 Welch, rwyfyn, o'r cyfrifobl iawn a amser cyfnodd gyda'r cestryd gyda'r gweinigur. Felly, rydyn ni, Counselor Gwrenfield Chamberlain i'r gweithio o'r gweithio gyda'r gweithio gyda'r Cymru Cymru o Gymru, yn y cherddau. Pwysigidol y gallwn amser arlefel y gweithio gyda'r cyfrifobl iawn, mae'n gweithio fydd yma yn e snacksu o gweithio gweithio gyda'r Cymru Cyfrifob. following the end of the temporary legislation allowing public meetings to be held entirely by video conference, all voting members must now be in the same room. However, officers and other councillors will be joining the meeting online so it is clear to members of the public, a committee member proposing or seconding a motion all voting must be in the room. Public speakers and others such as those giving evidence to the committee may be present in the chamber addressing the meeting by video conference, or by watching the web cuts. 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They are shown on pages one to four of your agenda pack. May I ask that they be approved and I will sign them into your course as a true record? Is anyone against? Thank you very much indeed. Item five is public questions. We believe that we have no questions from the public. No questions. Thank you very much indeed. And therefore we move directly on to the private sector housing policy, which is documented in pages five to 72 of your agenda pack. I will invite Councillor Brian Mills. Good evening to the committee and other officers. This is a policy document that has been created to fill an absence. And it's been developed by Leslie Beavers, who is with us today. And I can commend it to the committee as a piece of work that will articulate our policy in this area so that anybody in the private housing sector will know what to expect from us at any stage in terms of the quality of vision. So there's a lot of detail in here. It's been well worked through. I've revised it in small part with Leslie. So I'm happy to commend to the committee and answer any questions between me and Leslie by the committee. Thank you very much. I do not believe that Councillor John Johnson is with us remotely. So I will go first of all to members of the committee. So we would like to click. Thank you. Could you explain please why this is coming from environmental health and not housing? Yes, I can. So this is an enforcement and licensing issue because it deals with environmental health as an issue as a core subject. Therefore it falls within the remit of the environmental health service. I think that this is a worthy document. As you said, it does fill a gap. I think we need to be careful. Sometimes the tenants suggest as much as a landlord. There are various cases in my village I've dealt with over the years where the tenants failed to keep the property in its satisfactory condition and then tries to blame the landlord. So all I'm saying is we do have to be careful and I think that's spelled out in the documents and every case is considered on a case by case basis. So I think we do need to make sure that if there is actually an issue concerning the property and how it's being maintained, however there is health and safety recently made actually who is responsible whether it is tenants and the landlord's neglect or whether the tenant has one case in my village where there was someone who did lunch dogs and the landlord is in total fear of him and the dog suffixed the property and he tried to then blame the landlord. So there are issues here I think balance between tenant and landlord. The other question is do we actually have the staff resources necessary but it's because these could be quite time consuming these cases looking at them and investigating them, taking them through discussion, often they're controversial. Are we intending to do it from existing staff sources or are we going to actually employ additional people to do it? What else? We've talked about licences here and perhaps as mentioned in the report I might have missed it. I just want to know exactly under what circumstances you do have to have a licence, what are the requirements to all landlords that have a licence or some or whatever. Sorry, have you concluded your questions? No, the other one, the fourth one is we're talking here about fines and penalties. What actually happens to the money? Is it actually because the fines can be quite substantial? Do we keep it or is it paid over to central government or whatever? Just a number of questions and observations. Thank you. So I'll let Leslie answer the last questions because they're of a sort of technical nature and she's much more aware of this legislation in terms of the balance between tenants and landlord. I think I can answer that from at least the perspective of being both, having been a tenant of an absolutely dreadfully neglected property and of being a landlord of a property that was neglected by the tenant. So I think this strikes a perfectly reasonable balance in terms of really trying to address the issue of poor landlords who let their property into an inappropriate state and offers their tenants some protection from such neglect. I think clearly we'll have to monitor this as we go on to make sure that that balance is retained and also in considering this cabinet. We've had useful contributions from to me hoping so is also a landlord in terms of keeping in touch with the landlord community to make sure that they understand that we're trying to be supportive to good landlords in this respect. Versus the poor landlords who need persuading to act properly if I put it that way. Thank you. Leslie. With regard to the staff resources question that you asked, the service has recently gone through a restructure and we should be able to implement this policy within the new resources that we've got within the team. Full licences, not all private landlords need licences. The only area that does need a licence is for the houses and multiple occupation and for those is if there's five or more people in the property, four or two or more households. So they're the only ones who have got who need a licensing within south. With regard to fines and penalties, it isn't something that I envisaged that we will use very often, but it gives us an alternative to prosecution, which can be a very lengthy process to go through. The fines and penalties, it is all within the document how we determine what penalty somebody should pay. If we do go down that route, the penalties kept within our service area, that covers everything that was asked. Thank you very much indeed. Chair of the Council and a bad name followed by Councillor Graham Cone. Thank you Chairman. Right, just on page 22, just a panickety little thing, very top line, it's referring to banning orders and it's talking about the subject of the order cannot, blah blah blah, hold a licence that should be a C, not an S. Licence spelt that way is the verb whereas the subject is spelt with a C. I also wanted to ask, does this, it sounds like quite a significant step up in enforcement work and I wondered whether that's going to require more resources, but Ms Bevers has explained that it should be able to be managed within the resources that we have available. And similarly, Councillor Cathcart asked a similar question to myself, but I'm posing mine slightly differently and mine is this clearly is intended to protect tenants from negligent landlords. I wanted to know are there equal and proper protections for landlords because we know there are good and bad landlords and also good and bad tenants. So, are there equal and proper protections for landlords? Also, I wanted to understand how does this interplay with subletting, inappropriate subletting and use of properties that are rented for one purpose being then re-rented out for Airbnb. So, I wondered if those could be addressed please. Thank you. Councillor Milne. Yes, clearly this is not intended to actually work in terms of the protection of landlords from negligent tenants. The tenant deposit scheme, for example, would address that, but I think I'll let Leslie, if she's got anything to add to that because I'm now stretching my understanding of where we're at in the limitations. Clearly, this is trying to protect tenants from negligent landlords and offers us as an enforcement authority the ability to issue fixed penalty notices rather than go through a formal prosecution process. So, this is similar in many ways to where we can act elsewhere. The fly tipping, for example, where we've got the same option and it's a much less expensive process to go through. Leslie, I don't know if you want to try and answer Councillor Rudinman's other questions. Thank you. I would agree with Councillor Milne that this policy is with regard to protecting tenants from negligent landlords. As we're all aware, most landlords are called most tenants are called, but there is that element of landlords who don't do the actions that they should protect the tenants and that is where this policy comes in. Unfortunately, it isn't for protecting landlords from bad tenants, landlords have got actions that they can go through themselves to limit that happening and ultimately they can go through the courts if the tenants do need, if they are causing problems for them. With regard to having to play with subletting, this policy doesn't cover the subletting of a property on. So, that's it really, it just doesn't cover that part of Councillor Bradman's question. Thank you. Did you wish to come back, Councillor Bradman? Thank you, Chairman. Yes. As I said, I acknowledge that, the outset, but what my question was, are there equal and proper protections for landlords? And if there are, then great. So, I was hoping somebody would tell me what they were. So, I think Leslie's answered your question there, that this doesn't cover that and there are some protections I know from particularly deposit schemes in that respect, but that's out of scope for this document, for these documents. Thank you. We have councillor prioritising those not in the room and then councillor Cohn and councillor Richard Williams. Can we invite councillor Steve Hunt, who's joining us remotely, who wishes to ask a question? Thank you. Thank you, Chair. And I'd like to apologise first for A and to be able to join remotely today and B, even then only being a few minutes late, so sorry about that. And therefore, this question, I've already risen, I apologize if it has, but it's about the section, I think, on page 11 in the introduction where it talks about the powers being tenure blind. And so it can be used in connection with own-occupied homes, but I've had it fairly difficult to see. I mean, most of it is understandably written in terms of protecting, as just mentioned, tenants from landlords. And I just wondered how much of it would in practice apply to cases, for example, and I know, Leslie, you'd be aware of the case in Impington, which we've discussed recently, where there is a house in a very poor state of repair, where it's been difficult to get the owner to do anything about it. And the nuisance is not to the tenants, as this is mostly phrased as in this document, but is to the neighbours and the public at large. I wonder whether you could comment, and also on whether any of the sort of remedies and legal powers in the appendix are applicable in that case. I think I'll leave that to you to answer, Leslie, for me. With regard to the owner-occupied, the time when I have used housing out legislation in the past is when the owner-occupied needs some grant work or something like that, and if we can show that the property is in a poor state of repair, that might help them with that avenue of it. With regard to the entry properties, some of the legislation listed at the back of this policy is relevant to entry properties. This policy itself doesn't cover entry properties, but some of the housing assets can be used for that purpose. Councillor Hunt, did you wish to come back? Yes, thank you for that explanation. Is there anywhere a sort of a guide to what is and isn't? Is it written down somewhere, which bits of that legislation can be and can't be? With regard to entry properties? Yeah, yeah, in particular. I can get you a list of that outside of this forum if you would like. Okay, okay, thank you. I just wondered if it ought to be somehow included in this as it is a, you know, it says it's 10-year blind, but I felt that as reading this with a sort of owner-occupies mindset, I didn't see that much to help me understand what we can and can't do for owner-occupies cases. I'm personally not sure whether this policy is the best place for that. I've got an empty home strategy, which I think may well feed into that more than this policy. Okay, perhaps, yeah, yeah. Okay, thank you. I know there's been some discussion previously about empty dwelling management orders on what place they have, but it's a very underused policy. I think I looked in the first three or four years of it being used, only 43 were issued nationally. So there is a whole other area that is considering that. I'm not sure if there's a gap there between that, which I think is mainly about trying to get them back into use, and this which is about things being a hazard in some sense. And, you know, there's this case where over our houses can be a hazard to various people. And I just wondered whether that would be more specific in this document or not. Perhaps I could ask Councillor Hunter for you and Councillor Milne's between you and take this offline, since it's clearly not covered by this policy. Okay. Thank you very much. Councillor Cohn. Thanks very much, Chairman. I think a lot of what I was going to ask has already been answered by Councillor Milne's. I agree with Councillor Milne's that part of this policy is about evening up the balance. And I think he put that across well. There are, you know, legal actions that landlords can take. And I think this just sort of, you know, moves towards a fairer balance. I think for me, the resources are important and making sure we've got the right skill mix and the right, you know, resources in place. Obviously this document only works if those resources and those staffing teams are in place to, you know, carry out those checks and do that in enforcement, protecting sort of vulnerable residents essentially. So I think that actually isn't something we should try and do. It's something we must do if we want to enforce this document. The other question I had for Councillor Milne's was just around sort of big landlords. So landlords that, you know, in many of our villages we've got, you know, very big providers of social rental or, you know, large landlords that own a lot of houses. And I just wondered if there could be anything in this policy about working a little bit sort of more closely with those big landlords to address some of those issues. Because I know that, you know, many of our tenants come to us from those big providers. And, you know, part of that is about communication and part of that is, you know, they're not sort of fulfilling their role as well as they could be. I just wondered how this policy would get across to those bigger landlords. Thanks very much. I'm not really sure that there's a necessity for differentiating between the size of landlords. There's an escalation process here that monitors what landlords are doing and whether or not they effectively have repeat offences. In other words, whether they are so, for example, in the case of a large landlord, if they are persistently poor operators, that will become evidence by complaints from their tenants. So I think the policy covers that certainly in terms of escalation to larger tenants, sorry, larger landlords. And I think the suggestions that Timmy was making in cabinet about a dialogue with landlords is a really good idea. And she referenced Peterborough as a place where they're doing quite a lot of that. And I know Leslie and I were very receptive to that area, so we're likely to take that on board. I don't know if you want to add any more, Leslie. Is council going to housing associations as well as large landlords? Are you going to the housing associations as well as other large private landlords? Yeah, yeah. We do speak to housing associations and what we are currently trying to do is get a full list of contact details for them. So if we get someone coming to us with a problem, we can then go directly to the housing association to go through what the problems are and try to work with them to resolve the problem. So that is something we are in the process of pulling all together out of now. Brilliant, yeah. And I just thought, like Councillor Mills says, that this policy could work in conjunction with that and sort of communicate with those bigger landlords as well. So yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. Councillor Richard Williams. Thank you very much. I've got quite a few points to make. I'll try to work through them slowly so Councillor Mills and Leslie Beavers can keep up. The first point I wanted to make was just to pick up on something that Councillor Bradnan mentioned. I do think the document might benefit from a bit of a proof read. I think it might have been drafted by different people so there are inconsistencies. So I mean just to flag up a few, on page 16 it says where the council is and then on page 17 it starts saying where the council are and it should be is. And the bullet point lists are not set out consistently. Sometimes there's a semi-colon after each point, sometimes there isn't. So I think it will be good if somebody could just go through and sort of make it consistent where I think different people have drafted. Sometimes the bullet points start with a capital S, sometimes they don't. They are fairly finicky points. On to more substantive things that I will work through. I had a question, my first one on my first comment is on page 15. We've got consistency and proportionality, those two paragraphs and openness or three paragraphs. In the proportionality paragraph, I think actually that's talking about two things. It starts off by saying that proportionality means enforcement action will be proportional to the risks and the severity of the fence, that's fine. It then says this will ensure the most serious risks are targeted first. I think actually that's talking about prioritisation, not proportionality. So I wonder if that could be separate or identified because what follows is about prioritising cases, which is not the point about the proportionality of the action to the breach. So I think that could maybe be looked at and perhaps sharpened up a little bit. My next sort of major point I would flag up is on page 19, where we talk about civil penalties. There's a reference to a document. It says Department for Communities and Local Government, presumably that should have been Minister of Housing, Communities and Local Government. But it talks about section 3.3 of the document and this section having been written in accordance with that. If I've got the right document, because I went and looked at the guidance from 2018, if I've got the right one, actually there are points in here that are not in section 3.3, they're actually in section 3.1 and other parts of section 3. So I wonder if it's better to just say this comes from section 3 rather than 3.3 because there are actually points that are not 3.3. At least if I've got the right document there. So I thought that maybe something that could be looked at. So moving on, I think I've got various drafting points but I'll skip over those. On page 24, charging for enforcement activity. I was just wondering if maybe somebody could say something about the reasonableness of this because the Act, section 49 says you can make reasonable charges. So I was wondering if somebody could just say a little bit about why they thought these charges were reasonable and what work had gone into that. Particularly the 25% or 25 pounds part. I mean I did find some similar policies in other councils and they seem to set out a much more detailed list of charges. So I was wondering if we could just say a little bit about that. And then just one other thing on page 24, just because this is a policy document and I think it's important that it's clear, top of page 25, top of page 25, it says residents can expect a call within two working days. If that's a sort of target or a promise, I think it should probably be in slightly more precise language than can expect. So we're making a promise and say we aim to call within two working days. I think we should be precise about that because can expect is quite imprecise language. I've got the same point really when we come to page 26. And this applies to all of the categories when we talk about medium risk, high risk and urgent risk cases. The document says the sort of cases that would be designated as medium risk, high risk. Sorry Councillor Williams, I missed what page reference you were talking about. 26, sorry, sorry Councillor Mills, I know I'm going through a lot of things. 26? 26. Okay. 26, just at the top, it says the sort of cases that will be designated as medium risk are those where. From my reading of it, sort of cases, it wasn't clear whether that was, whether these were fixed criteria, i.e. cases will be designated as medium risk when they meet these criteria or actually whether they are other criteria because the sorts of cases doesn't really say whether this is an exhaustive list or these are exhaustive criteria or not. So, if these criteria, these sort of hallmarks, if you like, of a particular case are meant to be fixed and there aren't meant to be others, and I think maybe we could sharpen the language there. And it's the same when it's a high risk case, an urgent risk again. It says the sort of cases and that left me unclear as to whether there were other sorts of cases or other criteria that weren't mentioned or whether that was meant to be comprehensive. And then my penultimate point to probably be pleased to hear is just when we move then on to page 28. And we're talking about council owned properties and it talks about Irmin Street. And document seems to imply that actually we wouldn't follow these policies with those with properties owned by Irmin Street, but we are under a statutory duty to do so because they're owned by the companies which are separate legal personality from the council. So, I slightly worry about that, but it's kind of implying that we're not going to follow this policy in relation to those properties when we are legally obliged to do so because they are owned by a separate entity, they're not owned by the council. So, I'm a bit uncomfortable with that. I mean, of course, I accept in practice, you know, people will probably maybe talk to people in, you know, working in Irmin Street, which in normal times may be in the same office. But I think from a point of view of policy, I'm very concerned about us implying that we're not going to, you know, apply this policy to those companies because I think we're under a statutory obligation to do so. And then just finally, there's something broader point, but when it comes to setting civil penalties, so this is more to do with the document. Sorry, I'll just need to move on. It's a bit further on when we talk about, so, section 2, disturbing civil penalties. Sort of page 45 of that document there. In the Ministry of Housing, the community and local government advice was referred to earlier. Sorry, Councillor Williams, you're breaking up on this. I missed that last point. This is a point about Appendix B and the fixing of civil penalties. In the Ministry of Housing, community and local government guidance document. I'm sorry, can you give me a page reference for that, please? This is page 39, so it's Appendix B page 39. It's not a specific comment on a page of that. It's just the general policy, the whole thing. Ministry of Housing, community and local government paragraph 3.5 of that document that was referred to earlier. That sets that various criteria that local housing authority should consider in setting an appropriate civil penalty. So talks about severity of the fence, culpability, harm. Some of these things are in Appendix B, but some aren't. So the Ministry of Housing also talks about punishment and deterrence and setting penalties in a manner that might deter others from committing similar offences. I didn't really get much of that from our approach to civil penalties. So I was wondering if we might be able to say a little bit more about whether we have taken that into account in setting civil penalties and if so, how and if not, why not. Thank you, so I appreciate that was a very long list of things. Councillor Milnes, would you like to work your way through those, please? Yes, so if I take the first point and I'm going to invite Leslie to help me through these separate points. I think some of them are less onerous to deal with than others and maybe we could invite Councillor Williams to join us in some of the more complex issues. I'm not sure this is a forum to handle that if the chair is happy for us to take that away. So there are some layout and proofreading issues. I think this is a slightly earlier version than the latest because I already did some of that proofreading reading and there are, for example, some formatting issues where there's inconsistency with style sheets in the document that we can revise and when that gets brought forward to cabinet for approval, we can do that work. On page 15 you asked about prioritisation versus proportionality. It seemed like a reasonable point. I'd have to reread that a couple of times just to make sure that the sense of it wasn't spoiled. But again, if the chair is happy for us to do so, we'll take that offline. These questions of section 3, I think it's well worth revising that or revisiting that to make sure that it's consistent with the legislation referenced. Your case on reasonableness. Yes, we're heading into legal ease and definitions of reasonableness are a fraught area. I'm not sure I have any place in trying to ratify that as a suitable term. I'm not sure about the expectation of two days. I think this is to give people a guide about the sort of response that they should expect from us. But clearly, I don't have a problem with those words, so I'm dubious about whether we really need to do that. Indeed, the sort of cases that you referenced on page 25, similarly, I think it's giving people a reasonable level of expectation, which is clearly what we want to do in all of this. We want expectation management to under-promise and over-deliver is the nature of what we want to do in that, which allows us to, on your point about the cases of councils and properties not being subject, but therefore in the streets and elsewhere where they're owned by separate entities. But what we're saying is that, as you can imagine, we wouldn't expect to get to a situation where we were trying to enforce on our system companies and their properties. You would really expect us, again, in terms of expectation management, any such issue to be handled very rapidly without our intervention in those cases. Councillor Williams. Just to say, Chair, I'm happy to take things offline if that would be easier. I'll just maybe come back on that last point. I completely accept the practice is likely to be with the industry. You won't enforce, but I'm just slightly wary of the policy document suggesting we won't conduct. I wonder maybe again, this isn't something we can take offline, but just maybe changing that word to say, well, we are liable or we are responsible for enforcing against these companies, but we don't expect to be able to do so. I just thought the wording at the moment left things a bit ambiguous and could be clear that we do have responsibilities there, but of course in practice we would expect to resolve it quickly in other ways. As I said, I think as long as Chair, you're happy for us to take this offline. I'm happy to work with Councillor Williams and Lesley to address these issues and just revisit them and revise if we decide that's appropriate. I think that would be very helpful and I look forward to that happening. So please do work together to adjust those minor ones and while you're at it, you might have a look on page 20 in the second paragraph down. It refers to a clinical penalty, which I think should ought to be financial. Thank you. Chair, we have a message first of all from Liz Watts to speak directly into your microphone because it's very difficult to hear the other end. Then the order is Councillor Martin Carn, Councillor Peter Fane, Councillor Jeff Harvey, and that's it on my list. We also have Councillor Tome Hawkins who would like to speak at the end after the committee members. Thank you very much. Councillor Carn. A lot of what I wanted to say was covered by Councillor Hunt about empty property and the problems with that. But one thing that does occur to me is that empty property is basically a housing department function and a lot of the problems here are basically environmental health functions and yet actually a lot of the problems with empty property does produce a lot of environmental health problems. I wanted to know how you managed, how you proposed to integrate them. Obviously there's an advantage in integrating the way that you approach it together and interact. How much interaction is there, how much will there be in the future? Thank you. Councillor Bill. There is a second point I wanted to bring which is the comment about interaction with landlords and I think that's a good point. I should declare an interest in the sense that I am a landlord myself but not in this area. In three different areas of the United Kingdom and there are quite different approaches in different areas. But there are areas where there are landlord forums which take place which are useful. But they are difficult if the landlord lives a long way away. Perhaps after the last years use of distance communication there may be opportunities to look at for using those techniques. So that's a thought. But another thing that this is in Wales where I have properties. There they have a system of awards for landlords or for properties which they set a higher standard that is necessarily in the area which you would normally have for environmental health. You then get accredited at a higher standard of quality that you perhaps would do. That struck me as quite an ingenious idea about improving the standard of property. Particularly in an area like here where there isn't the same pressures that perhaps there is in South Wales where there isn't the same demand to increase the quality of property that you are letting. So that's just a thought that might be worth considering. Well thank you for those observations. And I think the landlord forum is really part of the consideration that we were talking about earlier in terms of increasing dialogue with the landlord community. I don't know whether Leslie's got anything to say about the integration of managing empty properties and the environmental problems that they often accompany those empty properties. We've had cases recently of increased rat observation. Whether or not there's actually an increase in the population of rats is another question. Do you want to say something about that? Because that mostly comes within your team doesn't it Leslie? Yes it does. I think it's something that will be progressed further as we go along. Because you're right to say that Councillor Cairn, the issues with empty properties does lead on to other environmental health issues where we do get involved and also planning colleagues also get involved in empty properties as well. So there's a number of sections within the council and we do need to, what we do work in a joined up manner, what we need to improve on that as we go forward. Thank you very much. Councillor Fane. Thank you chair. I should perhaps preface my comments by declaring an additional interest in that mainly do I let a small part of my own house. I'm also a director of a small property company that has some involvement in short term nettings. And of course in relation to the comments made earlier on page 28 about the council owned housing companies I should declare I'm a director of char homes and subject to agreement of the board I've been asked to take on a direct ship of Berman Street housing. So perhaps I should reflect that in my comments. I wanted to focus my comments on three of the areas of legislation listed at Appendix 1 on page 36. But it may well be that some of these comments would have wider application. I'm referring there to the Caravan Sites and Control and Development Act to the management of houses in multiple occupation and to the energy efficiency regulations in the Energy Act 2011 and the regulations of 2015. And I'm sort of following on from the comment that sounds as though it was made by Councillor Tuvie Hawkins at Cabinet about the need for a dialogue with landlords which I very much support. There are areas and I think the energy efficiency regulations might be one of these where enforcement is only a small part of wider action which we as a council need to be taking in order to secure wider objectives in this case and increase in energy efficiency, a reduction in improvement in affordable housing and so on. Where the enforcement action itself will not be limited just to the private rented sector although there's evidence from other districts that this may be a particular problem in the private rented sector I've seen evidence in relation to this district about that. So where it may be part of a wider relationship. And I think in that respect where we're trying to encourage a dialogue and to also perhaps draw attention to incentives and urgings to improve standards generally that it may be unhelpful on page 12 to refer to rogue landlords. Now I accept that may be an accurate description and indeed it was used by the minister in relation to the paragraph quoted on page 11 but it is nonetheless seen as pejorative and I think therefore unhelpful perhaps landlords out of compliance or words to that effect might be worth mentioning. I mentioned also the management of housing in multiple occupation. I suspect and again the minister recognised this in that paragraph on page 11 there may be a lot more work to do in this because it's becoming an increasingly common and popular form of tenure. And one of the differences here is that it may well be that problems caused by the tenants largely cause problems to other tenants rather than to others outside the house and that is a problem of enforcement both for the landlord in that case and also potentially for the council too. In relation to the Caravan Sites and Controller Development Act which is quoted here one of the requirements of course is that park home sites in particular must be registered with the council. In some cases I know of one in particular in my own ward where that declaration that statement of ownership is long out of date the company quoted in the notices and so on has ceased to exist and the telephone numbers ceased to operate. That could be a problem for instance where in relation to the energy efficiency it's perhaps worth noting that the main incentive scheme has recently been wound up and the funds that this council would have derived from that have been as I understand it diverted to improving energy efficiency standards in park home tenants and of course if we don't know who the park home owner is whether that company is active or not that may make it very difficult to approach the tenant in that case. Thank you Jeff what I want to say. Councillor Milnes did you wish to comment on any of that? Chair I'm not sure I spotted a question in amongst Councillor Ffain's very useful observations. I think if he's happy we'll just take those observations in hand with us and clearly this is the first stage of a policy development cycle that we will return to and I think we will clearly take some of those comments into account. Thank you very much. Councillor Ffain. Thank you Chair perhaps I could just rephrase my comments in relation to rogue landlords as a question as to whether the Councillor Milne might consider a slight rewording in that respect. Well I think if I've understood this properly the reference to the rogue landlord enforcement guidance for local authorities is the reference to a government document and so we can't change the reference because it is an existing title of a document. So it's not a description that we've used. It's a reference to an existing document. Chair I was referring to the reference on page 12. At the bottom of page 12? Page 12 I was referring to. Yes at the bottom of page 12 it references the documents, the rogue landlord enforcement guidance for local authorities. Councillor Jeff Hunt. Wondred have we sort of checked in drafting this that I mean when I read this I have a sort of picture of you know typically somebody who has bought a property in order to perhaps create a retirement income but this could equally be a limited company couldn't it and in fact you might choose as an individual to set it up as a limited company for sort of some kind of tax reason. And then that kind of raises the question well quite a lot of questions actually for example when on page 62 in the fourth paragraph we're talking about increasing the penalty based on the landlord's average income. Well does that mean specifically the landlord's average income from the rental business he's pursuing or does it mean because he might have other sources of income so that would need to be specified and then of course it would if I can answer that straight away that would be the legal entity who's the landlord. So if it's a private limited company who's the landlord it would be the income coming to that limited company. If it was a private individual it would be that private individual. Thank you so is that income specifically from renting a property or is it any income? I think I'll let Leslie reference that question because I'm not quite sure. I would have to double check myself as well but when we are looking at it's to do with what the landlord can afford to pay as well. So all income can be taken into account but I will just make sure that's very clear on the document as to which income we can and can't take into account. Because I was sort of wondering whether this is creating a mechanism whereby the landlord could effectively plead sort of hardship in meeting these penalties or whether it's intended to be a sort of multiplier if you like to take into account the scale of the business. And I guess I also wondered about culpability and prosecution. It must be slightly different if the entity is a company compared with if it's an individual. I would have thought because I mean are the directors separately responsible or is one of them responsible? I would have thought it could be quite complicated and might need some clarification. And also I wondered about the fairness because when you talk about the severity of an offence is that in a sort of qualitative way or could that include a constitutive measure? In other words I'm thinking if you were say a landlord probably in this case a limited company and you had say 100 properties and you had failed to maintain a smoke alarm in all of them. Does that mean you're going to be penalised the same as a single property owner? Or will the penalty be multiplied by 100 to take account? So I think you've hit the essence of the escalation process for the fines which is in that second part of the documents before you. And when I was reading through it it was clear that it was about creating so in effect penalty notice and environment rather than a prosecution. A system by which you could evaluate the performance and previous performance of a landlord. And whether they were a repeat offender or whether they had multiple offences as you just described for example not having a carbon monoxide detector in every property that they owned. And it would clearly be a repeat offence and this mechanism that we've got here is designed to be able to fix a penalty at an appropriate level for an overall performance of a landlord. So if for example the other thing is repeatability of offences or breaches of these standards so that if somebody keeps coming back then we can make an appropriate escalation of fines without having to go through a prosecution method. And clearly it's designed to inhibit a landlord from making such repeat offences. It's a published document. If a landlord looked at it and saw the nature of the escalation, hopefully that itself will become an inhibitor to them continuing breaching these protocols. Thank you both very much. Councillor Milnes was talking in response to the first question. I think in all probability in all fairness I have to say no. Okay, that's fine. Councillor Hawkins, remotely. Good evening chair and thank you very much for allowing me to speak. Good evening everyone. As Councillor Milnes has referred to, I did participate in the cabinet discussion on this and I'm glad to hear that some of the comments I made will be taken on board, which is a good thing. And I must say that yes, I am a landlord and I deal with potentially five local authorities in the UK. So I have had some experience of housing standards and etc etc. One thing I will say is this and I know I say this each time this comes up is I'm not used to seeing issues on housing on the environmental health, even if it's to do with enforcement. But where we are. I take the point that Council of Fame was making about the terminology of rogue landlord. And if I might point out to you, Councillor Milnes, page 12, first bullet point and the third bullet point both have rogue landlords in it. It wasn't just the document itself. That's by the ban. Those who know me know that I do not actually subscribe to the term rogue landlords. It is to private landlords. It doesn't come across well at all. And I think you will appreciate that. Councillor Bradnan asked the question about protection from bad tenants. There is a way to do that. And I think that is part of the communications issue that have referred to in the past, because there are tenants who work the system know how to work the system, which means local authorities need to work with landlords to make sure that the landlords do have some protection. I know a number of times I say, well, the landlords have recourse to the courts, et cetera, et cetera. But then when they do go to court and it results in homelessness, they are blamed for causing homelessness. So really, it's down to us as a local authority to try and work with both landlords and tenants to ensure that people can stay in their homes, that the homes are kept to a good standard. But that is, you know, my view of what we need to be doing. And the paper is a good one. So thank you for the work that's gone into it. I just think, you know, there's a lot of stick and it needs to be balanced with carrots. And it goes back again to ensuring that we talk to landlords. I know we have done in the past, actually. There was a landlord forum, but it didn't last very long. I don't know why. But it's easy enough to set up. And there are good examples. And I said Peterborough is a good one to follow. And I'm sure you will have a look at that. I just want to make sure that we are aware that there could be malicious vexatious complaints that potentially is not catered for. In this document. Right. So it's not all one sided. On page 26, you mentioned potentially having standard templates that tenants can use to write to their landlords. However, that particular paragraph is a bit. It's not clear. The tenants will be offered advice on how to write to their landlord detailing their complaint. A standard letters template may be provided. It's not a complete sentence. You might want to reword that. And make it clear that there's what it is you can offer. Noted that. Thank you. I have a question, which is to do with the fact, which to do with the experience of those who will get forcing this, because obviously there's housing standards involved, especially with the HM would license in. There's all kinds of standards. There's space standards. Many standards. By safety standards. Heating standards and all that as well as the the scoring of the housing health and safety rating system. Now that in itself is a specialty. And I just wondered if we have that specialty in house, or if we're going to have to do some training on get somebody in or whatever it is, because this is what determines whether or not a good landlord ends up being branded a bad landlord because the assessment has not been done in a fair way. But that's that's something for you to to have a think about. I don't know if we have that experience or not. And if we're going to get it in. Counselor Hawkins, are we coming to a conclusion? Yes, I am sir. And last but not least is that I would hope that we would have all this information on our website somewhere where everyone can go and have a look at it. So that is that was my last point chairman. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed. Chair, the CEO would like to comment to clarify on the recommendation before we vote. Liz Watts, would you like to come in please? Counselor Chamberlain. Thank you very much. And it's just a clarification. The recommendation is recommended that the policies are approved. Of this scrutiny can't approve these policies. So actually, could we just change the recommendation to say it's recommended that the policies are recommended on to cabinet? Yes indeed. Thank you very much. Thank you. And I think following the discussions that we've had there clearly is some more work to be done. And I note that Counselor Williams is going to work with Counselor Milne's to dot the I's and cross the T's and clarify one or two points. And I think subject to that, I'm inclined to invite cabinet to take note of the report and the report. And we therefore recommend that it should go forward to cabinet. Do we need to say we recommend that the policies are recommended to cabinet subject to amendment? Yes, absolutely. Is anyone against that recommendation? No, we are unanimous. Oh, indeed. So, yes. Counselor Bradman was later arriving and unable to vote. But apart from Counselor Bradman. Various members prefaced their comments by saying they had an interest in the residential property. Perhaps I should have done the same as I'm the director of a company which has a modest interest in residential property. But it doesn't. Anyway. Thank you very much. That will of course be noted. But I take it. I presume that everyone else is in favour that we recommend this to go forward to cabinet subject to the comments that we've made and the additional work to be done. Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you, Counselor Milne's and thank you, Leslie. Yes, thank you for the comments and the consideration of the committee. So, we move on to item seven, which is the quarter four performance report. And I'd like to introduce Counselor Neil Gough to present his report. Counselor Gough. Thank you. Thank you, chair. As you said, this is the quarter four report which covers both the KPIs and the reporting against the business plan objectives. I guess experience has told me the best way of handling this is just to put it to scrutiny to respond to questions. So, I'll happily hand back to you and your committee. Thank you. That's very kind. Thank you. And I see Councillor Vanda Weyer's hand is up. So, welcome to your first question. So, this is really obviously good stuff in the report. And I would though however like to focus on one of the particularly less encouraging things which is around the stats on the call centre, contact centre to the percentage of calls that were answered has declined considerably in the last quarter. And the call answer time has gone up hugely, I mean doubled, more than doubled in between February and March, for example, which is a problem. I think it was saying that obviously contacts through the call centre generally are sort of less and less important as an element of the interactions between the council and our residents. Although I'm sure I've been interested in the volumes of the work that will have gone up during the pandemic. So, that pressure does have to be recognised. I think rather than just sort of asking, I mean the commentary is useful, rather than just sort of focusing on the problem itself. Plus, we're asking about how we can sort of look at this more broadly in the broader context. I mean, obviously there is this effort to get more and more of the interactions done online. So, I'd be interested to know sort of how that's going and what more we can do with that and whether we can really thinking about other ways of enhancing that and encouraging that. And the other mention about some more staff and the new system and are there any things we could think of to just other ways of helping manage that, the volumes of calls and the problems with calls going unanswered or taking a lot of time to be answered, such as call me back options, for example. Other ways of doing that because obviously it's the, I mean hopefully as things ease up a bit, the complex centre will, the calls to the complex centre will become less important and we need to sort of do what we can to encourage that residents to use alternative means as much as possible. Councillor Gawth. Yeah. Okay. So, thank you, Councillor Van Duvar for this question. This is obviously the kind of stand out KPI, which we need to talk about. So, Chair, if you'll excuse me, I am going to take a little time to talk through this and as Councillor Van Duvar sort of think about what some of the issues which we need to work on are. And I will at the end ask Jeff memory to come in and pick up on some of the some of the things. The first point is to make is it is disappointing that residents have to wait so long for getting service on the call centre because some residents, and I put the emphasis on the some residents actually do need to call to address a particular problem or a particular issue. And I asked Kevin Ledger to produce a chart for me, which I will make sure that you see and scrutiny, but I hesitate to share my screen because I know I will fail. But the gist of it is that what I asked him to do was plot calls per day received into the call centre versus waiting time. And what one sees is that is a sort of exponential relationship exactly as you would expect. So, in essence, if the calls are 600 calls per day or less, the call centre codes and the waiting times are minimal or certainly less than less than target. When the calls go above 800 calls a day, call centre can't cope. What happens is that it can't deal with the inbound calls fast enough so the calls stack up and therefore the waiting times increase exponentially. So, this is a problem really of variability of demand and of course the problem is that the people who need to call get stuck in the same queue as the people who don't need to call who could perhaps access services in the other way. So, part of the resolution of this is to make sure we've got enough staff and obviously if we've got staff shortages, that doesn't help. But that isn't the solution to the problem longer term because if we staff up to deal with 1000 calls per day, that's obviously inefficient. Because when there's only 400 calls a day, there's going to be basically a surplus of a quantity. So, this isn't a problem which we are the only organisation to deal with. But it is a problem which we are faced with because we don't and many of the members I think will probably experience this in the pandemic. We don't have the option of what many organisations have done during the pandemic which is to switch off their call centre. So, for those of you who are members of the RAC and if you break down and you're not on a motorway now, you have to report online. There is no call centre for you. So, we don't have that option so we need to do other things. I would just draw members' attention to page 101 which is to flip into the business plan part of the thing. And you will see there part of the work which is being done to address this problem holistically rather than just through the call centre. So, D4 calls actually in 2021 were reduced 16% from the previous year. So, actually the way in which we are doing that is the other objective on D4 above which is to get people using more online transactions and actually carrying out their services without actually having to call. So, those are some of the broader initiatives we are taking. Councillor Bando asked about call back so that when people are in a queue, they don't have to wait, they can ask for a service whereby the calls are returned. We've asked Mr Member to take a look at that and we've also asked him to look at other means like chat services as well. Chair, if you will allow me just to pass over to Mr Member to talk about the new telephony services to what extent that can help us deal with some of those problems. Thank you, Chair. Yes, exactly as Councillor Gough said, we had a real challenge in March in so much as we had very high volumes of calls. We had comfortably over 1,000 on several occasions. I think we've reached a high of 1,400 calls in a single day, which is a great many calls. And not only did we have high volumes, but the nature of the calls were different from previous years. We had a lot of calls from businesses and people seeking support due to COVID. So, the length of time to deal with calls went up quite considerably as well. And this, of course, as these things always do, happened at a time when we'd lost some staff from the contact centre and were in the process of re-recruiting. I'm pleased to tell members that we successfully appointed five new members of staff. They started on the 1st of June and then the process of being trained. And that brings us back up to the correct level and number of staff in the call centre. As Councillor Gough has referred to, though, we're in the process of modernising our call centre as well. The technology that we've been using was fantastic when we took it on 10 years ago, but it's somewhat out of date now. And we've just gone through the process of evaluating the tenders for a new call centre telephony system. And we're likely to enhance the results of that next week. As part of that tender specification, we built in a great deal of the requirements you might expect that allowed us to undertake things such as the call back arrangements that Councillor Gough has mentioned. And we're looking at what the resource requirements are to deliver on that to ensure that that's one of the things that we can put forward for our customers. But also at the same time, we're looking at the fact that there will always, no matter what we do, there will always be times when the call centre is busy. And people lead their lives slightly differently now. We might not have time to wait like they have in the past. So we're looking at what other options we can make available to our residents. One of those are a web chat so that if people don't have the time to wait, they can go on to our website and engage in a web chat with one of our customer services officers. What's been shown is that actually in the time it takes a customer services officer to deal with one complex telephone call, they can deal with three complex web chats. So effectively that increases our capacity to deal with inquiries. There will always be people that need to phone us, not everybody is digitally enabled. But what we're looking to do is to allow those people that live their lives digitally like most people do with every other part of their lives. When it comes to contacting other organisations, whether that be retail organisations or arranging your insurance or paying your water rates, all of that is done now online primarily. So to allow those people that live their lives in that way to be able to contact us in that same way and to extend our capacity to deal with those inquiries outside of normal office hours. One of the things that we have at the moment is we're limited to normal office hours where we can provide customer services officers to give assistance to residents. But we're starting to look at artificial intelligence, which is now being increasingly used for transactional services and local authorities. And one of the benefits of that, it means that when somebody's got a relatively straightforward inquiry, they can phone us at any time, day or night and get a response to their inquiry. Either on the phone or via a web chat. Being open and honest with them that it's a bot that's answering their inquiry and giving them the option to call back if they need to. But in the vast majority of cases that isn't required. A really good example of that is the Airways KLM. Most of the vast majority, 80% of their inquiries on their website and their telephones are actually dealt with by bots now. Because they're relatively straightforward transaction inquiries. So we're looking at a whole range of options that not only reduces the likelihood that we're not going to meet our targets on the call centre, but actually extends the customers service opening times for our residents so that we're available at times that suit them. It's going to take a number of months potentially up to a year to get a lot of these things in place. I think it's quite an exciting development and certainly one that I'm looking forward to championing. I'm happy to field any questions that people might have. Thank you very much, Jeff. Council of Underway would like to come back on it. Thank you very much for both of your explanations. I think you've been quite straight with us by the sound of it and it tells us a lot about what you're doing. No dressing problem. The stats will be in quarterly reports anyway so we'll be discussing it again further. But I do look forward to, I'll just check. So in the next quarter these stats will be here again so you'll be looking over it again. If you're talking about it sort of coming back, taking a little bit longer than that to really see the results then maybe we need to be more focusing on sort of six months time rather than three months time. Not sort of putting my pressure on you to change it completely in three months time. Thank you very much. The next question is from Council of Rippers. Thank you. On page 79 with the 10 that's satisfied with the sponsored repairs data there. I know it's in the red but I just really want to comment that I'm actually pleased to see this because I think it looks like a much more true. An honest picture of the actual situation from point of view of being a local member. Previously it seemed a bit miraculous that there were never any sort of negative responses. Whereas the, I was just going to really say that the way in which the is being sent to change from the survey questions are sent by text messages. So the tenant is not put under pressure on the doorstep to say what a wonderful job that's been done. I'm just really asking if that's going to continue and obviously how long do you think it's going to take before that comes out of the red and goes into the amber and green. I know with the possible change of the contract coming up. So what's your time frame. But it's actually quite pleasing to see. Councilor Goffin. Would you mind chair if I pass that over to Councilor Batchelor. No it's absolutely fine. Councilor Batchelor. Right. Thank you very much. Thank you chair. Evening and evening to members. This is my first appearance before you. So I was being looking forward to that. So thank you very much for the question. Yes. Of course you're entirely right. We have been aware for some time that the satisfaction results are to say the least questionable. The current situation. Don't forget that you can see there's only December and March there. So this is not really very representative because in January and February there was no responsive repairs taking place. Meers were only doing emergency work. So I expect the response to be better next time. I think as you said Councilor Ippeth a six foot plumber standing on your doorstep asking if it had been OK is to say that he's probably a little intimidating. So we are looking at other ways of doing this. And they will be put in place in the next couple of months. Thank you. Thank you very much. Both of you. Thank you. The next speaker is Councillor Cohn. Councillor Cohn. Thanks very much chairman. So I just wanted to follow up on Councillor Aiden Fonda was question which I totally agree with the points that he made in the in the response. Council the got talked about the fact that the council needs to do more to transfer some of those transactions online and it's clear from page 101 that that has happened. In fact 16% more and thus result in less calls. But that for me makes the figures actually even worse because we have demonstrated that we can start to move those people to other means of getting through to the council. But actually the people that are now not doing that might be, you know, actually the more vulnerable proportion of the people ringing into the council and those that haven't got the means to do it in any other way. And you know it just makes, you know, quite bad figures look even worse when actually we're dealing with fewer calls, more people using the online services and still we're making very vulnerable residents wait a very long time for those calls to be answered, you know, if they're not hanging up in the meantime. So I wondered if he would just comment on that and my other point was on page 85 and regarding complaints and the breakdown of those figures and in where where those complaints are not being dealt with adequately. Clearly coming from the greater Cambridge planning service, you know, very, very poor figures there 21.4% 3 out of 14 is really quite shocking figures of complaints that are not being dealt with. And, you know, if someone has the need to complain and then the council is essentially ignoring that based on these figures that that is pretty shocking, I think. Could you could you ask answer whether those figures are across both councils? I assume it's the shared planning service. So those figures are amalgamated from both councils or is it just from South Cams. Thanks very much. Okay, thank you for your question, Councillor Cohn. So in terms of the call centre, you know, the issue is we don't really know what I think it's fair to say which calls are coming from, which are essential calls and which are, you know, calls which should be dealt or could be dealt with in other ways. So it's not possible, given the information we have available to determine that. In terms of the relationship of the number of calls, if you remember, I said that essentially the call centre can deal with on average about 600 calls a day and stay pretty much on target. If you look at the number of calls we've got in 2020-2021, which is 142,000, if you spread that over say 220 working days a year, that's about 650 calls a day on average. So we can deal on an average day reasonably well in the blow of average day obviously very well. So it is about managing this sort of variability and in particular managing the sort of peaks of demand and trying to sort of move that demand onto other channels. Hence, why we asked Mr Mambury to look at pullback services, for example, and web chat, which are more effective ways of dealing with those peaks. In terms of the information on the complaints you're right, you know, planning is the area where those issues are there. You will see in the notes that there's been a particular focus on resolving the backlog of those planning complaints with a expectation that from quarter one onwards, those will be significantly reduced. I think, can I again ask Mr Mambury chair to pick up on that because I know he's looked at the actual complaints processes across the various departments. Chair, please go ahead. Thank you chair. Yes, planning are in the invidious position of being incredibly busy and therefore getting a lot of complaints. So the challenge for them was always working out how to allocate their priority between deciding planning applications and dealing with complaints. I spent some time with them recently looking at how we can revamp the way that they do with complaints and what came to light is that currently what was happening was the complaints were going to planning planners to resolve. Whereas actually a lot of the complaints weren't about technical planning issues. They were asking what was happening with an application or why applications had to be made in a particular way or why something wasn't showing on the website. So we've made some changes so that actually we've already seen that for applications, sorry for complaints that have been made in the first quarter of this year, a far higher percentage of those complaints are being resolved within the time scales and only those that are really on very technical issues are going to our hard pressed planners. So it will take a little bit of time for it to come through the system because there was a backlog of complaints within planning which we've had to clear. But we've halved the backlog of the complaints and planning and as I say for new complaints that come in, a high percentage of those are now being cleared within time. But it'll take us a little bit of time to work our way through all of the backlog. Councillor Richard Williams. Councillor Williams. Thank you very much, Chair. I just want to start by saying I agree with the comments Councillor Riff has made. I think text is a better way of getting feedback on housing and property services. Just on that point about housing and property and the decline in satisfaction, I just wanted to ask a factual question as to whether that would include the roofing repairs that were going on in various parts of the district, certainly in my part of the district, in the early part of the year, and I know there were some problems there. So I wonder if it does include those roofing repairs, whether maybe that had been looked into. It wasn't carried out by me as it was somebody else. But I'd be interested to know whether that's accounted for in that part. And then I had just another point, which is on planning and the performance indicators. Percentage of non-major applications that terminate within eight weeks or agreed timelines. Can we have an indication of the number of applications where there was an extension agreed within those performance indicators? I think we are expecting another audit report at some point for 2021, I believe. But it will be useful if we could be given an indication of how many of those applications that have apparently met the target were actually extensions. Councillor Gough, are you able to clarify that? In terms of the question on the roofing repairs, I don't know whether Councillor Batchelor or Mr Campbell will be able to answer. Peter, my understanding that the figure stone is for the repair contractor. The roofing was a capital work that would have been recorded separately. Councillor Gough, are you going to take the second part? I think the best way to do that is we'll take that away, I think, and see whether we can add any more information to address the issues you raised, Councillor Williams. Generally, one of the things I think which would be quite helpful, and I don't want to over-promise this, but in terms of improving the understanding of some of this data, like, for example, the call centres. I'm just thinking we might actually add the number of calls received, for example, on these charts just to add a little bit more context. Likewise, the number of planning applications received and so forth might add some actual sort of clarity to some of this data and make it easier for the scrutiny and cabinet to build a picture of what's actually going on. I think that's a very good suggestion. I think it would be very helpful. Thank you. Do we have any other questions? We have two final speakers. Councillor Cahn, Councillor Gontan. Two couple of things that I wanted to ask about. Firstly, I was going to comment about using bots for responding to questions, and my immediate reaction was don't let me ever book on KLM. My reaction when I've achieved a bot is extremely negative, so you may meet the requirements in terms of time, but actually produce a bad response. I think you must bear that in mind that many people really don't like bots. Secondly, the comment that I was going to ask about is the pension fund forms, which have now been started again. I was very glad to have my pension form signed about shortly afterwards. There must have been a large backlog of people who in fact may not have been receiving pensions, the EU pensions because of it. I just wondered how that had proceeded. If you could report back on that, it's not separately recorded, but I thought it would be interesting to know. Yeah, I hear Councillor Cahn's comments about bots. All I can say is that sometimes a good bot is better than a poor call centre service operator. I happen to lose a credit card and reported that credit card. I think I was dealing with a bot. In fact, I know I was dealing with a bot, but actually the service was really good. I think it again all comes back to the quality of what services provided. If the quality is there, it provides a consistency of service, which is what we're aspiring to, and it can be as good as a call centre operator if it is correctly set up and correctly managed. In terms of the pension forms, I know a couple of, you know, I've had an experience of that where people have to go in and get those signed. I don't know whether Chief Executive, we have had that service, haven't we sort of put in place even during Covid times, but Mr Member, maybe where we stand on that. Yes, I'm happy to tell members that we opened to the public again today for pension verification. So that's been going on at South Council today. I just wondered what procedures have been put in place to remind people who have been doing it past. In fact, it started, I think early June, because you could book it online then. And the procedures being put in place to remind people who have the forms who may not know that they now can have them signed to draw their awareness, the fact that now the services are operating again. Yes, Councillor, well people have contacted us to request that when that service wasn't available. We took their contact details and we've been contacting them and letting them know that it's now available. In fact, you know, we were pretty much fully booked today and we are for the next sort of week or so catching up with those people that have been waiting to have their pension verified. That's very helpful. Thank you very much. Councillor Daunton. My question is about the B&B costs, page 79. I'm assuming that we're working very closely with the city and do these figures reflect our close working with the city? Councillor Gough, did you wish to respond to that? Chair, if you wouldn't mind I'll ask Councillor Batchelor again to take that one. By all means, Councillor Batchelor. Right, thanks very much. These figures, I mean we do work closely with the city all the time, but these particular costs are South Cams costs. I have some figures here that may actually give some confidence to members that this isn't an area that's out of control. At the end of the year, there was £259,000 expenditure, but a lot of this was down to the COVID situation and we have actually received from government substantial grant funding for that element. And we have also had to increase our services for rough sleepers. And again, there's been a grant for that. Most of the clients in this area are entitled to benefits, which also comes to us. The upshot of all that is that funding coming into us amounted to £231,000. So the actual cost for the year for the bed and breakfast actually to South Cams District Council was £27,821. So I think that's pretty well in target. Hope that helps. Thank you very much. I have no more speakers, no more questions on this point. We are asked to review the KPI results and comment upon them, which we have done. And to recommend where appropriate any actions required to address issued identified for consideration by Cabinet. I think the suggestions have come from Councillor Gough and from Geoff member. So with those in mind, are members willing to approve and take note of the KPI report, the fourth quarter report. Thank you all very much indeed. So now we move on to the work program, which is set out on pages 103 to 112 of your agenda pack. I'd ask you really to take note of this. But what I can say is that we will be having a meeting in July. It will be on the 20th of July, not the 27th as noted in your paper. And the main item for consideration will be the recovery plan, which will cover the proposed recovery right across the council. So I anticipate it will be a very comprehensive paper and we may have a lengthy meeting as a result. In terms of the other items on the work program, the vice-chair and I will be talking to the Cabinet, talking to the leader in a triangulation meeting. And we will be planning some additional items, I'm sure to come forward as well. Other than that, I think unless there are any questions on the work program, I'm happy to confirm that the next two scheduled meetings will be on Tuesday the 20th of July and Tuesday the 14th of September. Both will commence at 5.20pm. And we will... The chair, Councillor Williams. Sorry. Councillor Williams. It was just a quick one. I've already mentioned it. But is there any update on when we are likely to get that second audit of planning that we were promised in the last meeting? I can't answer that at this stage. Councillor Gough, are you able to indicate the timeframe for the second audit of the planning service? I'm afraid I'm not. I don't know whether Chief Executive could... I see shaking heads. I think we may have to come back to you on that point. So at the second meeting will be on Tuesday the 14th of September. Both of them commencing at 5.20pm with a pre-meat the previous day commencing at four o'clock. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that that concludes our meeting for this evening. Can I thank you all for your attendance? It's been marvellous to see so many of you in person. Although the fact that I feel behind a little imprisoned behind this screen. Can I thank all our colleagues who have contributed remotely? Aaron, thank you very much for organising the IT, which has worked incredibly well. And I wish you all, and I mean it this time, have a very safe journey home. Thank you and good night.