 Rhaid i'n newid y clywed am yr ysgol, ond ond er mwyn i'n ffordd yr hyn beth oes ar gyfer yng Nghymru. Mae'r cyfrigeisedd cysylltu i fynd yn lleol, a'r cyfrigeisedd cysylltu i'r cyfrigeisd cysylltu i'r cyfrigeisd cysylltu i'r gwybodaeth, This is a meeting of South Cambridgeshire District Council Cabinet. So the norm procedure at Cabinet is that we take votes by affirmation and will continue with this tradition. When we move to a vote on any item, I'll ask if members agree with the proposal and only those members present in the Chamber will be able to move and second motions and vote. But members present virtually will be able to speak in the debate and if they could indicate by raising their hand, then either I will see them or Erin will see them. Okay, so can I just confirm the meetings for it, please? Thank you. All right. So have you had any apologies for the absence here? Thank you very much indeed. Have we any declarations of interest? No. And on to the minutes of the previous meeting, I will propose that they are a correct record and I think Councillor Pee's Macdonald's going to second them. Are there any issues arising, Councillor? Yes, certainly. I'd like to second that. Thank you. Very much. Any issues arising from the minutes? No. Okay. Do members agree to approve the minutes? Thank you. Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? So the Cabinet therefore agrees the approval of the minutes as a correct record by affirmation. Announcements, I don't have any announcements. Does anybody else? No. Moving swiftly on, public questions and I don't believe we have any public questions either today. Okay. And issues arising from scrutiny and overview committee. Councillor Adam Bradenham, you'll hear representing the committee. Do you want to speak now or do you want to speak in the body of the meeting, please? May I speak in the body of the meeting? Fine. If I forget, just wave at me and remind me. Thank you. Okay. So the first item, number seven, is the response to the Huntingtonshire District Council issues engagement paper and I think this is going to be proposed by Councillor Tumey Hawkins and I think Councillor Bill Handley is going to second it. Fine. Councillor Hawkins, do you want to introduce this? Thank you very much, Leader. Yes, Hunt's District Council is reviewing its 2019 Adopted Local Plan which governs its development in the district up to 2036. The consultation paper is asking for feedback on how the council should set its priorities for improving the district. Of course, we have a duty to cooperate with neighboring councils. So this document presents our proposed response to that consultation and that's going to be jointly with Cambridge City Council. What we've done is identify what we see as the key cross boundary issues that affects Greater Cambridge and the main one of this is water supply, which is not surprising. Quite a very key aspect, especially since parts of Huntingtonshire is by Cambridge Water and also to consider water efficiency standards such as we are looking at 80 litres per person per day that we're looking at in our emerging local plan. Travel to work and transport issues is also a joint issue that we have because we've got the A428 upgrade and the East West Rail in common and we're also encouraging them to adopt what we think are ambitious biodiversity policies. I've got Jonathan Dixon here who can answer more specific questions. If we have any. But just to say, I recommend recommendation in paragraph 4 of the report to cabinet. Thank you. Thank you very much. I believe the paper was drafted by Charlotte. Thank you very much. Very nicely written papers. Is there anything you want to add Charlotte at this point? No, thank you councillor Smith. There's nothing that I feel I need to add. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Are there any questions? No. Okay. So again, thank you Charlotte for all your work on this. We'll move to the recommendation as set out in paragraph 4. Yes, I won't read them on page 21-22. So does anyone wish to... Sorry, do you members agree with the proposal? Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? No, thank you. So cabinet therefore agrees the proposals by affirmation. Thank you. And moving on to item 8. The adopted Cambridge and South Cambridge are local plans 2018. The five year review of strategic policies is a really very important and current item. So again, councillor Toomey Hawkins is going to introduce it. And I think councillor John Williams is going to second. And we've got John Dixon here who will answer any technical questions. Councillor Hawkins, over to you. Thank you, leader. I won't label this too much but the current local plan as we know was adopted in September 2018. So we'll be five years in a few months time. And we have a statutory duty to review the plan at least every five years from its adoption date. And that is what we've done. And that's what this report before you is all about. We have to assess if the current adopted local plan is still in line with any changes in the national planning policy that has taken places adoption. And if any changes, how that would affect the weight we attach to our local plan policies. Now, happily I can confirm that the majority of the policies remain consistent with national planning policy. There are a few that, although are still consistent, do not reflect the full changes in the wording in national policies. So those changes can still, however, be considered fully when applications are being determined. Just in summary, I'd say there are three which, as you see in the report, have a rack rate in November. S3, S12 and H10. S3 is a wording difference really, which is the presentation of people sustainable development. S12 is on the phase in delivery and monitoring, which we do, you know, the calculations of housing delivery test and, I don't know if the report should be based on the standard method. And the definition of affordable housing in H10, the MPPF says 10 or more and our policy is 11 or more. So those are just the slight differences. But as I said, you know, the rest of it is fine, but I don't think I can answer questions. And I want to say thank you for all the work that's been done on this. It's taken a lot of effort. So I therefore move recommendation in paragraph 4 to Cabinet. Thank you. Thank you very much, Councillor Hawkins. Are there any questions from anybody on this? Councillor Heather Williams. Thank you, leader. My questions, I think, probably relate to the section about the five-year land supply, which is currently in amber, and it says about the transitioning after October 23, I think it is, that we then go to a different sort of formula to calculate that. My question is how we stand given the environment agency's concerns that they've raised. And I'm just seeing in particular reference, they do reference, as well as Darwin Green born airfield. And I'm wondering, there was an application put in in 2018 which came to committee in 2021 that's still awaiting decision. Is that included in our calculations and what is the impact this is going to be? And actually, when was the council aware of the queries from environment agencies and then trying to block development here? Because it's a very major issue. Thank you. I'm going to come to John Dixon on that. I mean, we've been working very closely with the environment agency for a long time and we continue to work very closely with them. But I'm going to ask John just to sort of explain the timing of these things and the impact on the five-year housing land supply. So, much of these issues were covered in the updated housing trajectory, which we publish every year. The last one was published in April this year. And in that paper, it summarised the impact of moving to the standard method and showed that we will still have a five-year supply when that change takes place. In terms of the impact of delays to a determining number of applications, we have done some, what shall I call it, stress testing of the housing land supply. And again, delays determining those applications look unlikely to impact on our five-year land supply, certainly in the short term. Those applications, many of those are affected, were either late in that five-year period or could be delivered in the slightly longer term. So there's no instant impact of those delays, those applications being determined. As for when those comments were raised by the environmental or any individual applications, I don't have that information to hand, but Gilead is quite a recent issue. This has been evolving very much this year, as reported from my context through the local plan reports. Back in February showing we needed to have a greater understanding of the outcome of the draft water resource management plan. And I think the position has evolved over the very recent months regarding the environmentalist position on those. So I don't have that specific information, but it has been a very recent event. Thank you very much. Do you want to come back? Yes, thank you, leader. So I think as councillors, all councillors, full council needs to understand the repercussions of what the environment agency has done in raising their concerns. Because it says that it would affect at least 4,425 dwellings. And also as a member of the planning committee, I'm sure all planning committee members would appreciate some briefing or update ahead of the next committee as to what this means. Because in other areas it has actually meant when these agencies step in that we can't grant permission. So we need to understand exactly as a committee what is going on here. And it was not best to find out via the BBC leader. So we've been flagging the water issue for a long, long time. The new emerging local plan makes it perfectly clear that water supply and maintaining water quality is the biggest limiting factor in delivering growth in the area. So it's been quite clear. And we've written a number of letters to government over quite a long period, most recently about two weeks ago actually, highlighting to government that there's a problem here that needs escalating. I'm aware that the Cambridge Water Plan has recently been sent back by DEFRA, am I right I'm saying? Because actually it's, do you want to add some detail about John? At the environment agency has made comments on the draft Water Resources Manager Plan of Cambridge Water, which they will be required to respond to in the coming weeks and months. Thank you. So again, it's not, we're the planning authority, we're not responsible, we cannot build reservoirs and so on. And so this is very, we have to work closely with a large number of agencies and have been doing so for some considerable time. But we have talked on numerous occasions about the challenge of the water supply and the threats to our water courses here. So it's not something that's just popped up out of the blue. It's something we've been talking about very vociferously over quite a long period of time. Councillor Hawkins. Thank you, leader. Just to be clear, I know that there's a figure of 4,000 has been bandied about as what's been affected. Let's be clear that that is the total number of homes on each of those sites. It's not what is in the period of the five years that we look at for the 5,000 or so plus. For example, Bony Airfield, they say 3,000. But that's 3,000 over the next 10, 15, 20 years. Not within that 5,000. I just wanted to make that clear. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for your questions. So we will move to the recommendations. Four, which are on page 29 and 30. So do you members agree with the proposals? Agreed. Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? Cabinet therefore agrees with the proposals by affirmation. Thank you very much, Jonathan, and your team for a huge amount of work and for setting it all out so clearly. Much appreciated. Thank you. Moving on to item nine, which is the community safety partnership. Councillor Bill Handley is going to present this. I think Councillor Peter MacDonald is going to second it. Councillor Bill Handley. Thank you, leader. Community safety partnership. Community is a statutory partnership made up of representatives from a number of agencies, including the police, health probation service and councils. Aim is to reduce crime and disorder, substance misuse, re-offending and so on. And the gathering of data and their interpretation is a very important role of this partnership. I know the work falls into my portfolio. The council's member representatives are actually councillors Salian Hart and Helen Leaming. Together with Catherine Hawks, the office of Catherine Hawks and her team, they've been sort of the driving force in the partnership. The councillors are named responsible body and the accountable body for the CSP. So it must have oversight of and be in agreement with the operational plan. Hence its presentation to you for approval. And this paper did go to the scrutiny and overview committee and I expect Councillor Brandon will wish to advise us of their comments. But I won't say any more just to say that I think it's an excellent report and I recommend that Cabinet agrees the content of the operational plan considering the lead role that the council takes and the resources that we commit to it. If you look at Para 4, as described, if you like on Para 4, page 183. Thank you, leader. Thank you. Councillor Bradman, would you like to tell us some scrutiny and overviews on this? Thank you very much, leader. Yes, and thank you very much to Ian Senior for producing the summary of our findings, which were very helpful. As Councillor Handley points out, the community safety partnership is an extremely useful thing and an extremely useful gathering forum in which views from all parties can be brought together and brought to bear on problems which are recognised to be emerging or static or declining. So it's a really useful thing. One of the things I raised actually was that in the operational plan that we should not duplicate work that's already been done before and I remember when North Stowe was just developing we asked for a task and finish group to look at the developing of a new community and I just wanted to make sure that we were using the research that they did in that task and finish group to inform the developing of new towns such as Water Beach and to make sure that we didn't duplicate or miss lessons learned from a previous community development. We also asked for some straightforward things. One was a glossary of terms which I can see has gone into this report which is extremely useful for those of us who have set out wondering what the SG was and all that sort of thing. And just in addition to the three points that were made for which related to lessons learned glossary of terms and then an assurance from the lead cabinet member for resources that the existing sum of £15,000 in the budget will continue to be available because we recognise the importance of the work. There were also some questions about whether there's any analysis of trends rather than just compare achievement of targets and we also talked about rural crime and how that's being tackled by the community safety partnership and in particular hair coursing and we have various other questions interrogating the agenda that was on the whole. We were very pleased to see the work that the community safety partnership is doing. Thank you, leader. Thank you very much indeed. Councillor Handley, do you want to respond to any of the comments of scrutiny? Yes, I'm pleased to see that the glossary terms has appeared and all of the points that have been raised by the scrutiny of the committee were very helpful and have been taken into account by officers and indeed by myself. Thank you. Thank you very much. Are there any questions from Cabinet? Any questions from anyone else? No, okay. So thank you very much to Linda Galliford and Catherine Hawks for a very, very readable report, much appreciated. Just go to the recommendation at 4 on page 183. So do you members agree with proposal? Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? Cabinet therefore agrees the proposals by affirmation. And moving on, item 10, quarter four performance report and Councillor John Williams will present this and I'm very happy to second it. So Councillor Williams. Thank you, leader. This is obviously quite an important quarter for us to be looking at because it covers the period of the three month trial of the four day week and therefore it's of great interest to a lot of people to see. How we performed in those three months. The fourth quarter is also always a difficult quarter because it's leading up to the new council year. So in particular in the last month in March we get a lot of inquiries about new council tax bills and housing benefits and all sorts of other queries happen in that month. So the fourth quarter of the financial year is also generally a difficult quarter. I'm delighted to say and you can see from the results that first of all our performance largely was not affected by four day. In fact our performance improved in a number of areas and we were able to cope very well with that increased traffic from our residents at the end of the financial year leading into the new financial year. And as you see there in the outlaw column there are no rates that we are nowhere are we exceeded the intervention levels that we expect to in the current quarter and overall it's a very satisfying result. So I hope it gives confidence to our residents that the four day week trial the first four day week trial the first three month trial has not affected this council's performance and they've continued to have a good quality of service. Obviously I'm very happy to answer any particular questions on particular KPIs. But I would ask that you look at the comments and also the trends because there lies the answer to a lot of the queries. And can I also say that I'm very grateful to Scrooge and your overview for their views and we are looking at the way that the chart that is drawn to make it clear as to the the months shown on the on the trend graphs make it clear for people. Thank you. Thank you very much Councillor Williams. Yeah and I'm very pleased with Mystery Shopper work. I'd like us to repeat this to do this and make this a regular thing. Make a decision. I'll leave it up to the chief executive how often we do it but I think that's very useful benchmarking with the completely independently commissioned Mystery Shopper exercise actually does show us that actually the people working in our contact centre do a really really good job. The fact that they're considered friendly and they answer the vast majority of questions as soon as they're asked is excellent. So are there any questions from Scrooge and my apologies Councillor Bradlin. Right thank you leader. Forgive me I'm struggling with my online version so I'm not going to give you any page numbers but certainly Scrooge and your overview ask a lot of questions. Which is not which is not particularly reflected in this but I think that's because we had satisfactory answers but just to reassure you we asked for an x-axis on the graphs and that graphs of the little graphs that are shown in performance and that has gone in in your version you've got the years we had no x-axis at all on the original graphs so you really had no idea where you were so I'm quite happy with that and I think that makes them a bit more understandable. We asked a number of questions and for example on the Mystery Shopper exercise there were a range of questions ranging from did you do calls late at night do you think we could offer customer access in the evening when maybe people have come back from work and want to contact us. We asked about whether the staff who were on the customer call centre were aware that a Mystery Shopper exercise was going on so they shouldn't be caught on the hop as it were and feel vulnerable and we were assured that that was the case they had been told but obviously it was done in an anonymous way. We asked about benchmarking, about costs, we asked about also quite a lot of questions about recycling bins and the waste service and the analysis of the amount of waste that's being recycled, the amount of waste that's being collected and how that's being affected. There was a question relating to blue bin content being contaminated and whether that's frequent and how we can increase the amount of recycling that we do and reduce the amount that goes to landfill. We also talked about council tax and the recovery of that concentration on staff in January and February and we looked at the method of calculation, we interrogated the method of calculation, I think that also has been some strangenesses there have been ironed out in the version that's come to cabinet. We also looked at simple things like is data from the ground source heat pump in the car park actually being conveyed to members of staff here and I believe that's still ongoing, that process to produce some communication about what we're generating and how we're using that energy. Are we helping PCs with preparedness for the planning meetings that we have, things like preparing to apply for grants, whether we give parish councils any assistance with applying for grants. Finally, the EV charging grant scheme, we asked a number of questions around that because it's quite complex for signposting to suppliers and making sure that when people have, whether they have the wherewithal to apply for a grant in an informed way, it was just sort of helping people do that. Finally, provision for those who can't use online services, we absolutely recognise that it's important as many people who can access our services online but are we still making provision for people who can't access help online and certainly through the customer services survey we found people were reassured that people were being assisted to fill forms in online by our customer services system. Thank you very much and I'm pleased to hear that you had satisfactory answers to the vast majority of the questions. Councillor Williams, do you want to respond to anything? No, I don't really have anything to add to that. As I say, we did have a very, very detailed and useful conversation in the Spudino review on these figures and as Councillor Bratton has said, we've incorporated, we've changed things as a result in this report. Thank you. Any questions from Cabinet Members? Councillor Williams? Thank you, Leader. One question that was asked and I'm not sure we yet have an answer but hopefully we do is to how much the mystery shopper exercise cost to run as it was an independent and not done in-house. I don't know the answer to that. Jeff Menbridge, you know the answer to that one. Yes, through you, Leader. It was £8,800. £8,800, okay. So I think it's really, I hope you agree, Councillor Williams, it's a valuable exercise and I'd be very keen that we kept it up. I think it's important that we don't just rely on anecdotal evidence for how well our phones are being answered. I think it's important that we get some independent evidence of it. Do you want to respond back? I have to say that I find actually that's really difficult to agree with. The results are good and I have the utmost respect for those people in the contact centre and I often feel actually very sorry for them because they take the brunt of when things are going badly from people. I do feel though that often why would you single out them? There are plenty of other departments in this council that probably could do with that sort of level of we see the complaints come in, where the complaints come in service areas, it's very rarely them. So why would they get picked on in that way? I'll come to a second but I'll say that nobody's been picked on and actually we have very detailed KPIs that monitor performance in areas like planning but it was just when this is the face-to-face or telephone-to-telephone contact people, it's really there's no other way other than asking people about what's the person on the end of the phone friendly, did they offer their name, did they signpost you where it is? Where you needed to go so I think we're covered in other service areas but Councillor Williams. Thank you leader. The reason we did this is because members asked us to. In fact this isn't directly related to the four day week. We were going to be doing this anyway because at previous Scrooge and Overview meetings and indeed comments made in other committees including Cabinet. We had agreed that we would do this because there'd been some criticism anecdotal criticism of the way calls have been handled and so we agreed that we would use a mystery shopper to sort of see if those complaints were justified and that's why it's done. And I think having done it, as the leader said, I think it's worthwhile that we do it perhaps every year just to make sure that because this is front of house this is as someone has said a lot of people aren't able to use the website all the time. And for a lot of people who are not able to do that, face to face contact is extremely important and it's very important to us to make sure that that contact is done with the result that the person is satisfied with the result. So this was done really as a result of members' request and I'm pleased it was done because I think the evidence shows that our call centre is actually working very well. Thank you very much and I would just add that I think they take, the call centre often takes the very unfair brunt of criticisms and I think what this work has done has actually shown that actually it is jolly unfair. They are actually, so they haven't been picked on, we've actually demonstrated that actually they're doing a terrific job and that the vast majority of calls get answered within two minutes and well over 90% of people are very satisfied with the results of that call. So, you know, I imagine that they, I'm sure they welcome the results because it's, so yeah, so not being picked on. I don't know, Jeff, there was anything you wanted to add to that have we sort of covered it? And councillor John Williams covered it and I can reassure your leader that we are celebrating success with the team. I won't name the individual but there was one individual that actually scored 100% for all of the calls that they received for every area. So we'll be finding a way to particularly recognise that person. That's really nice. There's an opportunity for me to say thank you to them personally and then I'd absolutely welcome that. So fantastic. Okay, so if there are no more questions, we'll move to the recommendations at four, which is on a page 203. So, do you members agree with proposal? Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? Cabinet therefore agrees proposals by affirmation. And item number 11 is the annual equality scheme, which councillor adopted to me Hawkins is going to present and councillor John Williams is going to second. So over to you to me. Thank you, leader. It's like issues that I deal with coming like London buses several at a time. This is the council's equality scheme report, which we publish annually. And the one today that we're looking at is for the 2023 to 24 year. Of course, as I say, as a modern and caring council, quality, diversity and inclusion is important to us. What this report actually does is list the actions we propose to implement over the coming year to establish within the council and the wider district these policies. Scrutiny went through this report with a fine tooth comb. And I want to say thank you to them for the questions that they raised. The one thing I'd like to identify or at least raise is that you will see that we have started collecting some really useful statistics. Sort of in a quality profile nationally compared with the quality profiles in South Cambridge itself. And we got this from the 2021 census figures over the coming years. Of course, we will be looking at aligning them to make sure that we're comparing likes for likes, but this really does show some really interesting figures. Just to say, you know, appendix A, as I said, is the list of actions, some of which we carried over from last year. And appendix B shows that we don't have any red or grey indicators, which means we're doing something right, but there's always room for improvement, of course. So I would recommend the recommendation to cabinet. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Councillor Bradman, the views are scrutiny. Thank you very much, leader. Yes, we, as with the other items, there were a lot of questions about this. And very pleased to see the layout of the report and how clear it was, alarmed that we will have one in five people over 65 in 2031. One of the things we wanted to be clear about was whether, again, whether comparisons between our data and national data are being done on the same, on a comparable database. I was just slightly concerned as to whether we were comparing things from different sources and that they might not actually be comparable. But I think, in general, we were assured that they were. But we just need to be careful about data from South Gems and data from county or national sources. We asked about, sorry, I'm referring to pages from the earlier report on the horizontal tables. Let me just find it. Of course, we asked about whether there were procedures in place to avoid unconscious bias. And we were assured there are. So I think in applications we were assured there's no information on age, sex, et cetera. We were assured about that. We were also concerned about. While the work is going on at South Cams Hall, whether there was interim arrangements for disabled access and are we doing enough in terms of gypsy and traveller needs. We were assured about that too. We looked at crime data over the period and we interrogated that and we were reassured. One of the slightly amusing things we noted on the appendix A1 on the report that things like pockets of high fertility wasn't clear. We noticed that there were pockets of high fertility in places such as Milton and Water Beach for females aged 15 to 44. And we wondered whether that was considered to be of concern or of delight. Because it wasn't clear whether that was an activator in crime or something that we needed to address. I'm sure it was either, but that was asked about as well. But in general, the summary that we've been provided with is absolutely on the bottom. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. There's a very, very nice infographics at 271 that puts out the headlines including the high birth rate in Milton and Water Beach, which I'm sure must be celebrated. Any questions from any members? Any questions from anyone else? Thank you very much to Kevin Ledger for this report and the one before. I'm sorry I didn't thank him for the last one. Both huge amounts of work. So the recommendations are set out in three in this one. Thank you very much indeed. Do you members agree with the proposals? Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? Cabinet therefore agrees the proposals by affirmation. So we've got to the stage of the meeting where we need to consider whether to exclude the press in public from the meeting. And it's because the final two items contain information which is commercially sensitive. So members of the public are advised that if Cabinet agrees to exclude the press in public, the video stream will end. So we will thank you for joining. I therefore propose that the press in public be excluded from the meeting during consideration of the remaining items of business in accordance with section 100a brackets for the Local Government Act 1972 on the grounds that if present there would be a disclosure to them of exempt information as defined in paragraph 3 of part 1 of Schedule 12a of the Act as amended. Is that seconded? Councillor MacDonald nodding? Yes, yes leader. Do you members agree with the proposal? Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? Cabinet therefore agrees the proposal for affirmation. So members of the public who are watching the webcast, the video stream will now end. Thank you very much for joining us for today's meeting. And the next meeting of Cabinet will take place on Tuesday the 26th.