Transcript

Good evening. I see Councillor Jemster has brought some sweets, but she's not brought any my way. Okay, game on. So, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I hope I'm allowed to address you as ladies and gentlemen at the start of the meeting. So, I'm Councillor Ashutadol. I am the chair for the overview scrutiny committee. Before I go into the announcements, I would like to express my gratitude on behalf of colleagues around the table to the outgoing chair, Councillor Cassidy, and the previous members of the 2024-25 municipal year. I'm sure you'll all join me to extend our thanks to him and to the commission members, as well as to officers who have been very hardworking and have delivered stellar service and advice to us as members of the committee. So, can I ask for our thanks to be noted and extended to Councillor Cassidy? So, welcome. There is no plan for a fire drill. So, if in the case that the emergency alarm does sound, you must all evacuate the building immediately by the nearest fire exit and proceed to the area outside and converge to the Ramada-on-Core forecourt, which is on Charles Street, and we will be directed by the Democratic Services staff. So, once we converge there, they will give us further instructions. And on that note, I want to say welcome once again, and can I ask for any apologies? Through you, chair. Apologies received from Councillor Kitterick and Councillor Grecoe, who will be substituting. So, I will ask my colleagues now, starting from my right, to introduce themselves and declare any interest. Thank you, chair. Good evening, everyone. This is Councillor Miss Pabby-Tool, the chair of CYP, and I have no interest to be clear. Good evening. I'm Councillor Melissa March, and I've taken the advice of the monitoring officer. I don't think I do have a conflict of interest in item 13, but should one arise, I'll make a swift exit. I work at Citizens Advice Leicestershire. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Councillor Sue Waddington, chair of Economic Development, Transport and Climate Emergency. I have no interest to declare. Hi, everyone. I'm Councillor Saizemann, chair of Culture and Network. Nothing to declare. I have no interest to declare. Councillor Goupen-Jeré, nothing to declare. Councillor Aptil Rossman, I have nothing to declare. Councillor Aptil Rossman, I have nothing to declare. Okay, Councillor McGregor, standing in for Patrick Kitterick, I have nothing to declare. Good evening. My name is Nigel Porter. I'm World Councillor Frailstone, and I sit on this committee as a Liberal Democrat, and also leader of the group. And have you got anything to declare, Councillor Goupen-Jeré? If I have, I will. Thank you. I think the normal procedure is if people have something to declare, they declare it, rather than not declaring. Councillor Goupen-Jeré? I have to write it. It was a straightforward question that was just about, I know I have nothing to declare, or yes, I have something to declare. It wasn't for us to get into that. I just thought I'd help you out, obviously it's your first meeting, just to clarify the process. Normally, as a member of the council, if you've got anything to declare, you declare it. Is that okay? Can we stop, like, warm-ups at the meeting and not trying to... I will now go to officers to introduce themselves, thank you very much. Good evening, I'm Richard Sword, I'm the Chief of Director for City Development and Neighbourhoods. Thank you. Good evening, Damien Alcott, I'm the Divisional Director for Children's Social Care, Early Health and Prevention. Thank you. Good evening, Corrie Laywood, Head of Revenues and Benefits. Hello, I'm Claire Gavigan, I'm the Assistant Director of Finance. Thank you, I'm welcome, this is a very good meeting. It is, thank you. Hi, it's Amy Oliver, I'm Director of Finance. I'm Andrew Shalene, Director of Corporate Services, and I should say I'm joined by Tim Driver, our Customer Services Manager, who is sitting in the tube seats at the back there. Welcome to... Oh, sorry. Yeah, I'm the Assistant Assistant Mayor, it's responsibility for a number of things, but I'm here particularly for item 12 on the agenda. Thank you. And I'm still waiting for my seat. Yeah, because it's so free to do that. Thank you very much, and I'm part of the young people's house. Welcome. My name's Rebecca Lunn, and I'm here as a Youth Council Executive. Welcome. Hi, Julie Bryan, Tom Governance Services. Ed Brown, also Governance Services. Thank you, everyone, and welcome to the meeting. So, can I ask for those who were at the previous meeting, if the minutes can be agreed as a true and accurate record of the minutes? Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And we have a note of the membership for the committee for this municipal year. The dates for the meetings for this municipal year have also been published, and as expected, any apologies and substitutions will be notified to the government services team. The terms of reference is within the park, so have we had an opportunity to read it? Are we agreeable to it? Nothing to note or mention? Thank you very much. Questions, representation, and statements. Ed? Yes, Chair, for you. We've received two questions from a member of the public, Dr. Nizam Patel. I'll just read them out on his behalf as he isn't here in the meeting. So, firstly, first question, as a member of the public, I would want to engage with the democratic process as much as I possibly can. However, the current policy requires that public questions be submitted five working days before a scrutiny meeting. However, the agenda for the meeting is only published five working days in advance. This means members of the public have no way of knowing whether their questions will be relevant to the agenda. Will the overview scrutiny commission consider viewing this process to improve meaningful public engagement and allow questions to be submitted after the agenda is published? Possible solutions, changing the deadline for questions to be submitted for working days prior to the committee or publishing a provisional agenda frontally earlier, providing a draft, indicative agenda 10 working days before the meeting, marking it clearly as subject to change. Now, there was also a further question, as I've seen general error. This was submitted before the deadline, so if you can take it. So, second question, I attend council meetings often. I park opposite the city hall on Carlton Street with street parking now increasing by 25%. This now feels like a new tax on residents who are trying to participate in the democratic process. Will the council consider providing support at public costs such as validating parking or reimbursing bus fares for members of the public who attend scrutiny of all council meetings? Removing this financial barrier could help increase public participation in local democracy, particularly for those on lower incomes. Yes, I am aware through Carl, that he has received response, written responses to his questions. We have had no further engagement or responses from him. What I have asked is that... ..the information will be circulated to members of the OSU committee after this meeting. Yeah? Happy to do that, Chair. Yeah, thank you. I have a question about public transport. I know that in Manchester they have the Our Path scheme, which allows for free buses for youth aged 16 to 18 and 18 to 21 for those in care experience. And I was just wondering how Leicester could possibly do something similar or look into how they've achieved this. I know that they did it through the Manchester Combined Authority and I wondered if maybe we could come up with something similar. I'm on the walk. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. Sorry, I was anticipating you might want to take it under the City Mayor's questions, which we're going to in a moment. But I'm very happy to answer it now. OK. What we do have in the City is, of course, the hop bus, which is free, which links all of the central area together and has been enormously successful. We're able to do that because we've had government support for it and I'm delighted to say that government support is continuing. I think we're all very, very grateful for it because that particular service has been very successful indeed. It's and I've got a lot of very positive feedback from it and I see other members nodding as well because I think they've also had the positive feedback. I think the major inhibition to providing wider concessions is, of course, the cost of doing so, particularly Young City. But frankly, there's quite a lot of young people around and, you know, it will be very expensive. But certainly I would want to look for opportunities to accept the service that we provide at the moment and were it possible in the future to do that. But it will be dependent on the availability of government support to do it simply because, as members know, our own revenue budget, our own financial situation is pretty dire still. And, you know, it would be more than we could take on doing one time. But we'll certainly look at what other places are doing and, you know, see whether there are things we can learn from them. But I think as you, in fact, your question, the situation in areas where there are combined authorities and where there are funds available to support these things, you know, is one of the few things that actually make, you know, the prospects of having combined authority very attractive. Just a quick clarification. The question from Dr. Patel, it's a very important question. It's a very important question. And I think you say that somebody's written a response to her or him. Will we get a copy of that response? Yes. You will. And depending on what response is sent, I think we need to discuss at this committee meeting, because probably you don't know what's in the report, what response is given, because we may have different ideas from what is being said. Please, because it's important that we as members know what's being said, and we get a chance to discuss it, what's being said. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If I could just make a very brief comment. I heard the question was asked, and there was a point within it about the order in which we publish things and we will, I think, at some time in the not too distant future, have an opportunity to review the Council's constitution. And I don't know quite what you said in your response to it. It may well be that it has passed that review of the constitution. I'll certainly hold it in my memory. I hope others will hold it in my memory. And if it doesn't get fed back into that review, I'm sure we'll make sure that the appropriate officers of the Council are reminded of it. Very quick suggestion. I thought Rebecca's question was a very good one, and I would be grateful if it could be referred to the Economic Development, Transport and Climate Emergency Scrutiny Commission, who deal with the bus issues. Thank you for that suggestion, Councillor Bond. Thank you. Any petitions? I have any petitions, and I think it would be included in the part in Appendix C. So we are asked as a committee to note the outstanding petitions, and for those that have been finalized to agree to remove those that are marked as complete from the report. Yeah, obviously you were at the council meeting last week, and not only was the petition that had 5,500 signatures on, not debated, but it's actually been ignored again tonight. It's not even on the list of petitions. I mean, what is going on at this council? Tell me. For accuracy, firstly, I wasn't at the meeting last week. I gave my apologies. And from the communication which I have seen, the petition which was put forward, I think, went to the Lord Mayor. Is that the petition you're talking about, the one that went to full council? No. What happened was, 5,500 people plus signed a petition against the council's plans for community centres and libraries. And what's basically happened is, the council's constitution is crystal clear. It says any petition with over 1,500 signatures on it triggers a debate at full council. But for some reason, I'm not entirely sure why, maybe Sir Peter can enlighten us, that petition was pretty much ignored and pushed under the carpet. So there wasn't a debate last week at full council. It's a shame you weren't there, because maybe you could have joined us in our protest against what's going on at Leicester City Council. Because there's people who are spending a lot of time, going to a lot of effort in order to voice their opinions, but it's just hitting a brick wall with the Labour Council at the moment. And I think it's quite disgusting, because we live in a democracy. We're not living in Putin's Russia, or in Germany in the 1930s. This is Leicester. And what they're trying to do, what Peter's trying to do, is close down democracy. So really, you should have been there, and you would have been able to hear what was going on. Before we get the question out, let me bring you one of the opposite. I wonder if I might, because I have actually been personally referenced in that question. Chair, it is very interesting that before they pulled their stunt last Thursday, at no time at all, at no time at all, did Councillor Porto, or any other member who pulled that stunt, bother to contact me, or any other member of the controlling group, to let us know that there was even such a petition, or that the monitoring officer had taken a view as to whether or not it should come to Council or be dealt with them in some other way. Had they done so, I might well have been able to help them in suggesting, either by ways in which it could be considered, or other means by which the issues could have been considered at the Council meeting. Instead, in secret, they planned their stunt, and walked out. Clearly, more interested in the success of the stunt, than actually getting the matter debated. Did you want to just... I think from an officer perspective, I think we just need to note that the monitoring officer is not here tonight, so we're not going to be able to answer that question without the monitoring officer in presence. So what I would say is that, actually, I asked the monitoring officer to provide some feedback on the question raised by Councillor Porto in the next couple of days, if that's okay. Thank you, Chair. Chair, how many minutes go? I was going to... Yeah, thank you, thank you, Chair. Okay, Chair. The fact of the matter is, the petitions were submitted. So we approached the officer, asking them the deadline for submission of the petitions. We were given the deadline of 18th of June. I asked my colleagues, who were the lead petitioners effectively, to go and submit in person. Because in the past, when we are submitted by email, we were told they have lost or they missed. So they were submitted in person, on the third floor, to the governance team, and acknowledgement was received. When on the Monday, prior to the council, the first draft came out around 5 p.m., we realized that our petitions were not on it. Okay? That's the first time we realized that the petitions were not on it. At that point, those two lead petitioners wrote to the officers, asking them to be included in the agenda of the council. The reply came back from some officer, I forgot the name, but saying that they have been redirected towards the consultation team within the neighborhood scrutiny committee. They challenged them back and said, look, we have more than 1,500 signatures. According to this rule, it must go to the council, and that's what we are submitted for. No reply, but then monitoring officer, I think he was on holiday, he came back, and he replied, and he said, I have applied XYZ rule, whatever that was, and I have a full trail of that email data there. And therefore, it's my interpretation of that rule that I decided it to be. I agree that it must be given to the consultation side rather than going to the council. We challenged that back again. I said, look, we don't agree with that. The rule clearly states, and this is the reason why we submitted that in good faith, good time, to the governance officer, and we will receive the acknowledgement. Once that was done, on Thursday morning itself, no, sorry, on Wednesday, when his reply came back, no, I stick with my judgment, and therefore that is the case. Then I intervened, then I wrote to him, I said, look, I do not agree with your rule, the rule clearly states this, and therefore would you kindly, you know, change that and add those back into the agenda. On Thursday morning, his reply came back with the same position. At that point, because there were six, there were other residents group who have already asked for submission of six questions, his reply to them was, only Lord Mayor can overrule me. Therefore, I wrote an email with the full email trail, I didn't copy all of that to all of you. All that exchange that was taking place with the monitoring officer, forward that email to Lord Mayor and ask her to intervene and apply her special powers to reinstate the two petitions on the agenda. No response, nothing. Now you tell me, where do we go? Do we then suddenly run around? And by the way, I'll also tell you, in the past, when the labor group wanted to change, we have seen the agenda change at 4pm, just an hour before the council meeting. So agenda has changed before. Last minute changes have been made and can be made. So our request of not, now whether, I'm not, I'm not accusing anyone, all I'm saying is, Lord Mayor's office should have informed Lord Mayor that we have received this. What's your decision? They did not. That's what I understand. So Lord Mayor didn't look at it. And that's what she's confided in me, that nobody told her from her office that our request has come to her. I wouldn't send it to this already because she's just a councillor of her ward. I am sending it to lord.mayor at leicester.gov.uk because that's the role, that's the office. It's her office's responsibility to have informed her that this is what's happened. You need to take a decision quickly. Nothing happened. Now, why that happened? I don't know. All I'm saying is, this is no stunt. We have been changing it properly as per the channels. And if you call it stunt by, for us to, you know, stand up for our citizens, who have voiced a concern, a grave concern about what's happening, then so be it. You can call it stunt, but that is not the stunt. That's the whole chronology of the events. I haven't bothered replying to city mayor's email. But if you want, I can depict exactly email, date, timestamp, everything, one by one. Probably I will at some point when I get time. But that is the reality. But anyway, I'm happy to settle this matter here at this moment because let's progress with the agenda. Thank you. Thank you for giving us some background to your request for the petition. But I think I want to remind members that we have to try not to deviate from what we have set out in front of us. Otherwise, the meeting then becomes unwieldy and it becomes chaotic. So you've said something, you know, quite powerful there, Councillor Batia, that we need to carry on with what is in front of us. And what is in front of us is an agenda here. So the petition itself, I mean, Sir Peter has shared, you know, as much as, you know, he knew about it. And you have pursued it as much as or as far as possible to begin to try to understand what happened. Now, neither the monitoring officer nor the log mayor is present at this meeting. So nobody can speak for them. And I think it will be, dare I say, foolish of us to begin to make decisions or speak on their behalf. So it will be noted the points that have been raised by both yourself and Councillor Porter. And we will get some response. And I think our director of finance, Amy, has made a very good suggestion that she will get a response from the monitoring officer to the commission members within the next couple of days. And I'm sure if we also approach the Lord Mayor's office, we can also get some sort of formal response that if she didn't leave her office or the response did not arrive in time for her to make a decision. We will also get some information. But I don't want us to deviate from what you have in front of us. But thank you for bringing that to the attention. So the reason why we're talking about it is we're talking about petitions. That's we're not deviating. It's on the agenda. Councillor Porter, we are talking about petitions, yes, but we haven't got this particular petition on the agenda. So don't let... Thank you. Thank you. And the point is noted. So can we just make a note of the request that any completed petitions are taken of the report and outstanding petitions are marked as for action. Now we'll go on to agenda item number 11, questions to the city mayor. Oh. On petitions. Oh, yes. Did you have a point? On the... On the... The two petitions were basically from my wall which I presented. They're here on the... On the paper. On page 15. One of the people's work. It's marked red. It says the petition has been changed. It's marked red. It says the petition has been changed. They are written update. On page 15. Okay. Do you want to mark the red? Yeah, mark the red, yeah. Both of them. The first one is from me. It says the petition has been changed. I understand that it takes time. So maybe I'm not complaining about the times there. But I want to make a request that when that report is done, a draft report, or you're on the final before it goes anywhere, would the officer please contact me and back me? And let me know what they are doing. Just press the request. Yes. And the second one, from Marshall Stewart. Again, that's from my ward. It says a meeting with you with cancer. Okay. The first one is from me. The first one is from me. The first one is from me. It says the petition has been changed. I understand that it takes time. So maybe I'm not complaining about the times there. I want to make a request. That when that report is done, a draft report, or you're on the final before it goes anywhere, would the officer please contact me and let me know what they are doing? Just press the request. Okay. And the second one, from Marshall Stewart. Again, that's from my ward. It says a meeting with you with cancer. Yes. That meeting did happen. I had a meeting with the regional director. About an hour long meeting. We went through all the complexity of the problem. And he said that he looked at the proper action. And one of the actions he was going to take was that the process was not followed properly. He said that. That's right. In that case, make sure the process followed properly, that I'm involved and I should be there when the officers meet the residents. Now, that unfortunately has not happened. Now, that meeting took place a month and a half ago. Now, I understand the pressures of work. I'm not complaining about that at all. But again, a simple request is that, could somebody press follow the tab, follow up what action plans were agreed with my meeting with the director, and let me know what's happening. Because a meeting is due with the residents on that one. And that meeting should take place. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Welcome to Scotland. Sorry. I thought you had something for you to say. Okay. City Mayor, the floor is yours. No, I don't know. No, not any questions for all of our questions. No, no, that's what I meant. No, no, that's what I meant. The floor is here to answer questions from everybody. So... I'll ask you one. Okay. ... Yeah. Obviously, he mentioned about the government's proposals for the local government reorganisation at the full council meeting. And I think he's one of about 11 or is it 13 elected mayors across the country. So I know the government doesn't want to see any more. So has he been told whether or not he's on his way out? Well, you know, not you personally, but the position of an elected mayor in Leicester, will it mean that by the time we have the next election, you know, the way it goes, was it 2027? And we won't have anybody standing for the position of elected mayor. Yeah, no, actually, I said it before. I said it before they left, actually, but they weren't listening. But to you, Chad, I had in any case committed to members that in good time before the next election, they should have an opportunity to debate whether they wanted the mayoral system of governance to continue or whether they wanted to revert to the conventional system of a leader and cabinet model. And, you know, all things being equal, I would wish to, you know, meet that commitment and make sure that we do get a chance to debate in good time. In fact, it's been somewhat overtaken by events because the government have subsequently said that with the introduction of mayors in combined authorities and their intention that there will be mayors in combined authorities across the whole of England, they will be halting the creation of new mayoral systems of governance and will also be ruling out, I think it's a very sensible thing, ruling out a return to the so-called committee system that some of us have been around long enough to remember we once had here in Leicester but abandoned a long time ago. What they have said is that the authorities that have existing mayoral forms of governance can continue but, and this is a but that applies to us, where the extension of any boundaries or any other significant changes takes place requiring in law the establishment of a new authority that new authority must revert to the conventional form that is the leader and cabinet model. Now, that means that any change, however small, in the city's boundaries as a result of this change will, in effect, in law create a new authority because, you know, people have got to be elected on a very different basis or at least on a different basis at the moment and that will mean that the new city council, as it would be, as a result of those changes would have to revert to the conventional form. I think it is very likely indeed that there will be a greater or lesser, to a greater or lesser extent, some changes to our boundaries, that there will be a new authority and that the new authority will revert to that system. Now, obviously, we will know in good time whether it's going to happen or whether we would need to go back to what I was originally intending which was for us to have a debate on it but I think it will happen inevitably to us it's the one on the short of it. I hope that's clear. It's certainly my anticipation that if we are to change our boundaries we and other authorities to change our boundaries it would be likely to happen in advance of the next election of the council or at least it would perhaps take it back at the time of the next election of the council in 2027. So, you know, in a sense the matter is going to be decided for us. I hope that's clear. Come on! You don't want to go home, Ellie. No, no, don't. I don't want to encourage anybody. I feel neglected. No, it must be later. So, thank you very much for moving on there to I don't know, item number 12 which is our customer service is the one to request 20, 24, 25 appendix D So, I'll just do a short intro and then I'll pass over to the expert but as you would expect obviously I want to just share a bit of the good news story because, you know, this is a difficult area of work it's always easy, isn't it to sort of pick out the bits where things aren't going quite so well but, you know, there is a good story here this is an update report and since the last update we've made some changes I would particularly ask you to look at 3.21 which talks about an adjustment in opening hours in service operating hours I should say and that has seen an improvement in call wait times if you look at 3.22 we're talking about feedback from staff that the staff are actually feeling much better about their job now that matters because that means that we're more likely to get staff retention which means that we're going to get people who have got greater expertise and usually it also is reflected in things like sickness levels so all in all if you then look at 3.31 you'll see that the average time to answer between November 24 and February 25 dropped significantly to near the 6 minute mark which is an improvement on the previous year so for some very small changes not only have we got a better service to the public but we have also got a happier and therefore more experienced staff group meaning we can retain staff and we're not having to constantly spend money on recruitment so I would ask you know I think we should be hopefully commending the work the officers are doing in this area I think it's a great start I'll I'll go over to Andrew if you want to add a bit more flesh to the phone so to speak Chair if you wouldn't mind the operational expert is sitting on the cheap seats as I said so if you're happy I would like to invite him to the table to join the conversation absolutely so let's relieve him of the cheap seats please join us at the table so Tim is our customer service customer service manager he's responsible for all of the customer service offer at the council that you see so our front door so our phone offer and also the offer that you see on Grammys Street so I think if there's any more technical and operational questions I think he is well placed to probably answer them and actually I think Tim just reflecting on what Councillor Dempsey was just saying is actually one of our good news stories as well so previously certainly over the course of the last two to three years we've kind of had a temporary arrangement in place in respect of the management role within that team and I think bringing Tim into that role in a permanent position has been helpful to give us some stability within the service itself and also the introduction of a couple of new team leaders as we've changed our team leader arrangements I think we've brought some new people in from outside the organisation and they've really added value to the arrangement that we have also within the customer service function so I think without going too far through the report I think that's a welcome improvement on the previous time that I came here to report on what we were doing from a customer services point of view but I won't take long because I don't want to set a standard for talking too much in here and by Councillor Dempsey has obviously gone through some of this stuff already but the report in front of you broadly talks about four things so it talks about the current operational arrangements that we have in place both within the customer service centre on Grundy Street and our customer service line which is now based in City Hall we've moved it over the course of the last 12 to 18 months from York House it gives specific information around the performance of the customer service line itself and the reason why there's not a huge amount of information in there about our face-to-face offer is because telephony is much more heavily monitored through systems and practices compared to the face-to-face offer as well so we have a huge amount of data in respect of how we're handling calls the incoming call volume that we receive which lines it comes across and that's all included in the report as well there's an outline of the improvements that we've made since the financial year 23-24 and I think Councillor Dempsey has explained them in a reasonable amount of detail I won't probably go into them much more what I will do is say I think the context here is really important when we consider how we're functioning as an organisation and I think it's important for us to understand the wider trends from a customer services point of view and how we fare against them and I think I'll just spend a few moments just explaining them if that's okay Chair so I think for most of us across the sector from a customer services point of view what we recognise is that phone continues to remain a preferred choice of contact and when I say across the sector I'm talking about the public and private sector here so there's a huge amount of reporting around how public and private sector customer service functions operate and reflecting on last year's report the common theme coming from that is that people still prefer to make their customer service inquiries through phone so regardless of what private sector organisations might be trying to do to digitise their offer their customers are still voting to use the phone and that's an important element of I think our offer and at the moment continues to be there's a slight distinction there though in the sense that those more you know for want of a battle over explaining this mundane and more simplistic enquiries that easily easily handled through more digital and technology enabled methods and that happens in the private sector it happens in the public sector and the report that we are aware that gets done annually recognises that importantly for us what it shows is that people that have got more complex enquiries that relate to more than one thing still prefer to use the phone to do that because that's quicker and they get a bit more of an empathetic response instead of just using technology and digital platforms for that and you know that's a reflection across all sectors as well and the other thing that you know is becoming clearer is the increased use of technology to handle calls in a more automated fashion and by that I mean you might end up talking to an automated voice agent who sounds like a person but isn't and can handle some of those more simplistic enquiries or you might be engaging with an automated chatbot or someone might use some chatbot technology to be able to provide you with the answer and that's much more commonplace now and isn't something that we're currently able to do with our current technology but it's definitely one of the service improvements that we'll be looking to introduce over the course of the next 12 months once we've done a bit of work to make sure the environment that our new CRM sits in can provide you with the right answer there would be no point in us introducing some technology and then it giving the customer the wrong answer and there's some enabling work for us to do to make sure our web content is correct because our system will look at our web pages to provide the answer in an automated fashion and also to make sure that we've got a good knowledge base so the system that we're using can look at data and information and provide you with the correct answer so the context I think is important and we compare I think quite well to the wider customer service sector actually the one last thing I think people are looking more at is the introduction of comprehensive multi-channel customer service handling and that means things like web chat online messaging the use of whatsapp potentially answering some of our customer service related questions through social media platforms more self-service obviously the use of channels of face-to-face and telephone as well so there's a move towards combining more of those things together we do that already from a phone web form digital platforms and face-to-face point of view but the one thing we haven't yet been able to do is introduce some of that new technology to deal with some of the easier inquiries so people don't have to sit in a queue to get the information and that's certainly some of the things that we function on during the course of the next 12 months so Council Dempster's talked about the performance that's at 3.35 in the report an outline of the customer service face-to-face offer is at 3.36 so I won't go into any detail about them what I perhaps will do is just draw your attention to 3.39 through to 3.42 which explains the focus from an improvement point of view beyond what we've already done for the next 12 months and that we make better use of technology in the customer service centre we've got an update to our CRM coming which will allow us to do things like chatbot and automated voice agent so we can manage our queues even better than we're doing at the moment we'll be doing a review with Council Dempster of our face-to-face offer with a view to looking at how we can provide perhaps better face-to-face environments within our communities so taking the service to them a little bit instead of people having to come to the customer service centre on Granby Street I don't want to pre-empt what we'll absolutely do but we're going to review those arrangements and compare ourselves to others and I guess next year we'll report more on that and in the meantime we are also I'd like to look at introducing a bit of a focused approach towards a citizen engagement strategy it's quite commonplace in local authorities and other sectors so we have key statements around what we're going to do from a behavioural point of view what customer can expect what we can expect from our customers and also to focus some of the activity that I've just mentioned in a bit of a plan so with your permission chair I'll probably leave it there and just open up for questions thank you thank you Andrew before I bring in colleagues around the table can I ask Tim to just give us a short introduction of himself and welcome Councillor O'Neill so if you just sort of tell us a little bit about yourself and then we know who we're going to be directing and channeling our many enquiries so I think Andrew's kind of very cleverly passed the book there I've been with the authority since 2008 with customer support initially as a team leader and then as manager for the last two years managing the space offer thank you very much so I'll open it up now to colleagues so Councillor Portra Councillor Batuu and Councillor of Darby well I've got to write me now so Councillor Portra yeah thank you my question relates to in the report it mentions that the hours of the service operation have changed and I think it used to according to the information I have it used to start at 7.45 in the morning and then go along until 6 o'clock in the evening and now we're down to what was it 8.30 to 5 Monday to Thursday and then 8.30 to 4.30 on a Friday but it also mentions like half an hour before the close of business you're not taking any more phone calls no more queuing so I just wonder how that would work so if somebody rings in they think the service is open now until 4.30 and they ring in at 10 past 4 what happens if I was on the phone what's going to happen to them because nobody's going to pick it up are they and the last calls are able to enter those queues at half past four any calls that arrive before half past four go into the queuing system and our answer by officers until five o'clock that makes sense there will be nothing worse than service is still going so that sounds fine thank you very much thank you chair and thank you for your presentation my question is related to 3.4 two where you mentioned that while the council acknowledged that many authorities now publish a clear customer experience strategy what is the timeline and accountability framework for developing and implementing Leicester's own citizen experience strategy thank you council but all I think at the moment the arrangements for introducing that into the organisation have not been sorted I thought it might make sense to report the proposed improvements here first obviously after having some internal conversation to allow us to consider any recommendations you may have in addition to the four that are in here and then come back at some point with a more detailed plan around what customer experience strategies look like in other local authorities the key features and actually what one might look like and how we would develop one within our own council I'm sure there'll be an opportunity for councillors that have an interest in the customer experience environment and also our own customer service function to input into that process Is there any timeline available for them? As I said I was waiting for this conversation first for the agreement almost that that was a sensible idea and some other suggestions around improvements that you would like me to consider before I put some timelines to those actions So on the back of that Andrew and this is a very interesting point so do we at the moment have any satisfaction data for our tenants as a city council in terms of the engagement with our customer service team? So tenant satisfaction is something slightly different so obviously that's managed through the housing service and I know they're starting to arrange themselves in a slightly different way so they've recruited an engagement and a policy manager to look at how we beyond the annual tenant survey understand how our tenants deal with and sort of access the housing service. Within customer services we don't have a formal arrangement in place at the moment to understand customer satisfaction either on our phone lines or in the customer service centre obviously we use our staff we hear their voice they tell us about the overall levels of satisfaction when it comes to people's experience and sentiments expressed in a call but we don't have a formal arrangement in place at the moment that would measure customer satisfaction at the end of the call on a sort of quantitative basis and I think that's probably something that we would look to build into and is probably a common feature of other local authorities I'm sure we have at some point in the past customer satisfaction type activity but at this stage unless Tim tells me otherwise we don't have a formal arrangement in place for that. the technology is something we're looking for the platform okay thank you for that you did ask specifically about tenant satisfaction chair it happens that just yesterday perhaps I was shown the initial findings of the tenant satisfaction survey which will be reported to housing scrutiny in the very near future I don't want to preempt that because it's actually some very good news in terms of the levels of satisfaction dramatically improving but that is coming separately to the housing scrutiny thank you chair I think you mentioned about and you mentioned about some technology changes which is I think the question that I have is related to that primarily around using different channels whatsapp this that the other I think they are very powerful tools now that people are so hooked onto these tools and then they can really improve the engagement they so and then of course you mentioned about the customer satisfaction survey organizations use net promoter scores for example if they use call line identifications and things like that which allows them to relay that back a link after a couple of hours to that customer to say you contacted us how will you rate us and they click on that link and submit that or it's a text message they can reply back by one to five whatever something to look into the question that I'm basically asking is 3.34 and the breakdown is primarily housing repairs council tax tier 1 calls and general switchboard these are the highest in terms of the number of calls you're receiving is there an arrangement to split the need of agents available accordingly because if there is an idle time elsewhere and these are the kind of maximum that you receive are agents trained enough to handle them or do we have a specific limited set of agents who can only handle this and they can't handle the other thing therefore no matter what you have a limitation but if the agents are trained across the range they can be employed in case of peak so the peak comes in these are sitting idle they can be utilised that's what I'm trying to ask here so broadly speaking we do have multi still agents who are able to take calls across a range of different lines we have some that are obviously slightly lower on down the pay scale that will only deal with a smaller number of lines because they may not have had that experience but this is definitely where I'm going to pass the book and ask Tim to explain the arrangements in a little bit more detail beyond what I've already said and Tim pop my phone up yes so the structure that we have with the officers we have three different grades of officer who handle different levels of calls our lower grade officers deal with the majority of our contacts they deal with everything up to environment services housing options housing benefits council tax and general inquiry service lines they all start with repairs training and then as they get more experienced and become more proficient they receive additional training on additional lines so we focus all of our training on housing repairs initially because we do appreciate that it is our highest volume contact our scale four officers deal with all of the same calls as the scale three officers with the inclusion of council tax housing options and environment services and their initial training post repairs would be for council tax and then our highest graded officers carry out all of those previous phone calls and then include housing benefits obviously as Andrew said some officers are less skilled than others depending on their experience but once they've reached that top grade they'll actually train on other service lines thank you chair I've got a couple of questions I'll just fire them all at the same time so one is hours were shifted or changed just looking at the report between 8.30 and 9 you get 4% of the calls so did you ever consider just starting at 9 and reducing the opening time but then you have more agents potentially available between 9 and 5 to take those calls the other thing was where you move out into neighbourhood services I know the numbers of customer service staff have come down from 40 to 35 or so where now you have that in one location would that mean you have to increase your customer service numbers and staff numbers and how that can impact on the service and the other bit was so the average call time I think it was handling time was about 6 minutes so do you have any figures or stats on if that calls result in that 6 minutes and the customer has dealt with and they're probably being sold or is it passed on to another back office team or the customer has it then called back so I'll take the easier one first if that's okay that's the middle one I think in respect of what we're going to do from a face-to-face customer service point of view I think we don't have any absolute plans around that at the moment but obviously if we are going to move the service out into our communities however we do that on a rolling basis we'd have to do that within the sort of existing resource that we have and also I guess we'd look at taking opportunities to better connect with staff in those neighbourhood areas that already to a certain extent probably provide without really realising it some customer services type provisions so that'll be a consideration I think as we build up the option the first question around opening hours I think I'll probably ask Tim to explain why we don't go for nine o'clock and we went to half eight instead as a starting time but I'll answer the last question before I hand over so average handled time I think what we don't know enough of is if someone rings that first time do we resolve their inquiry or do they come back and contact us again I think we need to be better at understanding the reason for people calling in the first place and whether we successfully manage to deal with that inquiry because if we don't what it for us means is they'll probably end up ringing back and then they're dissatisfied and we have to handle that call twice so the dissatisfaction is not great from a reputational point of view handling the call twice is obviously a waste of money so as part of our new arrangements certainly with some new technology we'll be able to better monitor whether we've handled that call at the first point of contact and also from a satisfaction point of view the new technology will enable us to listen to the sentiments and calls as well so even if we didn't do a customer satisfaction survey we can we'll get a better understanding through the technology of was there a lot of shouting in a call for example and how many of the calls was that emotion expressed and we'll be able to report more on those sorts of things I think within the new technology as we start to implement it so that will help us in terms of the reason for the half eight time instead of nine o'clock the reason that we moved to the half eight starts so far I can say was based on a lot of the comparable authorities around us and say they offer a similar service hours and some statutory services required us to open at half past eight so the adult social care out of our service ceases at half past eight and we think of at that point the same yeah my question relates to the various forms that the council uses for different services or different ways of gaining access to particular opportunities so if you look on the council website for a particular area you will find usually an online form has to be completed and the online form will often tell you that you need to produce evidence which you have to scan and if you can't scan it the forms will tell you right at the outset that you can take the relevant documentation to the customer services centre and it can be done there now every form I've looked at recently which you know for constituents they have they do not have the opening hours that we know this customer services centre opens we only know it's not open every day of the week but the forms say it is now so I think that's the very first basis if we're trying to build a reputation not to give people the wrong information so that they travel to the customer services centre with all documentation only to find it's closed so my request is that you know if we are customer focused I should request that every form that the council uses that invites people to come along with evidence of their identity etc to be scanned and tell them it's available they can avail themselves of that service at the customer services centre should be you know accurate with the opening hours and the days when it is actually open and it might even be helpful to say you know what times are it is it quieter because sometimes when I walk past I've been you know the days it's open and you see queues of people waiting outside which can be you know I'm sure a bit daunting for the staff and certainly for those who come and join the queue thank you councillor wouldn't him councillor so Andrew did you want to come in I know it's just a comment not a question yeah because it's well it's a really important point that you've raised and I was just saying who's going to deal with it and Andrew said that he will definitely look at it and get that sorted because that's you know as you say I mean apart from the fact that its reputation is not good it's not good for the individual person is that you know just how annoying so yeah we'll look into that and when's the next to our senior time September I think we should be able to give you a written response before then so if you could I mean could I just ask Cass Warrington do you I mean we'll do I can give you examples later yeah that would be helpful but I mean you know this is you don't need many examples if it only happens once it's off putting no I think the reason why I'm asking for an example is because what I mean the reputation is important and people will just see the council and customer services as the the people that are responsible for that information but we've got lots of different services who produce their own forms and applications and without knowing which one it is it makes it a bit more difficult for me not impossible but it makes it a bit more difficult for me to go to the service and say look your information is incorrect you're referring people to the customer service centre at the wrong time on the wrong day change it please I'm a bit surprised because actually our Tuesday Tuesday and Thursday and one thing I should say is the report said Tuesday to Thursday everything else that's incorrect that's a typo from my point of view that was my mistake sorry it's Tuesdays and Thursdays but that's been the case for three years plus I think I will send you an example of reforms that I'm referring to and you can have a look and perhaps write to all the departments to make sure the forms are accurate yeah thank you councillor Wellington councillor March and then councillor Osmond and councillor Greg and thank you Jen thank you both for the report and I've got a couple of questions but I'll talk quick yeah thank you so my first question I guess I'm just looking for the answer of the 28% of calls that are dropped that they aren't safeguarding how we know that please my second question is I guess I've looked at the table at 3.34 and it looks like around about 50% of the calls that we're receiving are connected to housing and I also note that we've got this kind of housing pop-up thing that seems to be working really well and it kind of chimes with some of the plans going forward I wondered what the lessons from those housing pop-ups might be that we're learning that could inform some plans going forward please and my third question I guess is also connected to the plans going forward and based on what looks like a relative period of flux in terms of staffing and particularly around staff well-being and a reduction of certainly 20 to 25% of that team and then it seems to have stabilised now so just to kind of take the take a view around the well-being and the continuity and the importance of those staff when we look if we look to kind of go ahead with the suggestion that's in as I read it in 3.41 then about kind of taking and custom service staff into communities more please thank you abandonment rate we've had this conversation before I think haven't we and people and I get confused about abandonment abandonment rate means I've joined a queue it hasn't been on my call hasn't been answered or I've decided to leave that queue and then perhaps ring back later abandonment is not necessarily a bad thing I will say but it is improving if you look at the information certainly for the last several months within that report it shows that our calls answered has gone up from 72% to over 80% on average so actually we're now answering more of those calls but as I was saying abandonment is not always a bad thing because we've got messaging on the lines that does say if we're busy ring back at a different time if you've got certain types of inquiries go through a different place so we will refer them to online methods of front door access as well so it isn't that 30% of those people haven't had their call satisfied they may have chosen a different route or they may have chosen to ring in at a different point of time so I think it's a little bit of a red herring to a certain extent from a safeguarding point of view and again Tim can probably explain the arrangements that we have in place there in a bit more detail but we prioritise welfare related calls and certainly our adult social care and children's social care lines have a priority that some of the others don't and therefore they'll probably be answered more quickly because of the arrangement we have behind the scenes for the profile of those type of calls but Tim if you want to quickly explain. Yeah so we do gather an awful lot of data around the individual service lines which isn't included here I'm going to say because these are sort of broad strokes overviews the social social care lines and the housing option line have what we refer to as a key jump so because the stature of nature and safeguarding concerns that sit with those calls prioritise themselves and they'll go above any other call that's already queuing. Average answer time on both of those areas is some two minutes. The last question is about resource I think. Okay you can remind me of the other one yeah I've obviously lost that one but in terms of resource yes the service has shrank but I think that reflects the size of the council now and the fact that we're trying to operate within the budgets that we have. I think we've been able to better manage sickness and absence within the service. I think we've I don't mean this in a sensitive way but we've had some long term absences within that service area over the course of the last 24 months and we've finally been able to rectify that and that's created much more stability. New team, new-ish team leaders, new-ish manager, different arrangements now bringing staff over from York House into City Hall. It has it's stabilised the workforce that we've got there and we don't see the attrition at the moment that perhaps we were doing over recent years so we've got a more secure workforce I think within customer services now but obviously you know as the council shrinks over the course of the next couple of years two or three years unless something changes from a financial point of view we are a heavily people orientated service and you know we like other departments and teams across the council have to look to operate within the means that we've got so I think the first thing for us to do is handle the calls as efficiently as we can do through the use of technology and also better performance and quality monitoring I think when it comes to our own staff performance I think the last one was about lessons learned from the work that they're doing in housing and I agree with you I think that as we look to put more of our services into localities that's a big piece of work and again you know and it's careful handling it can't be washed you need to take the staff with you and when you're on some sort of change management program and it's absolutely critical especially given that 50% of the calls are about housing and that we learn the lessons from the work that housing are doing and make sure that it particularly works for them so yes going forward it's about getting the pace right it's about getting that level of engagement it's about taking the staff with you it's also very much about that being a piece of work that needs to be done with very closely with the housing department and that's what we'll be doing thank you so I'll go to Councillor Osmond Councillor Greg and then we'll go Councillor Newland and Councillor Porcher Councillor Osmond okay Councillor Greg yeah the joy of coming towards the end really is that I was asking about customer satisfaction you've dealt with that thank you I was asking about safeguarding being prioritised you've answered that thank you and then just about repeat callers really do we have frequent flyers and you've kind of answered that as well so the numbers are there but how many of these people are the same people calling back and back but I appreciate the answer isn't really available to us at the moment I don't think yeah so obviously we've not got the data in front of us but we do when we complete a call there's an activity code that you have to as a call handling agent you'll do the call you'll finish your stuff off and then you'll make an allocation as to why they've rang so we have got the ability even within existing technologies to work out well you know is this a repeat contact but I don't think we do we recognise that we probably need to do more of that both recording the repeat contact why they've come in and then to look at that to identify some service improvements because they'll be ringing in for a reason that we haven't been able to sort of satisfy in the first place and again as I said before there will be an element of those calls that are repeat repeat contact failure demand however you want to describe it but we don't know enough of that at the moment and once we know it we'll then have the opportunity to act on it and I keep talking about the new technology but when we get the opportunity to put the new technology in we'll be looking at our lines handling arrangements and we'll be able to build a new environment that makes being aware of that much more straightforward Thank you and we've got Councillor O'Neill and Councillor Porter next Thank you Chair the question it was a question but a bit more of a comment really about what we were speaking about with that abandonment rate on the phone lines something I've noticed and has been brought up by residents is when going through to the phone line it's all to do with obviously you know what we were talking about in terms of how referring people back to online and obviously utilising that purpose but if you go down some avenues obviously because this isn't just with the council this is obviously something that you know different companies utilise these days that if you're picking an option and then you're trying to get through you're constantly said oh no if you want to do that you've got to go online and then for example then find people going round and round in circles and people are going no I've already been online I'm calling because I can't get online and then being told that they have to go online and it's one of those kind of systems that if the only reason I'm saying that is because a lot of the staff over the phone are absolutely brilliant and it's really encouraging about the six minute mark but I do believe that actually even if that was ten minutes if people were getting through to the phone people are perhaps being taken off the phone basically when they do need to speak to somebody I think that's my only kind of criticism of the phone line and that was something that I'd feed back I've sat with residents when we were doing it before and I've found us going in circles and being kicked off but it depends what options you're picking because that might not happen a lot of the time but I've noticed that specifically with council tax I just want to make sure that obviously you know while we've got these the services while we can utilise AI and all of these other things which is great is that there'll still be certain crews and certain residents who will never be able to access that and they just want to make sure that they can yeah so I'm going to think in terms of there is no hard stop in any of our services that says you can't use the phone line unless it relates to specifically more housing related stuff so housing housing undertook an exercise probably over 12 months ago now to push people into that sort of online environment because housing online is actually quite a good platform for you to be able to use to report a housing repair and therefore there was a deliberate effort to try and get people to make better use of housing online but there was a there was a catch there in the sense that if you're recognised as someone that's digitally excluded you can continue to use the phone service so through when someone calls us if they're ringing about a housing related issue and we are trying to sort of get them into that online space because it's often easier and quicker to report and they can do that 24 hours a day instead of having to wait for phone lines to open if it's not an emergency that's a quite simplistic way of managing inquiries more effectively but there's always a triage on the phone to sort of understand that person's current circumstance and whether they can actually engage with our services online or not so that they're not absolutely excluded so I think that's a positive thing that we do Housing did a whole load of training with their tenants as well about the introduction of housing online which I think was welcome so people were aware that it was coming in place they could go to certain workshops across the city to enable them to use the platform and that was good I'm not aware of I haven't heard of recently this never ending loop of you know I've pressed one option and it takes me to somewhere else and then I press another option and it takes me back to that original starting point so I would say sharing that information with probably Tim more specifically is essential if you've come across that but that's not to say that we couldn't do a review of our own lines and you know I could quite simply pick up a call and test all the options myself from an improvement point of view so you know we could get into doing some of that once I think we've got that new environment better built yeah yeah just it was with council tax not with not with housing it was just something we'd noticed when calling through and obviously what a lot of options will say is okay if you get through okay go online and then you don't and then it says please hold for an advisor there was no there was no option on that it was just something I had noticed but I don't know that could be rectified now but it's just to say that that in terms of customer satisfaction it might be absolutely nothing to do with the advisor or the service that they're actually receiving from council staff if for example that could be another thing that could be an important part of that is that option on the phone well the outcome there is a disgruntled disgruntled member of the public isn't it really so I guess we need to perhaps consider whether that is something that currently exists and to provide channels for people to raise that with us if it exists in future okay thank you so we've got councillor Porter and councillor Dalvey and I will bring this session or this particular agenda item to an end so we can move on yeah thank you chair I mean I've mentioned about the telephone line before and I think it sort of follows on from what's already been mentioned by some other members in that the reason why I initially raised this was because of a constituent who was trying to book a large waste collection and they were basically on the telephone for about I think an hour almost before they got through to somebody and then I've had other people who tried with housing to get through who aren't online and then they're told to keep going online finally get through to somebody and get cut off so one of the things I suggested previously and I think I might remember this was about having a call back you know so if somebody rings and they're not you know they're going to have to wait for more than ten minutes that you press a button and the council will then call you back and the benefit of that I think would be obviously that people don't have to hang on the phone for an hour and also in terms of the council's management of its own time when there's a lull in the service you could pick up on those particular calls and then address that you know rather than so I mean those are just a couple of points so I mean is there any opportunity to introduce this call back or is it going to be too expensive or what you know what's the issue with it yeah I'm going to pass to the to the expert here because it sounds like a good a good idea definitely there are so it's about what are the barriers do we know what the barriers are and what can we do to break those barriers down so currently our current cellophony technology doesn't have that functionality and we do have a new system in the pipeline that's in development at the minute in regards to barriers the current downtime as it were when there's low call volumes is where we focus on our electronic contacts through the web forms and the emails adding a call back function into that service the timescale that those callbacks would need to be in to sit within the existing workflow would meaning that the expectations of customers would be very difficult to meet and the likelihood is that during a for example two working day turn around that those customers would pull back during that period because we handle more than just telephony inbound telephone calls take priority and then when those calls are to a lesser extent that's when we handle all of the digital contact so we receive 450,000 calls over the course of the last financial year they're never not busy we get 100,000 web forms or emails into the service as well and they've got a quick turnaround rate on responding to them because we don't want an email about something that might be a safeguarded related issue or something quite important to just find its way into a queue and not be answered for five days so the turnaround on them is quite quick so I think what Tim's saying is if we took them away to do that to manage the calls that have been sitting in the queue that might have an impact on our ability to handle that other contact and at the same time if we're looking to introduce chat contact or if we did for example WhatsApp they'd have to field those sorts of inquiries through those routes as well so I think looking at the callback option is probably something we need to do within the new system to see if that is something that we have the facility to do in the first place and then if we do is it something that's going to add value when you consider the whole picture of incoming contact and how we want to handle it so if you don't mind we'll take the question away in respect of can we do it with the new system and come back to you and say yes or no first and then later on maybe say well we can do it but we think it would be better to operate in a slightly different way or say yes actually that's probably a good thing for customer service point of view the good thing is key times down I understand that about the emails would it be possible though to have a system that could respond to some of the email using AI or something like that yes so automated contact is what we're trying to look at and so we but we have to build the environment first for the system that we're introducing to be able to give you a good answer and that means I've got to get all of our web pages up to date factually correct and searchable by the system and that's quite a significant piece of work but obviously prioritise it depending on the type of contact first so if it's a bin collection type of query or I want to know what time my leisure centre opens we can do that but we've got to organise ourselves first to be able to make use of that tech I'm really encouraged with what I've heard so far I think officers have really put a lot of work in it actually and that's really good to know that but my only concern is that we should be careful that the system doesn't take over in terms of at the expense of the services we provide it's like a GP service GP puts a lot of time filling in data and having less time to see a patient so I hope we never reach that position in the council systems are have got their own place in the in the council but not at the expense of providing frontline services and staff shouldn't be pulling too much into filling in the data all the time that's what we're here for I'm sure it's not happening I'm pretty sure that's not the case but we just should be very clear about that that we never reach the position because that's not our job our job is to provide frontline services systems are helping help them not their ground thank you thank you very much for that word of caution I think you know as you were speaking everybody's nodded and I'm sure Andrew and his team are well cited on how they're ensuring that we have staff who are able and capable to to do the work of providing high quality and effective front line services to the residents of the city before I close I'll just quickly bring in councillor Demister thank you I understand I think I'm right Tim is this your first meeting and I just want to say thank you so much I think you're doing a brilliant job obviously with Sandra I've got to say that I did talk a minute at the last minute as well so did you oh that's shocking so thank you very very much because you know since you took over and you you know you've got this job permanently we have seen those improvements it is a team effort I am aware of that but thank you for coming tonight and look forward to seeing more of things like as I mentioned that customer experience strategy that is really important like all we are talking about reviews improvement satisfaction but we are not having any mechanism that we can say that we are satisfied or not satisfied we can't change our services or we can't improve services until we are not aware what is going on good what is going on bad so our probably customer experience strategy that is really important for us that we can as early as possible if we can launch and we can launch in such a way that the data is available for customers they can check they can access they can put their input as well that yes we are satisfied we have done this so these are the live data that anyone can access and they can this way we can improve more our services so that's my recommendation if the man was it no thank you for that I think Ed was noting as every member was speaking so we do have a couple of points that he's noted and I think Andrew did acknowledge that there was some work along the lines which you've just mentioned but of course because it is still a system very much in its infancy you can't come with anything concrete to course at the minute but it is noted that we expect that there will be some reporting back into the OSC so that we can be cited on the progress within the customer service team so on that note I think we're asked by Andrew and his team to note the report and all of the recommendations and suggestions and points that members have actually raised have been noted by Ed who is our administering or clerking officer and I'm sure that we will get updates accordingly on each of those points of recommendation that members have put forward so thank you very much Andrew thank you to councillor Dempster and thank you to members for your robust engagement in this agenda item and thank you very much team and welcome now to our next agenda item which is the overview of the revenues and benefits service so I have that Amy will do a quick introduction of this and I think Corey is going to do the presentation thank you chair so this will be a very quick introduction from me this is a report that the committee asked for to provide an overview of what the revenues and benefits service does and what they deliver during the year and I'm going to hand over to Corey who's going to do a very short presentation which is just an overview of what the report is telling you thank you chair I was just going to say put my mic on is that a bit better hopefully you could hear me anyway at the same time we ensure low income households receive timely financial support through housing benefit counter-tax support and other welfare mechanisms our approach is to balance fairness and efficiency fairness and financial resilience we aim to ensure that our processes are fair and support residents to maintain financial independence wherever possible compassionate support for those in hardship we recognise that behind every application or mispayment is a person or family our approach prioritises dignity and support especially in crisis or hardship so moving on to slide number four I'm going to spend a little bit more time on this slide because it talks about the main part of the service okay so council tax collection we try to balance fairness with responsibility last year we were responsible for collecting 185 million in council tax there's lots of numbers in that paper and I'm just going to pick a few of them out for you that I think are worth picking out from over 140,000 households our financial collection rate for 2024 was over 95% it was one of the more challenging years given the cost of living crisis etc but nevertheless it was slightly improved collection rate than previous years we've tried to maintain a firm but fair approach we have streamlined billing through automation we have offered flexible payment plans and hardship referrals our focus has mainly been on on early intervention I think encouraging and proactively contacting residents to engage before arrears escalate I'll come on to that a little bit more about how we're doing that but what I wanted to take this opportunity to try and to maybe dispel a common misconception about our recovery approach or about council tax recovery approach as a whole council tax we have lots of powers it's a priority debt we have lots of things we can do to individuals who don't pay but that doesn't mean that we necessarily do them there is maybe a perception that we routinely use enforcement agents or take action against vulnerable households that that's not true and not accurate I'm sure you can appreciate there is very little point in trying to enforce a debt against somebody that cannot afford to pay we we do not refer households in fact in financial hardship to enforcement to enforcement agents but we don't do that okay instead we work closely with residents to find affordable solutions and signposts to support and I've got a little bit more detail you might be thinking how do we do that I've got a little bit more detail on the next slide about how we might do that enforcement is always the last resort it's only used when a resident where we think the resident has the means to pay to pay but refuses to engage and despite multiple opportunities and even then the action is proportionate and evidence-based we make clear distinction between those who can't pay and those who won't pay and our systems training oversight are built to support that ethical approach I'm sure some people have come across or seen in the press Martin Lewis is making a huge thing at the moment about trying to look for council tax reforms and there actually is some reforms that we're asked to consult on at the moment and we welcome those we welcome those reforms we we want to work in the best possible way for everyone and we are participating in that consultation actively so business rates so last year we collected 150 million in business rates from over 9,000 businesses supporting essential local services we also administered millions in small business and retail relief to ensure businesses especially independents can hopefully thrive very small very last bit on on this slide is just on fraud and compliance we recovered over 1.2 million in council tax and housing benefit fraud that's where people have filled in their application incorrectly it hasn't been proved to be correct so we use the word fraud but might not be completely true and city-wide our corporate investment teams identified over 1.7 million pounds in savings through mechanisms and we continue to participate in the national fraud initiative moving on to slide number five okay financial impact and welfare support last year we saw a lot of numbers here as well and we're going to probably throw there's a lot of numbers on this slide I'm going to throw a few more at you and there's plenty more in the paper as well I'm just going to pick a few out if that's okay so welfare support last year we supported twenty five thousand twenty five two hundred twenty five thousand five hundred twenty four thousand five hundred such a big number I can't even say it myself through council tax support alone we delivered housing benefit to twenty thousand pensioners and vulnerable residents issued six hundred and twenty five thousand pounds in discretionary housing payments to over two thousand households and provided half a million pound in council tax discretionary relief and this year as a result of the new council tax support scheme that's raised to three quarters of a million pounds the household support fund continues to make an enormous impact as I said that's being replaced by the crisis and resilience fund that and that crisis and resilience fund is actually going to be better for us it's going to enable us to plan for a longer kind of relief it's a three-year grant so we can plan better and we can use that money smarter since october 2021 we've delivered over three thirty million not very good my numbers today thirty million across six phases thirty million pounds worth of relief reaching more than a hundred thousand households within Leicester so what I wanted to do was if you allow me is just to give you a couple of case studies that may demonstrate how the household support fund has helped people in the past and how we want to continue to use it in the future I've got two very short case studies to present to you so we've got a lone parent with three children unable to cope with rising bills and a broken washing machine was provided in just over a thousand pounds in assistance covering food energy and essential appliances that support stabilised home life at a critical moment the last case I'm going to present to you is another case of domestic abuse survivor was left financially vulnerable after the partner was removed from the household with 2,219 pound in HSF funding we helped to avoid eviction stabilised payments and regain control we also provided advice and guidance on how to manage direct debits etc as previously the partner had managed these affairs that was all brought about because somebody picked up the phone or we identified someone that needed help because they couldn't pay their council tax I'm not sure that's always appreciated so lastly then moving on to slide six is our priorities always we always try and look forward okay so I did say halfway through this we tell you how we're going to identify people who are maybe in need or maybe in crisis and we're going to do that by something called debt segregation which pretty much speaks for itself but it's a fairer more targeted approach to debt recovery as I mentioned council tax have powers it's a priority debt and one of those things we can do is we can use credit reference data so we can look at people's credit files we can look at their financial history and we can use it through and people might think well that's a bad thing why would you want to do that right but it's a good thing because as well because we want to get as I said before we want to be able to segregate those people who can't pay against those people who won't pay and using their credit file is a very powerful tool to do that to enable us that to do that we want to use tailored advice and intervention we want firm but fair recovery for those who have financial means to pay as I say but avoid the obligation the outcome is that debt segregation will allow us to treat residents as individuals so rather than treating people who owe us this much money in this way we can treat people as individuals so we can look at their particular means we can build trust reduce unnecessary enforcement to ultimately collect more and also as we look forward to 2025-26 our focus is on strengthening early intervention and digital access this class have been very important however expanding outreach digitally excluded groups as well especially our residents and continuing our transition to automated reassessment for benefits linked to universal credit I'm sure you appreciate council tax universal credit is all linked now and it's all going to department work and pensions and preparing for the for the distinction of business rates in 2026 we're also reviewing the council tax support scheme that we introduced in April 2025 and there's a there's a working group about that and to ensure it delivers the expected administration and financial benefits while continuing to protect those in need so if I could just say in conclusion the revenues and benefits service underpins both the council's financial sustainability and the well-being of tens of thousands of less the residents we welcome and we collect income fairly we provide support compassionately and we adapt proactively to new challenges that's it thank you for your time and for your continued interest and support thank you very much thank you very much Corey thank you did you want to come back to Amy or are you happy for me to open it up for questions i think i'm happy to open it up for questions chair if that's okay thank you okay so i've got some names here uh i've got councillor portia councillor david uh sorry i've got councillor waddington councillor zamann uh councillor batul councillor david and councillor o'neil sorry thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you um my questions are based on the written report rather than the slides um on page 35 of the report we're told that um over a hundred thousand households are benefited benefited from the 30 million pounds of support provided through the household support fund now i'm assuming that that's not a hundred thousand different households but um some of the same households received uh benefit from this grant twice i say that because uh if we look at paragraph 4.4 um we see that 140,000 there are 140,000 households in total um in the city so uh it would be perhaps um unusual that 100,000 of the 140,000 had received benefits so that's really just a question to establish how many households actually benefited from the household support fund uh my second question relates to the welfare advice um pages so this is on page 36 um some of us here will remember that the internal uh welfare rights team were very much reduced in number and it was suggested that they would in future only be dealing with um freight i think it's called tier three cases um whereas the tier one and two cases were going to be uh dealt with by um an external organization that was going to be funded uh by the city council and i understood that to be the the case however when i read this i i also i thought maybe the position has changed because it tells us that the in-house well social welfare advice team has supported some um over 8 000 households so i'd like to know because they did they had an excellent reputation the in-house team an excellent reputation and when i've been in touch with um the poverty officer i don't know whether that's the right i know what her name is but i don't know i think that's her title she's always told me that i have to go to external agent now rather than use the in-house team so i'm trying to establish who the in-house team are actually helping what the criteria is uh as compared with you know perhaps going to citizens advice for example um that would be very good to know and it would also be good to see more welfare advice um facilities in the neighborhoods you know have some surgeries that regular surgeries for people who desperately need advice and for which we as councils are not qualified uh to provide it because we simply don't have all that professional information that you need for a proper welfare advice service so those are my two points thank you chair thank you councillor wallington corey did you uh yes certainly on the first point i'll get this in a second uh certainly on the first point council wallington or first question at least you absolutely right that's an observation that's correct the um hsf was delivered over a number of um different uh different timescales so by application process and by direct award so it could have easily been that the same household we've applied one numerous times absolutely you don't know exactly how many households have benefited i don't i don't know as we see here today yeah okay all right fine thank you thank you um so well welfare advice both you are again correct in that we deliver both welfare advice internally and externally through partners that is correct um we the numbers on on the sheet are correct that's the amount we deal with we have still got a quite a large um internal resource for welfare advice um and we do triage those accordingly some of those go externally some of them remain internal depending upon what the circumstance is and who's best that's exactly what i'm asking cory what under what circumstances are people dealt with by the insert house team and um when are we when do they have to go to an external agency and i'm sure you have criteria that's exactly what i'm trying to find out there is criteria in the team you're absolutely right councillor i can't bring that to you today but there is there will be criteria in the team that will decide where is best where best that advice is delivered that may be on based on a number of factors to do with resources at the time but there will be a referral there is a referral mechanism in place for that absolutely yes cory can i just before you come back in can i just ask if it's possible for councillors to be made aware of what the criteria is uh because it seems like you've had you know a number of residents who you need to support and it'll be good for us to know who we're signposting to whether we need to signpost to the internal advice service or we need to be signposting to the external uh partners to the council okay so what we have is our sorry i'll just i'm going to do this very over for you because i don't get into the detail of social welfare advice or um very often we have got tier one and two which are simpler calls they tend to come to us we deal with them we try and help them go sorry the other way around to social welfare citizens advice i never get a long way around to citizens advice they support that also citizens advice will do stuff where you know if we've made a decision we will refer them to an external person so that actually we're not challenging ourselves because in some cases we may have made a decision that actually isn't right sometimes we do make mistakes or we haven't taken into full circumstances so again we will throw them out to a third party and then we deal with the tier three which is the more complex ones and they come to us and we deal with them in our in-house team so but what i can do is send an email out which sets out the third criteria what tier one tier two and tier three call is and we are currently looking at that contract at the moment well thank you for that and thank you chair and can i also ask the same information about um uh having um welfare rights support services in the neighborhoods is there any how can people gain access to it because we are told for example in fosford the need may be on a saturday when the food bank is in operation but we're told there are no welfare rights staff available on the saturday so you know that that doesn't seem possible but there may be alternatives so it would be helpful if we had that information too thank you yes it is important and point tonight councillor waddington that some of our food banks do have social welfare advice in them so when people are visiting a food bank they also do have access to social welfare advice again that is not it's not always a it may not be saturday that they are available but there is a number of free banks and again i can supply you the exact dates of which social well when social welfare advice is available at which um food banks if that would assist as well but we have got a contract there thank you very much for that amy okay so i've got councillor zamann and councillor batul next thank you chair so my question was basically in the report says there's about 11 million that we don't get from council tax or you know we lose out on 11 million pounds of council tax that we do not collect um but it doesn't say whether that's people not willing to pay or can't afford to pay and if it's people can't afford to pay is that sort of being fed back into the council tax sports team review and the other thing was i think there's about four million pounds in business rate not being collected and again so i can understand why a business we wouldn't chase down a business for those business rates and if it's staffing issue i'm guessing if we could collect about 15 million pounds if it means we're just getting more staff in to do that then it probably makes sense thank you can i answer that one chair that's okay because it also links to the income collection report that's actually later on the agenda um when we say we haven't collected that level of um council tax so they just say the 95 percent that five percent we haven't collected that's just the in-year collection we do not stop trying to collect that debt at the end of the year we work with people people will be on payment plans we will work with and they may be paying it over for a longer period than the year because we will have worked for them we also will as Corey's already touched on refer to people to the discretionary schemes and the leaf where people need that support at a point in time because they aren't able to pay at that point so i just would say that we don't stop collecting it's very much the same with businesses we work with them we do enforcement action around businesses when they can pay and they're not paying or where they're struggling and we look like charges so especially with businesses we look for charges on their buildings and their property so that we can recover that debt at some point so just because we've got a finance year end doesn't mean that debt suddenly stops disappears we just continue early through process and actually we used to do a table in the income collection report that showed that we actually nearly collected by the end of it nearly 100 percent of debt we're not far off collecting the significant portion of our debt yearly it's just that it doesn't always happen in the same year it was raised thank you for that uh councillor batu and then uh councillor david thank you chair and thank you amy and cory for your presentation and the response on some of the questions that i have but i have still two questions there um with the planned um as in your presentation as well you mentioned that um there are expand digital access for benefits and entitlement so with the planned digital transformation of revenue and benefits how the council ensure that digitally excluded or vulnerable residents especially elderly disabled or non-english speaking residents continue to access support and entitlements without any barriers and you already mentioned that expand digital access i just want to know what exactly offer you are going to give it to that group and the next question is that will the council commit to an equality impact assessment for digital changes to ensure that inclusive access and prevent any widening inequalities i'll take the equality impact assessment one yet the council as a general rule should always be taking equality impact assessments by making any decisions that impact our service users and our customers out there um in relation to the digital inclusion we've got no changes to that we will have all the options that are available now but what we want to do is anybody who wants to access our technology um access us digitally can do it but they will still be able to pick up the phone we're not planning on changing that but if you want to change your accounts um i don't know you might have gone from a household with um children in to now you've got students who get a discount what we want to do is make that very easy and smooth for people so they don't have to ring us unless they want to ring us but we will still we are not planning to remove that access through the ringing for customer services because obviously a lot of part of our calls do go through the customer services and not direct towards the teams i hope that answers the question it's just a mention that you mentioned that that expand digital access that what type of support is available is there any specific program you are going to launch citywide like previously um i think three or four years back we are having that citywide that let's get digital program so is there any that format is available or you are planning something on those grounds i think anything if we're doing a corporate program that will be sitting with andrew and actually andrew will be much better at answering that question and his plans about rolling out any digital expansion so sorry but i will take that as an action to ask andrew to feedback to the committee thank you jay the council rate collection rate is 95 percent plus now how does that compare with the england's average and how does that compare with our family authorities and the in the sec and the second one is that the fraud recovery uh housing benefit 1.2 million pounds now do we know how much we have lost to fraud in the housing benefit system what is recovery but do we know how much we have lost so the comparative information for council sorry chair for you chair um for the council comparative information it's actually in the income collection report we look at our closest neighbors and we've come ninth out of 13. what i would say is it's very close it's like middle school percentages between us so it can take just a couple of percent for us to go from one to 13 so but we've we've come ninth out of our 13 and then i'm just going to let corey answer the second part of that question if it's okay yeah can we compare ourselves to our comparative neighbors i do not know their individual percentages but i can find that information out for you and supply that the reason i'm sorry the reason i'm asking there is because i think we should aim to be the top i'm sure we're doing that we do always aim for the collection and the high section but we do have to recognize the city that we live in and we need to as we talked about the social welfare advice and our support we have to give people that doesn't sometimes make it a little bit harder to collect debt and i think they have to recognize that in in our city and and that's why we always want to positively do and make sure payments are affordable which is why we talked about this 95 percent and we don't always collect the debt in that year we need to make sure these payments are affordable for our households we don't want to be um pushing anyone um into the financial difficulty to pay their council tax debt but yes i do agree we should always be where we can collecting as much as we can thank you in terms of fraud um yeah we we you heard you mention the national fraud initiative as well so do we know about fraud that we're not collecting no we absolutely don't we're confident that we are capturing as much fraud as it's possible to capture through various different channels including as i say that national fraud initiative objective which is a shared objective between authorities where we deal with 100 of our matches 100 of the time and just to follow up there actually there is a fraud report at governance and audit committee on monday that is available for everyone to read that talks about what we've done around fraud over the last year and what's the uh what cost avoidance we've identified through that process but if you would like to read that that's available for anyone here i think that report is available on the intranet um corey you mentioned in your presentation that your approach is based on compassion and fairness and my question then is if it's fair for people who live alone in their households to receive a discount on their council tax is it not also fair would you say for those who are care experienced to receive discount on their council tax as per your duty of the corporate parent i can answer that rebecca's fortune says our care experience young people do receive a discount they receive 100 discount okay so i'm coming to uh councillor anneal and councillor porter next thank you chair um yeah it was just um a question to you corey it was about the household support fund and then now we're moving to crisis resilience fund um i mean that's brilliant that you said that that's over three years i'm very used to them being i don't know they will use them until they run out kind of thing so that sounds that sounds great um obviously i know that we were utilizing that a little bit different obviously other councils were using them just purely for food and energy vouchers but we were doing something um obviously providing the support that's needed i just wanted to know um in the future with the crisis resilience fund are we doing the main focus on kind of mass vouchers food and energy vouchers or are we having a more kind of holistic approach based on the circumstances and what would that look like is it a mixture between both or so i know that was director corey but in case you chair i'll answer it we we only got the announcement that the class of support funding was going to be coming in two weeks ago we have no um guidance sat behind it yet we still need to wait for that detail the household support fund has gone through a bit of an iterative process each time it's announced now it's gone to this crisis i think what we will say is that we will review how we use that knowing that now we've got a three-year funding um program for it and i think it's a time for us just to revisit what it is useful and how it has the best impact on the households of leicester thank you chair thank you amy council of torture and then council of march yeah my question relates to the fact if some people miss their payments i think you have two opportunities don't you to catch up otherwise you'll receive as i've done in the past i'm quite happy to admit it a reminder letter um and i always leave it to the very last minute so that's probably why i get these reminder letters um but if i wasn't to pay it then the council demand don't they um that somebody has to pay it in full so if somebody is struggling it does seem very unfair that if they can't pay a month or maybe two months they miss then they have to pay the whole lot otherwise they get threatened with court action don't they and they um uh the court costs plus you know then they could end up with bailiffs etc coming at them and i think the the government are going to look at it because they feel it's a bit heavy-handed so although it's in the legislation at the moment and the council obviously has to follow the the current legislation is there any opportunity for you to be more flexible and not be quite savvy-handed with people i know you do you've got a certain amount of discretion but rather than this idea that people end up you know going to court and really the court is it a proper court or is it to the council just rent a room in the magistrates court and rent a magistrate and that's what the costs are no i'm just i don't know this is what i hear that it's what it is i mean is it is it a genuine court so i'm just wondering could we be a little bit more understanding because obviously if people are struggling i know you've said yes yes what you're saying is that um some people don't want to pay which is you know that's a different decision but people who are struggling you know is it an opportunity for the council really especially as the government to reconsider it just to you know maybe not be so heavy-handed that's one yeah then can i just intervene and just suggest that uh Nigel might be uh on risky ground if he is suggesting the justices of the peace offer rent i said you might be on risky ground if you are suggesting that justices of the peace offer rent i mean this is well this is i mean these are reports i've heard i mean it would be good if you clarify whether it is the case that it is a proper court section or is the council i can answer that yeah it is a proper court oh right so the council doesn't book it would you would you like to appear before would you like to appear before the bench and and i'm sure although i have been late in the past i've always kept up to my council tax things you know in fact for most years i was actually in credit so i've gone the opposite way um but now i've now i use direct debit so i'm up to date and i don't need to bother just for clarification the rooms are not rented and uh that the magistrates are not uh given a back hander so it is it is a genuine genuine court so amy let me just clarify this because this is recording i never suggested for a moment the magistrates were getting a back hander that's comfort that's come from you i think what i would say to start off with is something we always say to people if you are struggling to pay or there's a reason for you falling behind the best thing you can do is get in touch with us because that is the best way we can identify making sure that we've got reasonable payment plans in place where we actually if there's discretionary support that we can provide and actually sometimes it means we can help hook into other discretionary schemes that are out there to help a household i will let because calling those the technical side the technical side of what happens when you go into arrears be answered by corey if that's okay chair i can press the button for the right time for the first time um yeah no i think it's a good point and as i as i mentioned in the presentation the council has got wide wide reaching powers it's a priority debt counter tax it is entirely at our discretion how we use those powers and i think what i was trying to say we we do send the letter out that says if you don't um pay we will you will get the the opportunity for installments to remove we do that predominantly to try and get people to contact us because as soon as someone contacts us that stops we don't do that anymore we're in a process with them and that's all we want to do with anybody that can't pay is do that okay so whilst we have got those powers we do absolutely exercise with the utmost discretion we don't have to there's no there's no bearing on us whatsoever to have to do that thing somebody doesn't pay we don't have to say they lose their ability and we don't but lester at least anyway okay thank you thank you surprising as all i think my questions follow on really nicely from councillor porters i think there's loads of evidence that shows that if you're if we're chasing um if we're chasing debts of those hardest up actually we're not going to get it back and all we're going to do is end up criminalizing really um people who are living in in dire poverty and so actually i think there's a marked tone since last time we took a paper on on on the debt recovery here and i i and a marked change of tone sorry chair um here and i think that's really welcome and i think that reflects um um certainly some of the concerns i've raised in this area before and i think and this idea of kind of ethical debt recovery and and only really going down heavy enforcement lines when residents have the means to pay is exactly where we should be we shouldn't be in the business of criminalizing people who can't afford to so i think that's really welcome and i wondered if you might um elaborate a bit for me on this proactive um approach to kind of to arrears because it feels to me there must be kind of patterns and rhythms and when people are kind of dropping off from payments for example i know you mentioned like march and uh and april obviously that's when your bill goes out because the first payment of the new the new settlement for example so what are we looking at i know you talked about kind of um credit files but are we kind of looking at people who might be counselling their direct debit or or taking one payment and that sort of thing there's some proactive stuff we're doing with people in that sphere as well please and that's that's a comment and a question sorry chair thanks thank you thank you all really good questions so in terms of debt dropping off and people not paying debt we have now the new counter-tax support scheme that will enable people to pay when when they're income is changing but it constantly does we they are not affected and they continue with their installment plan and council march we hope that the chair chair we hope that we hope that has a big impact and we're already seeing some of that impact earlier even at this early stage in terms of debt segregation it is quite a detailed thing and i'm quite happy to talk about it for a moment um it does enable us to look at lots of different aspects of a person's financial profile and we can do it legally and ethically and we will do when payments start being missed or people aren't paying for whatever reason we will use the powers we have ethically we haven't used them to a great extent before so we've we've sort of as i mentioned in my in my um in my presentation we've sort of been siloing people who you know they owe a certain amount of money we're going to deal with them in a certain amount of way we're not going to do that anymore we're going to we're going to use the powers we've got we've got some new software some new technology to enable us to look at individuals as just that individuals and that's how we're going to achieve helping people at a very early stage absolutely yeah and we don't do enough and we can do more proactively contacting people we wait we're active we wait for them to contact us we want to be much more proactive in this and that and that's how we receive it thank you very much corey thank you um amy as well for the um uh additional support responses i think it's just um great to hear that there is um you know a you know a very ethical and responsive approach to supporting residents when it comes to debt management uh and debt repayment and i think you know something that i just want to mention um with the uh current report and you know its alignment with our customer service um update report both reports do talk about digital transformation i know that councillor batu has um hinted on you know uh um a part of it but i think my my comment and my ask would be that in developing digital transformation across both services that they're not developed in silo that they actually are developed as part of a sinless offer so that people are not um kind of having to jump out of one to jump into another where you know so that they can actually move without even realizing it that you're transitioning from a customer service inquiry and then you know getting some support around benefits or council tax support and i think you know there's no further questions so i want to thank colleagues for um as always a very robust engagement with the paper and the presentation thank you once again to cory i'm going to ask that we note the report that the um suggestions and recommendations and requests for information be noted and um responded to accordingly yep wait so we move on now to uh revenue budget monitoring um our turn report yeah so amy i think this is yourself going to introduce it and damien will present to us yes thank you chair so you might be all wondering why damien and richard are with us tonight what we have um because there's often been questions at previous osc's that go to quite detail around social care and sister elements neighborhoods and actually these are the officers that manage those budgets and have that oversight so actually we thought at osc when we have a revenue and capital report it may be helpful to have um well damien is here covering for um our director of our street director of social care tonight they're here to answer the questions so that you don't have to wait for the actions and to come back to you but just to give you an intro to the report this is the final revenue monitoring report for 24 25 it reports on our final um position at the end of the year i think what is positive to note and demonstrate um is the significant work that's already undergoing within the departments to manage our cost pressure areas and to improve where we know and to meet saving targets ahead of time sorry so in the report it talks about the significant pressures in homelessness and one of the areas of improving to out turn was actually we had less of an overspend by four million in homes it's not the significant work that's going on in that area about bringing temporary accommodation in so we're moving people out of bed and breakfast and into a better temporary environment we've also got the continued work in social care that is bringing down some of the costs in that area and we have in corporate resources and services it talks about the savings that we're achieving ahead of the date that we need to achieve them so we've held some um savings knowing that we had our target savings in 25 26. also in this report this is second time now as a committee you'll have seen a report that reports on our achievement of achieving that 23 million pound target that was set in the budget strategy in february and this notes that the director of taking decisions achieving of nine million pounds and there's a list of those savings in the back of the report at that point chair if it's okay for you i was just going to hand over to damien to give his update on children's placements costs which the committee asked for last time and then open it up to questions if that's okay chair yeah absolutely damien thank you chair um so you requested an update on placement costs they do form a significant proportion of spend within children's services um so just to give you an outline we currently have um 146 children placed in residential children's homes 40 of them within children's homes that we run ourselves and 106 in those run by the private sector and the quality of that private sector care can be variable we we aim to always placing residential units are rated as good or outstanding it's not always possible because of lack of availability and lack of um options for young people but for every child that we have placed in our own provision versus a child placed in an external provision the cost differential is 700 pound per week so as you can imagine by having 40 children placed in our own residential units that's a a cost mitigation of about 28 000 pound per week which soon adds up and that is what lies behind our current strategy which is to expand our internal resource so um some of you may know that in october of last year we opened holly house that was um two semi-detached properties adjoined that the council owns that were deemed no longer fit for purpose and they were knocked it together and then converted into a new children's home a five-bedded units and and hot off the press they had their first ofsted inspection over the last two days and they were judged to be good which is a fantastic achievement considering they've only been open for nine months yeah it's a fantastic facility and and at the same time we all we also commissioned a new build based on land that was an old correct me if i'm wrong i've only been working for last two years an old housing office at hillview or an adult social care officer that's right yeah and that building was not suitable to be converted and refurb so it was demolished and we but it did give us the opportunity to build from scratch and design specifically for the needs of the children that we felt needed to be placed there we've built we're mid build and we should get it handed over to us in the next two to three months we're aiming to open october november and that's a six bedded unit it's five bed with a separate independence flat that can be used as a training flat for young people moving towards independence both those were 50 funded by capital grant grant funding from the dfe and 50 by the council we currently as a result of of our program of growth to try and continue to mitigate cost against the private sector we've got two more capital bids in at the moment with the dfe we originally meant to get a decision in may but the government has decided to delay that decision to sometime during the summer and we do have don't have a definitive date for that but we really hope it will be by the end of august and we are hopeful based on the amount of follow-up questions they've asked to clarify our bid that we are being seriously considered for that one of those will be a a smaller unit a two-bedded unit for young people with very complex needs and then the other units will be a six-bedded unit um that well this is assuming they're successful with the capital bids that a six-bedded unit for children with um complex emotional well-being needs and there's a significant challenge that we have trying to find placements for young people with complex mental health challenges who don't meet the criteria to be in a specialist mental health inpatient units but still need support way above what a traditional children's home can provide and then also we continue to our attempts to grow our internal fostering resource and we currently have 226 so this is at the end of of the financial year 226 children placed in within our own foster care households and a further 132 placed in external foster foster care organizations and the difference there is about 640 pounds per week between our own provision and those external providers so again a significant i mean it's somewhere across the location of somewhere in the region of 7.5 million pound per year by having our own resource and anything counsellors can do to champion our our in-house fostering service which is is very welcome the more we can grow that the more we can make sure that children young people are cared for effectively in the city by carers that we support at a much more effective cost compared to those in the private sector because the vast majority of private sector providers are there to make a profit and that's there are some not-for-profit and some charitable providers that we do also use but the market is dominated by three or four the private sector residential markets dominated by five or six companies that are known to make significant profit and we also i just also wanted to add because we don't often talk about this in terms of placement cost but it is a significant cost uh proportion of the cost that we spend we spend about five million pound per year 4.85 million pound per year supporting special guardians and those family members or friends who've taken out a residence order to care for children and that is a really cost effective way of not only supporting families to make sure extended families to make sure they can care for children within their family network that can't be cared for by birth parents but also a way of delivering permanence for those children within their own family networks so we're currently supporting 407 children in those arrangements who otherwise would be in the care of the local authority and we will be looking for foster care placements or residential placements and the average cost to us is substantially lower than it would be if they were in those placements it's around 220 pound per week so as you can imagine that's a really cost effective way not only to deliver the support that those children and young people need but also to maintain their family relationships and their family network uh and pause there for questions chair thank you very much daniel thank you and you know great uh information on the number of children um you know we're ensuring you're not going through the uh care or you know adoption process but we're supporting families actually look after them so thank you for that uh data so i'm going to open it up to colleagues uh councillor march councillor vatia councillor davi and thank you amy thank you damien and the stuff that you're outlining is i think brilliant because it seems like it's good for children but it's also good for quality for consistency for oversight and also clearly there's some financial savings too but fundamentally if it's it's good it's better for children and the other things as well i think that's exactly where we should be and i've been a big supporter of moving into our own fostering and moving into our own children's homes uh wherever we can and i wish we could do some more of that in in kind of adult social care as well that's slightly more complicated my questions are for amy if that's okay and they're connected to page 46 the revenue budget outcome please and and um as you know amy my broad brush math gets almost worse every meeting but i'm always interested in variances and a variance of 32 can't can't go and question so that is uh what is departmental overheads and how do you manage to get that wrong uh so significantly in in there please and also in housing services i know we've talked about that but it felt like we were on track to bring that in considerably lower than 18.6 percent i think last time we talked about the same figure it feels like that's really rocketed and so uh please if you could just speak to both of those that'd be brilliant thank you for you chairs sorry that's much which one was it the second one sorry at departmental overheads is it details in the report it is around a bad debt um we've had to put some more bad bad debt in that area this year so we've had to allow for some bad debt which will be around our corporate estate there will also be bad debt around um income respects around busing parking funds so it's a combination of factors that has impact that which is quite a small budget but they're in that and it's this project the way it's shown on the table the income lines are actually in all the lines above and that's why it's calling from that so actually probably the presentational thing and actually we probably should show it on the individual departments if i'm being really honest and with housing services i would say we put some we put money aside last year in the budget we put contingencies in we we forecast the pressures that we anticipated and seen i said 18.6 is better than where we thought we were going to be in this year because actually that is that overspend has reduced by four million from what we were reporting at the end of december um so it is not an ideal uh place i think we should go into go into more detail about all the significant work that's going on to relieve the pressure in our temporary accommodation but that is the main reason that's what we're going into this year thank you chair thank you very much for this this is really useful you asked if councils can support in the endeavours to bring it in house so it says 700 pounds per person or per child per week it's quite substantial uh just from what i see from the planning applications that we received recently or there's an upswing or a rise in number of private care home applications coming in and the planning committee approves or disapproves depending on which were there and i don't know i don't want to go into that but the point is the point i'm coming to is in order to achieve that gap which is supported currently by the private sector and to bring it in house how much kind of investment do we expect to make and how much in terms of the timelines would it take effectively so that i mean it cannot be 100 accurate but in terms of achieving that target so that it can be balanced and and as you said you know so you invest up front you bring it in house and you save those 700 pounds per week element so it pays for itself effectively in that sense so that's what i'm asking for do we have some estimates on those things very briefly and i'll let uh damien talk about uh you know benefits but i think kirk kathamars really just sort of summed it up uh you know actually providing these excellent facilities ourselves uh just makes good sense for the kids it makes good sense for uh our own economy and uh it obviously takes them out of the hands of the power protector which is not always uh you know interested in their welfare but more in the bottom line for their balance sheet but i think i just wanted to say that um i think there's some conflation of different issues here because the issues about planning for um uh children's facilities um is not in the most part something that is related to this it is in many cases people wanting to provide places in leicester for children from elsewhere and it's not you know the two things aren't unnecessary substitutes for each other and there are wider issues uh about uh you know the way in which uh private sector providers um choose you know to put kids out of town basically um in uh places uh in our city um and uh i think what we want to avoid doing is being uh we're responsible for doing the same thing in other cities but i think damon can perhaps uh you know fill in on that but there are two separate issues related thank you uh chair i i would absolutely agree that the two separate issues coming up to your your primary question uh how long will it take to eliminate on our reliance on private sector that's never going to happen to be perfectly frank and what i would say is that government has recognized that they need to do more to support us with that and one of the goals of the recently announced reforms which is part of their longer term program over the next three years is that they're providing these capital pots that we can bid for both ourselves and not-for-profit providers and charities so that we can start to shift the balance away from private sector growth towards local authority and not-for-profit sector growth um but because the put the challenge is we're we're trying to not undo but combat or change a pattern that's been in place for about 15 years in the in terms of the growth of the private sector in that space um we will continue to bid for capital funding for whatever whenever it is available you know we we are we have a track record of delivering on these capital projects i can i i know of an and another east midlands local authority that got funding at the same time that we got the funding for holly house they haven't even started building their their unit yet and ours has been open for nine months so we thank the local government sorry central government know we have a track record we we have strong bidding um capacity uh we put strong bids in hopefully we'll be successful again and each time a pot is announced we will bid for it it is always done on the basis of 50 percent funding and match funding basically um but certainly previously that we've been well supported by by uh the mayor and by the the executive in those endeavors and in terms of your support my that was more around sharing the message that fostering in for leicester city council is is is something that can contribute towards our city and it you know sharing that message in your communities um councillor batool has we've already had a discussion in churn young people uh executive around sorry churn young people education scrutiny around um developing a champ and fostering champions model for the city that involves not only officers but also elected members and other faith group leaders and community leaders because my experience in other uh cities where there's a real diverse community is that the best way to promote fostering is by using people who have traction in their own communities sometimes if a local authority officer comes and tries to promote something it doesn't get as well received as perhaps it does if it's from a faith leader or a community leader or an elected member who represents the people of that community so um we are bringing a paper to um scrutiny committee for children uh later in the year with a proposed model as to what that would look like but equally if you have any community groups that you're involved in or faith groups we are more than happy to come and bring our promote and for leicester fostering kind of materials and staff to to any events that you have and as long as we have sufficient notice we do a lot of work with a wide variety of faith groups community groups festivals already but the more coverage we can get to promote that the better thank you for that damien thank you chair i refer to page 46 appendix one i i find the information they're really fascinating um let me explain my dog is just maybe to respond or not respond it doesn't matter to me it's just just i'm trying to express my views on what i'm saying in front of me uh what chair when we set the budget in february that's the original budget just what you think a department or council will spend in mid-year changes are made for whatever reason and then we see the outcome and if you look at this report the variance is between the outcome and the current budget but in reality we should be looking at the variance between the outcome and the original budget which we set that yeah if you really want to get the real information about how things are moving in terms of the trends uh in terms of how they're spending the money now if you if you look from that point of view and if you look at the total general fund right the last uh the last row there if you look at the i would turn 289 million original budget 429 million you know the variance i mentioned is savings would be 70 million pounds now it depends how you see the figures okay and then if you look at some departments for example uh uh housing services the original budget was 15 million revised budget what you call the current budget is 21 million outrun was 25 million so there's a really big gap how the money has been spent but there might be good enough reasons i know homelessness etc etc what i'm saying is there is that um um are we doing our projections properly at the beginning of the year or is there something we need to improve on how you predict how the amount of this plan is going to go with every year we get the figures with the figures we get an explanation about the demands and how services will that the money in the services will go or will be required uh so is the trend that i'm looking at fixing the original budget and then look at the current budgets some of them are way way out it's about the trend i'm questioning are we really projecting our stand in the beginning of the year properly or not because the variance to me for example that is another example that adult social care and safeguarding the original budget was 196 million it was revised downwards fair enough 188 and we again spend less than that and yet we keep on saying that there's a lot of pressure on social care budget it doesn't show that here either we all subscribed to have more money than we should have or the demand is for something has happened there so this is how we project the budget at the beginning of the year and how it turns out i'm just question you may not have the answer but i'm just thinking why why such big variance something is not right there when you study budgets Amy thank you councillor Javi Amy do you want to respond to that thank you chair so the variance from if you went to the budget approved in February 24 the variance is 40 million to what the actual final out term was at the end of the year that is and the main reason is there and it's on the second page of that appendix was the significant work that has been undertaken in social care to reduce their cost down particularly adult social care and also the additional income they are getting from the NHS around recovering costs where it's actually health care rather than social care and that was a decision that came in the period three monitoring report very early on and that is i think recognition of actually some significant work directors have done in that area to mitigate those costs and if you remember the a big part of the strand of the bridge that we set in February was cost mitigation so we've got the savings targets that are in falling mainly in city developments neighborhoods and corporate resources and services but also we have that significant strand of work that is ongoing in social care to mitigate those costs down and actually link some of the work that Damien was talking about earlier around children's social care and ensuring that we've got positive outcomes whilst managing our cost pressures i hope that answers your question council darry thank you chair very quick one chair if i remember correctly the 2324 budget when that social care was underspent as well right yeah i remember it because i was in meeting it was underspent um and despite that we increased the budget and one of the reasons we understand was that we before we had four million four million pounds health care money which we couldn't spend now that's that's fine i'm not questioning all that at all but i just in my mind year in year after if we keep on giving more money to the department not this any other department and the outtown just keeps on going lower and lower it's not what we projected then seriously we need to look at it properly when we do the financing budget financing for the following year through you chair um so we do review our um forecasting every year and we have reviewed it again when we took into account the decision that was made in period freeze monitoring that was built into the um estimations that we used for the forecast for 25 26 it is difficult we have to make lots of assumptions around the populations when it comes to social care and we recognized last year you are right we did get some nhs money in in 23 24 so i'm talking about various years and we have taken that into account in the 25 26 budget that does come with some risk that we flagged at the time because actually we cannot guarantee that nhs money or some of the grant money that we've got in the past will definitely come we often get notified that at a late position way after we've set the February and the budget for the following year in February but we have built some of that into the budget now so hopefully we'll watch that for the year and you'll be able to come back if we have any significant variances again throughout this year thank you um Joanne thank you Amy thank you Damien for the i i won't comment on on the social uh uh children's care although i do think maybe we should we could look at that in the same way that we looked at the housing crisis um and decided to borrow quite substantial sums of money to build to acquire houses maybe we should be looking at that for acquiring properties for children's homes but that wasn't the subject of my question really i wanted to in a way i my question is related to what the councillor davo has just asked because i've been um a councillor for a very long time and i know that every year uh we're presented with a you know the year ahead is presented or certainly the year after the year ahead is presented is going to be a really really difficult one and then when we get to figures we find in fact less has been spent than was anticipated this is a a normal pattern and i'm sure uh amy knows this and she's doing her absolute best to keep it on track but you know it's normal in local government for um projections of spending to be higher than than the spending actually is and then this year we see at the end of this last financial year that in fact um 15.4 million pound savings were achieved uh against the budget um so uh the amount of in reserves has now risen to 55 million from 25 million i see it on the same page so um that has told us that we spent less than we expect than we anticipated the reserves have increased but it then told us nonetheless uh that we're still facing this uh 68 million pounds gap in 27-28 so i think i'd like a sort of explanation as to why uh the reserves have gone up um yet we're still expecting the same level of um of a gap that we had anticipated earlier my second question is a bit more mundane but nonetheless i think relevant i saw in these papers somewhere that the connection service had suffered from a reduction in in its budget now bearing in mind that um we are told that there are about one in eight of young people are not in education employment or training neat i would have thought that budget for connect connection service would have been all used up and in fact a demand for more so could we hear why um that budget is has not been uh fully spent thank you questions to do some go back to the decision um with the reserves and gaps so the reserves is one-off funding so it doesn't fundamentally change the gap this is now between the income and extension we're going to have in year and those forecasts so you'll see in the report talks about some of this is one-off savings and we and some of the more savings that we took ahead of the the budget strategy so we were holding in andrew's area for the director of corporate services area for example we had holding spaces knowing that we needed to make some savings targets so that helps generate one-off money available for this year to put into reserves to help bridge that gap in future years and fundamentally that savings target is already built into our budget line so that gap is not impacted by this saving um by this one-off money that's going into the um budget strategy reserve so all this does is give us a little bit more one-off money to put aside for future years to bridge that gap but it doesn't fundamentally change the gap between our income and expense each of those years the bits that do affect that gap are the bits around the cost mitigation working social care and they will reduce that gap down in our future forecasts because they're not built into our budget predict forecasts going forward i hope that answers that question any connections if i can have a quick look and then i'll come back thank you chair and um i have one question regarding the report and one comment i want to make um about demand report um then i'm not going to go in detail because we already discussed a lot about those looked after children and replacements but i just want to mention to the members who are asking the question that page four and five of the minutes already there that last hour our last group commission our strategic director social care education he presenting a detailed report overview of those care homes that these are interdepartmental things not only one cyp or adult social care can do there's the interdepartmental and multi agencies we are involved there so one can't do that's why we recommended that item going to go to in a work program and i remember that i'd already mentioned that right now we are quite busy with the focus group but probably for the future we are going to have that focus group or like specific um open and close task group where we are going to invite strategic director from the fp of stand or probably cqc who can explain the situation that we were discussing that all those care homes so if you can check the minutes number page four and five it's already given the detail that what exactly we discussed in last meeting so like city mayor was saying that these are two different things that we are discussing one was that clear homes planning is already being discussed in detail in the last meeting and it's already mentioned in the minute so if you kindly please check i'm just giving you the reference that page four and five is all the details are there my question is about the report that given the increased number and complexity of working age adults requiring care packages what preventive and early intervention strategies are being developed to reduce demand and ensure that adult social care remains financially sustainable in the future years if it's okay can i take that action away because um our director of institute director of social care would have answered that normally and i can't go into that level of detail to answer all those questions if it's okay i'll take that as an action and we'll report back to the committee so that's fine um amy for you to take that as an action and i think uh councillor martin just said that uh prevention will be taken up within adult social care as uh uh an agenda item councillor governor thank you so just a quick question on the housing overspend i know we were predicted to understand by seven million but it's now four million um i assume that it's down to temporary accommodation and the money we've invested so the overspend of four million is that because we've not fully utilized that 45 million to you know get properties in order to reduce that down and if so would that overspend sort of disappear in the coming years as we get more and more of our own temporary accommodation in place do you want to come in yes i'll answer that so um the answer is yes we have bought a substantial amount of property um but a lot of uh houses flats um and as as we know from a recent osc we're also trying to buy the yoho building as well and a series of buildings to try and stave off some of the costs that we're saving so we've been um almost too successful um that's brought the projection of cost down from seven million to four million um and had we had a couple of decisions uh move through slightly quicker we probably would have brought that down by about another million as well uh to answer your ultimate question um yes we think that that will reduce significantly going forward we are my only caveat to that is we are doing some projection based work at the moment on the introduction of various legislation and um some early signs that we're seeing around the changes on the renters rights bill at the moment um so we're working on that uh but at the moment yes that that investment of the 45 million is what has brought all that cost down it's been quite quite a successful program so far amy is there anything you want to add thank you very much richard any other questions i can't see i'd say thank you all uh very much um again uh to uh note the uh outturn position which has been detailed in the report um i know that uh there's been a few actions from uh this discussion so they've been noted and uh will be uh made available to members uh thank you to the council of match for uh agreeing to take a particular agenda item and uh council of the tool for flagging the conversation which are taking place within the children and young people scrutiny committee um so just to again note the report all the recommendations and suggestions thank you to amy damian and richard for presentation and the responses to the questions and colleagues who are engaging quite robustly again uh with the um report so we move on now to um our capital budget monitoring our term report ted do you want me to keep the interest for the next three reports quite short and go straight to questions because i'm just conscious of time yes so if yes okay so this is the final uh capital report you can see three early reports in the year this is a standard action report it just reports the performance of the capital program against the budget there is a number of decisions in here for some additions whether we have got some additional grant funding and also there's some approvals where we are looking to move split budgets forward where the capital program hasn't quite gone to the timelines we were anticipated otherwise chair i will hand over to questions if that's okay counselor mature thank you um thank you amy um for the detailed report so you don't need to present a lot of things it's already there um my very first question is about um page 66 uh where they said with over 50 percent of the capital program budget unspent in 24 25 i can earn 37.7 million of 283.1 million um what systematic issues are contributing to persistent slippage across projects and work programs and what strategic actions are being taken to address capacity and delivery risks in the face of continuing inflation and supply chain pressures so the first thing i want to just sort of touch on there is that first line is in projects and that's 100 and nearly 160 million of the budget we don't expect that to all be spent in 24 25 the nature of capital programs they often go over multiple years so actually yes it says we're going to spend 61 million of that but we wouldn't have expected us to spend all that during the year um work programs yes we have got some slippage in there the main areas are um around fleet that is where we need the budget to approve it to be able to place the orders but actually there's a significant delay on ordering seats at the moment they can be months between us placing the order and it's actually um arriving for us to be able to use there is areas where um the schools maintenance and the official state where we are looking at improvements and richard may want to come and touch on those areas where they've had the largest slippage so yes there is it doesn't like we haven't spent all the program but actually there was never an intention that we'd all be spent in this financial year but what we do here is we put the whole approved budget for capital that isn't going to take them more for a year and if it's okay we should touch on someone's slippage items if that's all right chair can we expect a fundamental review of all those um like is it either procurement strategies or our contractor engagement or internal project management capacity to reduce any future delays okay so i guess i'll commit that point so um we operate in quite a difficult environment at the moment especially around contractors as we've seen in the city we've seen a number of contractors going to liquidation we've also seen a number of contractors suffer from quite cost-based problems at the moment so in terms of trying to mitigate that we do a lot of pre-market engagement so you'll see that we're currently out on a number of pre-market engagements we're also trying to let more frameworks we're also trying to do more risk-based reviews so we constantly go through projects and look at the main cost risks and issue risks and how we can mitigate those and we also look at cost-based float so if we look at all the risks how much cost variance do you think we'll see on a project how can we mitigate that early and we also look at on programs where we can and how can we mitigate program and access problems as well so there's a lot of work that takes place place there we do try and on the maintenance programs work with schools around school holidays sometimes that works sometimes we get issues with that i can go into some of that and on the maintenance programs we are seeing longer leading times creeping at the moment which again is something we're trying to mitigate so um we are trying to work around how we can do more engagement with the market around longer term um uh longer term procurement and the procurement act asks us to publish uh more long-term programs and open on procurement in that regard so i think that's probably everything a lot of the slippage is already committed slippage so what i mean by that is a lot of it is already in contract it's just that the program has slipped out so we're confident on the timelines of delivery based on that so i'll give you an example on a lot of the maintenance programs they're already in contract it's just they've slipped past the main dates as well so there's a degree of confidence around it yes we do um a thing called a stress test on projects so we do a number of reviews so for example on the school's maintenance maintenance program we did the stress review on that about two weeks ago and we principally go through that line by line what that identifies is the confidence on delivery so each line has a rag rating of green amber red red being the worst amber being there's issues green being it's good to go so and then we look at that as a percentage-based spend then where we've got red based issues we take those out to the next program and we review them and if we can't deliver on them we just speak to him about a money handback or we look at whether we can bring something else on the program forward or if we're on certain sites can we bring some maintenance items forward on that site thank you chair on page 10 summary of individual projects i just don't have any debate on it at all i'm just pointing something out here page 10 summary of individual projects yeah okay there's a line there towards the end library self-access rollout now look at 542 000 pounds in there it was agreed september 24 was the completion date and now the forecast is done now just is this in any way connected with the current debate on the reshaping exercise or this is different okay now if there's no answer that's fine i'll write to the director concern and talk with him or however i'm just going to open up the last time we brought a report to osc because i think it pretty much told us in that so if you just give me two seconds it's it's okay i like to the director doesn't matter to me i'm just pointing it out here because there may be more to it than what i'm saying here there may not be anything there if we come back to you chair that'll be fine if that's okay we'll pick it up outside this meeting might use games area thing i think there's a report going to the executive committee yeah it's on your schedule yeah okay hopefully something good will come up with for my word just very quickly what's the what's happening with the the rest of the railway station level um first thing to say is that um i've talked before about the fact that uh the getting of a contractor was not straightforward um i have double triple checked and none of the money that's been spent so far are city council resources what we've spent so far is money very uh generously provided by the government uh and we will be talking with them um about uh trying to bridge any gap between uh what has so far been provided by them and what it will ultimately cost uh and i'll be very frank um you know we will be explaining to them how strategically important it is to them to have a railway station to the 21st century if i did i get that right thank you chair and it's just a quick one on the on the projects that are in purple and on the whole when will a final decision be made to decide whether that's going to go ahead or not for example some pools which is impossible so obviously it's a personal interest and then um some of the district heating stuff as well so yeah 20 clarification on when that decision will be made thank you it's really difficult to give a blanket on all of them but um on site pools we're um trying to engage with the owner specifically um i'll say as it is which is the owners being incredibly evasive um uh our conservation officer justin's doing all he can to try and secure the building there was actually a meeting uh two weeks ago to try and look at different options and different ideas we don't want the building to deteriorate anymore um so that that's where we are we can't make a decision to move forward until we have legal basis and grounds to do so so um that's as much as i can give you and that feels really open-ended and as i've said it i can see it's open-ended but that is that is where we are at the moment so um we could get more engagement from them we've recently um agreed to uh issue some correspondence which i saw last week um and we're hoping that that may unlock the uh project so um what was it you asked for another one what was it all um uh yes uh most of the district heating so we've we've undergone a review on that a lot of it is committed and some of this is a provision we've got a uh review program taking taking place we should be able to give a decision on that around about next month or so i've got a meeting on that one as well thank you richard so um i've just got um a query around the energy smart initiatives so um currently is showing that we have a 2026 completion date and it's showing um green so can you just talk us through where those initiatives are so that's on page 74 so do you mean do you mean the energy smarts initiative cdn ebs b2 million yes i can on that sorry that's currently going through uh feasibility work at the moment um and we'll be able to come back on that we should be able to bring a report soon soon on that one at the moment um yeah that's yeah that is that's great yeah so there's original commitments on it and then they go through surveys on each of the sites at the moment no it's not it's not completed it's due for completion in in june 26 yeah that was a fairly recent decision that was published it's a clean it's like um we call it uh green and clean clean green initiative so it was invest to save where we invest in environmentally friendly environmentally positive projects that also give us a return on our revenue side and help with our savings program so it's a recent decision so it's gone now it's green because actually the date we set when we improved the budget was it will be completed in march and i think this might be the first time actually it's even been brought into this um capital report i hope that helps thank you chair so this is the income collection report this um reports on how we performed in our main income collections during the year i think i'll just conscious of time i will hand straight over to questions if that is okay chair i'm conscious that we've already touched on some of these items actually earlier today okay this is um a second report you've received for the year this reports on how we've managed our cash balances and loans during the year and again i'm happy just to go straight to questions if you would like um i think we always bang on in this one i don't really about that lost three funds and it's good to see the days broken down here and that that kind of candid approach i think it's something we need to continue to keep an eye on to major and and there's a new treasury manager role isn't there that's hopefully going to keep us um better at those sorts of things i guess in the compliance side of it going forward thank you yeah so this is um just report on the final position of the property funds and the lost three property funds that has now come to a close and this pretty much probably will be the last time we report on that um property item we have got new treasury advisors that will support us um i think what i would say is that we always err on the side of our caution but the nature of investments is sometimes they do do not always necessarily go in our favour but what we try and do is make sure we've got a balanced portfolio between assuring that um we get returns on our investment but also we protect the um public money okay thank you chair yes i i i know um that we i think we have some new i don't know what do you call them financial managers advisors what what their official title is um there's been a change anyway uh can i ask whether they these uh newly recruited or relatively newly recruited ones are in your opinion doing a better job than the their predecessors i would say that we have had a very good relationship with both our treasury advisors both historic ones and our current ones and i've had no particular concerns with either treasury advisors to be honest i think they all advise us on the best information they've got at the time based on forecasts from multiple agencies they don't just rely on their own information they use huge credit agencies out there that are multinational and they give us the best advice as they can at the point in time when they are advising us okay thank you very much and i think it is uh over to myself now to uh introduce the scrutiny annual report and again i would like to wholeheartedly say um thank you to councillor cassidy thank you to colleagues who were part of the um previous uh overview scrutiny commission uh if you um see in the report everybody's got um shiny smiley spacey on so um when i saw that i thought oh this is quite uh swishy so um i don't need to override the reports because um we all know the content of it um and i want to say thank you to all the chairs uh for those who are returning chairs thank you very much for the work you've done just to um stress that um as i'm sure we all know that um scrutiny in itself uh is a fundamental part of how we do governance um within you know our city and within uh local government and i want to just enjoy each and every one of us to continue to ensure that we um truly and you know uh faithfully give our all in in in the process of examining issues that come up or are brought to our attention either by residents or us and when we have our meetings i want to also um ask that we you know use this process as a way to establish some key ways or key lines of inquiry for us as you know as a group and as a city to be able to deliver for our residents to be able to challenge sometimes how we can do things better in a good example council rebuttal you know has raised some fantastic points around um the role uh or the the customer inquiry service around you know the customer experience and how we can actually start to challenge ourselves um not just as a local authority but a service provider to be able to match what the corporate um entities offer to um their service users so i want again i want to say thank you all very much and you know i look forward to a successful um year of working uh with each and every one of us to deliver for the city but most importantly to be able to come to um do good scrutiny and hold to account with respect but you know quite robustly and proactively so i should get off my salt wax and say thank you all very much it is oh yes the um uh work program and then oh yes question so is everybody happy for oh councillor waddon's in a couple of things sorry to hold you all up but um is that on the work program on the work program yes i'm talking about the work program um first of all uh i think in september we need to add uh there was um a report back from the task group if it is a task group but it's looking at adventure playgrounds yes um we've got a couple of meetings planned as i recall yes they're not down there you'll be on that yeah the second thing uh sorry to call you all up again i'm glad that um richard is still here because i saw an um timetable um item on the community asset transfer policy uh we have been told i think at the last adventure playground uh class group meeting that the there was a new community asset transfer policy being developed and obviously that's quite relevant in a number of situations so i wonder if we could ask richard if when that would be available for us to look at thank you richard that is correct there is one under development at the moment um it's due for sign off the end of this month um and due to internal sign off in august and i believe it's coming to due scheduled for a scrutiny in september i believe um i could probably come back with firm dates on which scrutiny and when but that that as that as i understand it that's the program for it