 welcome to this meeting of south can through the district council screening and overview committee. May I make a few housekeeping announcements? Those present, including any members of the public observing or any public speakers, are asked to note that this meeting is being filmed and live-streamed. By your presence you are deemed to have consented to be filmed and to the use of those images and sound recordings for a webcast. May I please remind members yw'n gweithio i ffrindwys ar ôl yn ysgol, felly rhaid bod ceuxaeth gyda'r dweithio a. Rwyf wedi ychydig arall i gael ei hun, ddweud o'r ddafyn yn cael ei ddweud o'r ddweud yma ar y ddweud ymateb o'r ddweud o'r ddweud yma. Mae o'r ddechrau cyffordd hynny oedd ymdindig arall, ychydig yn dweud o'r ddechrau ar y ddweud, felly mae'n dweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud hynny, please make sure your microphone and cameras are switched on, and then, when you finish addressing the eating please turn your microphone off again. Please, for members who are attending remotely indicate or wish to speak, there are chat messages in the Teams meeting. Those present in the chamber should indicate their wish to speak by raising their hand. Jingle those on your instrument is a 어�ite regional or complementary off. I will ask the Vice-Chair to note the order of speakers, both virtually and in the room. Committee members present in the chamber are known for each of you to introduce yourselves people of your respective zie. Members, after calling your name please introduce I'm responsible for Swavesy Ward. Councillor Sally Ann Hart. Thank you, Chair. I'm Sally Ann Hart. I'm one of the two members for the Melbourne Ward. Councillor James Hoprow. Good evening. My name is James Hoprow and I'm Councillor for Foxton Ward. Councillor Helen Leaming. Good evening. I'm Helen Leaming. I'm one of the members for Campbell Ward. Councillor Richard Stobart. Thank you, Chair. Richard Stobart. I'm one of the members for Gertin Ward. This includes the villages of Drydraiton and Maddingleaf. And Councillor Heather Williams. Good evening, Chair. I'm Heather Williams and I represent the Mordans Ward. Thank you. Are there any other members present either in the Chamber, I do not believe so, or online? I believe Councillors Libby L, Peter Fein and John Lovelett are committing members. It says you're online. I was simply reading through. John, I hadn't noted. My apologies. Well, no, that's fine. I only looked that way. So, to pause back, instead of just reading through my script, we shall come back. Councillor John Williams. Hello, I'm Councillor John Williams. I'm one of the Councillors for Fendin and Paul Bourne Ward. I'm also the lead cabinet member for Rejawses. Thank you very much. My apologies. And Councillors who are online. So, Councillor John Lovelett. Thank you, Chair. I am John Lovelett, one of the members for Cotton and Drumton. And Councillor Peter Fein. Good evening, Chair. Peter Fein, Member for Shelford. I believe that is all the members of the committee who are present. Now, we'll move on to other Councillors who are present. So, Councillor Bill Handley. Oh, hello. Councillor Bill Handley, one of the members for Over and Willingham. And Councillor Brian Mills. Good evening. Brian Mills, Deputy Leader. Thank you. And Councillor Bridget Smith. Good evening. Councillor Bridget Smith, Member for Gamblingay and Council Leader. So, based on those in the Chamber and those I can see online, I believe that is all the Councillors that we have present. So, we also have several officers in the Chamber, first of all, and Ainsworth. Would you introduce yourself, please? Thank you, Chair. And Ainsworth, I'm the Chief Operating Officer for the Council. And Peter Maddock. I'm Peter Maddock. I'm the Chief Finance Officer. Ian Senior. I'm Ian Senior. And I'm Scrutiny and Governance Advisor. And Aaron Clarke. Thank you, Chair. Democratic Service, 10 o'clock, sir. Okay. And online, we have Liz Watts. Good evening, everyone. Liz Watts, Chief Executive. Thank you, Liz. I'm sure we know what you said, but just so you're aware, you were very quiet. Apologies, Chair. Is that any better? Oh, much better. Thank you very much. Liz Watts, Chief Executive. Thank you. And Geoff Memberi. Thank you, Chair. Geoff Memberi, Head of Transformation, HR and Corporate Services. And Kevin Ledger. Good evening, Kevin Ledger, Senior Policy and Performance Officer. And Alex Nellyn Day. Hi, Alex Day, Head Waste Policy, Climate and Environment Team Manager. And Michael Parsons. Hi, I'm Waste Operations Manager for the Shared Waste Service. I believe I also see Peter Campbell. Yes, a lot. Peter Campbell, Head of Housing. Yes. You know, an agreement that we have covered all the officers, so thank you very much. Unless anybody wishes to flag themselves having missed out. I will follow my pattern from earlier. I can confirm that the meeting is quiet. There are being at least four committee members here in the Chamber. If at any time a member leaves the meeting, would they please make that fact known to me so it can be recorded in the minutes? Finally, please note a small correction at item 11 in the Agenda Work Programme. The investment strategy is now scheduled to go to Cabinet in February next year, so it will be considered by this committee on 19 January 2023, rather than on 15 December. The item I'm doing is apologies. Ian, do we have any apologies for absence? No, thank you very much. Actually, I can give the apologies for councillor Van de Vire, who apologised to me yesterday for his absence. So declarations of interest. Members are required to declare the existence and nature of any interest, which affects or relates to any item of business to be considered. If the interest becomes apparent during the meeting, then the member should bring it to the attention of officers at that time. Do any members have interest to declare in relation to any item of business on this agenda? Councillor Heather Williams. Thank you, Chair. Just in relation to item 9, that is a result of the motion that I brought for councillor. Thank you very much. Any other councillor colleagues online? I do not see any. I see no other councillors in the Chamber. Thank you. If an interest substance becomes apparent later in the meeting, please raise it at that point. Item number four is the minutes of the last meeting. These have been distributed in advance. Anybody wishes to raise in relation to these minutes? Do not see any objections or anything else being raised or any comments? Therefore, I would hope to be able to take by affirmation that we can send to these being a true and accurate record in our minutes. Colleagues, do we agree? Thank you very much. I will therefore sign. Public questions. There are no public questions or statements for this meeting. Thank you very much. One moment for my laptop turns back on. Item number six on the agenda is the 2022-2023 quarter two performance report. Councillors, are there any questions we wish to raise regarding this? Who would like to go first? Councillor Ellington. Might well start. Councillor Ellington, you are the one who has volunteered to go first. The floor is yours. Thank you. I was looking initially at page 10, I believe. It's very difficult because it's sort of mixed up with something else. No, yes, page 10. And we're looking here at the performance indicator. Organised by a service area in relation to business rates collected. Now, I believe that the target is roughly 50% because it's two quarters of a four quarter. Yeah, but I do feel that it doesn't really represent any of the issues that may be important for us to be considering. That the number of people who businesses that are not paying their council business rates is not really evident. It doesn't give us a feel of how much work needs to be done in order to help those businesses, which must be struggling in this particular year. And I just wanted to bring that up. Councillor Williams, in the first instance. Councillor Ellington. Councillor Ellington, I wonder if... Maybe use her snails again. Absolutely. So, I wonder if... I think perhaps John is suggesting that he is slightly unsure of exactly what it is that you are asking him. I sense that you are asking him that, although it shows us the percentage of businesses who are paid up to this point, it perhaps doesn't present us with a clear and accurate picture of the actual level of problems that businesses are facing with the current potential of the problems they have. So, therefore, I think it's more of a general question, as far as I understood it from our conversation last night. Yes. Regarding the extent to which either officers or yourself, Councillor John Williams, can say what we think the kind of state of businesses in the local area is regarding their ability to pay their business rates. OK. Well, you know, we have given businesses an enormous amount of help particularly during the COVID period. Businesses have, by and large, in our district, kept up with their business tax payments. What I wanted to try and find out is, what are you expecting us to identify businesses that are struggling? Because, obviously, we give here the overall figure which shows that it's on target. So, to get the sort of picture that you are looking for, we would need to drill down and look at individual businesses, presumably. Is that what you're asking us to do? No, I'm not certainly asking for individual names of companies. I think it just doesn't reflect the state of our businesses in South Cairns. And it says 39.9% were paid out of 40. But I don't get a feeling about what that represents. Is that a million pounds that we're short of? That's in FS105, not FS104, which is the business rates I think that's going to meant. OK. So, from the conversation that we had in our pre-scrutiny meeting talking about these kind of figures here, again, so I'll have a go at kind of seeing whether or not my understanding is different to yours and different to John's because that may be helpful. I think the point that was getting at in terms of discussion is this thing that at the moment, the figures seem to be on track. So, for September, the target is 59.78 and we're at 59.8. And on an immediate surface reading, it could be taken as a very positive thing, which kind of reflects what you've just said yourself there, Councillor Williams, where you've said that businesses have managed to keep up and lost support was given during COVID. But I got the impression from the conversation that was had that councillors were perhaps having conversations with businesses in the local areas where, you know, consumers being expressed by businesses that perhaps they were having a hard time, that they were finding it difficult maybe to stay afloat at times. And I think really what we're getting at here is whether or not from the council, sorry, the business rates that are being collected about whether or not either yourself as the relevant officer, sorry, the relevant council member, all the officers are of the opinion that they are likely to be growing problems or whether actually things look as healthy as perhaps they can be expected to be. And that's without drilling down to an individual business level. If it's more of a sense of what do we consider the health of the businesses within the district to be based on this information. Yeah, Peter, absolutely happy Peter. Through you, Chair. So, as things stand at the moment, we are seeing business rates payments in line with expectations and in line with the target. I am aware that we have had a little bit more contact from businesses around the issue. So I think the point we're making is that there's obviously potential for things to perhaps fall short of the target. We're not seeing any evidence of that at the moment. However, we are aware that we are having more contact from businesses. So I think the point's well made. I think businesses probably are struggling a bit more than they would do. But we're not actually seeing that come through in terms of people not paying at the moment. But I'm not suggesting. We may see some as time goes by and things potentially get worse. We may see that happen. And I think there's just a little bit of a warning there that we might see that happening towards the end of the financial year. So really quite a healthy south camp. Yes, I think it's quite a positive picture. And I think, if I'm honest, it's probably a bit better than we might have feared about in a better way. OK. Councillor Wellington, are you happy for us to move on? Can I just answer that? Sorry, Councillor. If you do know of any businesses who are struggling who need support, then ask them to get in touch with our business development team. Excellent. Are you happy for me to move on? Yeah, good. Councillor Heather Williams, you are next up. Thank you, Chair. Mine was mainly in relation to the conversation that's just gone on about a way of trying to square the circle at time. I think the crux of the information that would be really helpful for the council is to separate those who are not being able to pay because of financial difficulties and those who are just not paying. And we must have a level for that. So we're just taking on board what Councillor Wellington is saying. That's what I took from it. There will always be some that are just not paying and then there are others that have genuine reasons why. And perhaps actually as time goes on, as we see what happens, we will say, the figures are much better than I think we could have hoped for and that's fantastic. But actually what we don't want to do is see figures drop and us not really understand why potentially because there's so many different things going on for businesses. So a separation potentially going forward or a new KPI in relation to that I think may help to square the circle of the conversation that's just happened, Chair. I think my personal question was around in the housing property services. We don't seem to be able to sort of progress further on about the relay of all the housing stock. Sorry, Councillor Llywydd. Do you want to tell us which number you're referring to? Sorry, because otherwise... Page 13. Page 13. Okay, thank you. It is L211. One down the bottom of the page. Sorry, we've got a stamp on the number. So have you found it yet, Anna? Page... Wait. Average days to relet all housing stock. Are you good? Are you good? Okay. So one of the things it says about electrical meters and I just want to understand a bit more around that because that worried me a bit of cost of living that that meant that potentially the usage wasn't being calculated correctly. So just some clarity around what it is with the electrical meters that's causing the hold up on whether we've considered looking, although we need a specialist contractor, I assume that's a special type of electrician that we need whether we've actually looked at being able to sort of small things because it seems a very small thing to be holding up council houses where we've got so many people on the housing list. Thank you, Chair. Great, thank you very much. In the absence of Councillor Batch, I'm going to go to Peter... Sorry, Peter Campbell in the first instance, please. It's a pleasure to deal with this. Yes, the performance on the relets isn't improving as quickly as we wanted to. But we need to reflect that this, for the period shown, is the final quarter of the old contract where we're putting the relets out to a number of contractors. The new contractor continuation with Mears offers more focus on relets and voids. And certainly, Addie Spider's service manager is putting additional pressure on Mears to make sure that they play their part in the process. We're also recognised that relets are one part of the service. One part of our service that involves many different people, housing management allocations and repair inspectors, et cetera. We're also going through a process, a kind of business process re-engineering staff to make sure that there is no wasted steps or duplication in the work that we do. And I'm fairly confident that those steps those two steps, the new contract with Mears and the work that we're doing internally will improve performance moving on. It's also relevant that we're members of benchmarking clubs and many authorities across the country are also suffering problems with relets. We're not alone in this, but we're recognised there's still work to do. In response to a specific question about the electorate metres, there's anything further to add I'll report back after speaking to Eddie Spicer. I can't say other millions. Thank you, chair. I didn't quite catch the end of what Mr Campbell said. My concern is about whether it's people having to pay bills that they don't need to if the metres aren't right. What is that specific problem with the metres? I'm not aware that there's an issue of people having to pay more councillor, but I'm also not sure about the specific details about these metres. So outside this meeting I will speak to Eddie Spicer, the service manager, and provide a written response. Sorry, councillor John Williams, do you have something to add? No, but this is void, so there isn't anyone in the property. Sorry, councillor Williams, your microphone needs to go on as well. I understand what you were saying about it being a void property, but the resident beforehand has had this electric metre, and we're saying that there is some sort of problem with the electrical metres. So that didn't just happen as soon as the person vacated the property or suddenly it became void, and then there was an issue. Until we know exactly what that issue is, it's hard to tell who potentially got affected. That's what I'm saying, councillor John Williams. Great, thank you. Councillor Heather Williams, are you happy for me to move on from that question? I am, thank you, Chair. Thank you very much. Councillor Peter Fane, you are next up on the questions. Thank you, Chair. My question relates to development management, page 11, items PN510 to 512. This is the number of applications determined within the relevant period, 13 weeks in respect of major applications, and 18 weeks in respect of others. Now the issue for me is that on some occasions we tend to grant or agree extensions with the applicants if we're not able to meet the timeline, the original timeline. So it isn't really apparent from this, the extent to which, as it says here, we continue to make progress in reducing the backlog. And I just feel we may need to have some way of monitoring how many applications are met within the original timeline and how many are met within one or more extensions. And also in relation to PN512, appeals against major planning permissions refused. That is where the appeal has allowed, planning permissions we had refused. There have been a couple of cases I'm aware of where appeals were granted against non-determination. And I'm just wondering whether those appeals would be counted within these figures. Can I say, Chair, that I know that neither Councillor Hawkins nor the Director of Planning are present to be starting to leave? Stephen Kelly is actually now in the meeting, Councillor Fane. I don't know whether he had the opportunity to hear the question. Yes, he is nodding. But I'm very happy for him to be dealt with later otherwise. Excellent. Stephen Kelly, if you could both introduce yourself and answer Councillor Fane's question, that would be marvellous. Thank you. Hello, yes. Stephen Kelly, I'm the Joint Director of Planning. So thank you for your question. If I deal with the simple answer, Councillor Fane, in respect of the question, does it include non-determination appeals? I'd have to come back to you. But the level of appeals, two or three non-determination appeals that you referred to, because this is against a total number of applications metric and we deal with around 6,000 applications a year, I suspect is unlikely to impact the, this indicator is related to government performance standards given how far below the threshold we are. Is unlikely to impact that. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to provide clarity about that in writing afterwards. In terms of your question around the non-major applications and whether they include applications within agreed timelines or eight weeks, I can't answer the question about how many have had extensions of time. But the service is now plotting the average time for all applications against lower and upper quartile measures. And so I'm sorry because I'm working from one screen. If I can just for myself click to another screen, I can try and answer that question. So our lower quartile minor on hand analysis, chair, I don't know whether it's appropriate for me to share my screen, but I've got a chart that will perhaps reassure Peter Fane in, Councillor Fane, sorry, in this manner. If there's no objection, I propose just to share an image. Fine, please bear with me. So this is an abstract from the analysis of quartile performance in terms of the number of applications on hand. Sorry, and what I'm going to do, sorry, is, this is the graph I was looking for. So what we're now tracking is on hand applications in terms of the average number of days against upper and lower quartile performance with a medium. Now, what you will see from the falling upper quartile performance is from December 2021, for example, we've begun work with a backlog team in terms of trying to bring down the backlog of applications. And I've got separate numbers around that. But what this graph hopefully shows is that because we are clearing out those long standing older cases that we're getting the upper, lower and medium quartile performance closer to one another, which is an indication of improving consistency, but also of progressive reduction in the average number of days for all decisions which reflect the ambition to reduce delays in the decision making process. Now, I can't from that distill how many of those applications were within time. But in fact, I've been having a conversation with my colleague today, Matt Hull, who produces these tables, to see whether or not we can distill further from that the application, those applications which are within an agreed time scale with applicants, sometimes looking for amendments and so on, and those applications which fall outside of an agreed time scale. I hope that it doesn't directly answer Councillor Fane's question, but I hope that the positive trend in the performance around that is clear for everyone to see and they can feel some reassurance. If it's helpful, I can return to a subsequent meeting to explain that. Thank you. Councillor Peter Fane, are you content for us to move on? Very much so, Chairman. That's reassuring. I think perhaps this is a matter that we ought to find some way of keeping an eye on to see progress developed. Thank you. I have Councillor Allington and then Councillor Heather Williams in relation to this. I then have Councillor Cohn. Councillor Allington, first of all. Thank you very much. Yes, I'm really pleased to see these figures are reducing, but perhaps the figure that we don't have is how long it takes for an application to be validated. The figures that we have here, as I understand it, are established from when the application is officially validated, rather than from the date it is put into the office to be decided on. So I just feel we ought to have another set of figures which show how many people haven't been validated, because I believe that can be quite a substantial length of time. Stephen Kelly. Thank you, Chair. Bear with me a second. I have that information, I think, in terms of the current position, but of course, as the quarter two report, there will be a lag. We're obviously tracking in terms of our indicator around validation performance that there are still challenges in that area. In fact, it should be amber, not green on page 12, because it is at 12 days against our 10-day target. But if you just bear with me a moment, I'm sorry, I'm trying to talk and do two things at once. I should be able to give you information on validation, which is still an area of challenge, but bear with me a second. I will share my screen with you once again. So you can see we have a target for validation within five working days. We're not achieving that performance at this moment in time. We're somewhere away from that. But we are putting in place measures to improve the performance that we're trying to do. We're trying to get back to that. The issue that I've highlighted today, in which we can come back to members on, is clearly our target of our objective around 10 days as an average time is not being met. But I'm trying to determine how many of these applications, are substantially in excess of 10 days. The team have currently got a backlog that they are working through. If you bear with me, I will try and see if I can get Monday's figures for you to give an indication of what that looks like as of Monday this week. But one second. David is just finding that. I would also draw members' attention to table PN 519, which is on page 12, which is obviously also relevant to the point that Councillor Lingson has raised regarding the length of time taken to determine validated household planning applications. So there is data within the pack as well, but obviously the data that Steven is able to provide is greater and more specific and live as he's referencing at the moment. Chair, I think it's probably because I'm trying to sit through the emails and try not to hold up the meeting. I think it's probably best if I provide a written answer to that question, but certainly it's something that we are actively focusing on at the moment. Great. Councillor Lingson, are you happy to move on? I have Councillor Hella with it. Councillor Heather Williams. So on the same topic that Councillor Fay has raised, I do recall back in 2019, and I know that because Peter Toppings, the person that asked it, when we were looking at tar requests coming in, it was asked about having a KPI, something that showed how reliant we were on extensions of time into meeting those KPIs. At that point, if recollection serves me well, it was very difficult for us to know actually because everything was done quite informally, how many applications were extensions and how many were on time and how many was this, that and the other. At that point, it was said that there was going to be a system sort of put in place, Sharon Brown said there would be a system put in place so that we could try and obtain this data. Obviously we're quite a far way on and we've had Covid and everything else since then, but it does make me wonder the question with extension of times, the fact that they're still not being reported as has repetitively been requested, is that because we simply don't know? Or do we know right now how many extensions of time have been agreed and that we rely on or do we just simply still not know? Because if we don't know, chair, I think that's a concern because how can we judge really, truly our performance? Thank you, Stephen Kelly. So we do know, we don't report it as part of this KPI dataset. The thing that we're moving towards though, which is following conversations we've had with Department of levelling up communities and housing is that we are moving towards more of a focus about the average time taken to deal with applications because the extension of time process allows for an almost indefinite period for you to determine an application running into many, many years. And what we're focused on is how long it takes people to get a planning permission in terms of the number of days. So although, so our performance digest, which I shared with you just now, is focused actually really hard on our energy and focus with our staff, is focused really clearly on reducing the total number of days in an application rather than just extensions of time because actually the extensions of time is no measure of whether or not our residents or our businesses are actually getting decisions any quicker, is just a measure of whether or not procedurally we have gone through a process that makes the statistics look good. So on a qualitative basis, what people have told us is important is getting a positive decision as soon as possible. And it's for that reason that as I shared, you are up a lower and medium performance analysis of time scales for decisions is our focus, but we do have data, and indeed the system can report on those applications with an extension of time. But it's not been our focus more recently because people have stressed to us that they're concerned about the total time that's taken, not the number of times we're good at extending the permission. But I can't give you that data now because I just need to run a report on it to give you a contemporary answer to the question, but it's certainly an answer that we can provide if that's what's asked for. It's just not part of our current performance metric set because we're trying to focus those performance metrics on those things that we think had more of the most value to the user and to our residents. Thank you. Councillor Heather Williams. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate that no one particular data set will ever suffice every need, but that is something the reliance on extension of time has been asked repetitively over the years. So I for one would be very pleased to see how many extensions of time on a monthly basis we've done over the last couple of years because that way we can have an assessment as to whether the information that is in front of us today is within the statutory timeframe or not. And I think Councillor Ellington's points on validation is really quite important as well because obviously the longer that process takes, the more pressure it puts on the case officers to determine the applications even quicker and we still want to do site notices and everything else to go through. So it's not one piece of information. We'll resolve everything. Appreciate that. But now we know it exists. Please could we have it? Thank you, Chair. Can I make a suggestion that Councillor Cohn and myself, when preparing for the next time that this report will be published to us, will take an action to have this conversation in more detail with relevant Cabinet Member and Senior Officer in order to attempt to deliver upon what you have requested there? Thank you, Chair. May you succeed where others have not been able to? Yes, Stephen Kelly again. Yes, just quickly on Councillor Ellington's point. I'm sorry I didn't deal with this. The validation backlog doesn't make any difference to the total length of time that the application is recorded. The application, if it's validated but it takes us three weeks to do it, the start date for the clock is the day it was received by us, the day we validated it. So just to offer reassurance that that backlog doesn't adversely affect the experience of users or the way that we report it. It's all reported back to the days received as valid. In respect of the information on extensions of time, I suppose the only thing I would say is it's not one of our corporate indicators, but I'm more than happy to provide some further information on it. It's not that we fail to provide it in this report. With respect, I haven't been asked for it, and if I'm asked for it, I can provide it. But, Chair, with your assistance, perhaps we can make sure we have that information for the next meeting if it's important. Bring the matter to a close in terms of the meeting is really to say that myself, as Chair and Graham's Vice-Chair, would take it as an action to try to bring resolution to it. And you are actually down as next. Unless Councillor Bradlin wishes to talk about something related to the current topic, which she does, are you happy for Councillor Bradlin? Thank you very much, Chair and Vice-Chair. I just wanted to observe that I may be missing something here, but extensions of time are normally requested by, for example, parish councils because they haven't had a chance to respond within the normal time frame because of the timing of their meetings, or by residents for reasons of whatever that they were not able to respond within the time frame. And so I'm just wondering if actually we're trying to look at the wrong thing. I'm not disputing that the work might be done. But the other thing is, as I understand it, extensions of time are always agreed by the applicant. Sorry, Councillor Bradlin, can I support you for a second? I think some of the people online are struggling to hear you. I don't know if you could bring your microphone closer to you. Certainly. Thank you. I'll just summarise then. Sorry, so my observation is that extensions of time are usually asked for by parish councils who haven't had a time to respond because of the timing of their meetings or by residents who, for one reason or another, have not had an opportunity to respond within the normal time frame. And thirdly, they are in agreement with the applicant. So my concern is that whilst I'm perfectly happy for you to take the action that you agreed, I'm just wondering if it's trying to obtain the information which is useful. And also what did occur to me, it might be useful to clarify if there are any occasions when the authority seeks an extension of time, because they are unable to get information from the statutory stakeholder or something like that. So it might be helpful to distinguish between extensions of time that are approved by the applicant and extensions of time that have been required, asked for or needed by the planning authority. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I assume there isn't a particular question that you require Stephen to answer from that. It was just for clarification of what was trying to be achieved. That's great, thank you very much. Councillor Heather Williams, do you wish to comment further in relation to this topic? Thank you, I think it might help. I'm not asking about extensions of time to consultation. What Councillor Bradman said about parish councils, often you have the 21-day consultation that they will ask an extension for, but not the determination date itself. What's the purpose of requesting this information is to assess are we fulfilling our statutory duty and how successfully are we doing that by what's being said. Yes, people may agree to, an extension of time has to be agreed to by both parties. I don't say that it's not, but equally we need to know how reliant we are on that process and how many applications we are determining within the guidelines and the processes that are legislated for. So that would be the purpose of it. Thank you, Chair. Unless anyone else has anything else to say in relation to that moment, I would like to thank Councillor Peter Fane for starting us off on a road that has clearly caused great interest for councillors and has given us the opportunity here from Stephen Kelly in great detail and to see some more of his graphs that weren't originally in the report. I think for me that represents a really good example of councillors and officers being able to engage in great detail for the benefit of residents. Councillor Cohn, it is now your turn as it were. Thanks very much, Chair. I've just got two very quick points on the report. The first is on page 13 about the relettins and the time scales on that. I think we've discussed in previous meetings whether these time scales are realistic or not. So I just wondered maybe the housing team just to comment on whether those figures are set by us or by an external body, i.e. the 17 days for turnaround of those properties. And the second point was on page 17 about the complaints resolved. Obviously that they are improving and that's a really good thing and something that we had asked for at the last scrutiny meeting and commented on. So it's really good to see that those complaints are improving. Obviously what we'd like to see is all complaints handled within the relevant time scales because it's so important that if someone does complain that they're dealt with. So really the question around that is, I'm glad to see those improving, but have we put things in place to make sure that that is consistent across the year and those complaints continue to be dealt with in a timely fashion? So your first question struck me as related to housing specifically. OK, so I'll go to Peter Campbell for the first one related to housing. Yeah, very pleased to answer this. In short, we're not sure. So at the moment, so what we're doing is doing some more research in our benchmarking group to find out how other organisations are performing. What I don't want is to recast the performance targets just because we're failing. I want it to be realistic and I want it to be challenging against other organisations. So I want to do some background research to see how other organisations are doing and set a target that's realistic but challenging based on that information rather than just in isolation. OK, thank you. Is that OK? Yeah, thanks. So my understanding is that we set the figure of 17 days. Yes, it's an internal target, yes. OK, but you'll compare us against other councils to see if that is something that we are doing correctly in terms of timescales. Yeah, we want to make sure that what we have is roughly in line with similar organisations of a similar type, similar rarity, et cetera. So something that's realistic but still a challenge. I mean, it's just seen quite a quick turn around at 17 days. OK, and there was a second question that you answered, Councillor Cohn. Second question, Councillor Cohn, is obviously related to complaints procedures. Councillor Smith, I wonder if we could come to you in relation to Councillor Cohn's second question, which was about the extent to which we are seeking as a councillor as a whole to ensure the maximum number of complaints I've dealt with as quickly as possible. I wasn't entirely sure which cabinet member to go to, Councillor Smith. So I'm thinking I'll go to you as a leader in the first instance. That's fine, all complaints, and if they're not dealt with, they end up in my inbox. So Geoff memory has been doing a vast amount of work to really transform the way that we, both the way we deal with complaints and the speed which we deal with them. So if I think back to five years ago, there was a lot of confusion where sort of service requests were logged as complaints and complaints were logged as service requests. I think those late days are long gone. So I'm going to ask, this has been an absolute priority for us because even though when you think about how many bins we collect on a weekly basis and so on, one or two complaints is relatively insignificant within those numbers, but actually it's really significant to the person making the complaint. So if you would forgive me, deferring to Geoff, who will be able to actually talk with more detail about this, I would appreciate that. That's fine, thank you Councillor Smith. Geoff memory. Thank you chair through you. Yes, we've put in place a series of complaints champions within each of the services that meet regularly to discuss what's happening with complaints. We have a corporate complaints champion who keeps on top of what's going on with complaints as they come in and identifies any potential issues. We're improving the complaints system that we've got so that it starts to flag up complaints that are getting close to the date we'd expect them to be resolved so that we can start to identify those corporately and I get regular updates from services about how complaints are doing. If I had some updates this morning from housing and planning for example, confirming that things were still running smoothly, I'm afraid I can't guarantee that in every single case no complaint ever drifts over the targets because we do occasionally get the odd very complex complaints that we find difficult to respond to in sort of the 10 or the 20 days, but the vast majority of them get around in a appropriate time at the moment. I hope that's helpful. Yes, I'm sorry, I've pressed a button on my screen that makes it look like it wants to log off and I don't know how to get rid of it. It's gone now, thank you very much. Excellent, apologies. Thank you for your answer. Councillor Cohn. Thanks very much for your answer. Marvelous, great. Thank you very much. Which brings us on to Councillor Sally Ann Hart. Thank you Chair. My question is related to the final page and the penultimate page of the report regarding the contact centre. Having used the contact centre a few times I feel pleased to see the level in terms of what's resolved first time and a number of mine have been and some of the residents I've been working with. I just wanted to get some clarification on CC303 when it says calls to the contact centre that are handled in brackets answered. Does answered actually mean speaking to a person or when the caller requests a callback? Thank you. Jeff memory, I think. Thank you, Jeff, through you. It means when they actually speak to a person. So these are the calls that are actually answered by a call handler and they speak to them. So I'm just wondering. I mean certainly been trying to encourage people to use the callback facility because obviously mine from a busy time. I'm just wondering going forward we might be able to have some data on how often that is requested, how often that's used. People take advantage of that and then if there's a way of measuring how long it takes for people to get the callback. Would that be possible? Yes certainly, we can get that information and put it in future reports. Sorry, through you, Jeff. Thank you. Councillor Hart, are you happy to move on? Thank you very much. Councillor Leaming. Thank you, Chair. I would like to ask about the KPI on page 18, please. CC307. This is the average call answer time. I was wondering whether the issue in regards to the energy rebate scheme is going to be an ongoing pressure for the call handling team throughout winter or whether this is a timing issue and whether there is enough resilience in the team. Jeff Manbury. Thank you. Thank you, Chair, again through you. We anticipate a high level of demand continuing throughout the winter. We were particularly unfortunate that over the quarter that we're talking about we also at the same time as having these high volume of inquiries had an issue where we had to recruit some additional staff. We lost some staff, unfortunately. We have got a lot of information about the calls that are coming in. The really interesting thing is it's not that we're not hitting target most days, most days we are, and actually even within particular days where we're not hitting target, for most of that day we're hitting target. What we're beginning to see is that we're getting trends of high volumes of calls at particular times on particular days. For example, if some letters go out about an energy rebate scheme we'll get a lot of calls on a Monday morning between 9 and 10. That's what's causing us quite a lot of these issues. We've got enough people to manage the calls over the course of a day but actually we're finding that at particular times we're getting heavily hit. Now that data is particularly useful because we're going to use that to try and be better at predicting when high volume calls are coming into the council so that we can plan our resourcing of the contact centre better by doing that. At the moment they're irritatingly avoiding a pattern apart from knowing that when we do a mass write out that that's going to generate some additional calls but as we get more and more information we're able to refine that in more detail. I'm confident that if we use our resources to the best of their ability we've got enough resource in the contact centre what we need to make sure that we're doing is using the data to maximise the way that we're using that resource. That probably will take a little bit of time which is why we're predicting the next quarter for that indicator to also be amber. I think it is worth saying at this point that although it's not what we aspire to I think if you're looking at a lot of organisations they'd be very envious of our two minutes answering times that we're getting and certainly I know when I phone my bank I tend to wait an awful lot longer than two minutes but we're very focused on getting back to being able to answer all of our calls within the target time and we've got the technology to help us get towards that. I hope that's a helpful answer. Councillor Leaming. Yes, it is indeed a helpful answer. Thank you very much. Councillor Stavart. Chair, thank you. My question concerns ES418 which is a performance indication around recycling volumes. Just let me turn it up. It's on page 16 of the agenda. That's page 22 of the PDF. My question is this. Recycling volumes particularly for green bins were down hence the amber indication. What happened over the summer is probably typical. We're seeing a drought. Next year it may be an inundation and excessive amounts of grass and so on. In the longer term perhaps we are seeing dry summers and people giving up on grass for example in the garden. In a microcosm this might be saying as we see the effects of climate change there will be significant shifts in the kind of material that gets recycled both in green bins and later on we might think about what goes in blue bins and that again impinges on bin collection reliability because if you fill the truck you have to stop the round and that ripples through. The question is how are we southcams anticipating some of these changes building inflexibility into our waste collection systems and kind of anticipating some of these scenarios. Thank you very much. Councillor Mills. Thank you chair. The environment for collecting green waste including food waste is under national review that we have conducted a separate food waste trial recently. I think with about 3,000 different users acts will be able to confirm the sort of numbers that we've been we've had in the trial. But I think the there's something of a watching brief we would like more waste separate waste to be collected separate green waste and things that we can do in the blue blue bin context as well. The big thing is to try and avoid waste going in the black bins and going to landfill and that's our main focus of attention and I think this is where government legislation which is very late in arriving we've been waiting for it for a couple of years now at least. And that will help us determine what we are going to be obliged to do under national regulations. So it's very much a watching brief for the moment and I don't know if Alex wants to add anything else to that summary of the situation that we have. Please do if you can. Thank you, thank you chair. Yeah, just to add to that we are as a local authority we're part of a partnership with other local authorities and that query around how we anticipate what future demand of future service delivery needs to be is very much kind of looking at what we do with those partners and having that strategy around the future demand. As councillor Milne said we are awaiting some further guidance from central government and from DEFRA around what will be kind of stipulations of how we collect recycling but also kind of extra kind of responsibilities and new ways of dealing with kind of waste streams that are coming online. So a lot of that kind of looking forward is being done at the moment and obviously awaiting some of that further guidance so that will be in the strategies that come out shortly. Thank you very much. Councillor Stavart. Just briefly, so we're listening to some input there which refers to government guidance but actually we're south camps and we're quite peculiar to ourselves as well. So just one small additional question how does the local situation bear on that or produce some variation in that national response, how do we vary it to accommodate south camps? Councillor Milne, would you like me to go to Alex first or if you want to do the answer yourself? I'm not sure that we have one even within the recap area so the Cambridge and Peter recycle group there are significant variances because of the fact that we have a lot of areas where there are significant variances because of the type of location we're in so I know that our officers are very diligent in trying to accommodate what we're doing locally. I don't know what Alex would like to add to that but I'm confident that we are doing the best that we can understanding our area so we were a shared waste service and clearly for example have a very different profile of use in the city than we do in the rural south camps area so that's pertinent, we have to run a service that can accommodate both profile and they are different so we're already quite adept at adapting our service. Alex Day. Just to add we do collect a lot of data around how we deliver the services that currently is so a lot of work does go into reviewing that data and looking for trends and trying to look forward in terms of what our service delivery needs to be and how that matches up so we're constantly in this process of looking at how we make that service fit for purpose and responding to that future demand around particular growth areas and that kind of thing as well so yes we're definitely trying to make sure that we do that. If I can share there's a particular example of that that we've just discussed recently my own experience having two teenage children is that they really don't spend very much time thinking about where their waste goes and I think engagement with certain profiles of users is important and we do actively seek ways of encouraging the whole of our user population to deal with their waste appropriately. I'm suggesting that your teenage children may not be an entirely representative sample I feel that we ought to point out as a council that we are not completely suggesting that all young people don't care about recycling we recognise that young people do value recycling however my teacher hat points out that you are no doubt correct for many young people I feel I want to add that before we move on Councillor Stovart is there anything you wanted to say in response? Just one thing chair thanks through you to Alex and Councillor Mills Thank you very much. I have Councillor Bradman and then I am assuming it's going to be me and then we will move on from what is always our biggest item at the start of the meeting. Thank you chair. It's quite a straightforward question I hope and that is that in ES418 which is on page 16 in the page numbers embedded in the pdf I just wanted to ask why did the target change because it's gone from a target of around about 50 to a target of slightly more than that I assume around about 52 and I just wondered what prompted the target to change and what was the reason for that. Thank you. You referred to ES418 So that's the target which is in the green line it goes along from January 2021 at 50 and it goes to April 2022 at which point it goes up and I'm wondering what prompted us to increase our own target Excellent, thank you. Councillor Mills in the first instance I think I'm going to defer because I can't remember I say I'm afraid we are not hearing your remembered answer Thank you chair. Sorry I might bring in Kevin at this point because I think this is to do with having a stretch target and that's why we introduced a higher target Excellent, Kevin Ledger Yes, I think that was the case I recall some discussions with Bode the head of service at the beginning of the financial year or even just kind of entering into the new financial year whereby we were looking at previous performance and saw that we had consistently kind of met the 50% target over previous years and so it was a case of looking to see if there was any possibility of increasing our ambitions in relation to that target so I think that was some of the context around the discussions that took place around that target So that's encouraging to hear and that's what I guess must have happened You realise that you could meet these targets so that's great and long may it continue Thank you I have cleared all my list of councillors so I would just like to think I think I'm going to direct my question to you councillor John Williams even though part of it is related to housing because it's to do with collection of money on the revenue section, FF102 housing rent collected and to FF105 council tax collected here today it's quite noticeable that both of these are in the amber, what also strikes me is the fact that both of them are about the ability of residents to pay the bills that we are requiring them to pay because we are not, you had any thoughts about why it is that we are seeing two targets related to residents and the ability to pay turning amber when in general we retain greens across the board Well because of the economic circumstances people are finding it more difficult to pay their bills and that includes council tax and council rents I think our officers are doing an extremely good job in identifying those particularly on housing, identifying those who are struggling and signposting and ensuring that they can get the support that they need and similarly with council tax and in fact we've literally just agreed today at Cabinet a whole list of a whole suite of schemes that are being introduced to actually help our residents residents and tenants in these very difficult times so, you know, it just indicates that what everyone knows anyway that with inflation and the cost of living increasing that people are struggling and south camps is no different to the rest of the country Great thank you and I'm particularly pleased to hear that the answer is not only obviously a reflection of the answer situation but as you said there that the council is doing all it can to support residents in that situation and applying funds and as you said about conversations at Cabinet in order to do that so I appreciate that, thank you very much I don't, I'm happy for that to be the answer Councillor John Williams unless you want one of the officers to add anything to it I'm quite happy for your answer to be complete unless there's anything else that you feel Peter you need to add I mean all I would probably add is that particularly on council tax I think it's really close to the target how we do to see fluctuations around it so perhaps a little bit more concern on the house events because that's further adored but I think John's comments will cover it pretty much Great, thank you for adding that to it Okay, so thank you colleagues we move on now to appendix B, the business plan progress report and obviously as colleagues are aware this is what tends to happen when we're on the kind of data report bit we tend to take a long time of the first bit and then go a bit quicker with the second bit and then our other bits become slightly shorter items by their very nature I do say that sometimes in hope as well as in reality but obviously if things take time they take time so who would like to start us off with anything related to appendix B the business plan progress report Councillor Stobart Thank you chair so I'm referring now to item A2 Romance Halex 2 which is on page 26 and why are we restricting ourselves so question why are we restricting ourselves to local schools and employers when in fact elsewhere in the eastern region and further into the midlands into the north there may well be ample opportunities to recruit so why stick to the local when there may be good people out there just a little further away Okay in my mind in the first instance I'll direct this towards Councillor Smith but I'm not sure that her plates can answer so therefore Councillor Milne's as the deputy, oh no Councillor Smith has reappeared I was hoping Councillor Smith that you had disappeared for a few seconds there did you hear Councillor Stobart's question or would you like it repeated No did you repeat the gesture sorry the dogs were going mad No no it's absolutely fine Councillor Smith and a long meeting we are entitled to a few moments Councillor Stobart if you can repeat the question for Councillor Smith please Yes let me just turn this up So we're developing a formal engagement programme with local schools concerning recruitment so why focus on local when in fact there may well be good people with an easy reach in the eastern region and further west in the midlands and to the north again possibilities more people why don't we reach out a little further I think I'm probably going to ask Liz to comment as well so we know from all sort of all the work we've done on the four day week that you know living here is a real barrier because it's so so expensive here so if we're targeting people who are already here actually that rather overcomes possibly overcomes one of those problems it's very very challenging to get people to relocate here and that's one of the reasons for doing the four day week scheme in that it makes us attractive as an employer hopefully in a way that compensates for the high cost of living here as well and I think personally I think it's perfectly proper that we focus on the local initially you know certainly when we look at our procurement work we give extra weighting to local suppliers to local people, local businesses and you know we are a local authority and I think our focus should always start with the local I don't if Liz wants to say anything Yes, Liz Watts Thank you and through you chair just two things to add I think the corollary of what Bridget has said is that going further afield would mean likely mean that anyone that we recruited would need to move to Cambridgeshire and for those jobs which are tend to be on the kind of lower end of the scale I think that would be you know present real challenges so that's one issue We do however do a lot of work with universities recruiting wider for a number of our posts so it's not that we're just restricting ourselves to Cambridgeshire it's just the apprentices where we tend to focus more locally Okay, Chancellor Stavart I'm just casting my mind back to my early years and we had apprentices converge on the big industrial centres it wasn't necessarily the same thing but from all over the country and it was that in that kind of rich diversity that you got that range of people you needed to support the business in the future so I was just reflecting on that experience I appreciate the practical points of living in the Cambridge area very expensive but some diversity anything that pushes towards diversity I think has good qualities associated with it but I appreciate the practical points that through you chair Liz and Councillor Smith have raised Okay, thank you Any other coun... Sorry, yes of course would you please Just may come back and say absolutely and I hope you know that introducing as much diversity into our workforce is every bit as important to us as introducing diversity into our council members as well and that's why we've introduced various policies recently which makes us hopefully an employer of choice for people with disabilities we are trying to be as parent friendly as possible and we've had a recent policy to make sure that women who have premature babies don't get all the maternity leave that they're entitled to it doesn't disadvantage them because their baby's being premature so I hope we bend over backwards to do that if there's ever more we can do then of course we shall do it we're also a partner of the Greater Cambridge partnership and the combined authority both of which do lots of work on skills but pretty local skills but obviously the combined authority has just been responsible with the new university at Peterborough which is very much focusing on probably a more local cohort of students but very much feeding them into the skills training that we need in our area but hopefully that will help us in itself in attracting a more diverse workforce and also in terms of the backgrounds that people come from we've also got one of our officers who's promoting apprenticeship opportunities for care leavers and I personally think that's marvellous Marvellous, thank you very much Sorry about the barking dogs Yes, councillor Stavart Nothing further, thank you for the answer Great, thank you very much I have councillor Heather Williams Thank you chair and my question is a relation to page 26 B5 I think we have to do with the community centre in north stone just following recent announcements and changes to the temporary facilities just wondering as that's one amber so it's running slightly behind which is big projects often do will we be seeing something at full council with the other options to bring those back and just conscious that now the temporary facilities also aren't happening as planned so we don't want to leave them with nothing any longer than we need to councillor Smith, I'm going to have to come to you at this point I think councillor Handley has held on for a long period of time and unfortunately we've asked the question related to him literally just after he left which I take responsibility for obviously as chair so councillor Smith That's fine, so a considerable amount of mine and councillor Handley's and officer time has taken up with trying to move forward the new facilities at north stone as fast as we can and we're at the point now where really any further delay is unacceptable and we've gone a long way to develop much more positive relationships with the town council there that works been going really well councillor Handley is now involved in a big community liaison group can't remember the name of it or Fand but again that's very positive that's about making sure that what we as a council are delivering in north stone very much reflects what the residents and the town council are telling us that they want so this is a massive project involving massive amounts of money it is really complicated but we've made significant progress in the last 12-18 months and I think the town council are now appreciating that we are now I won't say on the cusp but a dance site nearer than we were and it's a major focus for us councillor The Williams Thank you chair my question was around temporary facilities in the meantime which hasn't been addressed whether we'll be seeing that at full council councillor Smith Right, I'm just trying to think so obviously very disappointingly we haven't been able to progress the purchase of the show home so we are now looking at an alternative and again I'm not sure how much is in the public domain but as soon as we can come and be more public about what the interim facilities are then of course we will share that because it's really important that we share it with the residents and the local members as quickly as we can I'm only hesitating because I'm not quite sure how much is in the public domain at the moment my apologies if I'm being overcautious Okay, thank you I'm councillor The Williams Anne-Anne'sworth is offering to add something to that answer I'm happy to come back in now and go back to councillor Smith or do you want me to get Anne-Anne'sworth to add to the answer and then you come back Thank you chair I'm not asking what the temporary facilities are which I've been very careful not to ask that question but there were other options on the table when we took the vote back in March of this year on the temporary facilities will those other options, not stating what they were be coming back to us at full council for assessment in a couple of weeks? We will certainly, whether it's a settlement depends how much money I think the answer is probably yes but I'll ask Anne-Anne'sworth to confirm that and I think there will be other options over and above the options that we've already seen because we've been trying to identify other ways of solving this problem but if I may defer to Anne that would be helpful Anne-Anne'sworth You're absolutely right there were a number of options that were brought forward earlier this year and at that point the decision was taken to proceed with the show homes obviously given as part of that due diligence process the decision was then taken that wasn't the right approach to make we can bring that back to council for you to look at the option that we're commending to proceed with Councillor Williams I'd be very keen to see something at full council last time it did come through scrutiny as well extra scrutiny metres are needed because there were other options and we could start delivering for people and also a lot sooner if we were looking at it in this full council coming OK, great, thank you very much Councillor Elling, sorry are you happy for me to move on? Thank you, Councillor Ellington Thank you Chairman Page 31, C6 talks about upgrading 1800 street lights with LED I am aware and very concerned about two of my very small villages who are currently experiencing 900% increase in their electric bill for those street lights they are so small the companies don't want them and are really revving up the costs and I wondered whether it's not just about producing LED and making it cheaper which I'm grateful for if it happens to my villages but also for perhaps the council to look at a central electrical contract that smaller villages can plum into because there really is a problem OK, thank you Councillor Cohn, I think this might be you, Councillor Milnes but we feel it might be Councillor John Williams we apologise if we are unsure It's me It's you, OK Thank you, Councillor Milnes So, the LED programme was really very timely as you can imagine because of the huge increase in utilising particularly obviously the electricity rates but street lighting is very typically done on unmetered supplies so basically you work out how many street lights you've got what the sort of usage would be and then get charged by the electricity company for that unmetered supply Unfortunately and I'm just trying to remember whether it was two or three years ago the County Council washed their hands of this process and left all the parishes responsible for their own bills and it caused a huge amount of disruption it was an extremely painful process I sat with four other people in an office waiting for a supplier to answer to the phone and when they did we got a very unsatisfactory answer and that was for one of the largest villages in the district so I've got a lot of sympathy with Councillor Ellington's own parishes that are very much smaller and therefore have even less negotiating power and unfortunately I don't have a particular supportive option there for her parishes to approach it's a very awkward situation and very disappointing that the County Council chose to choose their method of operation and in fact we drew their service in this regard Councillor Ellington Sad but maybe we should be looking at it under a grant system John Williams is shaking his head Do you want to add something Councillor John Williams? Yeah there's quite a history to this and it goes back several years and at one time parish councils I can remember this when I first got elected were invited to give up their lights and to the Highway Authority to the County Council in part of the Banffo BT replacement of the highway lights most parishes declined to do that because they didn't want the lights that Banffo BT were putting in and of course also we also bit unusual for the District Council but we also because of the West Chesterton Urban District Council we also own some street lights and it was the decision that was taken and this council again many years ago not to transfer those street lights to the County Council so in a situation where we have not just the County Council supplying street lights but we have ourselves supplying street lights we have parish councils supplying street lights and of course we have other on private roads we have other supplying street lights such as housing associations so the whole thing is a bit of a mess and we don't have the ability to take that one I'm sorry Councillor Ellington the people who did were the County Council obviously had the staff and the ability to do that but as Councillor Milne said about three years ago the County Council decided that it no longer wanted to do that and passed it to the parish councils where the parish councils have to pay for the electricity some of that electricity is spent on lighting our lights but there were also other lights so the whole thing is really complicated and I'm sorry to say that we just don't have the facilities and the resources to take that one Councillor Ellington, anything to add? I don't think there's anything further I can ask to say I don't actually have anyone else down at the moment but something has come into my mind in relation to this statement and I'm not entirely sure whether it will be Councillor Milne or Councillor John Williams to answer C6 specifically says upgrade our stock of 1,800 street lights to LED so does that mean that we are responsible to the County Council for those 1,800 lights? Do we own them? I apologise for being a little bit ignorant on it Yes, these are the street lights that we own and maintain but the parish councils pay the electricity the cost of the electricity to light them and that decision was taken many many years ago that the parish councils could do that because they didn't want to transfer those lights or want us to transfer those lights to Banffar Bt so the decision was taken I think back in sort of 2014 or something that the parish councils would take on the cost of running those lights because they also had other lights and as I think Councillor Milne has explained none of this is needed so it's extremely difficult to decide who owns what and what lights are cost in the parish council so the whole thing is extremely complicated and the most simplest way to overcome this was the decision and we weren't the administration ever the decision was taken that the parish council should pay for the electricity but the lights would remain our lights and we would maintain them now we get to a situation where a great many of these lights were sold as old sodium lights the columns were in a poor state because a lot of them were cast iron they needed replacing so we went ahead and replaced the columns and the lanterns and the advantage that the parish council has over that is because they're LED, they're cheaper to run so actually by us doing this work it's actually resulted in the parishes having less lower energy bills for their lights but there are some villages for example Tewisham who we don't have any lights in Tewisham but the parish council do and I assume the same in soons of villages they're not our lights, they're the village lights but of course it's down to the parish council to they own them and we maintain them it's down to the parish council to replace them and I think when you, sorry I'll come to your second councillor I think councillor Ellington when you were referring to this in the conversation last night you were referring to maybe an example of a very very small village and my only have six lights and therefore by definition it's parish precepts is going to be equally small so that becomes a problem I feel much clearer on that in terms of as you said they're councillor John Williams even if it is our lights we are fitting all the bills of the district council to replace them, to put them up and maintain them and it's just the electricity bills unless it happens to be that a village has unfortunately ended up in a situation where all those lights are for the parish whilst that is not a particularly helpful answer I feel I understand better on that I think we're then probably moving on Thank you chair I just wanted to clarify something through the light discussion and I think one thing we have always all agreed on that if anyone was putting streetlights in they would not have the system that we have in place of all the different ownership it's something that has evolved over many many years but on page 31 C6 it says about reducing and saving parish council's money which I would expect we're putting in LEDs but we've also been told that they're not metered so is it something that they tell them and that they're LED and therefore it's a different flat fee if they're not metered and even though they are using less energy how are the parish councils or ourselves getting that money and I've always chaired if it helps the thought of streetlights like a free hold these hours and the lease hold is the parishes but I think what Councillor Ellington was saying was about setting up perhaps facility and Councillor Mills referred to about bargaining power and the smaller ones don't have the bargaining power is there something we could do to help parishes come together to negotiate together as opposed to having these small ones I myself have got more parish meetings than many and some of them don't even have a precept but what we're looking at here was not the district council I think from what I've understood it's fitting the bill but actually helping to get creative or collective bargaining power is that something that we could maybe assist with which wouldn't be us actually paying for anything it's two things that I chaired Councillor John Williams in the first thing but that would still require officer time I mean the reason why the county gave up doing exactly what you wanted is because it was costing them a lot of money to co-ordinate and organise and negotiate with the various electricity organisation so it passed that responsibility down to the parishes and we don't have the ability to pick that up we don't have the officers with the expertise and we would have to employ more officers or at least an officer to do that and you know it's a difficult situation I mean it may be that parishes have importance with this it could approach the county and ask the county to take its life so far but you know but at the moment we certainly don't want to take on that responsibility that the county had because of the cost of doing it it's just not and also it's not a district council responsibility there's what I'm saying you know for historic reasons most district councils don't have street lights and it's only because for historic reasons that we've got these street lights and I think we've done as much as we can to reduce the burden by installing an LED and making sure that they're most modern and energy efficient I think that's probably as far as we can go with this Okay, thank you. Councillor Healy-Williams and then I'll come to Councillor Stoep after the next question Thank you chair there was just a question around if they're not metered how is the cost savings filtering through of the energy efficiencies that we're making I can answer that for you Thank you Councillor Yeah, so the unmetered supply requires you to inform the electricity company so that you can reassess if you change the types of light or lamp units in our case to LED from sodium or similar older fashion lights and they will work out a rate for such devices and I think it's really a very substantial reduction in the cost so it's about 40% less than the previous lights I think was the last estimate I saw so that at least will give them some advantage but of course in the current circumstances we've got vasting increased electricity rates so there's not going to be any net to gain for them it's just going to be less of a painful gain Thank you Councillor and the way in which you have me to move on and Councillor Stavart who will be the final question on this item On this item of the agenda Sorry, I mean this It's not relevant to street lighting No, no, no, no Thank you chair So I'm looking at items C3, Italic 1, 2 and 3 and that's on page 30 of the agenda or 36 of the PDF so significant improvements through use of renewable energy better energy management around this building and so my question concerns so first of all how do we propagate that good practice because I'm assuming that the council is pioneering to some extent I mean these things are being done in many places but for a building of this type in this place there will be some excellent data generated does that become in a sense good practice which is communicable to local businesses and secondly is there a route for that data that monitoring to be used in the longer term to actually keep that very progressive image of the energy management in and around this building so yeah those two questions benefits of local business how do we keep ourselves at the leading edge Captain Mills in the first instance Yeah, thank you but we had a conversation earlier today that covered this topic because as you say we're doing really quite interesting things both in South Camps Hall although it's taken an awful lot longer than we would have preferred and would have preferred them to have stuck to their schedule but we've also got the renewable energy network project at Water Beach which will again give us a good case history for us to glean really very useful information and gain experience about working with UK power networks for example where negotiating with them for connection to the grid is an important part of that process and I think we can certainly use that experience to our own gain what I hadn't really thought about which Councillor Halbaugh just suggested was that this may be very useful information for other commercial organisations locally in the district to be able to pass on to them Okay, thank you Captain Mills, is there any office you'd like to turn to to add anything to that? That is a no Okay, Councillor Stobart No, that's excellent I could go deeper into a technical question about how we're gathering that data and organising it but I think that's a good answer and I think we can pursue the other details later on Okay, thank you very much Something that brings us to the end of questions in relation to that which brings us then on to agenda item 7 which is general fund revenue bids and savings following our pre-meeting last night we'd like to ask a first question and this is not a question designed to reject the fact that the report is here Sorry, yes, Councillor Williams Oh, right, okay That was getting in early So this is not a question designed to reject the fact that the report was here but in order I think for us to fully understand and ask questions in the way we wanted to we just wondered either from yourself Councillor John Williams or if you want to hand over to Peter Maddock what exactly your thoughts were in terms of what you hoped to get out of presenting this report to the Scrutiny Overview Committee I don't mind who answers and it's not designed to be a rejection of the report it's just a thought process question Yeah, so this is a draft report at this stage that's due to go to Cabinet on the 12th of December The budget process has been ongoing for some time and as part of that process we asked for bids for additional funding for particular projects or savings Now, there's a list here of the savings and the bids that potentially are going to be brought forward There's a note saying there that there is some information still awaited before we can finalise whether the bid should go forward or shouldn't go forward I think the committee has asked to consider the items within the tables and comment as appropriate whether you think the bids are concerned you're happy with them, whether you've got any questions there are officers from other service areas who can answer questions on bids in relation to their particular area The other bit of context I think it might be useful to give is this bid process has to be viewed in the context of the general financial state that local authorities find themselves in I think it's fair to say local authorities collectively are holding their breath for Thursday when we have the budget as we are expecting to see some cuts to funding obviously the stage we don't know what those will be but we are predicting at this stage a budget gap for next year of somewhere between £700,000 and £1 million a lot of that has been driven by the turmoil that we are seeing in relation to interest rates so we have seen interest rates rise significantly in recent months and predictions of interest rate rises even further beyond what we are seeing at the moment I think it's probably fair to say that some of the predictions we have seen have suggested interest rates going to as high as 5, 6 or maybe 7% more recent information is suggesting it's not going to be as bad as that but I think the overall picture is that we don't really know where interest rates are going and some of the increase in interest rates will hit the budget in 2023-24 which 2, 3, 4 months ago we weren't expecting so this is something that has come through fairly recent so also I would say that the bids that have come forward have been closely scrutinised by officers and where it's believed that those bids couldn't be supported or they weren't absolutely necessary they have been the news so the bids that you're left with are those that we believe are ones that should be put forward as I say there are some highlighted in pink where we still require additional information to be certain whether we really need to put them in or is there some option to them and a lot of those are around ICT projects so this is a bit of a sort of position statement if you like rather than the finished article so it's just really whether there's any comments from the committee about any particular items or anything generally about the bids and savings process Thank you Harman, that's most definitely the comprehensive answer that we were discussing last night and thinking that might have been the case but we just wanted to absolutely make sure and in particular where you've referenced there the fact that the list that remains is after it's been filtered which we assumed and we thought was the case but we just wanted to absolutely make sure that was the case so we appreciate that I have Councillor Heather Williams for the first question Thank you chair so CS on page 40 is quite a big budget gap for this year but equally on paragraph 8 a budget gap overall of 7.5 million and there's going to be so many different variables over the coming time so it does make sense that we're going to have to be very careful as to how taxpayers' money is spent chair when it comes so I'm guessing we're going to be noting this Unless there's anything particularly specific that anyone wishes to flag up or ask about I just think being asked to comment on this is really difficult when we're not seeing what's been discounted because I was trying to look at it from a household bill the oven spoke will spend £100 on an oven I know if you wish you could get an oven for £100 that seems logical, sensible but if the £100 means you haven't got food for that week then you're going to go no oven has to wait you need to spend it on the food so it's really difficult I believe to judge this without seeing what has been discounted and if we're being asked to comment so I don't feel I have enough information here to make an informed comment because on the surface things can seem very reasonable and what have you but actually what is this in the place of so if this report does come to us again in future I think we need to be seeing what's not going forward as well as what is proposed to go forward and I think without that information I just can't make a comment Thank you Councillor Stobart did you want any kind of answer to that? I think it's more statement based on a quest for future reports and a nice little sheet that tells us what we're meant to do Councillor Stobart Thank you chair so page 45 of the agenda which I think is point 51 of the PDF there's a one year extension of a post so it's a project office a post and I think through you chair Councillor Williams' question you know what's the if you will the environment of this question it is funded or not and funded or not would be if we don't fund it then actually this very important area of activity stalls because there isn't somebody to do this this important work around for example EV program delivery but that was just a comment the post itself looks intriguing so it would be really helpful to know from the management responsible what's hoped for from this one year extension the kind of I guess there's a person in post already what's going to happen here if this is funded so which line on page 45 is that on? it's third line so okay yeah sorry I was looking at the bottom of the page so I assume then that this comes to you Councillor Milne's in the first instance I'm not sure it does but could Councillor Stonbarth repeat the essence of his question I lost track of that sorry I rambled so chair just to refine the question this is what is the aim of this appointment in a brief summary Councillor Milne's you need to highlight which appointment we're referring to in the table no that's absolutely fine I noticed as I referred to you and you are probably going to pass it on to Alex possibly anyway but obviously we'll go through you in the first instance so on page 45 of the report which is page 51 of the PDF the third line in the table says director of CW climate environment and refers to a years extension of the post of the project officer related to extension of climate environment project officer for energy and EV program delivery yes so we're extending that and actually Alex will be more familiar with the detail of that so I'll save us all a bit of time and direct the question to her if that's alright thank you Alex yes so we have a number of projects at that particular post work so on including the new EV charge point grant scheme that we just set up this year and extends into next year as well we also anticipate more funding coming out from other sources that we can leave room for additional EV projects as well there's also a lot of activity that we're involved with local partners as well so that's why we envisage that area of work kind of growing and on-going which is why we've requested an extension to that post okay, councillor Stoibart just one brief question to finish if it's extended for a year does that enhance the prospect of this becoming a permanent post? so perhaps we'll look at next year's bid process to answer that question but it's likely isn't it? it's a policy of agreeing to the core council and we want to extend that as much as possible we want to extend our use of renewables as much as possible and we'll continue that work and that will likely have a concomitant staffing requirement to go with it okay thank you I've got councillor Smith online followed by she's waiting to say no first of all she's going to councillor Stoibart are you happy for us to move on? and then it will be councillor Cone but councillor John Williams if you wanted to ref yes please do yes at the end of the item, yes absolutely councillor Cone thank you, it's just a quick question regarding the seven and a half million it says in paragraph 8 of the sorry chair it's very difficult to hear councillor Cone in fact everybody could speak a little bit closer to their microphones that would probably be helpful my apologies councillor Mills is that a bit better? yes that's much better, thank you sorry about that, so I was referring to page 40 and paragraph 8 because do we have any idea of how much the transformation programme will give us in terms of funding towards that gap within that timeframe that they've stated in paragraph 8 either councillor John Williams or Peter Maddox so the transformation programme is expected to deliver two million pounds worth of savings and the 7.5 million is after that has been taken into account so it would have been 9.5 million potentially so and that gap primarily arises because of the expected fair funding review in 2526 ok, great, just before I come to councillor John Williams sorry councillor John Williams I just wanted to say I'd noted that the second line on page 43 of the report in Appendix A obviously means that which is referring to the increase in fuel cost means that to some extent there are items within this bidding process which actually are effectively beyond the control of the council anyway so although initially I think when you see something that says revenue bids ongoing you kind of think well this is going to be things that you know are nice to be able to do or make things better it does strike me that it reflects also just the increased cost that exists and then I really kind of struck with what struck me with that was then the third line regarding the HVO fuel bid that obviously as well as having to pay more for diesel obviously the council I assume what I should read into that is continuing to seek ways of saving money in the long run in terms of the way in which fuel can be provided whilst also delivering on the green agenda as well so it was quite an interesting document in both showing what was important but also reflecting reality so councillor John William joined to sum up I just wanted to briefly go back to Peter's point it does include a fair funding review or the expectation of a fair funding review and that review causes us to lose a considerable amount of income from business rates clearly if that and so far it's never happened actually but if it doesn't happen then clearly that will have a big impact on the out-term figure of 7.5 million because we will hopefully if we retain our income from business rates then it's going to reduce that but also we've also put into the fact that we estimate that we expect that we're going to lose the house new homes bonus thank you yes as well which is again is a considerable amount now going back and putting this into context we don't put the budget together in isolation for the MTFS this is here and so is the MTFS to deliver the business plan that's what I would suggest you look at and then come back and look at the budget and look at the MTFS and say right have they got this right in order to deliver that business plan because there's nothing in this there isn't anything that we would like to have in this budget at all in this budget is there to get us through this financial crisis to deliver that business plan so if there's anything in that business plan you do not agree with or you think we could do it differently then this is where you come forward with suggestions of how we can change the budget to the way that you would like to see the business plan okay so there is a link between the budget and the business plan so we're not just looking at figures in isolation here and asking people to come forward with business savings based on the end result of the budget on the out turn we're actually saying to people this is what we believe we need to spend or save to deliver our business plan so we start at the business plan and then work back that's what I'm saying great thank you very much okay so that brings us to the end of the item that William said we are noting that has been given to us there's no further comment to make so we then move on to item 8 on the agenda which is the first example of an item on the agenda which is the result of the screen overview committee wishing to have a report and to investigate something and this is related to the future use of South Cambridgeshire Hall which came up in a conversation we had a few meetings ago and we now have the report here obviously in the first instance any questions we ask will begin to councillor Milne's and then possibly on to Geoff memory so any questions colleagues in relation to our report here regarding the future use of South Cambridgeshire Hall councillor Heather Williams thank you chair so two main ones looking at the proposed so South Council would have the central floor just around how we would safeguard and create re-u-do our security because essentially we would have we're renting this out we don't we won't look at everybody that's coming through because even if we know the companies we won't know their clients etc and we have a responsibility to make sure that there's confidential information in the council and all those sorts of things and council facilities that taxpayers are paying for aren't being used by other companies so I feel that that's something that we definitely need to understand and know because what's lovely about this building is it's so open and so you don't feel sort of closed in or anything else it's lots of open workspace which I believe was purposeful when it was done so that's my first point is around security arrangements the other was who we will be but I feel we need is who we will actually be allowing to rent this space from us and I say that because those policies will be vital as to whether this is successful or not in my view because we must not we must be very open and accessible to everybody that's really important but equally there will be tensions around what this council building and who we're renting and who we are receiving money from so for example companies would potentially have links to Russian and be Russian funding we wouldn't want that, we wouldn't want something that was inappropriate but then you have other issues as well tax avoidance companies that's it right with us given the fact we're relying on tax to fund services so I feel that that's another piece of information that before it progresses actually we need to know because there's no point putting all these plans together if we don't actually have a vision of of who will be able to use this for example you know that there are examples chair without trying to you know we're not this is before the watersheds they say there are certain companies that we definitely would not want advertising themselves as being at this building but how do we ensure that we are therefore still being open and not discriminating equally it's a tension that we're going to have to find and I think before we go any further those barriers need to be decided and we need to have a clear vision as to who will be allowed access to this building and thank you chair on the first instance interesting points two aspects of security really that Councillor Williams was referring to both the physical security aspect in an open space building with the atrium and then a security aspect a policy of who we might be to grant space to the space that we have and I think we've probably got something of a model with the investment board and their requirements on who we are prepared to let buildings to so I think that's certainly a basis going forward to create a policy of who we will accept because I think the williams is right is that there are clearly companies out there that we wouldn't want to be associated with and I'm sure Jeff can add to that as the lead officer in this project I don't know if you'd like to add to that Jeff Yes certainly Councillor I'm through you chair two levels first of all there's the way that we arrange our floor space currently for example we already have tenants within the building we've got both the NHS and training standards that work with us and those confidentially confidentiality issues had to be addressed in the way that the floor space and the deskings have been arranged so certainly that would be built into the detailed floor plan arrangements that the proposal first of all is to develop the first floor which will be where most of our staff will be based and then at that stage to look at whether that's delivering what we wanted to deliver successfully and then to move on to look at the proposals for the second and the ground floor I think we would be perfectly happy to bring back to this committee a policy on proposed rental to tenants so that this committee could agree before we proceed with anything for the second or ground floor I think the most important thing first of all is to get the first floor sorted out and ensure that that actually meets our needs in terms of having the desk space available for officers very conscious of the fact at the moment that although we've got a working assumption on the level of occupancy that's based upon a situation where we've had the greening of South Council going on for some time which means that probably the number of people coming into the offices has been less than it might be when that greening project's finished so what I think we'd like to do is get the first floor sorted out see to be confident that it's meeting the needs of our people and then go on to look at the second and ground floor what we wanted to do here is give you some idea of the thinking behind the proposals at the moment but I'm happy to bring more detailed proposals for the second floor back to this committee when we've reached that stage to chair Thank you chair and thank you for the response that's been given particularly about having more people in the building because I do strongly believe particularly for our contact centre that we should have somebody from each department available on hand if people do come into the building which we don't always have at the moment so I think that would be important for us to actually give flexibility but have more people in the office. The only thing I would say is in relation to security situations it may, if we don't have a way of creating physical barriers into the council areas then potentially would it not be better for us to be on the highest floor, on the second floor as opposed to the first floor so essentially you're subsectioning of the people there's no need for anybody that's not related to the council to go to that area because currently people that are renting the second floor are coming through first floor before they're getting there so that's what I was saying about understanding the way that we will make sure we're secure and keeping information secure at the same when we're putting these proposals together if that could be taken on board. Thank you chair. Great, thank you very much councillor Heather Williams and councillor Bradnham. Thank you chair. Some of my concerns are similar to those expressed by councillor Heather Williams so my concern is where will our contact centre staff be and will they have access to officers as well should they need to Again, why are we allowing non South Council district council staff onto the second floor which means they will go past our staff on the first floor what's the thinking behind us being on the first floor and our tenants being on the second floor and that might just be to do with the way it's currently being used and the extension of that. The other thing that concerned me is I'm glad to see there's still somewhere for members on the first floor the members lounge is being maintained and I'm glad to see that because I think there are times when members might want to actually work here rather than at home so I just want to understand the reasoning behind the rented space being on the second floor maybe if Mr Member could respond that would be really helpful. Thank you Jeff. I'm going to go to Jeff Member. The only thing I was going to comment was that it's an extension of what we're operating right now and Jeff can confirm that and he's already mentioned for example the NHS staff who work currently on the second floor so we've got that situation at the moment and I'm happy for Jeff to add to that. Yes, I thank you chair and through you. Both the NHS and the trading standards have currently got contracts for the last remaining year so in order to make the changes that we need to make we need to do that either on the first or the ground floor because we've already rented out the space on the second floor so that makes it contractually more deliverable but as you've mentioned Councillor Bradman, on the first floor we've not only got desks that officers sit at but we've got room for members we've got access to the council chamber so that seems to be the most sensible place to house our people and certainly we'd be moving to a different arrangement whereby a lot of the old paper that's been around in the offices will be gone when we need to move to the new desking arrangements it's not going to be a case that people coming through the building would be able to come across locked cabinets with big piles of paper in them pretty much everything that we deal with is dealt with electronically now so once we've digitalised that paper that is still there the security will be based around people having laptops which only they have access to and making sure that they keep them secure so the security challenges are not quite the same that they have been in the past but certainly when it comes to the contact centre those people that see people face to face will still need to be in the offices and they already have access to services officers from other services either face to face if they happen to be in the office or more frequently nowadays through teams so if they need advice from a member of the back office they have that access there already the other big point is I think we were discussing earlier on the budget gap that potentially is going to be a challenge for us going forward the renting out of the top floor gives us the most optimal potential use of space and potentially that could generate something in the region of £300,000 a year extra income which will again make a significant contribution to closing that budget gap so there's a number of things that we have to take into consideration but certainly the whole point of bringing this report here is to hear members' concerns and to adapt what we're proposing in light of them and we'll certainly do that Thank you and I know it's early days yet and this is a project that's developing but have you any feel for how the building will end up being divided up by rent people either using the ground floor rentable space and I can see that I can see how that works as a separate location but for people who've got to go up using the same lifts that's still open on the first floor to get to the second floor how will we I can see Brian, Councillor Mills is shaking his head I'm just trying to work out how we will identify the second floor and will we try to restrict their access to the areas on the first floor how will that work Councillor Mills or Geoff memory I'm happy for Geoff to take that but for example with the access at the moment public access is available for example to the council chamber but more on to the second floor you have to have access via there so that can be part of that solution and I'm sure Geoff got this all in hand I mean there is the ability to restrict access based around the access cards that we all carry I think one of the things I'm trying to perhaps explain is there's not going to be on the first floor that many vulnerable places so somebody who works on the second floor if they were to accidentally get off and walk through the first floor they're not going to have documents laying out on desks that relate to our residents they're not going to be encountering confidential information everything is going to be digitalised so that our staff will be viewing it on laptops if they have somebody that's not a member of our staff walking around looking over their shoulder they would be very confident I think in asking them what we're doing and directing them up to the second floor that's not to say that's what we're relying on but I think what we're trying to do is ensure that we're not in a position where we have a vulnerable information just laying around it's not to do with vulnerable information it's to do with vulnerable staff as well so you're concerned about the security of our staff potentially being attacked by employees of other organisations I must admit I've not given that that specific thought Councillor Bradman I'll have to come back with that because we have had to exclude some members of the public from some parts of our council operation so I'm just wondering how that would be achieved that's simply it thank you I'll perhaps have to come back at another time with an answer to that chair if that's okay absolutely fine Councillor Bradman are you happy for me to move on I have Councillor Cohn Thank you chair I think my question has been partially already answered by Jeff Menby my question is around how the existing NHS and trading standards would be affected during the transition of the building essentially but you sort of said about the contract being for X amount of period do you envision that sort of continuing then the space essentially whilst that transition happens and following on from that I wondered if it would be possible to look at maybe either very small entities using us renting space to smaller groups or entities during that transition period or is that something that wouldn't really be possible because of the reshuffle of deaths and so forth Yes Yes to answer your question we are intending and in fact we have contract for trading standards and the NHS to continue to rent the second floor during the transition and certainly I think it would be a good idea to look whether during that transition period there are small businesses that would be interested in renting a smaller aspect of the space that the nature of renting out office accommodation means that actually the best return on profit is if you get somebody who's prepared to rent out an entire floor but we know that at least for a period that's unlikely to be the case so certainly that's something we will seriously look at Great, thank you Councillor Coe you're happy for me to move on Thank you very much Thank you Councillor John Love-Luck Thank you chair very briefly on in relation to Councillor Bradman's foot about vulnerable members of staff and our members I think what is really important is whatever it's done is that people feel safe in this building and I would refer to the gentlemen that arrive of a box of bugs at the council not that long ago on a four council day was not able to get past reception before he released said box of bugs which to be fair he could have released anything we were probably quite lucky it was just bugs in there so if you're having businesses on the second floor it's not just I really want to get to this point it's not just the people that you're allowed to go on there we know with the NHS and trading standards that they're not bringing people in but if I was in my own business preventing a space I'd want clients to visit prospective clients that would be what I'd be using it for so how would you start with somebody that wants to explode a box of bugs on us that just books an appointment with somebody on the second floor and therefore gains access to and it was bad enough for the poor members in the contact centre in that situation so I just would like to hear some confirmation about the duty of care obviously that we have to officers and members to safeguard them from those situations because we can't pretend that these things don't happen because unfortunately they do councillor Milne's first or Geoff memory I should be mindful of the fact that we do carry a risk in being a building open to our residents that's part of the service we offer so we can't make this building into some sort of fortress that can cope with every contingency and everyone slightly crazed enough to throw cockroaches around the place or worse and there are worse scenarios so I think a security audit of our proposal would be a very useful idea and I think Geoff can take that on board and incorporate that into our planning Thank you Geoff, anything to add or are you happy for us to move on? No, I'm very happy to include a security audit Okay, councillor Heather Williams if you want to come back on we'll move on councillor John Lovelock Hello, thank you chair I don't want to make too much of it because I think Geoff has just agreed to do a security audit but I've found some of the comments maybe naive is a little bit pejorative but the idea that we don't have conversations that you don't want people to hear, the idea that there are no papers I think we really do need to look carefully very carefully at the segregation of areas and equally for example if it was me renting some of those spaces I wouldn't be so happy but in my company I'm wondering through I think you do need to take carefully into account the confidentiality many aspects of confidentiality both the council and the potential tenants but a security audit is the right answer and possibly investment in security barriers Okay great, thank you I assume councillor Lovelock you're not particularly looking for an answer that's more of a statement, yeah If I can just round off on this and just say to councillor Milms councillor Milms I assume we will not be the only council who let out part of our building in the whole country to others and therefore I would assume that this is something that happens in other places and that models do exist to deal with these issues in council buildings across the country we will obviously be liaising with other councils to make sure we learn from them who have already gone through this We've got a knowledge base within the LGA for example that would usefully inform that so I think that's a perfectly reasonable base for Geoff to look for advice and shared experience and I think shared space in general in commercial terms is not unusual if we look at some of the office rental companies that are out there this is standard procedure for them on either a day by day, week by week, month by month or yearly basis so it's certainly an area where there's plenty of experience that we can call on to make sure that we do things in an effective and safe way OK, thank you so thank you to councillor Milnes and to Geoff Member for your responsibility relations so that was our first item where we had flagged up that and I feel that's a really important item for us to be involved in and I think obviously colleagues sat to my right as it just happens have raised a number of concerns in relation to safety that I think it's really important that we take on board but obviously at the same time as Geoff Member referred to we have talked about funding gaps and therefore that pulls that in back together as well but I look forward to this coming back to us again at some point in the near future whether that be December, whether that be January because there are clearly things that we need to consider but I think that's a very variable discussion for us to have so appreciate, thank you very much for your report in that regard which brings us on to item I've lost my little bit agenda item number nine on the agenda which is the young people task and finish group terms of reference now, sis of course, Councillor Bradlin We have been going for two hours Will it be pertinent to seek a pause? If you would like to seek a pause we are only a couple of items on the end I was hoping to gallop on through to the end but I am happy for us to seek a pause, it's absolutely fine Yes, there is definitely seconded so if we could ask I suggest a five minutes pause we will start again at nineteen forty seven by the clock on the wall thank you very much Thank you very much and this brings us to agenda item number nine which is the young people task and finish group terms of reference there is an oddity to this which is obviously the five members of the young people task and finish group are all members of this committee so therefore we are just checking that we are happy and content with the terms of reference just so everyone is aware, Councillor Richard Stover has taken on the role of chair of the young people task and finish group so all is going to do in this to ask if there are any members of the committee who wish to make any comment or ask any questions in relation to the terms of reference that have been put forward I have Councillor Ellington and Councillor Heather Williams Thank you Chairman the only thing that I would like to be sure is that there is some time frame for this work to be completed task and finish groups can go on ad nauseam if they don't actually feel that they've come to the end of the piece of work that they've been set up to do and I would like to see a time frame put in it Councillor Stover as chair of the task and finish group I'm going to refer to you for this one So last meeting we had a long discussion about the timeline and what we would like to do is aim to complete a report for council at the July council meeting which is I think second week is just ahead of the summer holidays and that made us consider that the interview program discussion program clearly will but the meeting with young people and the discussion would take place between January and March so this is a good time after Christmas before Easter not that much happens not many people are going away and so on educational institutions are in term at least for a substantial part of that period so we think anchoring the process in that first three months of the year will help us considerably towards meeting a reasonable goal now it could happen that we get the run up to the council meeting and there is some issue we need to rethink or we work the data in some way but we think this concentrated three month period is actually going to anchor us quite well but we can't legislate for everything that could happen Thank you very much councillor Heather Williams Thank you chair So looking at terms of reference just to confirm that although press and public are not allowed it has been the case in particular task finish groups in some constitution things that other members are allowed to attend and observe if they so wish as we have with other meetings and then can only contribute at the discretion of the chair just wondering if that's possible because although I think you don't want to go beyond five for task and finish group sorry chair but there may be others that want to bring suggestions and things so just making sure that it's going to be open to all the membership is important and a bit of a plea though the young people is not just those of school age and also not just those that are in schools in south Cairns what we've done previously which is well meaning is we'll consult the six one colleges or what have you but we have huge border so a lot of children in my ward for example go to school in Bedfordshire or Hartfordshire they are equally part of south Cairns as everybody else but they go to school in Royston because it's it is the nearest school so if some thought and then indeed there are people I have people in my ward who are home schooled and also people at university and I think we can afford to be quite generous I sort of joked to be I know since the last elections we've got a few more campuses that are younger thankfully but I sort of joked to that Councillor Cohn and Councillor Batchfair Henry Batchfair and I can't stay the young ones forever as much as we may like there's a significant gap I won't reveal my age but a significant gap between myself and school and so don't be stingy on what you refer to as young people I think is what I'm trying to say Council's vote vote through you chair response to the first point I think being generous I completely agree we do have a question of a limited number of people, limited time so we do have to choose our targets well but through you chair your point is well made and I think we're going to see some interesting geographical effects in the sense that we will be talking to for example university students in Cambridge but who've come from all over the country we will be talking I hope to students at Cambridge Regional College again students being drawn from all around probably from over county borders as well and to your point if there are students heading over the border from South Cams into other administrations then we need to take that into account as well because all those factors will be brought to bear on how they feel about their environment in South Cams so they're good thoughts are you going to have to let us take those away and have a think through what the programme is going to be like chair if I can and the first bit about it being the meetings being open for members to be able to contribute even though they're not public meetings but the first thing was please those that don't go to school at all there are many people that don't for numerous or leave school early at 16 or going to trade and are working they need to be equally as valued as those people that pursue academic careers as well so can I just comment and I didn't respond to the first point so can other members attend absolutely I can see there's any reason why not we do need to have a think about meeting dynamics but I think the point is well made and as for homeschooling children in care all those who might be more difficult to access we've got to think that through so officers are being very helpful in that regard in helping us to understand well we might find those if you were difficult to access young people so we might need to test that list out and just make sure that we've got good coverage we can't be exhaustive if we don't have the time but on the other hand we do need to be representative we can evaluate that so thank you council Williams for those questions after me Tom council Williams and council Bradnham thank you chair I appreciate this is the first investigation of how you're engaged with young people and that's really you're feeling your way and that's fine I just wanted to point out I chair the corporate parenting subcommittee at the county council and we engage with our children in care through the children in care council and they have their own meetings and discuss items of concern to them and some items that we ask them that they might like to consider and then their views are gathered by a number of representatives from the council and we have just recently started to be able to actually have the young people attending our subcommittee meetings so that they can say to us directly what they think about the papers but that requires that the papers written for the subcommittee have to be accessible to those young people as well so wondrously there is a on every paper there is a one paragraph summary in straightforward language about what it's about so you might want to instigate that but also that children in care council might be your way into the children in care aspect so we can liaise on that, thank you councillor Feibart well I'd like to thank councillor Braden for those comments particularly the offer of help which I appreciate it unless there are any other comments in relation to the terms of reference I can just ask for agreement by affirmation with the terms of reference for the task and finish group great, thank you very much everyone which brings us to agenda item 10 which is the ice rink update so we're aware of this approximately two years ago it was agreed that an ice rink update would come back to the treaty and overview committee and this is that paper obviously quite a lot has happened in the last two years in our world but at the same time service things happen to the ice rink update I just wanted to if anybody has any questions or comments in relation to this item we have agreed that the standard process for the committee is that we do not ask people to present things to us, we have the papers in advance unless the person is typically asked to present so if and then obviously people have the paper in advance and others will ask questions if they wish to do so, so is there any questions that anyone wishes to ask I have councillor Lee me in the first instance thank you chair, I would like to ask a question about paragraph 17 please which is the revised loan agreement you should see the counciller group it's money by 2049 I was wondering under what terms that loan was structured and whether it was linked to inflation so councillor John Williams or do you wish me to ask Peter Maddock in the first instance to Peter future, so there is a link to inflation the original loan agreement was due to be repaved in 43 ports now 4849, you will see in the original agreement there was a request for additional funding we managed to get the visit so the agreement itself will be drawn up by our leaders through the process so when the agreement is drawn up there will be a number of stipulations within that around having representation on the board of click and the creditors demands on the company have been significantly reduced and there is also an intention that both the loan in tandem with the agreement the new loan schedule there will also be an agreement between click and the landowners which is Marshals and the management company which is Greenwich Leisure Limited for a 10 year extension to the existing leases so that will then take us beyond the raised end of the loan period so the link will still be operating and the other stipulation that we are going to introduce and click are quite happy with this is to review the loan agreement on a regular basis so that if finances allow they can repay us early so there is a number of sort of details to put in the agreement and hopefully all listed there but that is what we are hoping to achieve OK OK thank you and Councillor Heather Williams Thank you chair and I confirm that I am much happier with an extension of time than when they wanted more money but we will have that categorically that we will not extend their loan until the Marshals and GLL as extended so we will be after that because hand in hand always worries me a bit of which goes first so categorically we will not sign until that has been signed because what we don't want to do is extend it and then they not be able to get the extension and especially with GLL and Marshals and click it's very complex structures Yes so that will be the case we will make sure that all happens at the same time But we go last It will be a condition of us extending the agreement that they will have in place for 210 years Just to add to that I mean obviously there is a proposal to relocate the park and ride site and the ice ring is located within the park and ride site The new market road park and ride site is actually owned by Marshals But we understand that Marshals will allow the ice ring to stay but clearly we want to make sure that is going to be the case So we do in case anyone is wondering aren't we going to relocate the park and ride yes we know about that and that's something that we have taken into account OK, if you have anything to move on I think we can cancel out of the Williams Councillor Fane It is Thank you chair Just one item that I had expected to see referred to in this report which isn't there which is the effect of interest rates on the viability of the ice ring and on the cost of repayment of loans cost of servicing loans Is there a reason why that isn't dealt with in this report Yes So the interest rate is fixed at 4.31% throughout the whole term and that's Yeah, so that was more of the greed than the outset So I'll take your vigorous nodding Councillor Fane as we are OK to move on and I have Councillor Bradman Thank you chair I wanted to look at risk We know that this site has not been without risk in the past and 19 says there is a risk obviously we have to look at all risks a risk that the loan repayments will not be made within the time scales stipulated but this is common with all such arrangements I would like to ask if we are considering a regular review process to see how the company is doing with its ability to repay the loan in the expected time frame so that we don't so it doesn't come to the end of it and they say no we can't repay I think we ought to be keeping an eye on it on a regular basis but I don't know how that's achieved through legal agreements and whether it's possible to do that but I ask the question is it possible to keep an eye on that So we are going to make it a stipulation within the new loan agreement that we do review this on a regular basis and it's quite clear that they were happy with that because if they're able to repay early then we get our money early and they pay us less money as well so it is actually in the interest of both parties if finances allow so there will be regular reviews and we'll make that clear as part of the agreement Thank you That's reassuring and I'd like to think there was a plan somewhere in the back of somebody's draw that said what we would do if they if it looked as if it wasn't so rosy and it looked as if they couldn't pay back but the other one is if the park and ride moves all that free parking will be also removed and I suspect in terms of a business decision marshals will not want to leave much parking space because they'll want to develop it so I'm just wondering what happens, do we have some agreement with marshals about the minimum requirement for parking in order to keep the ice drinkers a viable going concern Counselor, John Williams, or these matters? The agreement is between click and marshals and we're not party to that agreement so that's why we want the assurance and marshals that they will extend the lease and that the ice ring will stay there it's down to the ice ring and marshals to disturb is not for us to dictate to click or marshals what arrangements they should make with our interest in this is the loan and our interest is to ensure that loan is repaid not how they operate the ice ring. We will have two members on the board and clearly they will have be able to have a say as to what happens and will be put back to us but sadly we don't control the ice ring the ice ring is not controlled by us we are simply a lender in this respect and we want to make sure that our loan is protected how the ice ring operates and how we we pay that loan is a matter for the ice ring. Yes, please Counselor Berkham, yes. Absolutely, thank you for that clarification Counselor Williams the reason I ask is that if usership drops consequent on loss of parking spaces we will be able to repaid the loan so hopefully the members on the board will be mindful of that. Okay great, Counselor Heather Williams Thank you Chair it was just a point of information about the original agreement meant that we had a place on the board so I'm assuming we will have somebody that's going regularly and it sounds like that's going to get finalised because it was a bit of a grey area when we discussed it previously so hopefully this will bring some formality to it but I think we have to remember who our loan is with it's with click GLL will be responsible for the running and for the financing and what Councillor Bradlin is referring to but our loan is not with GLL and the running of the business our loan is with click and they have other ways of dealing with things other than GLL if they so please so that might alleviate there it's just reminding and also a bunch of new members that this is not a straight forward process we're not directly with the people running it we have put a loan into the landlords essentially of it so click are responsible no matter what GLL and the running of it happens Okay thank you Counselor Milnes your hand was up I believe it was really to the perspective of GCP in this who would be responsible for any proposed move and it seems to me that it would be very obvious for aiding the commercial viability of the ice rink that enough parking was remaining on that site to make sure that the ice rink was a continually viable option because that would give clearly if it wasn't viable then marshals would lose out effectively anyway so it's I think in everybody's interest and it was very comforting to know that the ice rink recovered post pandemic for its usage levels so it continues to be quite viable right now and I think it's in everyone's interest to maintain that viability Okay thank you Sorry Counselor Williams Thank you sorry just because benefit towards the GCP has been referenced I just need to declare that I'm a member of the Greater Caves partnership assembly that's all Thank you But any other GCP relevant to people like to say the same thing Counselor Williams thank you very much Excellent just about that As I mentioned okay, marvellous So therefore Counselor Williams is saying he obviously wanted to add in relation to the ice rink and we haven't covered in that regard No that's what I thought but just to make sure then again we as a committee we know that that report is there and thank you very much for all the information and the answers you provided which brings us on to basically our final item on the agenda which relates to our work programme and obviously the documentation there we go on the work programme and the forward plan but there is also the specific reference to the fact that Counselor Stobart and Counselor Bear Park who has joined us have submitted a request that the committee take up an interest in relation to section 106 agreements and monitoring So therefore what I'd like to do at this point is ask whether it be Counselor Stobart or Counselor Bear Park who would just like to explain to the committee briefly what it is that you would like the committee to be interested in to engage in and then perhaps we'll have a discussion in relation to that and decide if you wish to accept that as something that we're going to do Counselor Bear Park Thank you chair Since I became a Counselor over a year ago section 106 seems to come up a lot Certainly in my ward Sorry Counselor Stobart just because I didn't ask you to introduce yourself we haven't mentioned what your ward is Apologies if you can do that first and then you can carry on That was my mistake No sorry I'm a member for Milton and Anwar speech So Yes I mean there are a number of things coming forward in our ward which arise from section 106 agreements largely as a result of the new town development some of those coming forward quite nicely and there are new section 106 agreements coming forwards with the other developer of Water Beach New Town and I suppose this is an area that I'm learning slowly but I'd like to learn a bit quicker and I understand you know this has responsibilities for reaching agreements and also for monitoring you know how those agreements how section 106 is carried out once the agreement has been reached and I suppose because it's so important for Water Beach New Town coming forward I'd be interested to you know see if there's not a possibility and we suggested a possibility of a of an item to examine how section 106 agreements are reached and what sort of monitoring is taken by by officers as you know that multimillion pound schemes are brought forward As you said chair this is a joint suggestion for an item with councillor Stobart Do you want to add some further words to that? Mr Stobart So the word that I help represent Gertin was surrounded by Eddington and Darling Green that has strong links with Histon and it's in that context that you know I was concerned that the section 106 agreements that had been agreed for example for Darling Green 3 and for parts of Eddington were not necessarily joining up so I mean it's hard to future prove things completely but the notion of well do we have a vision for example active travel in the Gertin area that would allow students for example to travel safely between education institutions and their home had that been thought about for example when Darling Green was conceived when Eddington was added and so on could that have been done better so that we weren't for example now looking at Darling Green 2 and 3 and thinking well actually that could have been better that could have been the access to World Book Way in Gertin could have been better planned so I was concerned about how they all join up and how much you could future prove a section 106 agreement so that infrastructure might be emerging better adjusted things like trigger points very difficult to understand if you're planning and again I'll come back to my favourite this active travel network what's the right trigger point for an active travel network when you're trying to encourage people to buy houses on their development and for them to think I can use my bike from the day I move in if it's all kind of mud and just hope about the number of people who are going to move in and then my cycle way will be there I don't think that's correct so I think some thinking around how these trigger points interact as well in relation to this multiplicity section 106 projects comes back to the point that Councillor Bair has raised which is how do we conceive and monitor them and what is it within our power and we appreciate that for officers this is a big challenge it's a monstrous kind of situation of being pushed multiple ways with developers with very strong commercial agendas that we would like to investigate and see if there's any way we can help the whole system to be better Thank you I'm conscious of your hand but I wanted to first of all ask if there's anyone else on the committee who wanted to make any comment in relation to the proposal that Councillor Stobart and Councillor Bair have made and then I was going to come to you and then Liz what I was going to come to you after I'd been by that so Councillor Bradman first Thank you I think it's a very good idea that we look at this but I'm just mindful of the thought that I can't remember off the top of my head the precise wording but something like S106 is as it were a contribution made by a developer to mitigate the impacts of the development itself and so I'm just mindful that when it goes into active travel we're talking about travel between the new development and somewhere else and sometimes that's quite hard to envisage until it's actually there on the ground where people might actually want to go and also it's just I'm anxious that it should not actually fall outside the purview of S106 payments the other one is still and I think that maybe is delivered in a slightly different way but anyway I'll let others think about that I will go to Councillor Heather Williams and then I will go to Councillor Mills Thank you I've got no issues with the S106 coming to us just as long as I could have better free assurance just from officers because we're always planning and as a planning committee member I've been in planning at some point we're always told about how it's the planning authority and not the council and it's a statutory function rather than a political function obviously this is a scrutiny function off the statutory function so to just make sure that we're not for well-meaning purposes opening something that could be held in court against us on that process so long as officers are satisfied then I see no harm in it coming through just conscious that what we will be talking about is potentially live applications as opposed to finished and completed so it's just about where that line is because I think also we would lose the we would lose the point really if we were doing it after the horse is bolted if it wasn't on live applications but how we managed to balance that independence of the statutory function away from the political and whether with that in mind if there is a problem then perhaps actually the planning committee could have it as an agenda item if that is a problem as opposed to scrutiny I'm just open to the ideas I just want to make sure that we are squeaky clean on what we're doing and we don't accidentally trip ourselves up because I think the purpose that has been sought here is a very valid and good one. Thank you chair. Thank you. Councillor Mills? I'll defer to Liz because I think she may be saying something that I might also want to say but we'll see. Liz, what? Thank you chair. So my first thought here is that this is a really interesting subject for all members and I personally think this would be better run as a sort of training workshop for all members to be able to I suppose scrutinise how we do things it doesn't need to come through a scrutiny committee I think from what Councillor Bear Park and Councillor Hobart were saying they want to understand more about the process and be able to engage with it more and understand why things haven't happened and how they might happen in the future. I think that would be really interesting for all members and so my suggestion is that it's a workshop that we get colleagues in planning to run that we open to everybody. Councillor Mills, your hand is still up I don't know if that's because you haven't turned it down. So I want to just confirm that you won't see my notes here but it says workshop for members on section 106 so somebody that has been closely involved with 106 agreements in my ward of Sallston where we've got two significant developments going on there I've been quite intimately involved in this and I think that the idea of a workshop or training on section 106 understanding the statutory requirements that Heather Williams was just referring to for example and including things that are going on elsewhere so for example cycle routes we just had a particular example in Sallston where a cycle route into the village centre from a development on the side of the village is part of the section 106 agreement so that definitely has to be aligned with an active travel perspective from the County Council and I think their involvement in section 106 agreements is a really interesting area that particularly people members on the planning committee need to be aware of but a wider membership issue for everybody that's involved because we've got developments all over the district thank you. There's probably two things that we're talking about I think one is S106 agreements that are being negotiated and being discussed and Heather Williams' point about not straying into planning I think it's really important there because I don't think scrutiny should be looking at that supervising the negotiation of 106 agreements but we as members do need to be involved in that we've all got examples where we've been involved in section 106 negotiations in one way or another and improving our understanding of that, improving our relations with the officers of the side of it on those negotiations with the planning officers would be excellent and that workshops and training and that would be great possibly we need to have a little bit more thinking about it about the potential world that scrutiny could have which would be a slightly different one of reviewing and sort of looking at things holistically in a reflective way that is really our role as a screening committee so before we maybe decide I think we could have more reflection on that and the monitoring is a particularly important part of that that's part of what the introduction was about focusing on monitoring which is I think I'm sure we'll get some good advice on this less of an issue for in terms of straying into planning so that is potentially something that we could be looking at as well as how those agreements are monitored and how changes are managed so I would certainly like to not not exclude any role for scrutiny in looking at one of six agreements at this station Thank you Councillor Bradman Thank you chair I think it might help if I gave a particular type of example because one of the things I think is that we have found difficult in our ward is where sorry where conditions have been applied that for example require an improvement of a cycle route but that is that delivery is done through section 278 arrangements which are simply the developer designed something gives it to the county council and the county council makes observations on road safety and then they say no so you need to change this and adjust that and make that longer and make that shorter and then they come back with different plans under 278 and eventually the county council signs it off from their road safety team but the problem with that which might all be being delivered as an S106 condition or as an S106 delivery the problem is there's no public consultation and it's that element of it that's been problematic so it's not just S106 it's how that is delivered in the process now that might be statutory and we might not have any influence on that at all but if you can see that is the sort of concern that we have locally about how section 106 I think that's why the element of monitoring is coming into it because actually what's the problem is the lack of local consultation on how those section 278 deliveries happen Thank you a couple more bits and I'm going to round it off and then we'll be done so I've got Liz I think your hand I'm not sure who was first actually let's go to Heather, let's go to Councillor Heather Williams first and then we'll go to Liz Watts I was actually going to try and clarify some of the council back and said if that's okay to help so what you're saying is the staggering where we have the discharging of conditions and some of them will lead to that so when a condition an application is in although there's not a statutory consultation you can feed into that process so this is something separate that you're struggling with or is it a discharge condition in relation to drawing down a 106 drawing a letter in other words it's the way the process of delivery of what has been requested as you say as a condition that draws on the S106 it's how that is delivered that's the problem it's county councillors are familiar with this and indeed any member who's been involved in something that's the way it happens it's quite complex but that's an element that I'm concerned about I think it's what councillor Bear Park and councillor Stobart are interested in as well as how because when we get a planning application at Planning Committee very often we get a heads of term for the S106 as part of the planning application and that's very helpful because it says basically what it requires what that has required in order to draw it up is for people to say to the parish council ok if you're going to have this development right next to your village what are the things that you think you need as a in this community to mitigate the impact of the development and the parish council if they've got their heads together says oh actually we know we could do with extra open play space or extra indoor recreation or we need a bus stop or a pavement that's lengthened to connect the two developments or something like that but unless the parish council is really on the ball about what it needs and some are great at this but some are less equipped then that S106 because they haven't got the ideas from the parish council so it's that's all the stuff I guess that might come into this is how a process happens as well in that case chair because some of this it does feel and I am please bear with me I'm trying to get us into the statutory process because obviously there are ways in which we word conditions as planning committee that could perhaps help with this situation but of course there can always be an application to Ulta S106 Ulta we quite often see pre-commencement become preoccupation and the like so they're all still live going on can I make a suggestion that this is obviously a really important issue and that officers work with and the councils that have brought it forward to us and we can really see what this is because there are so many different variants ways and so many different departments and different functions and like councillor van der Veier says I'm sure there is a role for scrutiny in this somewhere there might just need to be a bit of work to find it so that we don't interfere with the other processes and and maybe Stephen Kelly can give committee some guidance of conditions for me that's part of the reason why councillers submit their form, we have a conversation with the committee and then we work out where we are going with it I've got Liz Watts your hand goes up a minute to go Liz, I don't know if you've decided not to just a thought chair I mean it feels like I wonder whether it would be useful to collect all of the questions from this committee and potentially the wider member group around this issue because it is a really complicated issue and then allow us to run a workshop that responds to those questions and then for scrutiny to say okay what would we now, what are the elements that we now feel that we need to scrutinise because otherwise I fear that not all members are going to benefit from the knowledge that we could share in the challenge that you could give us and also it potentially is a huge topic that's been presented and I think we need to hone in on what you actually want to scrutinise Thank you chair I think the idea of a workshop is an excellent idea very much to support that I think that will be fantastic I think the reason, one of the reasons I brought this up was really just to try and ensure that I suppose the agreements that are being reached with developers are the best they can be for achieving our local priorities it feels like 50% or more of my case work relates to section 106 agreements which I had no input when they were reached you know, are we learning lessons from the considerable number of agreements that have been reached in the past and then are I don't know if it's the right word discharged later on I know other councils have provided quarterly reports on section 106 activity to the council and I think to Councillor Stobart's question about you know, are we ensuring that the different agreements are joined up correctly and I think we can do this without referring to live section 106 discussions and negotiations it's more at a kind of higher level it's just really really understanding whether all the aspects are being you know, are being attended to and have the resources that they need and the council officers have the resources they need to deal with this because obviously it's a massive area I suppose lastly I wanted to just kind of consider the impact of rising construction costs and the risk of stagnant or falling housing prices whether that's being actively considered because that's obviously a hot topic and we can do that and Councillor Leaming last separate word Thank you, thank you chair I think perhaps I would like to sort of reiterate the idea that the training workshop would be an excellent idea and I think opening it up to all members would be a really good plan but I don't see this as an either or situation I think that would be a really good starting point but I would like this to remain as a scrutiny item I think there's lots of things that we could look at with a scrutiny sort of a view of scrutiny things like monitoring implementation overlaps between various section 106s timing trigger points lessons learned from previous section 106s I think these are all valid things that we could could look at and learn from as both members and if there's any areas where we need additional sort of resilience within an office to do Great, thank you very much So my proposal would be first of all is it reasonable for me to suggest to everyone that there is agreement within the committee that we would like to take on board Councillor Stobart and Councillor Bedford's initial suggestion and to find a way forward with that and that we're not rejecting it Do we agree to that? OK, great. I'll say that in the loosest way to begin with. So thank you very much for that So it seems to me that we are then agreeing that this is what suggestion of a training I want to say seminar when I realised that wasn't really the right word Member Workshop Yes, a Member Workshop No, because it's not and a Member Workshop which would be as it is suggested where everyone could put forward a stage. And then I come back to the points that have been made at the end there by Councillor Bedford and Councillor Liming that that is the starting point but until we have done that we perhaps don't have that bigger picture of understanding but we're also not kind of rejecting the points that Councillor Bedford made at there and Councillor Liming made towards the end of that there is a role for scrutiny in this of looking at this, the wider issue whilst also taking into account Councillor William's points very much related to making sure that we follow the tram lines and we don't depart from them in the way that would be problematic and I'm also very much struck by Councillor Bradman's reference to a specific example which obviously is very current and pertinent within the Mils and Waters Beach ward Yes, Councillor Bedford Would it be useful to have a report or just an update not anything very complicated but just an update on to the next scrutiny and overview meeting that says what we are going to do having had a big discussion about it My thought would be to for Councillor Cohn and myself to have a conversation with this water whoever to see that we can put on the member workshop as soon as possible and that doesn't mean like tomorrow but as soon as possible now if that means a way to do that ahead of that meeting on 15 December which would be quite a push but nothing is absolutely impossible in life and then we'd be able to do that if it becomes the case that in this stage then our update on 15 December would be a much smaller thing and we'd be coming in January with more Okay, so I'll move us on from that item which means number 12 as I've just mentioned to note the date of the next meeting which is Thursday the 15th of December at 5.20pm Thank you very much We don't have the exclusive press in public but as we don't have any more discussion that we don't want, yes Councillor Williams Thank you chair It's just something to potentially throw out there that I'm conscious that I work for my mother so she will cope with whatever time I finish but there are other members that have had to come in later or just making it and I'm just wondering if we were to make it 5.30pm whether those that are working 9.00pm to 5.00pm would then enable give them half an hour at least to get here because South Cams is we're not in the city, we are quite rural and that means that not everywhere we're within a 15 minute drive I mean it took me over an hour today but just wondering if 5.30pm is as other evening meetings sometimes are would be better for people I have no particular view Again if I can say that Councillor Kern and I will have a conversation with him as the officer related to the meeting to the screening over here and we will see when we go from there it may not be possible for the 7th meeting but it may be something from the January meetings almost so that brings us to the end of our agenda and I always at this point turn to Ian and I say Ian is there anything I have failed to do or missed out completely? 2% Yes you see there is something I failed to do and missed out completely obviously as you are aware Councillor Kern and I are unable to attend the cabinet meeting at which a report needs to be presented on the 12th December 2022 is there anyone on the committee who is going to be attending that meeting and would be willing to take on the role of either presenting or answering questions You should have asked that at the beginning of the meeting so that anybody could have taken notes with a view to a report That is what Mr Senior is here for Is there anybody who is going to be attending the cabinet meeting on the 12th December who would be able to represent the committee? 2% We will come back to that conversation after the meeting Thank you very much Ian I have failed in that one I am afraid but we will come back to that at some point In that note, thank you very much Members for your extended participation this evening Obviously if we ask lots of questions and we require lots of answers then we make our meeting last a long time and I appreciate all of the things we have gone on this evening Thank you to officers for your time this evening Thank you to cabinet colleagues for staying throughout the meeting