 Is anything happening here? Yeah, I've sent us live. I'm just waiting for the stream to load. Okay, thank you. Yeah, the feed is now live. Thank you. Sorry about the delay. No problem. Thank you very much. I can confirm we're now live. Thank you. Thanks. Good afternoon members, councillors and any members of the public who may be joining us this evening for this meeting of the Squirterly Network of Youth Committee of South Cambridge Youth District Council. My name is Councillor Gengio Chamberlain and I am the chair of the Squirterly Network of Youth Committee. I'd like to start with just a few points if that's the thing if I may please. So if you'd please make sure your device is fully charged or charging, please switch off your microphone unless you want to speak. And when you are finished thinking, please turn off your microphone immediately. So we do not want to interrupt anyone and if you wish to speak on an item please indicate this using the chat function which the vice chair will be managing for me. But please do not use the chat for anything else. Present online with me are the following members of the Squirterly and Overview Committee who I will shortly invite to introduce themselves. Members, after I call your name, please turn on your microphone and introduce yourself so that we may note to your presence. Please remember to turn your microphone off. Chair, I can't hear you. Chair, I think it's Councillor Cathcart's microphone is cutting in. Councillor Cathcart, are you on mute? It is mute. It's showing it's mute. Is that any? Can you hear me? It's better once it's on mute. It hasn't been on mute. Hi, Chair. It's Lynn, the producer here. Just as a comment on the audio quality, your microphone on your system isn't kind of coming out very well. It's quite quiet. If you know where it is on your computer, if you just try to sort of talk into it like in the direction of it a little more, then it would result in some sound. Thanks. I will put it right in front of me because it isn't. That's much better. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. So could I firstly invite Councillor Anna Bradenam to introduce herself, please? Good evening. I'm Councillor Anna Bradenam and I'm one of the members for Milton and Waterbeach. Thank you. Thank you, Anna. Councillor Nigel Cathcart. Thank you. I'm Nigel Cathcart. I'm the member for Bassey Bourne and Lettington. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Sarah John Johnson. I'm Councillor Sarah John Johnson, one of the members for the Longstown Ditton Ward. Thank you. Councillor Graham Cohn. Good evening. I'm Councillor Graham Cohn, one of the members for Fenditon and Fulbourne Ward. Thank you, Graham. Councillor Claire Daunton. Yes, good evening. I'm one of the other members. Sorry, Councillor Claire Daunton. I'm one of the other members for the Fenditon and Fulbourne Ward. Thank you, Claire. Councillor Douglas Delacy. I'm Douglas Delacy. I'm one of the members for Gerson Ward. Thank you, Douglas. Councillor Peter Fane. Good evening. Peter Fane, Shelford Ward. Councillor Geoff Harvey. Councillor Geoff Harvey, member for Borsham Ward. Thank you, Geoff. Councillor Judith Rippith, who is also Vice-Chair. Good evening. I'm Councillor Judith Rippith, one of the members for Milton and Water Beach Ward. Councillor Richard Williams, please. Thank you, Chair. I'm Richard Williams. I'm the member for Wittlesford-Tripleau Heathfield in Newton. Thank you very much. Are there any members of the committee that I have missed? No, thank you very much indeed. Agenda item one is Apologist for Absence. So, can I ask democratic services if there have been any apologies for absence for this meeting? Thank you, Chair. We've had apologies from councillors Martin Karn, Joes Hales and Steve Hunt. Thank you very much indeed. Agenda item two is the declarations of interest. So, do any committee members have any interest that they would like to declare in relation to any item on the agenda this evening, please? No, thank you very much indeed. Agenda item three is the minutes of the previous meeting. May I ask, are members happy to approve the minutes of the previous meeting, which was held on the 19th of January, or are there any matters of accuracy that members would like to raise? No, thank you very much. Agreed. Agreed. Thank you very much. Agenda item four is public questions, but I can confirm that we have received no public questions this evening. So, we go straight on to agenda item five, which is the 3C-ICT update. And I'd like to welcome Segar Roy to the meeting and invite Mr Roy to provide an update on DCT and answer any members' questions. Mr Roy, are you with us? I am. Good afternoon, everybody. Good afternoon. Could I invite you to present your report, please? Sure. For those who don't know me, I'm Segar Roy. I'm the interim head of ICT in Digital Four to Three Councils. It's part of 3C-ICT. And the report that I provided for the scrutiny committee was to cover the data centre, the current description of the current issues that we had basically during quarter three, and also an overview of the design and resilience that are currently built into it. I won't go through the whole important detail. I know that it's been circulated previously, but just in summary, breaking down the sections, the data centre provides services to all three councils. It was a project that started shortly after 2017 when 3C-ICT was formed. The first services went live in 2018, and the project closed in quarter three, 1920. And in the end, the project was to bring all the server rooms across the three councils into two locations, one in Huntington and one in Cambridge. There's also a section, just the background of where South Cams started from for that piece of work. And also there's reference to what's known as the Paul Tonkin's report, which was report commissioned by South Cams to review IT services at the time. And that was supported by the ELGA, and they part-funded that report as well. And there are some brief findings that I've mentioned in my report. The current data centre, as is given an overview there, but in brief, it runs in two halves. They run active-active, so effectively all live services across the three councils that we host operate across those sites simultaneously. So it's not like one is down and ready to be activated when the other fails. They're both running live at the same time. Now, unfortunately, during quarter three, we did suffer a series of outages. And in appendix one, I've included a description and a list of those outages that were affecting the ability to access services that are hosted within the data centre. The main series of those outages was caused by a network card bug, as a piece of hardware, that there was a bug introduced as a result of a software update that we applied during quarter two of that year. Unfortunately, it took a couple of incidents before we could actually narrow down exactly what the root cause was. And we then took immediate action to replace network cards. And we did that over a period of four days out of hours. And since then, since early November, we've had no further interruptions as a result of that network card issue. And we've maintained the data centre services from that point onwards. There is still other work going on. And as a result of those outages, we did bring in an external company to carry out a review of the data centre. Those findings are due to be with us in draft at the end of this month, and there will be an exact report that will be circulated probably second week in March, where they will present their findings and make any other recommendations. We'll also add that at the end of January, we did carry out a very significant moving change to the data centre. And part of the reason for getting an external company in to help us review the data centre was to make sure that we could carry out that move safely without introduction services. They provided advice and that move was carried out successfully on 29th January or that weekend. And we now have the data centre that's half of its move from Cambridge to its new location in Peterborough. And that's where we're operating from now. So that's the summary of what I put in the report. And as I said, the appendix one includes just a little bit more detail about the outages we suffered during quarter three. Thank you, Mr Roy. I can see that there are a number of questions coming and I'd be grateful if you're able to stay long enough to answer them. Yeah, I'll be here till seven o'clock. Thank you. Councillor Rippert, who was first, please? Councillor Dr Delacy. Thank you very much. Councillor Delacy. Thank you very much indeed, Chairman. And thank you to Mr Roy for your report. I presume when the data centre was set up, there was a service level agreement. Can I ask what level of service you promised to provide at that point? And then I have a completely separate question, if that's all right. Sure, no problem. I'll answer the first one. So I've looked back through this and there was no definition about uptime. However, there were some elements that were agreed and they included. There was monthly downtime agreed as a window for maintenance. So every month, four hours downtime over a weekend each month, which was allowed for server updates and patches to be applied. And the only other element that was the brightest part of the design was to maximise the existing tools and licensing and technology to support availability. Now, I do know that the South Cams had already invested quite heavily, actually, in a particular server virtualisation technology that we pretty much built the design of the data centre around that licensing that was already provided. It kind of reused what was already invested. Thank you Chairman. May I come back on that please? That is good. Thank you very much indeed. And yet you had a significant failure, which as you say, because you didn't have a service level agreement, was not outside it, you presumably had to identical pieces of kit to have the same problem bringing both pieces of kit down. Is that not effectively a single point of failure? What it was, the bug that occurred was cascading failure. So it affected both sides at the same time. So it wasn't a single point of failure. In fact, if you think about it, it was 12 plus network cars that all stopped at the same time, which effectively broke the interconnectivity between the two halves of the data centre and then that's what stopped the access to the data centre itself. And do you have different types of network card now? Well, the original design actually and the spec recommended a single manufacturer across so you can keep the standardised kind of hardware. That was, it was actually recommended by the provider of the hardware as well when we first data centre in. What we did during this last set of investigations, we actually went with another recommended brand, but again, all the same because the idea was to keep it all standardised. So there's no, no chance of any conflicts or incompatibilities for different manufacturers. We saw external advice on that because we, we suggested, well, what if we do, you know, half the data centre in one manufacturer and half another? And that would, what that would do, that should actually complicate the, the process of updates and patches and changes going forward. And that was felt too risky. And bearing in mind, we don't have a mirror environment to test everything. Thank you, Chairman. May I ask a different question, please? Yes, please. Thank you very much. It's about the remote desktop service. I realised that your report is only about the data centre, but would you care to comment on the problems that we've been having with laptops and officers and I believe some members unable to do their work because of these problems? Because of access to the remote desktop service, is that the? Well, this is the Lenovo laptop. So I don't know exactly where the problem is. You're not aware of this problem? Well, I'm aware that there was a, there's remote desktop access. That's, that was a different service. There is an issue that we're dealing with at the moment, which is the Lenovo desktops, not all of them, just a particular build is suffering from startup issues as a result of a particular patch that Microsoft Windows released in, well, I'm going to version numbers. I can quote version number, but I don't think it will mean very much to many people here. But there is, there is, there's a problem that's affected, we think just under 12% of our laptops at the moment. There is a problem that we've got that we're looking at how we resolve it. It basically means when you reboot the machine, it doesn't always start up properly. And that we have actually got it narrowed down to a particular update that was provided by Microsoft. We're not the only organisation to have suffered from it. There are others out there as well. Thank you. If I may ask a subsidiary, a supplementary, is part of the problem not that we are unable to prevent Microsoft updating our machines. If you could have sent a message out saying just don't update, that would have been a great problem. But I'm using one of the Lenovo's for this meeting. And it simply says I'm going to update. There's nothing I can do about it. Isn't that a weakness? Well, we can prevent some updates from going out. We have centralized tools that will let us manage the distribution of the software. So the software that did go out, it did go out, it was tested, but it's only under certain conditions that it actually stops the laptop from booting properly. So even with the testing that we carried out with the internal champions and the various service areas that help us out with that laptop testing, when we do roll out these updates, it's just something that wasn't picked up. Thank you. Thank you very much, Kevin. Thank you. Councillor Chung Johnson is next speaker. Just before I come to Sarah, Mr Roy, can I just focus on the first point that you were talking about with Councillor Delacy and relating to the network cards? You said the problem was as a result of an update. Was that a Microsoft update? No, that wasn't. No, so I probably should explain that, sorry. So the virtual server infrastructure, if you think of it as layers, you've got the hardware that the network card sits at. There's another piece of software that sits across the data centre which manages all the virtual infrastructure, virtual servers. It was a bug within that software that caused the network card spacey to not operate. Thank you very much. Sarah, my apologies. Councillor Chung Johnson. That's fine, Gremel. I have a few questions. One is actually a follow-up to that network card, since we're on that topic. So you said that it wasn't, it doesn't classify technically as a single point of failure because you had 12 network cards, but actually it's a software bug that impacted all of those network cards. So I think the concern here is not whether or not we technically define it as a single point of failure, but that actually what it's showing is a lack of resilience in the system that one software bug can take down effectively the entire system and mean that the council just can't do any work. So whether or not we define that technically as a single point of failure, the impact is still the same because of one bug, we lose all of our services. And that seems to me a weakness that we obviously have, and are we confident that we don't have other weaknesses, other bugs, other points in the system that could also have similarly large impact? Okay, far response to that then. So we take all of the expected precautions and measures when we do apply patches, when we do choose technology and software to operate on. The software that we use is industry standard. It's probably one of two of the biggest virtual server solutions used globally. The checks that we ran prior to applying the updates, we went through all the recommended checks. There's something called a hardware compatibility list that was checked. So our server hardware, network cards, all appeared on that list, but it's okay. We couldn't have predicted that that failure was going to happen. And when it did, when we had the vendor, the software vendor come in and have a look, they then had to create a series of software updates themselves as a result of the bug that we found. Okay, and then there's a follow-up on the service level agreement question from Councillor Delacy. In that agreement, are there any penalties for being, having downtime, for exceeding the amount that's specified in the agreement? Is that penalties for 3CICT to... Yeah, to self-count. No, there's no penalties in that agreement at all. Okay, so I would just like to flag this then to cabinet that I think that we need to review these service level agreements. It just seems to be a bit odd to me that we have a service provider that has no penalties for taking, you know, for having a service that's down for such a long time. Can I also ask the report itself that you are due to commission that's part of, you know, the future work, will you have some lessons learnt built into that? And then also I note that you are looking at the cloud technology as being a solution. So will that also be reviewed to see whether or not that would have helped in this situation? Okay, so that report that we're going to get covers a number of areas. So one of those was the overall design, you know, does a design that's been implemented. Is it standard? Has it been implemented the way it was intended? Are there changes that we can make or should make? And we know that there are going to be some recommendations coming out of that because, you know, because of the issues that we've had. But what we need to kind of follow up on is are those recommendations, are they suitable for our environment? The other area that they're going to be providing advice and recommendations on is what the next steps are. What do we need to do in the future in terms of our future strategy for the on-premise hosting services that we provide? And then the last part is going to be basically a cloud readiness assessment. Are there aspects of the service we provide that can be provided in another way in a host environment? Bear in mind that all that, what that will do, that will transfer the risk, it won't remove the risk, it will just transfer it to an external service provider. Now, there are, I know there was a question that came in from, I think, from a pre-meet that you had that asked about why would, why did we not do that change as part of the move of the data centre? Well, the scope of the move of the data centre was just that. It was taking the existing infrastructure from one location to another. There wasn't enough time or resource available to also build into that any move of services to a host environment. Bear in mind that that move was paid for by county. It was a county site that we moved from and it's part of their agreement they provide that service to us. So as part of the report that we're going to be getting from our partner, we'll provide a recommended kind of next steps about how we consider moving more services to the cloud. That said, we have the opportunities already when applications and systems and services come up for replacement, come up for review, to move to hosted environments. And, you know, bear in mind that those decisions are made by service areas and jointly across the three councils. We've had opportunities to move some systems to hosted away from these premises. I mean, the latest one is the HR service system, which is going from on-premise to cloud hosted, Tascomi and Yota, you know, those two projects that are in flight now, they elected to choose solutions that were hosted externally. Equally, there are ones that go the other way. There are decisions that are projects that come in. So the housing system, for example, that went live last year. There was a cloud hosted option, but the service area picked the solution that was hosted on-premise, that in itself actually added to the on-premise infrastructure. It's going to be a long journey. I can't, you know, paint it any other way before we get to a point where a lot of our services are hosted externally. Okay, understood. Chair, if I may just one last question. I don't know if any of these problems have been related, but we're having a lot of problems with the planning service. Parish councils are coming to us to say that they can't access documents, etc. What is the cause of this system often being down? I think that is, I'll have to, I need probably a bit more specific information about which system, which service, but I think it's probably related to the iDocs application that they're using, because I think that's what shared planning is using. That is not designed, that's not designed to run remotely. In fact, I mentioned earlier about which services that we moved to the cloud. That one, when shared planning went live, was actually a service that went from a hosted solution to an on-prem solution. It brought it back in-house. And that solution itself just isn't designed to be run remotely. And we are throwing computing resource to try and make that run properly. We're waiting for a roadmap from the supply themselves about how they can update or provide that service differently. Okay, thank you. Can I ask a specific question? We've got Councillor Bradman next on the committee members list, and Stephen Kelly has also asked to speak. So that might be relevant. I was just going to ask Stephen Kelly if he kindly come in, because I think he's probably wishes to comment on that final point about iDocs. Stephen, would you please? Thank you, Chair. I mean, it was just really to say Gar's point. Obviously, it's important to bear in mind that some of the outages that we've experienced predated the server migration that has happened, and both ourselves and 3C invested in that server migration project to improve the resilience. But over the autumn and the, in a sense, the second part of 2020, there were a number of unscheduled outages associated with the kind of age of the hardware that we were running the service on. But say Gar's also right around finessing a service that's designed to be accessed within a kind of fixed environment remotely has also caused some problems. But I think resilience has improved. We still have some scheduled outages which are associated with upgrades that are part of the process, and we are trying to communicate and accommodate those. They've got a little bit better organizing alternative options, but it is something that, let me say, Gar says we're aware of and we're trying to work with. If we are scheduling planned maintenance, do we, as a matter of course, notify the parishes that such work would be undergoing, or do we put a note on the planning portal to indicate that it's not available at a specific time? We have normally put advance notifications on the planning portal a week or so ahead that indicates the system down time. And for very large applications like Born Airfield and Water Beach and so on, we've actually made arrangements to host the documents elsewhere whilst the system has been down ahead of planning committees. But we're always keen to understand whether the parishes are accessing the portal in that way, or whether they're just going direct to pages and so on. So we're always keen to improve. Thank you for that. Just before we invite the next councillor to speak, I'd like to bring in at the Chief Executive, if I may, just for Liz to comment on the issues around the service agreement, because I'm not entirely convinced that in view of the structure that we have a formal agreement, do we, Liz? So we have a partnership agreement. I think it's worth reminding everyone that this isn't a contract. This is a shared service. Thank you. And so I suppose, you know, the implications of, for example, a penalty on downtime would be that we pay the penalty because we're the ones who are in the service. So it's not as though we have a contractor external to us. The service is owned and run by Hunt City and Southcams. So there is a partnership agreement that I think, if you remember, came to you probably around about last summer for scrutiny and then was signed off by Cabinet in September. Thank you very much. Right, so let's go back to the list of councillors and I will take the members of committee first and then come to other councillors. So Councillor Bradman, please. Thank you, Chairman. I just wanted to ask, I wasn't here right at the very beginning, but I just wanted to ask whether the Chairman realises that his camera is off. That might be intentional. My camera is off. Oh, okay. I'm only seeing an icon of you, but okay. So my question relates to the Appendix A report and noting that, I mean, for example, on the Wednesday, the 7th of October 2020, in the description there, we've got the description of the downtime. And of course it started at six o'clock in the evening on the 7th of October and was finally resolved just after midday on the 8th of October, which overlapped outside normal working hours and working hours. And it was elapsed, it was 18 and a half hours interruption, but only four and a half hours described as normal working hours. But I just wanted to clarify what is our understanding about the fact that now of course many staff and indeed members are working from home and outside those normal hours. So it presents a greater disruption to staff working from home maybe later on in the evening than they would do normally and indeed members. I just wondered, Mr Roy, whether you could, what's your understanding of our targets around that? Okay. So yeah, we understand that obviously because of the changing working practices now that people are working different hours now and we do our best to accommodate and support that. We provide the service that we can with the resources and the staff and the budgets that we've got available. If we wanted to scale that up then it's going to cost and we'll have to put bids in the next kind of financial round come September for that. We are taking guidance and a steer from intelligent clients and the service areas around what kind of service they want. We do our best to accommodate that even, I mentioned it in the report, that when we do those maintenance windows we are doing those outside normal hours. We're doing them at 10 in the evening 12 midnight so that we can try and avoid those busier times. If this has to continue that way then yeah we need to look at a different operating model for IT services. I recognised that and I just wondered really how sustainable the system is given that now we're working increasingly from home. Do you see what I mean? It's not that I'm criticising I'm just saying given that we're now working more from home is the model that we have going sufficiently resilient for that and it sounds like perhaps we just have you know at the moment we're having to say well if it's and I can see that they've often been resolved at eight o'clock in the evening so obviously your staff have been working late to try and sort things out and indeed when you've got planned maintenance you obviously are doing that deliberately outside working hours but I just wondered whether you felt that was a sufficiently resilient backup system for us as it were. I think what I'll say is that we have to continually just review what kind of service is required because if you'd asked me last February can you count can you cope with this for three months six months? I said yeah we can probably do that you know six months on there was no change in sight but who you know you couldn't predict how much change there would be in the way which working practices are being run you know how this changes service areas even from their own business process point of view. This does need a wider review in fact we've already recommended from a business continuity point of view you never mind the operating hours this has to change the way in which people want to plan their kind of work. Before COVID-19 hit your resilience plans would have involved you sending staff home to work it's the other way around it's flipped around the other way around but our service provision model doesn't necessarily account for that and that's not something you can change in six months or even 12 months that's going to be a bigger piece of work but you're right I mean if this is the way in which we think we're going to operate going forward then yes of course we need to consult with the service areas with the councils how do you want to operate and here's what we can provide for the resources available if you want a different kind of service then this is what it's going to cost you. So I just wanted to check whether there's a review in the work program as it were. So as part of that one of the reviews that is already I mean this is less for ICT it's more for the service areas across all three councils is look at your business continuity process. Right now if anything goes wrong the chances are you have to come back into the office as opposed to head out elsewhere to other sites houses that change the way in which you you know everything from communicating to your staff with what equipment is available. Okay thank you very much thank you chairman chair Councillor Harvey. Councillor Jeff Harvey please. Yes thank you chair yes I just want to understand a bit better what the thinking is behind having the centre split onto two sites I wondered is that because it just happens to be a kind of space on those sites to accommodate the total of the equipment or is there a strategic reason in terms of you know there's redundancy on two different sites so if a sort of bomb drops on one it it can't destroy the other because I suppose you could argue that you could have redundancy on a single site for example you could maybe have two separate rooms two separate air conditioners different power supplies that kind of thing which might lead to a low cost solution I suppose just I think the rest of the committee were quite intrigued to know why we've ended up with one and half of the service in Peterborough which isn't kind of one of the three partners in 3C and I suppose that leads on to what would the liability be if the server room hosted in Peterborough if the air conditioning were to fail there whose responsibility would that be is that something to do with Peterborough city council and also just representing the climate environment committee the way in which the service have been kind of wandering around the county creates a bit of an issue for us in terms of our scope one emissions because I think the data center does consume quite a lot of power and there might be ways of for example sleeving power for example from one of the county's green energy generators if we had confidence that it was going to stay in one place for a particular length of time also sorry there's so many questions here but is there any option to profile the power usage through the 24 hour cycle and and somehow you know close down some virtual servers at night in order to save power that's an optional question I think thank you okay so first question so I can get these in order there's around the decision around the split so that was as part of the strategy it was there needed to be geographically diverse we wanted to make sure that an issue in one location wasn't going to be affecting another the original design obviously had shy hall and path finder house shy hall has been sold off I understand county panning over to developers later this year we buy a service from them and we need to make sure that we maintain our services their recommendation was to provide that service from their shared location in Peterborough that was run past or agreed and approved by the shared services board as a piece of work and that's why Peterborough still remains as part of that strategic agreement now with regards to the power usage we already use the automation tools built in within the virtual server environment to use that hardware efficiently it it moves servers around so they're on the most efficient kit they're no spinning discs they're all SSDs the the efficiency of those servers and equipment they're as good as they can possibly be without over provisioning perhaps you know cutting back on hardware and then risking performance I think we've got the right balance there in regards to moving the kit to another location that can make use of power provided by existing green initiatives we have to consider that our strategic plans are that they that half the server environment remains in Peterborough that'll be up for review probably in three years time thank you very much did that answer all the questions counselor I think I've got them all yes it did yes thank you very much thank you Councillor Rippith I think it's you next just a quick question so how confident are you that the chances of these outages happening again are much reduced okay so we we know that the the work we did to replace network cards last October November has reduced the chances of that happening we've seen that the fact that we're now where we February 25th so that must be 18 weeks of uninterrupted running from the network card bug point of view we're confident that we've got that resolved that said you know there's always improvements that we can make and we will make as a result of recommendations to come through the report we will see very soon at some point we can we can tune this within an inch of its life and then you're only going to get more resilience by throwing more money at it in you know if we think that's worthwhile then we'll come back to the councils and ask for additional funding and guidance on how much more they want from the service okay thank you interesting um okay Jeff member you would like to speak yeah the head of transformation Jeff would you like to come in um thank you very much chair this was just add to Councillor Bradman's point about new working arrangements just to make the the committee aware that officers are undertaking a moving forward project which is looking at what impact um COVID and the new ways of working that have come out of that is going to have going forward and we expect that what will come out of that is a better understanding of what we need from the IT service going forward and can inform those discussions I just thought you needed to be aware that's very helpful thank you very much indeed I see that Councillor Delacey would like to come back and then I'll come to Councillor Milnes Councillor Delacey thank you Chairman I've just had a news flash from the University saying the Queen's University Belfast is being attacked by a ransomware attack on the active directory servers I'd just like reassurance that we are safe from that kind of attack please our active directory servers are well up to date are they yes I can't comment on exactly what that university is is being attacked from or but what I can say is that um obviously um I know Councillor Delacey you've got you've you've got a background in IT so you understand how important active directory is in terms infrastructure um uh yes active what I can give you an assurance on active directory because it's a critical part of what we do and how we operate things it controls access it controls accounts um it's a key part of our infrastructure um that we protect as well as we can um we we do annual pent in fact we do pentests three times a year um and anything that comes out of that um we take seriously in terms of especially if it highlights any uh vulnerabilities with AD all the usual things you'd expect around replication and backups offline backups are steps that we take thank you you might like to look within the next four months at this particular attack yeah I mean yeah what we'll say in fact and this kind of and this is probably more um kind of relevant to this audience um Red Car and Cleveland uh the attack they suffered last February um I was part of a debrief and there were lots of lessons learned from from that more to do with the response as opposed to what that she suffered from but one of the recommendations that or one of the things that came out of that was protect AD all costs was basically their one message because it adds weeks if not months to recovery time uh and we take that seriously good thank you very much thank you chairman you're very welcome councillor Delacey I was getting a little bit worried with you talking about attacks and councillor Harvey before you're talking about bonds going off I wondered what had happened it's been 20 past five um I see the leader would like to speak so leader would you like to come in please who are you are you with us okay right yes I'm there sorry it's very sensitive actually it well it's just really fortuitous um what councillor Delacey has just said because I I sit on the safe and stronger communities board at the local government association and we had a briefing today from an expert on their cyber security program and um they are conducting a piece of work called closing the loophole now the loophole very interestingly is that it is illegal for government departments to pay ransoms but it's not not currently illegal for local authorities to pay ransoms so in the case that um has just been referenced a ransom was paid and a ransom of about around a million pounds was paid by the local authority I gather that actually it was the treasury that paid it um in that circumstance because the cost of sorting this out is estimated like we were told today at between 10 and 15 million pounds now you know the the there's many doubt and what they were saying is that when you look at the incidence of these major cyber attacks which are mainly based on phishing um every time someone pays a ransom the incidences go up so what we what my board has just promoted today is putting a private members bill or something to government to close this loophole so that if it's known that local authorities are legally not allowed to pay ransom it will reduce the likelihood of an attack but as soon as a local authority has paid a ransom there will be an exponential increase in attacks on local authorities because we are seen as fair game now I did ask the question about um you know if you pay up the money will you actually get all your data back to which the answer was well you might but of course they could have copied it all in the meantime and then of course we also had the added risk of prosecution from the ICO which could add many more million pounds so the question that I am going to take back to the senior leadership team is about um is this on our risk register is it is it highlighted as red because I gather there are well councils apparently are getting dozens if not hundreds of attacks a day I'd be quite interested to know how many we are getting a so is it on a risk register are we ensured against it how would audit deal with it if something happened so I think so that's quite I'm really pleased with that point was raised so I've been able to bring this attention thank you very much indeed I see that councillor Brad would like a very brief follow-up question so councillor Bradman a very brief question if you would please was councillor Toomey Hawkins first no I'm going to councillor Toomey Hawkins is not on this committee so I'm taking 50 members first okay it is a very brief one and that is where is it in Peterborough is it at Peterborough city council or is it somewhere else in Peterborough it's a San Martin house so it's part of their new new facility thank you and if I if I may I just want to just comment on them the I think there was a comment made about insurance so we were approached ICT were approached to feed into and a consortium of councils who are looking at cyber insurance policy and one of the questions that we've raised in there is that does we've got to make sure that whatever policy that we might buy into doesn't penalize us for not wanting to pay a ransom I think and that plays to the point that was just raised by Councillor Smith around we should be paying ransoms there are some insurance policies that will obviously they want a quick and easy way out and that might mean them recommending paying a ransom out which is obviously ethically probably not ideal if the law is changed it's not something we'll have to worry about yeah and chairman what while I'm thinking about it where is the other one if one is at Peterborough where's the other one it's in Huntington a pathfinder house okay thank you right thanks I'm going to come now to other lead members and I'm going to come first to Councillor Brian Mills thank you chair um since my time with you on the scrutiny committee I've recently been asked by the cabinet to take a responsibility from our ICT affairs so I come to you this evening with some significant interest in Segar's report to you and also you remember I was part of the working party on scrutiny with ICT extremely well and it's sad to say that I'm not convinced that we've made huge amounts of progress since they're in some of some accounts I think the the lack of a service level agreement for me is a residual matter that we ought to be addressing here there there ought to be some expectation of them for example the maximum acceptable downtime Segar's referred to some of that in terms of the the joint agreement that was the creation of the shared service um as part of your new responsibilities Councillor Mills are you going to ensure that a service level agreement and maximum downtime levels are set and established or is that something that you would like to see as a recommendation from this committee um I already share many of the committee's reservations about the level of service that we've had from our ICT over the years in the three years since I've been here we've had continuing outages that have really been I think unacceptable despite you know huge efforts on the part of the ICT staff who've valiantly you know tried to make good some of the failures you know the historical investment in ICT particularly in south camps was very low it was a rickety old system when we got into the administration three years ago and it's improved significantly since then the the ability for us to support remote working since the Covid crisis has demonstrated that we were in a far better place than we went when we first started so it's not to say that that has not been significant progress in this regard but there are still remaining issues and there are particular issues around the structure of the management of the contract or the the agreement that was something that we talked about at length we asked for for example a document repository you'll remember that the shared document repository still is not available so there are issues like this that I want to see addressed when I'm when I want I want to interject when the issue of the planning system and didox was raised because this is a big part of our responsibility and public facing role to say that we have a system that it is not designed for remote access seems quite phenomenal to me the applicants everybody involved in are wanting to access this system remotely it's not an inter some internal system and it continues to be unavailable too frequently for comfort so that's another issue that I would certainly want to take take up as part of the the service but then there were other other things if you remember say there was a an issue if you remember when the certificate expired unexpectedly yeah and we had a situation where the report said the reason we there was further delay was that we didn't have a credit card on which to pay for the upgrade to the certificates which would suggest that we didn't have some credit with a supplier that could provide this for me that's quite quite astonishing so if there are still issues of that nature floating around and that wasn't too long ago I mean was that nine months ago perhaps uh say that I can't remember that was uh august 12 Councillor Mills by the sound of it I think there are a number of issues here that probably need to be handled outside this meeting I think we will we'll make a recommendation that a service level agreement maximum downtime ought to be put in place but by the sound of it there are other matters which need to be addressed and I don't think we can deal with them here tonight but I'd like to invite um Sagar to come back perhaps in a quarter's time and let us discuss this again in the light of your new appointment and um activity in this area which I hope will lead to addressing some of the issues which you've just alluded to so I'm having a sequence of meetings with both Jeff memory memory and and Ainsworth to establish our position in terms of you know one of the three partners of the shared service it it's clear that there are other changes occurring so with the chief executive of the city and so on where I think the there may be a shift in or a potential for shifting reaction from another one of the parties so that we can continue to improve what what we've got and I mean that's the the fundamental issue here you know not to worry too much about historically what's gone on and just to make sure that we continue to support 3C ICT in providing a much more robust and you know invisible service if you like you know it ought not to be impinging on a day-to-day activity and and she failed to mention when she was just talking but the the leader was not very happy to effectively have lost her secretary this this past week or so because of this issue with the laptops thank you very much and I'm sure you will have our full support and we wish you well in your new role thank you but chair there's them cancer Hawkins left if you want to take that yes I'd like to cancel to the Hawkins please good evening and thank you very much chair and thank you for allowing me to to come in I will try and be brief but I just wanted to express my concern that the outages that have been occurring have been affecting planning quite severely and we are a public facing service as you know I know you said that Mr Roy that 12% of the machines that the that were supplied were not rebooting but it seems to me a significant portion of that is with our planning officers I mean there are two of them today who couldn't communicate because they didn't have you know their laptops were not working so I guess my question is how much longer do they have to wait to get their service back and I also note that the outage that occurred just after the new year is not on your list here on the Monday the 4th of January the public access on idocs had fallen over we raised this issue but it was not resolved until after midday on the Tuesday by which time I'd had a lot of complaints so why do you not have out of hours cover and I really would urge you to please resolve whatever it is that's occurring that's making the validation team unable to meet the targets that we've set for them because the rest of the service especially the delivery is dependent on them thank you okay the report the report was with only including the data center outages so the outage you talk about for the shared service or the planning portal sorry I have to look into that separately that wasn't included deliberately on that report that was only to cover the data center outages with regards to the laptops in the planning team I'll check with Jeff we work with Jeff closely on a daily basis on prioritizing which laptops get reviewed and rebuilt I can only ask that if you give me till tomorrow and I'll find out where they are in that in that list I'm not aware of anything that's outstanding particularly over a long time but I'll double check Mr Roy we talk about 12 percent of our laptops how many is that in a finite number we've had 175 that we fixed out of the fleet of 1440 so it's quite a lot 12 percent probably therefore represents something like 160 170 devices so it is a lot and you've fixed 175 how many do you think you've got to go well with modern daily basis today we only had four come in whereas last week we were seeing I think the peak we saw 20 came in in a day so it's come right down in terms of volume of devices we're not seeing that many come in anymore do we have any spare ones that we can give to people who they've already been issued the spares that we had have already gone out I think I probably come to the end and we I don't see any more speakers so final speakers sorry yeah sorry I'm just confirming that speakers are finished so I'm just going to rework back to the recommendations that we have which is I think to to take note of this report but I would also like to add a recommendation from this committee that a service level agreement specifying the maximum downtime should be drawn up and resubmitted and remain in place going forward is it the view of the committee would you generally wish to see that that would happen agreed yes agreed okay so we'll read we'll leave that with the officers to take away I'm sure and that the remaining question that Dr Hawkins has asked Mr Wright would you like to make sure that democratic services get a copy of that and that can be included with the minutes and you've heard the recommendation which will be coming forward but could I thank you very much for coming along this evening and explaining the present situation to us I'm sure we'll see you again soon sure thank you thank you councillors so let us move on to agenda item six which is the housing repair contract process and could I invite the lead cabinet member for housing councillor Hazel Smith if she would like to present her report please thank you chairman thank you can you hear me all right all right good I'll just say some words about this bit of history and then I'll hand over to Peter Campbell in case I've missed anything the responsiveness of the housing repairs arrangements actually matters very significantly to our tenants and the satisfaction with the whole housing service is coloured by this relationship it's also a very big contract many millions of pounds a year so this is why we need to take great care in choosing the right contractor or indeed in-house service and specifying in the contract all the service standards that are important to us we engaged our consultancy who are national experts to help us with this tendering process the report before you is the second stage of this work and follows an initial scoping report the conclusion of this report is that we should continue to use a specialist contractor to handle our housing repairs and maintenance and the writing of the tender specification will be the final part of this work Peter Campbell has warned me that the tender document itself will be hundreds of pages long so that at that stage when we consult again we will not want miniscule changes to be proposed so now is a good time to seek some input from the scrutiny committee the previous contract ran from 2012 there was a light touch review in 2017 and then it was reviewed it was renewed for another five years that review introduced the concept of price per property but it did not look at the performance on dealing with voids it does have social value requirements in it mires took on two apprenticeship apprentices throughout and paid for another officer to help tenants who are falling into arrears with budgeting and benefits advice and that was really helpful to us they've also given us help behind the scenes in helping kind like decorating communal rooms for us the void work is done while the property is empty after tenant leaves and these are often major refurbishments often as tenants get older they resist the offer of a new kitchen or bathroom because they don't want to cope with the upheaval and we tend to accept that maybe more than other housing providers do we do not have we do have a lot of older tenants in our housing and not just in sheltered housing but also in general needs the result is a larger amount of work needed when they do leave you'll notice that in the very useful benchmarking work towards the end of this report many of our statistics are way outside the averages that they quote and I think this is explained by what I've just said about our tenant profile to a large degree the overall cost of the service seems to be lower than their benchmark if you look on page 67 that if you multiply up their benchmark with our number of houses it's 11.6 million so we have been getting value for money I believe our housing is recognised to be of a good standard and well maintained but our current contract with mires has been criticised as not up to modern specification and the new contract should have more relevant key performance indicators and leave as we can pull when the performance drops of course all the statistics have gone wild over the last year for long periods including the current lockdown only emergency repairs have been done for example to keep tenants safe but for benchmarking we're mostly looking at previous years I'm hoping that those of you have been called on by tenants over housing maintenance problems and of course as local members we're only called in when things go badly wrong so we do need to be aware of that we're not seeing the average that you will think about what we can add to the tender to improve this relationship with a contractor going forwards because I think members input will be very useful and I look forward to your comments on the report. Well done thank you very much Peter was there anything that you wish to add? Yeah I'll just fill in some of that if you ever may I mean Hazel's quite right for tenants a major influence on their satisfaction with the landlord is an experience of the repair service if we were tenants we'd all want we'd all want a good repair service and a well-run repair service as obvious benefit for the council and for our tenants and conversely a poor service will cause a cause a unneeded upset and tension and at the end of the day we'll follow all our inboxes with complaints it's really important that we get this right. The repairs contract that we've got is actually made up of two parts both with meers the main contract was due to expire in March next year and that's the that has previously been extended and we've got a separate heating contract which was due to end in June this year but that is able to be extended. With the agreement of the procurement team we're proposing well we have agreed with meers to extend both contracts slightly or one slightly to June of next year and in doing so we'll put enough mass within the tender to make it attractive for some main providers and the soft marketing by the consultants as confirmed that. The deputies hands up it's fairly critical about the about our current arrangements it's an old-fashioned contract it's a contract which is described as being comfortable from both sides we don't really issue challenges to the contractor and because of that and because they're comfort it's unlikely to deliver the standard of service that we require and remembering that tenants' expectations of services increase over time. Some performance is poor and some appears poor but some of that is out of choice such as you know our void costs are higher than than many others but partly of that is generated by the fact that we have a much slower turnaround so our tenants stay in properties for much longer than they do elsewhere and we choose to let properties in go to condition in the hope that they will be valued by the tenants moving in or the landlords make other choice and let properties quickly and do work for tenancy. We have a clear lack of service standards and performance data and we need to work to improve. The report looks at a range of options for providing the future service but boils it down to two either return to the service or to provide the service in house and the recommendation from that is to return the service out to a specialist advisor. The reasons for that is that any house service would be high risk. We're a relatively small player in the field and we struggle to retain specialist staff whereas a larger contract can draw people off other contracts or from other areas of the country. In house will be higher cost albeit marginally. We don't currently have the skills in house to manage a contract and have to bring people in. I would have to bring people in before the contract but the main reason is that we've as I said we've not particularly handled the current contract well. It's hard to see that we'll be expected to not only handle a contract but handle our own team from a standing staff and provide the sort of service that our tenants deserve. And as Hazel said you know what we want to do is to make the service better in the future. We've also we've already started discussions with with members through informal cabinets etc and there's some really excellent ideas that have come out of that process with this increase in the social value printed in training which which Hazel mentioned. But also important things that where a good relationship with the contract can can lead to a better overall service. So for example we'd expect a contract as operative in a house. If we saw fines which make suggest safeguarding concerns or domestic abuse concerns we won't be able to capture that information and feedback that back. And we would expect any contractor to make a. You're frozen Peter. That was very telling wasn't well it's our fault talking about IT problems it's a tense fate. Yeah and we would expect a contractor to make confusion towards many of the other parts of the council about treating people well and you're frozen again I'm afraid. Would it turn your video off. Much as we'd like to see you. Can you hear me now. Yes. No you've gone again. All right what else I'll do chair I will I will leave the meeting going to rejoin. Okay I think we just have to hear you just then. We just have to hold on for a moment or two while Peter goes out and then comes back in again. Liam as soon as you see Peter in the waiting room would you let him straight in please. Yeah absolutely. Thank you sorry about this everyone. I've got a spare laptop here you can cancel laptop here that I never use you're welcome to. I hope to come back with you now. It does sound that way let's hope it stays like that. I've got the end of my presentation so there's any. There's no questions. Sorry right. Cancel Nigel Capcom please go ahead. Thank you Mr Kim. Yes you know I think it's a good report and I think Peter Campbell is a very thoughtful review and analysis and teased out the the salient issues. Speaking personally I wouldn't I recognize the arguments against retaining in-house but my feeling is to keep it on the table if possible at least to some extent. It gives sort of greater flexibility we can provide training and apprenticeships where necessary there's a closer contact with the with the operatives and it wasn't many years ago that we did actually have our own direct labour organization that I think it actually worked quite well so one can make out a case for actually retaining a an in-house service and as I say I wouldn't like to feel it just disappeared altogether just my feeling is to keep it on the table and look at the you know to to to look at if we make it work the other thing is looking at the figures it looks as if actually the set up costs would be higher that is true I think about 850 000 but the actual yearly costs are looking at page 30 30 38 is about 7.8 million compared with about 8 million for the option one the outsourced outsourced outsourced service so it looked to me and I may be wrong here but it looked to me as if the annual operating costs are a bit lower than the outsourced costs and I agreed that the actual set up costs will be higher but that's a one-off and there's some differences to see about 550 000 excess set up costs for the in-house service but that is over a lot life in the contract so if you spread that over the life of the contract there might not be a great deal in it so I think it's something that sort of you know can still be considered at this stage and the other issue the other the other point I like to make and building on what Peter Campbell said is that the this that one of the reasons why sometimes the service runs in the difficulty in the district is the fact that it is it's not unique but it's a much more difficult service to provide in the sense because it's scattered throughout over 100 villages and the variety of stock is probably greater than many parts of the country from pre-war stock to modern modern the states they're often quite small so they're difficult to provide that service and also of course like many other authorities many of the stocks and stock has been sold so you've got a mixture of stocks and houses which have been bought and those which are still retained by the council's all that adds to the difficulty and cost of the maintenance service and I agreed it beers has done a fairly good job because I personally I don't seem to get many complaints and there are one or two but these complaints generally because of the difficult nature of the house so that says and the other point I really like to make is the if you like the council's green agenda but this could be an opportunity just to some extent it may be another argument for still considering the in-house option but we have recently approved a very sort of fairly radical and imaginative and long-term policy on climate change and this is an opportunity to incorporate that philosophy within the within the contract so I mean there are a whole range of things that can be done I agree with the response response prepares when you just sort of prepare an emergency issue like a tap or a missing slate that is different but the bulk of this work as far as I can establish is maintenance plan maintenance and there is a considerable scope for introducing sustainable and and other measures into that contract and the time to do it probably is now we might not be able to do it in every case I totally agree but at least we can sort of say to ourselves this is the ideal we would like to achieve is it feasible and possible but it costs too much and can it be done if we leave it too late in the day with the contract to sign then it'll probably be too late because me as well or whoever's appointable quite rightly say well you know we've signed the contract there are no elements in there which we can actually adjust very easily to accommodate your desires so you know a number of points there but overall yes I think that you know the contract needs improvement but I'd just like to see as I say the climate change issue addressed at an early stage as possible and also the you know the in-house option still considered if possible to as an option thank you thank you very much Councillor Smith would you like to comment on that yes and in terms of the green agenda that that comes down to the asset management strategy which which Pete has been working on and which will it will inform what we're asking them to do but it would be the same whether they were our our operatives or the contractors operatives and what we would be asking them to do so we can we can certainly do that anyway and I spoke to the manager of Mears they have a new guy who came in towards the end of last year about electric vehicles and Mears do have a program nationwide to bring in electric vehicles so so he's going to go and look at that I think the problem might be in this area that they will struggle to find places to charge them so we need to provide the charging points and then and then you know as as they ramp up any contractor can be asked to bring in more and more electric vehicles which which is good I think I think it's probably easier for them to do it rather than us to manage a small fleet you know as we as we've seen at the depot you know these things turn over over quite a long period of time thank you thank you not the Councillor Kafka's other point was the option of the in-house service where where where where do you stand on that well I think the um I've certainly seen over the years I've seen both because I was on the DLO board when we had our in-house service and I was very skeptical about us going out to Mears but having seen the problems we get sometimes getting the right trained people to do particular jobs in this area I know some you know a nationwide company has been able to bring down operatives from the north for the week so that they've been able to to keep the numbers here up and that's that's certainly an advantage there's a bit more resilience there having a bigger company behind it and as Peter said actually we are quite a small player in this field although we've got 5 000 houses that is not you know it's not even a medium-sized housing association so I think probably this is the right decision that we should go with with a nationwide contractor thank you the next speaker is Councillor Graham Cohn I think Councillor Rippert am I right yes sorry Councillor Cohn thanks chairman and I just wanted to um firstly say I think the report's a very good one and it highlights the different options you know and it puts it very clearly and I want to talk a little bit about communication so it's mentioned a lot in in the report um on page 29 there's an example of where you know communication has been lacking in paragraph 2 there and then on page 37 where we're looking at addressing it and I really just wanted firstly to ask how does that communication model how is that going to evolve and how is that going to look obviously communication isn't just about tenants feeding back service delivery or how well their repairs are done it's also about the programme over the long term and what maintenance is going to happen and how are you going to get that across to residents because that will be something sort of above and beyond what me as is looking to do or as part of their contract and the second thing is options three with the hybrid sort of option when I had had a look over that I can see the the district fundage is laid out fairly clearly there but also it made me wonder if there would be sort of other behind this document there must have been multiple multiple options in terms of the hybrid option because you've only set out one hybrid option is to you know which services would be retained in house and which services would be contracted out and actually there's so many multiple options of that I just wanted if those were explored in the background as well as just you know either staying in house or going fully out to contractors but I understand from your you know previous answer the cost implications there thanks very much thank you councillor Smith did you wish to take that um yes I can talk about the first bit I think I might hand over to Pete I understand so the difference might be possible for a hybrid model but certainly as far as communicating with tenants goes um obviously we um we're we're just about to send out ballot papers for the new housing engagement board and that will be um going forward the major way that we communicate with tenants um obviously we've got the um the e-newsletter and um in house cap in south cams um web pages and so on all the housing web pages there's a lot of information there for tenants and and the tenants magazine that goes out twice a year um but the the housing engagement board um will be taking over from the tenant participation group and the um that will have six tenants on it and three members from this council um so that that will be able to take more of an active role in scrutinizing matters to do with with the housing policies so that that will also um as part of that structure there will be three area meetings obviously all this was planned um before the covid situation where we were talking about all these meetings being actually in person and there was a criticism that people found it difficult to come to tenant participation group meetings because they were they were you know in one place usually at water beach which was a long way to come to from balsam or gambling gay um so what what has happened is we've divided south cams into three areas and there will be two representatives on the housing engagement board from each of those three areas so it's effectively making three wards out of south cams for the election to this board and and then there will be local area meetings as well now obviously if people can participate online it doesn't matter where you are um so that's been rather overtaken by events but hopefully they will get back to uh to meeting in person and then it will actually be much better because people have less far to travel and there will be local meetings in each of those three areas um closer to where people live um then you you also asked about planned maintenance somewhere in the benchmarking it does show the list of um the decent home standard the things that we that we the major things that we do replace on us on a uh a cyclical basis so that's the kitchens and bathrooms i was speaking about we also sometimes replace roofs which always seems a bit bonkers to me i mean they say a roof has a 50 year lifespan um so there are roofs which have been replaced in my village but whether they whether they were really no longer fit for purpose i'm not sure i suppose you have to look and see if they start leaking um i don't think anybody else replaces their roofs apart from councils actually but uh but there is a given lifespan for each of these things and and they are replaced on a regular basis um a 15 15 or 20 years for a kitchen actually you know uh seems quite a short time if you're in the house for that period yourself if the house has changed hands three or four times in that period then it's a different thing i think so um but some of these are laid down by legislation and we have to comply with them for the decent home standard anyway um yes perhaps peter would like to speak about the other matter about the hybrid option yeah can just fill in and there's some extra bits in communication as well which i think are relevant um remember that this this report is is about the repairs um and it's a midpoint report it's it's certainly been our intention to address communication and what on what tenants want from communication through the development of the of the next stage and included in the in the tender process but we thought it was important not to be too prescriptive at this stage and act to seek the views of of members of members and members of the public there's also as um counter smith mentioned there's also a an asset management strategy which is currently being developed and there are a whole sways of information there about improving information and involving um residency in standard settings so it's rolled up into into both documents um coming on to the hybrid model um richard medley who who's the author of the main art report um he decided which which models to use and to his credit he's been and scanned the the environment and looked what what's um works well in other ways the country are and he's taken some best practice models so you know we're actually compared with something that the challenge rather is taking on the that suits us thank you very much and councillor delacy councillor delacy delacy please thank you gentlemen i'm afraid this may come over a simply copying criticism uh but i think there is a real point behind this may i refer um peter and hazel to pages 84 and 85 on the um of the agenda please we say we're green to the core um we appear to have moved to being blue to the core and there is a huge amount of absolutely absolutely wasted color in this report which achieves nothing and i i think we ought to say to people when we are going to um commission reports like this we do not want glossy color that is just wasteful on the earth's resources we just want the data thank you um and if you look at page 85 i'm astounded that the company which is supposed to be a highly professional organization produces an almost unreadable font and and these two pages together really got my goat and i hope that in future when we commission work we'll be able to do something better than this thank you jim your point is well made and i i find the word client and contract word client and contractor very difficult to believe one is c line and the other is c on factor so there we are thank you for your point belter delacy uh councillor richard williams please thank you very much chair um and um thank you to councillor smith and um and mr cambell for the for the presentations um i i had to um i mean i'm broadly happy with the recommendation that we stick with a um external provider um but with a better contract um obviously that that's a really important thing i mean my my well i i had one question i've got a following question actually from something mr cambell said but um my first point was just i'll to what extent are we going to do the internal work i think that's necessary to make sure that the the new contract with these increased you know performance measures actually address the problems that we've got with the service i mean you know looking at page 28 29 of the agenda there are there are clear problems the residents feel um and i think other members have mentioned that too so i think if we're going for a new contract we really want to think about how we can have terms that will address the the concerns that residents have um i mean also some of the benchmarking this is more of a cost thing but you know on page 74 75 um we are quite high on a number of these benchmarks so whether that's something that can be resolved through the you know the the re-tendering process obviously presumably we'll we'll be looking at that as well um the second point i had though some of the peter peter cambell mentioned and he mentioned that um we hadn't necessarily always handled the the relationship with me is very well um so i was i was just wondering why in in what ways we've not handled the relationship well and and the ways we can address that going forward thanks very much well i'd like to speak about the cost per repair on 74 and 75 i i think from memory i think these figures were much more um were much lower before we had the price per property thing i'm not certain about this but maybe maybe peter can advise but i think we now have fewer visits to people because that was the idea of this um review that came four years ago when um we brought in price per property which meant that if um you know i could we have um multi-skilled operatives going there if they go to fix the toilet and they see a dripping tap they'll fix that as well you know it's that sort of thing make sure you don't have to go back again and um that's um that might have changed um after that but of course i haven't got the figures in front of me from from way back then um because we weren't with the same benchmarking um outfit so we didn't have that same data to compare it to but um for the others can i hand over to peter because i think he's um more afa with what's uh what's going into the new contract um yeah happy to answer some of it is saying to as the as a previous question asked by uh councillor kohn is that there's an intention between now and issuing the contract to work with groups of residents to to determine what's important uh to them what sort of priorities that that we should give to um to to various classes of repairs uh what time scales will will be involved involved and making sure that what we put with a nintendo meet uh is is among the best in class there is no intention to go to go out with a with their poor contracts um and that you know and again it'll be also linked to the emerging asset management strategy um the point about um the cost which councillor smith has covered um is partly to do with the um move to price for property uh and the um importance of right first time you know we live in a rural district we've got the house houses spread out across the district and unless we give that sort of flexibility um to the operatives to to fix what's right for the property we'll end up paying people to be van drivers rather than plumbers and electricians it's quite right that they that they're trying to address as many issues at once whilst in the in the property and the third point about challenges is that from what i understand the um the the contract with me is started off well it was me it was meeting uh our needs um but it was a contract with which we got comfortable and what we failed to do is to uh compare assume that that that comfortable and steady state was acceptable whereas elsewhere the industry standards have been uh have been improving uh and what we want from a contractor um it would be increasing so what we've ended up with is a contract which looks 10 years out of date so what we want to do is to make sure that we are understand what what the best offer is elsewhere in the market uh and adapt our tender to uh to meet that and also ensure that we um have a a program of continuous improvement on benchmarking um through the to turn the contracts on offer okay could i just come come back for a quick supplementary chair if it's brief councillor thank you yeah just just a quick one i mean on that first point um yeah thanks for that but i mean obviously i think it's important to talk to residents and find out what they want for the future but i was more thinking about looking back and investigating why there's this perception that the service is not working finding out what went wrong in the past and and using that to to you know take things forward and improve as well rather than just you know a discussion of what you want see what i mean point take an example i think that that is important yeah capture that thank you very much um councillor bradnam councillor bradnam councillors we've got i've got five or six more speakers to come so could i ask you all or should be brief as possible please absolutely i agree chairman um i just wanted to ask if we um encounter a council housing that we have recently inherited from developers you know as part of their affordable housing provision and we find quite soon in that in our ownership of those properties that they've got um quite significant problems how do we um do we have any redress back to the developers you know for example their damp or they leak or or noisy or whatever um and the other one is is it part of this contract well it's the it's the mere's contract that would have to be coming back over and over and over again to the same property do you see what i mean so and i just wanted if we identify properties that do have major problems what do we do do we divest ourselves of those properties or do we continue to pay mere's to go and do the repairs thank you shall i start on that one if you would please yes um i think i think um i know something of the background to some of this but um yes um on section 106 properties obviously we wouldn't know necessarily if mere's went back several times to a particular repair if it was within the price per property and that's something which um has come out at the housing board meetings um when tenants have told us that that sort of thing's been going on and actually um there was no mechanism for mere's to feed that information back because the kpi wasn't there and we are asking for better kpis this time so that is part of that um but um yes i must say i've asked the question if a house starts um misbehaving if you get damp um because something isn't working after you know only a couple of years after the house is new what redress do we have from the builder and i've asked you know do they have nhbc guarantees can we actually go back to the builder in that case um but i don't know whether peter's got the answer to that peter over to you there are three parts to this answer really um firstly uh most of your properties come the defect liability period where we're during that time uh responsibility for um defined repairs uh will should be met by the developer that is mainly mainly major pieces of work wouldn't include things like plaster pops that you often get in a new house secondly i think that we have and i need to double check this um that we would retain some um the final payments for the properties uh until the end of the defect liability period uh and thirdly uh more generally and to do with properties that generally in bad condition uh rather new property in bad condition the asset management strategy uh uh contains specific guidance on what we what how we would cut with properties that were in such a bad state of repair um that they'll be uh on on economical thank you thank you very much it's me but i have had my questions answered so the next person is councillor peter fein peter thank you chair yes the report um assesses two options and jumps uh from the dlo option as i will call it to a conclusion that um in cost terms there's not a material difference between the two main options but there are big setup costs if we were to go back to a dlo arrangement my concern is that when repairs are reported they go to a manager who looks at delivery of the contract and cost effectiveness of the way in which those repairs are delivered and there is a problem with minor repairs particularly in our sheltered housing sometimes officers involved who who are meeting the tenants sometimes vulnerable tenants or were meeting them quite regularly now talking to them obviously in a different way um have to keep going back i'm sorry i've reported that again i've just this afternoon had confirmation that a a shower for an elderly resident it sounds like a very simple repair that shower has not been functioning for over six months now and the officer who is trying to get that repaired is clearly tearing her hair out she says it's disgraceful but i can't do anything about it now that would not happen if in most cases if we had a small dlo operation at least in relation to the the most vulnerable tenants i know that sometimes officers would love to be free to do a quick repair themselves but of course they can't um and yet sometimes these are not very skilled operations i suspect i haven't been able to go in and inspect it myself but the repair of that shower would not be complicated often uh fixing repairing fixings that might otherwise fall down and become more expensive to repair can be done very quickly by a small dlo operation and i think therefore that it is worth considering the hybrid model and i'm largely following what uh other councillors have said this afternoon i do think it is worth having uh the scope to do some repairs ourselves in order to ensure that the not only is the the service maintained but the relationship between our our own officers in the sheltered housing is not constantly undermined because their credibility is reduced by being unable to control when those repairs are done if we had a system whereby we could get minor repairs done quickly i'm not talking about anything particularly high skills some plumbing skills some carpentry skills then i think that could be more cost effective and would offer a better service to our vulnerable tenants in many cases thank you peter basil did you wish to comment on that um can i can i bat that one over to peter yes of course yeah can i just there are a couple of things there firstly the point about about multiple visits look let's be clear the situation described about about that shower it is unacceptable and that would be unacceptable whoever was was providing the repair service um second point is that you you make the point about multiple visits uh and that is exactly the sort of um behavior that the price for property contract is intended to to to design out um it as we've mentioned to previous questions a lot of the cost of providing repair service within our district is one of travel um and you know it is unlike a traditional contract which pays you know per per per job actually attending multiple times to sort the same problem is in effect penalizing the um the contractor but then moving on to your final point about um services for um in sheltered housing thinking this through there would be no reason that i can think of why we couldn't include something in any contract which required a regular handyman type service and visits from whoever contractor if it's in household or external to to attend a sheltered housing scheme on a on a regular basis with the authorization to carry out any repairs that identify identify during that during that visit and that's you know if that's successful that's something that i'm more than willing to explore with the um with the consultants to include within the contract that's a very good suggestion please i i i scribble down a few notes here of things that we might wish to add as recommendations at the end i've just added that to it i mean that's an extremely valid point thank you uh judith who's next please and we have councillor claire daunton and then finally councillor jeff harvey claire over to you yes thank you chairman um i think pete when you are i'm giving your presentation early you mentioned that the the contract with meers was had become too cozy or was cozy um so presumably in um taking out a new contract whatever whichever way you go whether it is with an external contractor that replace it who replaces meers um presumably that would you would want that to be much more professional much tougher and more professional but then do you feel then that you need to improve the internal toughness and professionalism do you think that that needs to be balanced both sides laser over to you that's absolutely essential yes yes well i know i know peter's um peter's got a post to fill in that role and so i'll pass over to peter thank you yeah um yes kind of absolutely essential that that that we are that we are tougher and that that applies to my officers it also um applies to the information that we provide to tenants and members um to and given them you know given people outside the department the ability to scrutinize the the performance of the of the contractors and let's be blunt this is not just something that we are saying this is no a requirement within the the housing white paper we've got to give tenants more control over their environment and their properties okay um can i just quickly follow actually i'm really glad that you mentioned that because i was going to say that one of the things that will be embedded in the new contract presumably is everything that follows from Grenfell um housing um fire precaution and all the new tougher measures that have come out as a result of Grenfell and um social the impact on social housing uh not so much uh within within the this contract but it's very strong within the emerging asset management strategy uh and we we've listed um all the at-risk items or electric gas water safety uh fire risk assessments and another one i can't remember but it's all in there and what we're saying want we want strong performance information um there with an identified officer uh and you will see later on the agenda we're looking at the at the business case for the council uh and there's a suggestion within there that it's this is so important that we make um monitoring your compliance a corporate target so it's more open around something that's just just hidden within the uh housing contract thank you that's very good thank you thank you very much and so we come to councillor Jeff Narvey our final speaker yes um thank you chair and i i just wanted to um sort of support some of the things that um councillor Cathcart said right at the beginning i i suppose um we're working through the assumption that the in-house option and the hybrid option are in there because they are realistic options to go for rather than to be just um kind of options that we reject in favour of renewing a contract um i suppose the reason why the running cost um for an in-house operation are slightly higher i mean would i be correct part of that is is sort of for example uh the pension's overhead so so you can't really compare sort of those two jobs because one i think probably has better conditions of employment than the other and the difference partly made up by sort of paying shareholders and i think um sort of the experience with things like you know private finance initiative and you know um kind of um putting things out um you know out out to private contracts is sort of i i feel is almost um uh perhaps time that pendulum began to swing back the other way um the the other i suppose um psychosocial i'm sure you've considered is that obviously we've invested in south council you know we've got water beach i mean um as as time goes by we probably quite like to have people to fill that space and make use of it um as we find sort of desk based workers are more and more working from home might actually be quite um would it effectively reduce that cost if we if we could use some of that space for a sort of physically based operations thank you um Councillor Smith did you want to come back on that um yeah yes i can come back on that i mean at the moment the um the mirrors operation is is run from next to Travis Perkins in Cottenham um which is very convenient um so um he's wondering when i'm going to make his tea um yes they they are operating from next to Travis Perkins in Cottenham um obviously um it would be for a new contractor to to find premises and in fact um we could we could um get an income from using part of South Campbell for that whether or not it was an in-house operation indeed thank you well um we've come to the end of our speakers and we were asked to under our recommendations to firstly take note of the progress on the project to date a support the re-tendering of the repair service and make our comments and suggestions and among those i have noted here but we believe that sustainability should be an integral part of the contract but the concerns of residents should be noted and the communication systems that we put in place will continue and hopefully improve um but any potential improvement possibilities should be integrated into the contract and the contractor also to include a handyman service for minor repairs is everyone content with those comments and suggestions and that therefore we take note of the the housing repair contract can i come in please chair um what's the handyman service for the shattered housing so for the more vulnerable residents i wasn't going to limit it to that so i'm just going to demand service chairman i just wanted to ask one very quickly please well it was didn't did we not also include the um option that if um uh new housing was found to be defective um that we we did pursue it through the developer um through the builder that happens anyway okay we would automatically do that as a as a responsible organization so um subject to those comments is everyone content that we um note this report and move on sorry can i just um come in briefly i i think please yeah i agree it's just at the point that was touched on i think i mentioned one of two members touched on about the in-house option i look i totally agree on the the arguments for going out to tender but it's just for not to be lost sight of in the process in case circumstances change and we sort of that's i'm probably a minority viewer here um well i've just cancelled Smith and the head of housing have heard the comments and i'm sure that they will give consideration to it i think that's all i've been asking for not that it's actually um uh put forward as a as a as a view of the committee but just um the advantages of the in-house service are not lost sight of that's all i'm trying to say thank you thank you very much for that can i can i thank councillor hazel smith and peter cambell for your contributions we put you on the spot a little bit tonight but thank you very much for your very detailed responses the most helpful thank you thank you i hope you enjoy your dinner and mr smith delta let us move on to agenda item seven which is the review of the business plan and i'm delighted that we have councillor neil doff with us to present and it is included on the supplementary pages that you have so neil over to you okay thank you chair i'll try and be very very brief and just say a couple of introductory comments about this obviously the the business plan is an important document um but it doesn't reflect everything which the council does because a lot of what the council does falls into the sort of business as usual category things like planning applications and so forth and some very important business as usual like the local plan and much of that is monitored in a different way by your committee in terms of business as usual through kpi's and other measures and so forth but what the business plan does is try to focus on some key deliverables in the year ahead and highlight our particular things which this council wants to wants to achieve and this is now i think a familiar format to you and and it's a familiar format because there's you know a lot of continuity in terms of the priorities which this council has and those key four priorities remain the same um so there's a lot of continuity in the business plan but we also have to recognize that this has been a year of discontinuity and so there are there are two particular areas in this plan i think which have got greater weight um in terms of our consideration this year one is is around um support for business um including recovery business the green dimension and the other is support for um communities in the covid recovery both of which have been recognized um with new cabinet positions and uh and resources in the budget and um in the the formation of the the new posts in cabinet um so how is this how is this report structured essentially um what it does is it goes through the four priority areas it it picks out um the key the key actions and the key priorities for uh the fourth the forthcoming year um and each one of those has a commitment associated with it a deliverable which is defined by um the quarters and um we also have um at the at the bottom of each section highlighted those actions and achievements which were really completed in the past year and those have been those essentially sort of drop out of the drop out of the plan um is actions completed so what's in the table is focused very much on the forthcoming year and i've just noticed that um on some of the tables on b it's 2021 priorities but of course everything in the table should is 21 22 priorities so um i thank the officers for all their hard work this is a this is a you know a culmination of all of the input across all of the activities um in the council and and is kind of spearheaded that and and uh act as a bit of a quarterback with it but it reflects a lot of input from a lot of people thank you we can't hear you chair i i've put it onto muting cases any background or is in the phone ring um so i think we have cancer bradnam yeah cancer and a bradnam looks like looks like the only speaker yes thank you and um i just wanted to say thank you very much this is a very useful summary um and my only um request is a matter of formatting which is i find format confusing because as uh councilor gough has said for each of the sections there's a title which he's identified confusingly had this current years um uh years on it instead of the four the forward looking year the priorities for the forward plan so that was slightly confusing but also can i just simply suggest that the actions and achievements completed from the 2021 business plan should be at the beginning of each section then looking at the priorities going forward with the ongoing objectives and then the priorities so it sort of flows in chronological order i would just find that a much simpler way of looking at it so so it's simply a question of formatting please thank you i'm sure and we'll take that away for the future thank you council adorned yeah thank you very thank you chairman um thank you very much for the report which i found very um easy to to assimilate the information so it's very well set out and very comprehensive i've just got two small points one very small point which is on page nine under ongoing objectives um we know a community safety partnership not a crime and disorder reduction partnership that's the old name so maybe that could be updated to the csp um and then i'm more important i was looking for um where where you've um scheduled in the work on health and well-being so i can i find that i think that was um if i remember it's in point i think that's an area big isn't it well i have objectives uh footnote note four um page 12 this is this is this is a little bit where we get we get caught in our in the trap of our own continuity um five five wanting to sort of put things under four four headings um and also sort of keep them as specific uh you know deliverables and i think sort of that the whole health and well-being agenda you know does have elements which are in it in section section b but it does also really significantly fall under the ongoing objectives on the b rather than the specific deliverables in the table okay so i was looking basically um i was looking in the wrong place yeah well i guess i guess the difficulty was something like health and well-being is that it's very difficult to translate it into a sort of specific deliverable with specific timetable that really is ongoing activities and um and that's why it sort of flips down to the ongoing objectives okay thank you thank you i'm just going i've got one more i'm just going to take one more speaker i'm afraid we need to move on so chair a jeck sarah chung johnson and then we must bring this to an end thanks i'll just echo my thanks for this really clear business plan i just wanted to on page 11 where we've got community forums mentioned as part of the housing that is truly affordable priority um could i see some um what would be good i think is if we have uh kind of some forums internally for lessons learned because obviously we're going through a lot in north star at the moment and i would like to think that some of the the the things that are causing us trouble now could be fed back so that they aren't you know future problems for other new developments that are coming on and i don't i think we lack that kind of internal feedback loop to and so it's not just community forums but it's other things that have tripped us up or we have found difficult that that it would be good for us to capture those and ensure for all of the new towns that we're building that we can kind of learn from those lessons yeah i think that's i'm sorry i think that's an excellent idea and um we have obviously started these liaison meetings and we have existing forums which have been operating and um some of them are going really well and some probably are not going less well so what i will take as an action is to talk to jeff memory about pooling you know what we think are the the key key things which are which we're doing well and why they're going well and seeing if we can sort of replicate across um all these all these groups and forums um you know this is this is one area where um this is a journey and we started some and we probably will start some others but uh we also need to make sure that the ones we started are operating as best as they can and i think sorry my point was also just on the wider remit of just community development as well as you know other areas that we're looking at but not just just isolated to community forums but some of the the wide lessons yeah thanks i support that chairman please yes indeed um and i think that i'm gonna wind this up now so uh i'm going to say to cancel the goff and to and thank you so much for what is an excellent report and a report that amongst all the reports that we have tonight is it um true not a single question in the pre-meet last night so there is broad satisfaction and support and i thank you both very much for the hard work that's gone behind it okay thank you very much very much indeed so we move on to agenda item eight which is the report from the task and finish group uh which was responsible for looking at our covid 19 response and you have the report that we there are two minor two minor but important amendments to the recommendations which have been circulated so far recommendation one will now read the council should host appreciation events plural to celebrate the success of the community response and to acknowledge the work of community groups volunteers and local members during the covid 19 pandemic so that's a change in that and in recommendation two that which recommendation two is is the appreciation events which i've dealt with in sorry that so that was the change for recommendation two for recommendation one um in terms of supporting groups going forward we would recommend that any applications for funding should be made through the grants committee who would monitor and review any grants that are required to sustain the groups going forward the reason for that is if you look at the um the detailed responses in appendix b of the groups which have carried out some unbelievable work during these months um perhaps listening to them was almost the most humbling moment that i have experienced as a district councillor the amount of work that the volunteers led often by local members has been quite extraordinary and we would very much like to see that continue now in order to do that they're clearly going to need some seed funding and we believe that there is an opportunity to provide that and following on from our last meeting i wrote to councillor john williams head of finance seeking his support for grants to be available and i'm delighted that i received the report a couple of days ago in which john confirms that he wanted to wait the approval of the 2021-22 budget before replying he went on to say that the budget provides for a contingency fund of 250 000 pounds and we also have what remains of the 50 000 COVID-19 fund we set up this year and grants may agree this friday to amend the community chest rules to permit community groups and parish councils to apply for to apply to it for funding up to 2000 pounds for mitigating the effects of the pandemic for a limited period so i think we have a mechanism in place to ensure the the funding and i would therefore ask that the committee support this but in doing so to thank jay clark who is with us now and also cecilia murphy roads both of them have done the most incredible job in supporting our volunteer groups through this very difficult year um you will you will all have seen i think the two briefing notes that were sent out which provide a tremendous amount of information on where member aware community groups can go for help and information even in some cases sending them as far as Scandinavia to get advice really wonderful stuff that's been put together so to jay and to cecilia i'd like to record my most sincere thanks but also to my colleagues on the task and finish group prayer dawns and joe sails and judy throughput who worked incredibly hard to bring this report forward and to hopefully highlight the outstanding work that has been done and i've asked that when we get to the end of this the information relating to the work that's been done should be circulated to our county councillor and member members of parliament so that they are fully aware too of just how much good work has been done by the volunteers within within our district hi does anyone have any questions no speakers are you therefore minded to accept the modified recommendations as i have laid them out great a great thank you chairman it's been this been an absolute delight to work with you all on such an exciting and interesting project and we come we come there to another one agenda item nine and i'm going to invite um councillor sarah chung johnson who led this task and finish group to recommend her report but just before i do can i thank sarah and the team again their dawns in jeff rd and rickard williams for your incredible contributions to what i think is an extremely valuable document so sarah thank you to you and your team and over to you thank you i will keep this brief because i know uh the meeting is running on um as you can see there are several recommendations uh from the report a lot of them actually come from really good work the city's doing that i think we need to emulate um they have a dedicated officer uh they have their equalities policy and some of these measures already embedded in various different business streams throughout the council and i really think that it would benefit um the um people who will look at this for us to have some meetings with the city to to look at how they do it but also to join forces with them especially on some of the um outreach items to other communities because obviously um our communities are shared across i mean people don't don't don't just stick to the being in south cams to to go and attend community events for example so um hopefully the recommendations are pretty straightforward but obviously if you've got any questions to bring them up um i would just like to take the opportunity to thank uh victoria wallace for supporting us um for the my fellow uh council members of the task and finish group and also to susie garner craig and her hr colleagues for all of the time that gave to us um in answering our very many questions on hr and how our recruitment process etc works um but i think the main point i think we'd like to make from the this report is that obviously this is not a closed-ended task and we really want to see a lot of this work embedded in the work that we're doing in the council and to that end the recommendations hopefully support that so that we can begin to see some of this work take fruition in all the other areas that we switch on thank you thank you very much indeed i i see no speakers i presume that means once again everyone is in a similar mind to mine and that we should simply give clarinet of saranda colleagues uh total support and thank you very much for the yes sorry sorry chairman apologies there was just one um comment that we made which was in recommendation one absolutely lovely report but in recommendation one we just said the authors might want to just look at the wording of recommendation one because it's slightly ambiguous and it might imply to somebody reading it that you meant something other than what you intended so it um where it says key performance indicators relating to bame employees i'm not sure that's quite what you meant i think you might have meant but it was key performance indicators into how the council responds to bame employees rather than than what they're doing it sounds as if we're monitoring them whereas actually i think we're monitoring what the council is doing with regard to bame employees if i can yes no you're right you're right council president yes so you might want to just reword that recommendation thank you uh i believe we'd like to come in so uh bridge it over to you well only to say thank you very much indeed i don't imagine this was an easy piece of work to do um and i think it's been turned around and in a surprisingly short time frame it's a really high quality piece of work which as as a council i think we should be really proud of so um many thanks to everybody at concern because i know that you've put your your heart and soul into this and it's much appreciate it yeah well done thank you thank you leader so we now come to item 10 on the agenda which is our work program uh i ought to tell you that we had a triangulation meeting with the leader and uh to the two deputy leaders and chief executive yesterday and we have some thoughts going forward on what we the work that we might wish to pick up in future but we're going to take a short break because whilst we just determine exactly what which areas we tend to focus on for our task and finish groups um because i think with the staff are absolutely worn out at the moment we need to give them a bit of a break so Judith and i will speak in the coming days and we will look at uh with in conjunction with the lead members particular areas that we might wish to focus on but other than that i think it's fair to say that the work program is as as you see and of course we'll be subjected to change as uh documents and papers come forward chairman there is just one other element and this this work program is needs to also have its date updated it says 2020 to 21 it should be 21 to 22 yeah indeed that that seems to be a a thing that's running through and i'm sure that before it gets to cabinet all those dates will change lovely thanks well are there any other points on the work program no thank you very much in that case can i just inform you that our next meeting will take place on Thursday the 18th of March 2021 at 5 20 p.m and can i thank you all very much for your contributions this evening my thanks to the dem services team for providing the network thanks to all the presenters and thanks to both committee members and lead members who have joined us this evening and made their contributions so helpful so thank you very much everyone have a safe journey home and i look forward to seeing you very soon thank you thank you thank you bye bye thanks very much