 Rhaid. fel rhywbeth. Wel, mae'n rai, fyddai'r rhaglion fod y ddechrau. Efallai, mae'n gywir i ysgrifennu Cwbannadol y Saedd Cymru. Mae'n ymgyrchydd Smyth, a mae'n ysgrifennu ar y gyfer. Mae'n cyffredin iawn ar gobyn a'r cyffredin iawn, ac mae'n cyffredin iawn yn y cyffredin iawn. So beth, trafu'r symbannaid â'r gyffredin iawn ar gwaith. Rwy'n meddwl ydi, mae'n'n ddangos cyflod, o bobl ychydig yn y trofynol, ac mae'n fawr yn ymddangos i'r traddwl. If you are in person in the room and you'd like to speak, please just raise your hand. If you are attending remotely, can you please indicate in the chat that you'd like to speak, and Councillor Billed-Hendley will let me know who is waiting to speak and will take you in the best order that we can. I'm aware that we've got one Cabinet member attending remotely and that's Councillor Brian Milne's morning and we have a number of other members and officers attending. Welcome to everybody. OK so we start off with apologies for absence and I think Jonathan who is I back to you over his desk. Will tell us who the apologies are from. Thank you, Lly crunch. I can confirm we've received apologies from Councillor Peter McDonald, the lead Cabinet Member for Business Recovery and Skills, and we've also recieved apologies from Councillor Gwendaël Chamberlain, the chair of the Scrutinian Ovidio Committee, and Councillor Judith RYPPorth, the vice chair of the Scrutinian Ovidio Committee. Thank you very much. I didn't know we are aware of any other apologies, are we? So, item three, are there any declarations of interest pertaining to the items on the agenda today? No, and moving on to the minutes of the previous meeting, which are on pages one to four, and these are the minutes of the meeting that was held on the 1st of October. So, I will be, members are asked to approve the minutes meeting, and I'm going to move the approval of these minutes as a correct record, and I think Councillor Neil Gough is going to second them. Are there any matters arising from the minutes? No, okay, so do members agree to approve the minutes? Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? Okay, so Cabinet therefore agrees the approval of the minutes as a correct record by affirmation. So, we have, we move on to public questions, and we have one question from Mr Chris Thornhill, and regrettably Mr Thornhill cannot be in attendance at the meeting, and I don't know whether he's online, I can't see him there, but okay, that's fine. Anyway, thank you very much Mr Thornhill for submitting a question to us. It's not a long question, but it relates to planning and enforcement issues on Hayden Way in Willingham, and the full text of the question is available in your packs, and also on the website. So, I'll respond to the question. So, in response, thank you for your question Mr Thornhill. I am already aware of the issue, having been briefed by my colleague Councillor Handley, and by the Chief Executive, and both have met you and the residents with a number of planning officers, and have subsequently been working to provide answers to your questions. I'm therefore confident that it is being dealt with at a very senior level within the council already, and I will continue to receive briefings from Councillor Handley and the Chief Executive. So, thank you very much indeed. So, moving on to Item 6, which are issues arising from the Scrutiny and Overview Committee. Now, unfortunately, neither the Chair nor the Vice-Chair can be present today, but we thank them and the Scrutiny and Overview Committee for the work they've done. But I'd just like to bring in Mr Peter Maddox, because I gather there's a couple of inaccuracies in the papers in relation to the Scrutiny's time looking at the medium term financial strategy. So, if I could bring in Peter Maddox, please, to tell us what the corrections need to be. So, on the supplementary agenda, Page 1, towards the bottom of the page, it says nature of the savings outlined in the report. And Point A should read, the Head of Finance confirmed that the predicted savings were ongoing at this stage. And then on the next item at the top of page 2, and again it's Point A under business rates, that should read, the Head of Finance said that South Cymru District Council is in the top 10 for business rates growth above the baseline. And then finally on towards the bottom of that page, so towards the bottom of that page, entitled Council Tax, Point C there should read, increased income from the counter fraud project. So that's council, increased council tax income from the counter fraud project. And that's being discussed later in the agenda. Thank you. Okay, that's all of them. Thank you very much indeed. So Jonathan, if you could note those corrections in the minutes please, that would be very helpful. Are there any questions in relation to the report from Scrutiny and Overview? Nobody online? Nope, okay. Thank you very much indeed. So we will note the report from Scrutiny and Overview and thank them again for their diligence. And moving on to item 7, which is the health and wellbeing strategy. And Councillor Bill Hanley is going to introduce the report and move the recommendations. And I am very pleased to be able to second it. So Overview, Councillor Hanley. Thank you, leader. This is the biannual report to Cabinet on the progress of our health and wellbeing activities. If I can start with the community response to the pandemic and the communities team are now working on plans to support ongoing volunteer-led community support to strengthen resilience post COVID. This type of work has also done that other local authorities, it's known by them as community-led planning. Although I must say I prefer to use community-led plans to avoid confusion. Projects to support the mental and physical health of our residents have been central to the council's activities. And during the period of this report, the wild mines mental health programme for young people has been extremely successful. And officers are in discussion with Wimpall Hall with the intention of extending the programme to offer courses in different outdoor activities to those that are offered at Milton Country Park. Things such as tree planting, for example. This will not only extend our reach across the district, but it provides an alternative type of outdoor therapy for young people. And we would very much like to continue to this work next year. Further work on young people has recently been launched, aimed at charities and organisations working to improve outcomes for young people. And although the current project is a pilot to see the kind of ideas that come forward, it is planned to extend this into our service support grants scheme as a new theme within the service support grants from 2023. On the physical health side, and thanks to money from Sport England and the government, we've injected substantial funding into the dual-use leisure facilities that we're associated with, which have been very badly hit by the pandemic. These monies are intended to help refresh and upgrade interiors and equipment and get people moving again. The mobile or community warden scheme has been strengthened with three-year funding contracts now available, giving security both to the clients and the staff who care for them. And we are working more closely than ever with other authorities in order to deliver good services, good examples of which are the Healthy You Lifestyle Service, and the training of volunteer walkleaders to set up community walks into which GPs can refer patients in school nutrition wellbeing programmes. All of those things, we've also been helping various projects restart after the pandemic, and obviously recovery from the pandemic is central to our efforts right now. And we've been offering over the summer holiday sports schemes and many Olympics camps and helping to improve and extend community facilities. Leader, this update is for information, but I hope you and the rest of the cabinet will join me in congratulating officers on the amount of work that they've delivered on health and wellbeing. They've done so much during the COVID-19 pandemic. I would very much like to thank them for all their efforts. It really has been exemplary. Thank you very much indeed. Absolutely. I think it's been fabulous what's been going on in response directly to COVID, but all the other work that has kept on as well. And it's great to hear that we're building on all the success of the community-led support and COVID moving forward, and I think that's something we're discussing with partner councils and the county council as well. Thank you, Councillor Handley. Councillor Williams. Yes, thank you. Thank you, Leader. Can I add my congratulations to the officers for the tremendous work and the way that we've rolled this out and the increase in effort that we're seeing in our communities, particularly in Fallbourne. On the community, your warden scheme wasn't in Fallbourne before, and it shows that we used to have a postcode lottery on this, and now we're getting towards rolling this out across the district, which has to be good. Can I also ask that we add the income maximisation officer to our list of achievements, because this person we have introduced to help families with their income in difficult times, and obviously that then has an impact on wellbeing and mental health if we're able to help families with their bills. So, I think that's also a very important piece of delivery that this council has done to help our residents in these very difficult economic times. Thank you very much. That's a point very well made. Councillor Batchelor. Thank you, Chair. I, too, would like to welcome this and note the impressive amount of work being done. In particular, the dual use funding is extremely welcome to the village colleges. As you know, we have the village college ethos of being at the centre of many of our communities, and maintaining the sports facilities is a particular difficulty at the moment. So, this funding is very welcome, and I hope we might be able to widen it in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I think sports facilities have really struggled, but actually they've never been so badly needed as they are now to ensure people's health whilst we're still in the heart of a pandemic. Any other? Councillor Hawkins. Thank you, leader. I just want to say thank you as well to the officers and everyone who's been involved with this. But in particular, I just want to mention the Wild Minds scheme, which has been very, very successful and oversubscribed. Very often we find our young people kind of tend to be left out in things and they don't have a way to go, a way to meet and stuff like that. And as someone who has a teenager myself, I know how difficult it's been for them. So this programme, I just want to say well done to all involved and hopefully we can carry on doing good stuff like this. Thank you. Thank you. We are potentially facing a pandemic of mental health, mental illness as well coming out of COVID. So I'm delighted that we've been so successful in this. There's nobody else in the room. I'll come to councillor Anna Bradman now online. Thank you very much, leader. So thank you very much for that report and it's so encouraging to hear of all of the positive things that are being doing to help keep people healthy in their communities. And in that regard, I wanted to draw our attention to the paragraph 24 financial, which is where we're told these courses have proved very popular and the initial outcomes have been very positive. I'm sure they have an options for continuing this project of being explored. So firstly, I wanted to say absolutely as councillor Hawkins has said how very positive that Wild Minds project has been at Milton Country Park. And I very much want to encourage us to seek, make every effort to seek funding in order to enable it to continue whilst also expanding into Wimpoll Hall. Because you will appreciate if anybody has been to Milton Country Park that it is extremely heavily used. It has a very dense local population, both in the city and in South Cams, and you'd be surprised actually the distances that people come to use the facilities at Milton Country Park. And as a result, it's really quite heavily used. So we need to support it and help it to support the people who want to come and use it to be out in the open air. But also it's an essential green space for those reasons. There aren't very many, we don't have, it's the only country park, I believe, in South Cams. And so we really need to help it maintain the courses and facilities that it offers. So I just wanted to, it's really an appeal to make sure that we do make the money available. Because, for example, those are the kinds of courses that the Chairman's Charity, Centre 33, might choose to assist and refer people into when they're having struggles with mental problems. So I really support this and hope we can find money to go on and expand into Wimpoll as well. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I'm delighted it's going to Wimpoll. They do have a vicious park run. I can vouch for that. It seems to be all uphill. I'm sure the one at Milton is a bit kinder, but more of a drive. OK, so Councillor Claire Dawn to next. Thank you Chairman. I hope that you can hear me. Can you hear me? We can, yes. Good, thank you. Yes, and I also would like to add my thanks to the offices for this report. And I'd particularly like to point to the community chest funding and the particular COVID funding, which I think was very welcome. And really helped communities to get back up and running after the worst of the pandemic and particularly able to bring communities together as set out in the report. And I'm really glad that the grants committee can do this kind of thing. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. And Councillor Heather Williams. Thank you, leader. I first like to welcome much of the report. I think health and wellbeing is something that we all take very seriously and needs addressing for many in the district. I just wanted to put a little bit of a play and awareness around the initiatives in Wimpole. As you may have seen leader being from our part of the district, we now have a lot of double yellow lines in Arrington because of the parking issues in relation to Wimpole Hall. So any initiatives that the council is looking to do, could we please make sure that we do take into consideration the parking elements? Because there is an access and because Wimpole Hall is now incredibly expensive to actually go to, I think it's 18 pounds for an adult just to enter the grounds. So there has been a lot of issues in that area. So I'm just asking that it's taken into account in any planning that we do for Wimpole. Thank you. Thank you. Yes, so I am well aware of the parking issues in Arrington and we will bring the wrath of the residents of Arrington down on our heads if we increase the problems there. So affordability and access to services is very much at the forefront of our minds. So thank you for pointing that out. So I don't think there's anyone else. Since I'm going to be seconding this, I think for a council of our size to have a 60 point action plan for health and wellbeing is deeply impressive. And my thanks in particular to Leslie McFarlane for the report she's written and the considerable amount of work she puts into this. So it's very, very exciting and I'm very pleased to see us moving forward. It's not a static document. I'm sure it's going to be changing all the time. And we will keep on responding to whatever new health and wellbeing needs emerge as we come out of the pandemic. So the cabinet's recommended to A, approve the business case shown in Appendix A, providing agreement to proceed with the project and B, delegate authority for signing any required agreements as part of the project to the chief finance officer in consultation with the lead cabinet member for finance. So do members agree with the proposal? Anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? Nope. Okay. So cabinet therefore agrees the proposals by affirmation. And moving on to the North East Cambridge in principle commitment to delivery of AAP and councillor John Williams is going to introduce the report and move the recommendation. And councillor Tumi Hawkins is going to serve and jumped. I'm sorry, I jumped. Just backtrack there. Sorry. Obviously don't want to talk about council tax compliance. Back to item eight. Sorry about that. Cambridge Council tax compliance and counter fraud initiative. So council John Williams again is going to introduce the report and move the recommendation and councillor Neil Goff is going to second it. Thank you, leader. Council tax discounts, exemptions and reductions in South Cambridge total over 70 million pounds per annum. We carry out checks to ensure that any reductions are correct based on the information available. Invariably, however, there will be a proportion that are claimed incorrectly or for longer than applicable. We believe that enhancing the processes already in place to ensure there is a more robust and uniform council tax compliance and counter fraud strategy across Cambridgeshire. We can even better protect us from fraud and compliance issues arising from discounts, exemptions and reductions being claimed incorrectly. I don't have to remind you that whilst the council benefits from very high collection rates for council tax currently, any discount reduction or exemption claimed incorrectly as a direct impact on the council tax base negatively impacting the ability to fund local services. Revenues and benefits managers from across Cambridgeshire meet regularly to discuss topical issues and share best practice as part of the county revenues group. Periodic reviews are carried out by all billing authorities to ensure that council tax discounts and exemptions granted are being claimed legitimately. However, the frequency of reviews and results committed to them currently varies between councils. Billing authorities also participate in the National Fraud Initiative, a national scheme where councils provide various data sets to the Cabinet Office annually which are cross-checked and any inconsistencies are reported for further investigation. Variable levels of success are recorded from such strategies mainly due to the fact that data is reviewed only annually and the CRG is keen to explore new and innovative ways of implementing an effective compliance and counter fraud regime. It is of benefit to all residents that the council maintains a robust compliance regime to ensure any such reductions are awarded correctly and the proposals contained within the business case in Appendix A seek to enhance existing arrangements across the county furthering this aid. So I asked Cabinet to approve proceeding with the business case as provided in Appendix A to procure data matching software to compare a range of data sets held across the county wide county and district councils in order to detect anomalies and the sharing of the costs and gains between the partners. If agreed, it is proposed that the new procedures will take effect in quarter four 2021 for initially a three year agreement. Whilst the exact data sets to be matched will need to be determined as part of the project, it is proposed that it would include information such as benefits, electoral role, housing waiting lists, blue barges, concessory bus passes, payroll and deceased persons. In addition to the proposal for matching data, the business case also contains a financial proposal where both the costs and gains of the initiative are shared. Currently the administrative costs for council tax falls to the billing authority. The business case proposes that the costs of this initiative are spread across all of the preceptors but excluding parishes proportionately in accordance with their current share of the council tax. Likewise it is proposed that any additional council tax generated by the initiative will be shared on different proportions. The current position sees the county council retain at least 68% of the council tax collected in each district where the district council retain around 12% on average before parish precepts. The business case proposes that where additional council tax is generated as a result of the additional activity set out in the business case, the county council will pay 25% of their proportion to the district councils. If you look at the table in paragraph 7.1 of the business case, the cost to us for the three years is estimated to be just over £52,000 while assuming a combined average saving of 3% of total council tax reductions as detailed in paragraph 8.1, the total anticipated net savings accrued to this council could be over £110,300. If Cabinet agrees to participate in the project as detailed in the business case, Cabinet are also asked to delegate authority for the signing of any agreements required as part of this project to the chief financial officer in conjunction with myself. Thank you very much. Councillor Gough, do you want to speak at this point? Yes, I'd just like to support this recommendation. It seems like it's a good example of looking at other areas of the country for best practice and taking good ideas and bringing them into Cambridgeshire and applying them. It looks like a very sensible approach towards the allocation of the costs and the benefits, so I would support it. I think it's a very good piece of work. Thank you. Are there any questions from members of Cabinet? Have we any questions from anybody else? Okay, so the recommendation is Act 3 and that's that the business case at Appendix A is approved and that we delegate authority for signing any required agreements as part of the project to the chief finance officer in consultation with the lead Cabinet member for finance. So, do you members agree with the proposal? Does anyone wish to vote against? Anyone wish to abstain? So, Cabinet therefore agrees the proposal by affirmation. Right, I just need to take a step back because I'm afraid I jumped over my pages, so I just need to take a step back to the health and well-being strategy because the recommendations I read out for those were the ones I've just read out for item 8, the council tax compliance and counter fraud initiative. So, I'm afraid I'm going to have to take the vote again just to be absolutely sure we've done this right for item 7, the health and well-being strategy update. So, the recommendation was set out at paragraph 7 of the report. Let me just go back to. So, Cabinet has asked to note the contents of the report and the delivery of activities and services which promote physical and mental health and well-being with consideration for the impact the pandemic has had on delivery of some projects. Right there, Rory? Okay, that's fine. So, sorry. Can I just do members agree with the proposal? Thank you. Anyone wish to vote against the proposal? Anyone wish to abstain? Okay, that's lovely. Apologies for that, getting ahead of myself twice today. Right, so moving on to item 9 now, which is the North East Cambridge in principle commitment to delivery of AAP. So, Councillor John Williams is going to introduce the report and move the recommendation and Councillor Tumie Hawkins is going to second it, I believe. So, over to you, Councillor Williams again. Thank you, leader. You may ask why the lead member for planning is not moving the recommendations on what is seemingly a planning matter. This is because you are being asked to approve the possible use of our compulsory purchase powers, which is a financial matter, a practical tool for our toolkit to enable us to deliver in principle the area action plan for North East Cambridge, not the planning policy behind it. The North East Cambridge site has a number of land owners and we have to show that we have the ability of willingness to facilitate land assembly or relocation to deliver the AAP in due course. The decision to acquire land or dispose of land or to use compulsory purchase orders if necessary would be subject to a separate report which would outline the special circumstances, the case for council intervention and the resource implications. So, I ask Cabinet to approve the recommendations to show our commitment to the delivery of the North East Cambridge area action plan. Thank you. Thank you very much. Councillor Hawkins, do you want to comment? Thank you, leader. Supporting these recommendations simply because we need to be able to ensure that when the time comes we are able to put together a new district that works and works well. And that means that we should be able to put together land as we need it. And so this will help us to do that. Obviously our goal is for the health and well-being of the people who are going to live there. And this tool will help us to do that. So I second this motion. Thank you. Thank you. Do you have any questions from anyone else on Cabinet? And any questions from anyone else? Councillor Anna Bradman. Thank you, leader. I hope people won't mind if I recall the discussion that we had at Scrutiny and Overview about this, which chimes very much with what Councillor John Williams and Councillor Dr Tumie Hawkins have said, which is that we feel it's so important that the North East Cambridge area is brought forward in a measured and well-planned way and that things are done at the right time and that we create the infrastructure in the right order for this really important development. And that's why Scrutiny and Overview were very supportive of this document to make sure that we can do everything in the right order at the right time. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Councillor Williams, do you want to comment on that? No, thank you for making that point. Any further questions? No? Okay, so I'll try and get the recommendations right this time. So they're set out in paragraph 6 and 7 of the report. Cabinet's requested to note that the North East Cambridge area action plan is contingent upon the separate development control order being undertaken by Anglia Water for the relocation of wastewater treatment plant being proved and be agreed the council's committed to the delivery of the North East Cambridge area action plan including land disposal or assembly and subject to formal adoption of the area action plan in due course to use its compulsory purchase order powers if required. So do you members agree with the proposal? Agree. Anyone wish to vote against? And anyone wish to abstain? Thank you. So cabinet therefore agrees the proposals by affirmation. So we've now reached the end of our agenda, gosh in record time. Thank you very much for joining us, those people who dialed in today. I note the next meeting of Cabinet's schedule to take place on Monday 6 December 2021 at 10 o'clock, which seems like a tremendously long time away and we've all got a lot of Christmas shopping to do in the interim. So thank you very much everybody.