the forward plan, the scrutiny review, the tracker. Do any of the community chairs want to bring any updates to the committee? Don't see any. We've all seen the work programme. So unless anybody else wants to raise anything, that concludes the meeting this evening. Thank you all for your contributions and for keeping to time. All right. Sorry. Thank you. Put your growth cards back in. Put your growth cards together. Do not use the progress cards. Put your growth cards back in. Thar.