Gwbod, yn ôl i'n gweithio mewn amser a'r offodusau a'r amser a'r gwaith o'r cymdeithas a sydd yn gweithio'r cyfrannu i rydyn ni. Fy fawr i'n gweithio'n gweithio'r staff Llyfrin Cymru, ac rwy'n meddwl â'r Comitiynau mynd i'w cymaint. As we are on the 11th day of the 11th month, I would like to start this meeting with a minute silence in view of those who lost their lives in conflicts, and so therefore I ask you if you're able to please stand with me for a minute while we remember. Thank you all very much. Members, can I remind you that everything on your desk in this room may be broadcast at some point. The camera will follow the microphone being switched on, so both counsellors and officers are requested to wait a couple of seconds before speaking just to allow the camera to catch up. If the fire alarm should sound, then please leave the chamber by the door near the top table and make your way down the stairs. Do not use the lift. The safe assembly point is next to the marketing suite, halfway along the business path. May I remind those who are joining the meeting via the live stream, please indicate your wish to speak via the chat column. Please do not use the chat column for any other purpose. Make sure your device is fully charged and you switch your microphone off unless you are invited to do otherwise. Please ensure that you've switched off or silenced any other devices you may have so that they do not interrupt proceedings. Please use a headset if available and hold the microphone close to your mouth. When you are invited to address the meeting please make sure your microphone is switched on and when you finish addressing the meeting please turn off your microphone immediately. Please speak slowly and clearly and do not talk over or interrupt anyone. Please note that if we do need to vote on any item we shall do so via the microphones but only those present in the chamber may vote or propose or second recommendations. Committee members present in the chamber, I will now invite each of you to introduce yourselves. Members, after I call your name please turn on your camera and microphone, wait two seconds and say your name so that your presence may be noted. As I said earlier my name is Councillor Gwynfield Chamberlain and I am the Member for Hardwick. My Vice-Chair is Councillor Judith Griffith. I run through the name qualifying may. Firstly, Councillor Anna Bradman. Good afternoon. Councillor Anna Bradman, Member for Milton and Water Beach. Thank you very much. Councillor Dr Martin Cahn. Councillor Martin Cahn, Member for Hystin and Bington and Orchard Park. Thank you very much. Councillor Nigel Cathcart. Well done. Councillor Cathcart has just walked through the door. Councillor Graham Cohn, whom I think is not with us at this time. Councillor Dr Clare Daunton. Yes. Good evening, Chairman. I'm Clare Daunton and I'm one of the members for the Fendit and Full Board Award. Thank you. Councillor Peter Fein. Peter Fein, Shopford Ward. Thank you. Councillor Sally Ann Hart. Good evening, Chair. Sally Ann Hart, one of the councillors of the Melbourne Ward. Councillor Jeff Harvey. Good afternoon. Thank you, Chair. Jeff Harvey. I'm the Member for Portion Ward. Councillor Steve Hunt. Good afternoon, Chair. My name is Steve Hunt. I'm one of the members for Hystin and Bington and Orchard Park. Thank you. Councillor Aden Van Der Wae. Good evening. I'm Aden Van Der Wae. I represent the Villages of the Eppington Ward. Good evening. Councillor Dr Richard Williams should be with us yet. May I ask are there any other members present, please? I see from the cabinet we have my apologies. Councillor Judith Ripeth. Good evening. I'm Vice-Chair of this committee and I'm one of the members for the Milton and Orchard Park. I'm Aden Van Der Wae and Orchard Beach Ward and I'm Judith Ripeth. Thank you. We have from the cabinet Councillor Jimmy Hawkins and I believe that Councillor John Batchelor is online and from about 5.20 this evening we should be joined by Councillor John Williams. Councillor Batchelor, good evening to you. Yes, good evening. John Batchelor, Councillor Fudton and the Cabinet Member for Houses. Thank you. Have I missed anyone out? Anyone else out, I should say. Thank you very much. Councillor Jimmy Hawkins, would you like to introduce yourself, please? Good evening. Thank you Chairman. To me Hawkins, councillor for Codicot Ward and I'm the lead Cabinet Member for Planning Policy and Delivery. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. I'm happy to confirm that our meeting is quarat and I'm delighted that we're able to be here this evening. It was only yesterday afternoon that we appreciated, I'll come back in one moment, that we realised that this meeting room had been, the work had been finished earlier than expected and that has enabled us to come back into the meeting this evening. So many thanks to Liz and to Aaron for making the arrangements at such short notice. Thank you. Councillor Bradman, my apologies. Thank you. I just wondered if you wanted to invite Councillor Cathcart to introduce himself since he's now seated. Councillor Cathcart, would you care to introduce yourself, please? So full record. Thank you. Yes. Councillor Nigel Cathcart, Member for the Passing Board Ward. Good to see you. Thank you. Members, if anyone leaves the meeting at any time, would you please make that fact known so that it can be recorded in the minutes? Item two on the agenda is Apologies for Absence. Ian, can I ask if we have received any apologies, please? We have just one from Councillor Sarah John Johnson. Thank you very much. I do have a substitute, so just one apology. Thank you very much. Item three is Declarations of Interest. May I ask do any members have interest to declare in relation to any item of business on this agenda? Let me say if an interest subsequently becomes apparent later in the meeting, please raise it at that point. Councillor Bradman. It's just occurred to me it may be appropriate to point out that I'm a member of the Planning Development Group. I don't know if that's appropriate or not. At least it's a declaration. We'll make a note of it. Thank you very much. So item four on the agenda is the minutes of the previous meeting that was held on Thursday the 14th of October. Can we just check them for accuracy, please? Page one, page two, page three, page four and page five. May I take it that we are agreed that they are a true record? Agreed. That they can be approved appropriately. Agreed. Thank you all very much indeed. Item five on the agenda is Public Questions. I can confirm that there are no public questions for us to deal with this evening and therefore we move straight to item six on the agenda, which is the Planning Performance Follow-up Review. I'm not sure whether Stephen Kelly is leading on this or whether Councillor Hawkins, Jonathan Tully. My apologies, Jonathan. Hello. Good evening, Chair. I hope you can hear me. Yes, we can. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone for having me back to the committee. Just by way of introduction, my name is Jonathan. I'm the Head of Internal Audits for the Council. So, I just wanted to introduce the report, so we're going straight into page seven of your agenda packs. The purpose of this is to inform the committee on our latest review of planning performance management. We've previously reported back to you in April 2021 on planning performance, and as part of that review, we agreed to complete a follow-up review to evaluate the implementation of the management actions which had been agreed. So, our report summarises that work, and we're asking the committee to note the contents of our report, which is included at Appendix A. So, the report on Appendix A, I suppose, I'd start off by drawing your attention to page ten, where we cover the scope and objectives. So, our previous report provided limited assurance following a review of planning data from April to June 2020, and that review gave us the opportunity to identify actions to help improve risks and controls. So, our objective simply was to review and see if those revised controls had been implemented, and we wanted to aim to substantiate the implementation of the controls by testing data from the next available quarter, which was April to June 2021. So, next on the report, I would draw your attention to page 12, the summary of findings, and looking firstly at the statistical analysis, our first observation when we were reviewing the data was that there was a significant increase in decisions in the period compared to the previous data set that we reviewed. In terms of data accuracy, it's going well. We did identify a difference, which was just due to interpretation and roundings of calculations. I would clarify, this was an immaterial difference. We show it in the report just for clarity, but nothing to worry about. And we did make one recommendation previously about retaining data exports for business continuity, and we were happy that that was agreed and implemented. The next thing I would like to talk about was the data quality and supporting information. So, we sample tested and reviewed data quality to help evaluate the effectiveness of the controls. I'm pleased to see evidence that the agreed management controls have been implemented, and that will definitely help the performance management process going forwards. We did sample test data for compliance, and there were still cases from the quarter where the new processes had not been adopted, but just for context, two things to consider. The controls were implemented in the middle of the quarter, and some of the applications would have been submitted from previous quarters, so the new controls wouldn't have come into effect for those. But we report that just for full clarity because we were reviewing the immediate quarter, and it was worth doing that because we wanted to quickly see that the controls had been implemented. So, we never expected to see the full compliance in the quarter, but just make sure the controls were there. On page 14, we summarised the management action process. We hope that's an easy way to digest how the team of progress from the previous reports. And we summarised the implementation status of the actions. So, you can see from that one action at a high level has been implemented, which is very positive. Three actions have been implemented during the quarter, but as the data contains applications from before the data controls were set up, we've recorded this as being in progress rather than fully completed. But it's very reasonable to expect improved compliance going forwards. Then we get to page 15, where we have our conclusion, and based on the processes and data that we reviewed in that period, we've provided reasonable assurance that controls are operating effectively. And that is an improvement from our previous report that we brought to you back in April. So, that was all I was going to talk through, but happy for any questions or comments that you have. Discussion by members. Can I just say that we do recognise that this report is produced during what is a challenging period with the pandemic, with staff shortages as a result of difficult recruitment. And also, of course, partway through the period, changing the computer software that's been used. So, with that in mind, the comments from my colleagues will all be that of a critical friend that they're designed to be helpful. And I hope that that is the spirit in which they're taken. Thank you. So, members, Councillor van der Weyl. Thank you very much. This report has been extremely useful, especially in conjunction with the report on the next item, giving us a sort of overview of what's happening in the planning service. I felt the information in it was very helpful. Certainly, my reading of this is that the process of doing this disorder has been helpful for the service as well, and that would be useful to get an idea about that. My sort of question is what happens next with this. This feels like a completed piece of work. Obviously, with an issue like planning performance, it's something that we're never going to take our eye off the ball on. We're always going to be paying attention to it by ourselves and the public. So, I think if we didn't carry this forward, I think I'd be satisfied that we weren't going to allow things to revert or anything. And if there was any sense of any issues coming up, we would quite willingly take them off again and whether we asked for something similar again or not. So, I'm very happy to accept this and move on. Thank you. That's helpful. Councillor Bradman. I'm sorry. Can I watch it? My apologies. Councillor Daunton. Yes, I was really going to make much the same point that Councillor Devire has made. But also to ask what you've done here, is it reasonably common in other local authorities to do this kind of exercise and to repeat the exercise at regular intervals? Thank you. I personally, from experience, I know that a lot of councils don't complete internal audits of planning data that regularly. It is worth looking at periodically. What we are approach to identifying audit work is that we have a sort of risk based plan and we try and identify what are the areas which would benefit most from having an audit because we can't look at everything in a single year. So, as we see controls improve and we get positive assurance, there's going to be less demand, less likelihood that we'd want to complete a review there. Can I just note that Councillor Dr Richard Williams has joined us? Good evening, Richard. Would you just like to introduce yourself for the record, please? Nice to see you. Welcome. Councillor Bradman. Thank you, Chairman. I wanted to thank Mr Tully for a very comprehensive report. It's interesting to hear that it's not necessarily every authority that does it, but thank you very much because I think it gives us great reassurance that you have considered the matters that we need to consider and are giving us a good steer about how to address them and that we're taking good steps towards improving things. So, I'm very grateful for this report and I'm also very encouraged to see that the works that are being proposed and towards template letters so that communications should not be, and that you are still confusing and I think that's a great help. So, thank you very much and I shall pick this up under the next item. So, thank you. Thank you. Councillor Steve Hunt. Thank you, Jack. With regard to the EOTA recommendations about using the Fields and the Uniform System, it's good to see that they are starting to be used, but clearly not comprehensively, as I think it says here on page 13, the Salty did not contain a decision with all three fields completed. I just wondered why the system lets you do that. Can they not be made compulsory or something done such as even peer review, frankly, by somebody else casting eye over it just to make sure those are actually being done as opposed to just an effort being made? OK. I can't say if it can be configured to make those fields mandatory, but what I would say is, again, the records that we looked at, they certainly would have been early stages of them implementing the new processes. So, I mean, we have made reference also on that page that it would be good practice to issue refresh training to help embed it. It needs to become second nature, doesn't it, to fill in these fields? Thank you, chair. Well, just to highlight, yes, we have, obviously, since the sampling was done by Jonathan and his colleagues, we're obviously reinforcing that point. We have done a comprehensive system audit of the IDOC's software solution with our partners in the transformation journey to try and understand how we can get exactly the point that Councillor Hunt raises at proper and full compliance and assurance from the systems and what the IDOC solution can achieve. So it is something that we're actively exploring whether, in a sense, we can prevent progression through to the final decision phase by making the field completion mandatory. Of course, the issue is, is not every application has an extension of time. And so there are some elements to which it would, if you had to give a reason for the extension of time in order to allow the system to progress and 60% of the applications didn't have an extension of time, we might find that we're building in extra problems into the system either way. But it's certainly something that we're, in the planning service, obviously committed to. We want you to feel assured about the performance figures that we're putting forward. And we're working with IDOC's and the transformation team to try and find the most effective way of doing so. Thank you very much. Councillor Peter Fein. Councillor Peter Fein. Thank you, Chair. As you said in prefacing this, it was a particularly difficult period for planning officers. And because of the number of variations, inevitably the period being audited is almost certainly not typical in terms of outcomes. The key outcomes are those in relation to the number of applications determined within the statutory period, whether or not it was an eota in those cases. That's very interesting data on page 12. I just wonder, there is obviously a limit to the number of times, the number of issues that the internal audit team can look at each time. But I wonder whether we need to look at these data again in the future and whether perhaps the IDOC system enables that to be done more easily. To some extent, Stephen Kelly was addressing that point just now. But it would be helpful to know how we keep an eye on this important issue as hopefully more typical times come in. Councillor Richard Williams. Thank you very much, Chair. Just if anybody didn't catch it online, I'm Richard Williams, I'm the member for Whittlesford. I'm sorry I was late. Obviously, I missed the introduction to this item. A number of the points I was going to mention have already been raised. So I won't go over them again. But I did just want to thank Mr Tully for doing this. I wanted to thank the Chief Executive as well for ensuring this report came. Because I think it was after a comment I made in a previous scrutiny meeting that this got picked up. So thank you all for doing that. I've got some comments on the substance of planning performance, which I think I'll keep to the next item. I will just say one point though, and it does come off what Councillor Fain has just said. I mean, I don't think we need to keep going back and doing audits in the past. But I think just from some admittedly unscientific analysis I've done, I think this was an issue before 2020. If you go back and look at applications, EOTs are not recorded and there's no evidence of them. I think that's probably common ground. But I think we don't need really to look back. I think we need to look forward. And I was pleased to see the action points. And I would just like to say I'd be very pleased to see those being implemented as quickly as possible. Thank you. Thank you very much. Stephen, on your building site. Chair, sorry, I didn't have anything further to add. Thank you. Councillor Jimmy Hawkins. Thank you very much, Chair. Just so if I may, through you, add my thanks to Mr Tully for the work that's been done. It was mentioned about doing an audit like this a number of times and do really need to. That's been answered. But I am thankful that this has been done. I think just to put that in context, this is a shared service that was put into place very recently. It was not until 2019 that the processes actually became, or we tried to make them into one. We are currently undergoing a transformation project to enable us to actually streamline what were two processes into one. So it has not been an easy time. And I just want to say thank you to all the officers because I know how hard they have been working.  But we certainly, I'm sure, will be at some point as a great bring to you the performance going forward. Yes, there were issues, but we are now implementing lots of things to improve the service. We will agree that there has been improvement and there will continue to be because our aim is to be the best planning service in the country. That's what we're aiming for and we will get there. Thank you. Thank you very much. Councillor Cathcart. Thank you. Yes, I mean, it seems to me a good report. It's quite comprehensive and just really with the improvement that there always is in any organisation on any issue. And just having spent half my life doing audits, I'm aware that one could often, if you like, concentrate on process and compliance rather than quality. And quality is an incredibly difficult thing to measure. It's probably no part of the audit department's brief anyway to do that. But as I say, in my experience, you can easily lose sight of when quality and planning decisions is, as I say, difficult to measure. Things like customer satisfaction, I suppose, making sure we are compliant with policies and we are actually moving the whole thing forward. So it's actually not easy to measure, but I'm just wondering whether in this whole process of audit quality does actually feature in any way and isn't measurable. Probably isn't. Stephen, did you wish to respond to that? Through you, Chas, I can. I think absolutely and one of the big challenges, I suppose, is that the government's metric, which is decisions within time or with an agreed extension of time, doesn't really touch the user experience at all, and it is a statistical process. And we know full well that we've still got a journey to go on in terms of the user experience, but we're not essentially sitting on our laurels in determination of a government metric and using that to judge the quality of the service. My teams are striving really hard to make the user experience and as well as from a management perspective, a employee experience as rewarding and constructive as possible. And that's actually at the heart of the transformation programme that we're working on with the transformation teams in both councils. And it's at the cornerstone of the brief that we have given to our partners in that process as we go forward. So I absolutely agree with Councillor Cathgard. It isn't a number that defines the quality, it's the experience of the users. And we're trying to think really hard about how we can put a more effective metric than the national performance figures around that. Thank you very much. Nigel, would you mind turning your microphone on please? I think Councillor Jeff Harvey, did you? Yes, thank you, Jeff. We're really just falling on from Stephen Kelly's point and from the point of view of a customer. And I think it's good that we're getting in the direction of more and more of these extension of time reasons given. But I just wondered, because I think sometimes it happens that because the department is under such pressure, it ends up that everything is compressed into the last couple of weeks of the initial time for determination. And then, of course, whilst the client would agree that an extension of time is necessary, we've got to sort of maybe break down how on arrived at that point. So I just think it would be quite useful to kind of try and capture that in some way, but I'm not sure how. Thank you. Welcome, if I may, Councillor Graham Cohn, who has just joined us online. Thank you, Graham. Good evening. Thanks very much, Chairman. I'm not sure that we have any more speakers as everyone finished with this. In which case, may I say, Jonathan, thank you very much for the work that you've done. We have noted your report and you've heard the comments which are all very favourable. We thank you for the work you've done. Stephen, may I ask you to convey our thanks to your colleagues for the work that they have done in getting us to this position? And we look forward to the continuing improvement. Thank you very much. So the next item on the agenda is item 7, which is planning performance overview for the period from 1 September 2019 to 30 September 2021. And my comments in relation to the previous item also apply to this because of course the similar issues were prevalent in this period, the pandemic, challenges in recruiting staff and also the change of system. But I'll now call upon Councillor Chumey Hawkins if she will be so kind as to introduce her paper. Chumey. Thank you very much, Chairman. I think we have said a lot about the background to extensions of time issues which I think is what this is about. It was a request that was made at the last full council meeting by Councillor Heather Williams. And we were asked to present this data to show as stated at the next full council, sorry, at the next meeting of full council, what will be presented to council in relation to planning performance, showing number of applications determined within the statutory period, how many had extensions agreed and how many were waiting determination at the end of each month to cover the last 24 months. That was the request and that is what we've brought to you as agreed at full council. If I may just say that sort of a general preface to this is that across the country and here especially, applications are increasing. And it is not so unusual for us to have a certain number of applications at the beginning of the period. And to find that even though we've met all the criteria and the same things now, we still have more at the end of that specific period. So applications are increasing across the board. But also we have looked at, and I don't know if this is not in your report, but just to let you know that we have looked at the use of extensions of time by other authorities, neighbouring authorities. And just as an example for major applications, we have a figure of 77% usage of extensions of time. East Cams has 93%. Peterborough has 80%. Hunts, 87%. Fenland, 68%. That's for majors. We are not exceptional in the use of extensions of time. And for non-majors, and this is reported, we are averaging 50%. For the non-majors, East Cams is 46%. Fenland is 29%. Peterborough is 46%. Hunts is 58%. And West Suffolk is 42%. So, you know, use of extensions of time is part and parcel of the application process. But I think I've said enough for now. And we will take our questions please as they come. Thank you. Thank you very much. Members, Councillor Bradman. I'm very interested to hear comparison with other authorities. And thank you for providing us with that comparison. Because I think that probably illustrates to us what difficult times all planning authorities are going through, particularly with the pandemic and particularly with the amount of development that a number of counties are and districts are needing to deal with. But one of the things I just wanted to draw out of that, and I'm looking at the data on page 40 about the minor applications and extensions of time. And this is not actually to do with extensions of time. It's actually to do with the amount of time taken maybe accidentally.  Because this can be the individual sale of a house where somebody is hanging on, waiting for information, desperate to sort out some planning or legal nicety, which means that they, in a particular case, in my ward where a resident has had to sell the house that he lives in in order to ensure his sale. But he's not yet able to be sure that he can buy the building that he really wants to buy close by. And he's having to do that on a wing and a promise on the hope that the information that he has provided with the planning office is now adequate on what they needed. And that has been a time of absolute sheer anxiety for him and his new family. And so I just want to be reassured from the planning authority that we are mindful of the impact that delays in time, even on minor applications, can cause to our residents. And this involves officers who are needing to rent another property while you can be sure that you can move into something else. So it's just to be, I think one of the things is I would like to know whether there are any plans for addressing the matter. And I know it's difficult but the matter of communication whilst that delay period is going on, if there's a genuine reason, are there ways in which we plan to keep in touch with those residents who've been waiting for an answer from the planning authority? Maybe for good reason, just to keep them reassured that you're still on their radar and you haven't completely forgotten them because they do appreciate your horribly busy, or we are horribly busy, but they would just like to know where their applications got to. Thank you. Councillor Hawkins, do you wish to respond to that? Yes, as best I can and perhaps Mr Kelly can add to it. We do encourage officers to respond to requests and to communicate. Customer service is one of the things that we keep harping on and I say harping because I do the same. In fact, I still attended one of the team meetings on Monday and one of the things I said was please, please carry, can you please make sure that you respond because as you rightly point out, Councillor Bradman, some of the, what you call the minor, I would say household applications and fine, I think 80% of our work is household applications. We're mindful that they affect people this is on. So yes, and the other thing we try and do is encourage applicants to actually register on the customer portal and monitor the applications from there. I'm not sure that many of them do, but I would like to see us, if that is something that has not been taken up as it should perhaps, we can focus a bit more on encouraging them to do so so that they can actually monitor their applications without actually coming through to planning officers. And of course that's one of the features of the new planning software that we bought because we thought if they can do that then they don't have to keep trying to contact. I know we all like talking to people. It's second nature. And just so you know, we have been told that we are using IDOC's uniform very efficiently, much more than other organisations or councils are. So we're trying our best to make sure that we do communicate and communicate effectively. But I know we have a long way to go, but we are improving. Thank you. I guess Stephen Kelly would like to come in. Stephen. Thank you, chair. Really just to build on Councillor Hawkins' comments, but also Councillor Cathcart's comments in respect of the previous item. We absolutely recognise that one of the biggest challenges that people have had over the last couple of years is understanding and finding out where their applications are. And we've invested in a review of our software to see how that can help. I think there is, as I'm sure the report hopefully makes clear, there isn't complacency in the planning service around the challenges we face. We have got a transformation programme that is working alongside the teams to think really hard about the most effective way of communicating with people because in some respects, if they have to phone us up to find out what's happening, in many respects our systems and processes have already failed and either we haven't made the decision soon enough or indeed they're not able to secure information in a more accessible format either online or by phoning our contact centres. So we are looking in depth at ways in which we can make the software work even harder for us, how we can help their agents and their planning consultants to access more information and how we can work so that in many respects they don't have to phone to chase because we're making decisions sooner and more quickly. But the reality that the report paints out is, as you can see, the focus has been trying to deal with a very substantial volume of applications, some eight and a half, nearly 9,000 applications we've had in the last two years. Of course, that's South Cambridgeshire on top of that. There's another six and a half thousand that we've been dealing with for the City Council and I would be the first to hold my hand up and I know my officers have been really challenged about this. The quantum of applications that we have been trying to process through, not always with the easiest of circumstances, but I'm not going to make that an excuse for the communications on itself. But the focus of the service has been trying to continue to provide the service because we do recognise that local residents and indeed local businesses need to make important decisions in a timely way. So we're not at all complacent and the focus is, as I said earlier, about the user experience, the planning service, rather than tick boxes in terms of planning application performance because we want to make it meaningful and me and my officers know we need people to feel better and more confident about it. Right, Stephen. Councillor Peter Fane. Thank you, Chair. My question relates to paragraph 18. We all understand why it's been necessary to introduce the no amendments approach to try and reduce the amount of time that was being spent on numerous amendments in some cases. And as it says here, it's too early to assess the impact this is likely to have including of course on the number of extensions of time. I just wonder whether this might also make the system less flexible, that amendments that might easily have been agreed between case officers and applicants that would have made a case capable of approval. Because those can no longer be amended, the applicants may be tempted to withdraw them and resubmit in a slightly different form which could actually increase the overall workload. And I just wonder to what extent that is a factor and whether it will be possible to monitor that. What about, Councillor Hawkins? Thank you, Chairman. I think I will leave Mr Kelly to answer this one because there's a lot to it. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Councillor Fane's absolutely right. There is potentially a risk. One of the issues that I suppose we're balancing and one of the issues that the report highlights and from the analysis that we've done is in paragraph, it's not numbered, but it would be paragraph 20. We highlight the fact that we're currently carrying 1,278 planning applications or we were at the end of September. And a number of those applications, in fact are applications that have amendments or the applicant is seeking to amend it or they require modification. And one of the dilemmas that in many respects the service faces is that when you translate that into what might be a sustainable case load for officers, some of our officers' case loads are probably double what might be seen as a sustainable case load because they have a lot of paused work where we are seeking amendments and either waiting for further information and so on. And the effect of that is a bit like trying to drag a chain down the road. For those of you that have got very big intray or have got a lot of files in your intray, it's incredibly challenging for officers to manage about 150 or so cases where some of the half of which may well be awaiting amendments and so on. So it is a pilot, effectively. We are trying to explore whether or not by introducing greater discipline to the process, applicants are firstly encouraged to get the application right first time because if you have an unlimited amendment policy, there's absolutely no incentive for either the applicant or indeed their architect or designer to get it right first time. And equally to try and recognise that those people that take the effort to do so are able to take advantage of a faster process because we are more efficient at throughput. The flip side of that, as Councillor Fane highlights, is the risk that applications get withdrawn or refused and resubmitted. But there is an element to which we need to share the burden of getting applications right rather than, in many respects, own completely the obligation to take an unacceptable application and make it acceptable. And that, our previous approach, essentially made the council, the planning authority, own the responsibility for getting application right by a myriad of amendments. And of course, the third party interest in that space was that a number of communities and individuals have told us that constant amendments of planning applications and re-consultation of the money not only prolongs the agony in some cases for those people who are neighbours or concerned about development happening next to them, but it also makes it increasingly hard for them to understand that sometimes two or three re-consultations, what it is they're being asked to comment along. So we're keeping it under review. We are trying to make the process clear and be perfectly straightforward to the architects and advisors that help the vast majority of applicants make an application and trying to convey to them the importance of them helping their clients to get the application right first time. Because we believe in the long term that's got to be of benefit both to our citizens, our residents who are paying these agents, but also to the process to the neighbours and indeed to productivity and efficiency in terms of the service. Thank you. Councillor Richard Williams. Thank you very much, Chair. Briefly, if I may, just pick up on that last point. I'm pleased to hear that this is being reviewed and there is a pilot on that no amendments policy because I have been contacted on occasion by some people or on the other side of the planning divide to the people I normally hear from expressing some frustration that they've had to resubmit applications where they were, to their mind, were very minor things that they could have dealt with with an amendment that they weren't allowed to. So anyway, I'm pleased to hear that that's a pilot and it's under review when you'll be looking over that policy and how it operates. On the broader point, this does pick up on what Councillor Branham said. I wouldn't doubt for a second, of course, that the staff in the planning department are working extremely hard and I know they are under a lot of pressure but I do have to say from my side as a ward member and I think from the side of my parish councils, things aren't working as well as they could be. I think parish councils feel that they see the same application week after week after week on the weekly updates. One of my parish councils recently said that they thought that when the weekly update came in they were really pleased, they thought it would be a great source of information. Now they find it rather depressing because they're just getting the same application again and again and again and new ones get added and very few seem to get taken off the bottom so the list gets longer and longer and I must say as a ward member I notice that the number of applications in hand is going up and up and up every week. It's not really coming down so something isn't working right. I understand the difficulties and I say I don't doubt for a second that the staff are not working very hard but I do think something is not working and it will be very good to hear a plan of action as to what the service is planning to do to start to clear these backlogs because I think residents suffering particularly in the minor applications of parish councils are noticing and I think they would like a positive statement about what we're doing about it and if I can just make one final point chair. I was very interested in the data that Councillor Hawking supplied on EOTs and other authorities would be great if I could email to the committee because I don't think it's in the report. Thank you. Thank you. Stephen, did you wish to come back on that? Yes, thank you. Councillor Hawking, my apologies. Thank you very much. I'm sure I will ask Stephen to come on and answer some of it. Yes, I'll take the last one first. No problem, we can forward that to the committee. Just to say, my ward villages are not seeing what yours are seeing. But I take the point. Some of these applications have been in the system well potentially because I think we started these new amendments on the 1st of July. So it's just kind of come in. So anything that's submitted before that will still potentially have the, yes, you can make changes, but anything submitted after that is not. And I'm sure Mr Kelly can correct me if I'm wrong. But the thing is what we've, the reason this has come in obviously, in addition is I know for a fact that, and I've been told this by a couple of people or more, that when they've had applications going, you know, they, oh, don't worry, we'll just throw it in, they'll tell us what we need, if we need any more. Right? Putting the honours on our planners to do their work for them and we're not getting paid for it. So there is a, you know, there is a practical reason. Oh, that's an additional practical reason. And the agents know because they were warned, they were written to. We've had agents forum meetings and if anyone of them is listening, we reiterate that again, that it is working together to make the system work for all of us. But yes, as we've heard, the process is under review, but I think at the end of the day, you know, if we can get applicants A to, you know, perhaps go through our pre-app and I know we have issues with those, but that's the whole reason why we went through a revision. And yes, that's not working as well as we would like it to at the moment, but again, that's down to resource. But what one of the things we're doing, which has come up through the Transformation Project, is actually providing additional guidance on our website on how to make planning applications. There's already a couple of videos on the Greater Cambridge Planning website that actually walks applicants through and says, you know, this is what you need and that's what you need. So we're going to be doing a lot more of that, improving the information we provide to applicants so they can get it right, so we can then process the application for them in the time that, or in the statutory period of time. I've said enough that I can say I'll ask Mr Kelly to fill in the blanks I've left. Stephen, over to you. Thank you, and picking up on Council Williams' point, we recognise that there is, in many respects, there is still a variation in the kind of monthly outputs from the planning service, but if I refer members to paragraph 13, one of the encouraging signs is from really a low point in the middle of the lockdown pandemic where we're looking at really only being able to make about 160, 180 decisions a month, September 2021. So the last month that we saw 406 decisions going out to the door, and so we are starting to make some constructive progress. The key point around the variants and the graphs in many respects illustrated is one of the key objectives of the transformation programme is to dig down into the reasons behind the variants. We know some of them and certainly they relate to levels of staffing and indeed staff availability, as well as practical issues, for example we didn't have any planning committees in May and indeed we couldn't put site notices up if members will recall at the beginning of the pandemic for health reasons. But we do feel that we're starting to at least get a much richer understanding about the reasons for those variances. By way of reassurance to Council Williams, the transformation team and our partners are taking a totally holistic end-to-end view about those barriers to both consistent but timely decision-making as well as improved communications. The biggest issue we've got and indeed it's reflected in some respects in Council Williams' original question that has prompted this report is that we are carrying a fairly substantial load of live planning applications and what that does is create an element of failure demand in people who quite rightly are expecting to find out where their decision is, needing to contact the authority to chase up decisions or indeed contact members to chase up on their behalf those decisions. So there is a programme that we're working with the transformation team now on to remove those long-standing applications that are essentially impeding the ability of frontline planning officers to deal promptly with the work in front of them and to take an approach of essentially lifting some of that. It's not dead weight because it's live applications but lifting some of that work out to make both case officers caseload a little bit more manageable which will improve contact with and their ability to communicate with our customers but also to have a concerted and clear programme in place to try and tackle it. The data that we've got suggests that in fact that backlog or the number of cases on hand has stayed fairly steady through the last 24 month period and what that points to is notwithstanding that in fact officers have had to work incredibly hard to keep that steady state it does suggest that it's not a simple matter of resource in terms of overall staffing although we are looking at that in fact we're part of a national project with the planning advisory service which is benchmarking authorities across the country to make sure that we can understand how we fit in not only in relation to perhaps local councils but actually more widely across the country through a national programme. So the main issue that we're looking to tackle is how can we improve case officers workloads by perhaps separating out some of those older and long standing applications and freeing them up to concentrate on the cases that they have coming through the door right now whilst at the same time clearing away effectively and efficiently those perhaps long standing cases where they're getting a lot of calls and you as members I'm sure are getting a lot of comment. Thank you very much. Councillor Claire Daunton. Thank you. I'd like us to talk a little bit about staffing. In paragraph 17 on page 29 of our agendas the report refers to difficulties in recruitment. So I've got two questions. One, are the difficulties greater now than they were say for example last year? Do we know why, are there any particular reasons why it's difficult for us to recruit here in South Cambridge or in Greater Cambridge than it is in other parts of the country? Are we suffering more of a problem than say other rural areas or even other metropolitan areas? Councillor Hawkins. Thank you Chairman. Superficially, seriously, it's expensive to live here. We all know that. But generally there is a shortage of planners. It's a nationwide problem. It's not just us. Even the private companies here are finding the same. So we're all trying to fish in the same limited pool. As to specific issues perhaps I'll ask Mr Kelly to answer that part of the question. What would definitely need some more investment nationally in planners? Thank you. Thank you. I think there's two broad issues and it's interesting. I'm in Southwch at this moment in time where the developer that I was talking about earlier on was saying that they've spent very large sums of money with the local authority and they can't get any planners in response to it. And so what we're looking at is a national problem particularly for experienced staff. Now it's fair to say that one of the effects of lockdown last year was that a lot of people and it wasn't just in planning across all sectors. I think took a view about staying put. And we had very, very low staff turnover in the previous 12 months. But with the advent of greater mobility and increased confidence, particularly in the kind of development market, we've noticed a number of people, a number of our staff starting to move on or looking at exploring new opportunities. That's not just a reflection of the scarcity. There are elements to working in Greater Cambridge that are challenging. We have a highly scrutinised planning environment in this area and that does carry with it pressures on our staff in terms of their experience of working for us. But more particularly, it also means that we need to double down on our efforts, not only in terms of recruitment, but in retention. And so for the next financial year, we are looking to invest further in creating and taking advantage of the Royal Town Planning Institute apprenticeships so that we can bring pathways for people to join the planning service and hopefully support them so that they stay with us. But also importantly, to try and put in place measures that allow us to retain our staff for longer or indeed to retain them as part of a kind of managed process of progression, recognising that people will, at all times, with the market as lively as this, seek to both join us to gain the fantastic experience that you can get with the kind of work and projects we've got. But also become incredibly valuable and incredibly attractive to all of our competitors, not just planning authorities, but also the planning consultancies. The projects in Greater Cambridge are some of the best in the country and our team who work on them are highly prized hires for both public and private sector companies. So we know that we've we've still got to work harder on that. It is not just an issue of pay, although that's clearly a factor that the public sector struggles with. But it's about trying to create the very best experience and help our planners to really enjoy being here, which some days can be quite hard and we've talked about workloads and so on. So there's a, so our response to this national challenge needs to be comprehensive, but it needs to focus not only on recruitment and talent development, but also retention. And we're looking to do that in our proposals for the next year. Thank you very much indeed. Very comprehensive response. Councillor Nigel Caffcott. Yeah, I think what I was going to say has been dealt with. I mean certainly a lot of the applications are actually not up all to normal. It's down to the applicants, often as agent, and slotting it up between themselves and often they get stuck because the applicant or his agent don't actually provide the information. And that's not to say the applicant will be invented as they just don't produce the information in a timely way. So it's actually to some extent not me from a public authority at all. I just mentioned that Stephen mentioned quite right, that the backlog of cases. A lot of the application is almost there. It's 95% of the way there. Just one additional little bit of the jigsaw is needed to actually determine it. And the other point I was going to make, I think, was we want to be careful. We don't replace the historical backlog of the backlog that's developing because of the extension of time. So it could easily be in a position of three years' time of a new backlog, which is exactly the same as what we've got at the moment. I mean, that is, to some extent, possibly demonstrate the figures because I know that the average of the EOTs has increased from 39% of a minor application in September 2019 almost doubled as 76% in recent months. So we could actually be in a position of all these EOTs bunching up, in fact, at a further stage in the process. And I think the other thing I was going to make with COVID, we could well be in a position of growth starting to resume the gain of getting more applications in the next year or two, and perhaps with experience, even though it's held up very well. So I'm just wondering who we are building into our planning strategy, if you like, and anticipate an increase in the number of planning applications in the next couple of years. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Hawkins. Thank you, Chair. We recognise, and I think Mr Kelly has spoken about this, the fact that we are at this point trying to deal with what was a historic backlog, and one of that is to bring an additional resource to enable us to clear that so that our officers can focus on the new cases that come in and put those through. We did have, if you might recall, a backlog in the validation process, and of course it's like anything else. You've got this huge amount of traffic sitting there waiting, and then you release it and it goes on to the next stage, which is what has happened. But now we're going to try and get that off so that officers have something that they can deal with. So hopefully that kind of helps answer that of the question. Can you remember what the second one was? The second point that you made? Yeah. Once we've, when we've been able to get rid of this historic one, we can work in a more level way, so to speak. It's not surprising we've had an increase in extensions of time for the miners, particularly because we've had that backlog, which has then pushed on to the case officers to deal with. But I'm expecting that, yes, as COVID recedes, there will be more applications we are expecting more. There will be more. There it is more than what we had before. So this is a growing area. It's a dynamic area. It's an area that's going to be seeing a lot more growth. So I guess hopefully with the transformation project coming to helping us to streamline things, we should be able to then determine the level of resource that we need and obviously then bring that in. But with a streamline process, I would imagine that we should be able to deal with some of these issues going forward. Mr Kelly, would you like to add some more to that? Steve. Thank you, Chair. Yes, it won't surprise. I mean, I'm not about to rush down to William Hill and put some money on the fact that application numbers are going to increase. What we did notice in the latter part of last year was a bit of a bounce really in respect of we had quite a large increase in the number of applications. It's less predictable at this moment in time. So looking towards this autumn, perhaps some of the trends that we've seen over the last five or six years in terms of patterns of applications per month are not tracking exactly this this year, as perhaps they were based upon historical patterns. We've done quite a lot of work. Stephen Windsor, I have to pay credit to him, has done a huge amount of work trying to look at can we have an algorithm that will try and predict what we think is going to happen based upon past performance. The difficulty is, is that COVID is not really an entirely known entity in terms of the effect it's having on the development market. There are a whole series of externalised impacts, even down to things like the availability of materials and indeed costs of construction, which are putting off as much as there is a stimulus in terms of the market for applications are putting off people implementing those permissions, therefore doing things like discharging conditions. In fact, the largest almost category of applications that we have is around the discharge of conditions. So we have developed quite a sophisticated model that tries to predict what we think should be happening each month. And then what we will have to do, the reality is, is what we'll have to do is to track those assumptions against realities as we go through the winter and start to head out into 2022. But we are in so far as we can doing that in order that we can try and match the resource that we need to the patterns as they emerge and I'd be the first to recognise that requires a lot of work to get to the point where we can do that. We have spent a lot of effort over the last three and four months especially trying to build something that allows us to do that more effectively, precisely so that we can safeguard our staff from peaks of work, but also so that we can predict the resource requirements going forward and indeed the income and costs that we might need to balance in order to achieve a proper response. Thank you. Councillor Judith Rippert. This is more of a comment rather than a question. I hope that's okay. I find the list that we get on a weekly basis really useful just as a tracker for me, just so I've got the applications in hand in mind. Obviously I'm very aware that as a local member I can always talk to somebody and discuss and try and apply a bit of friendly pressure if need be. I just want to comment that one person actually got back to me to say how quickly she'd had a response on her householder application and to tell her how to improve it and it wasn't good enough, it wouldn't get approved. I just want to pass on that phrase because there are examples where people have said it was really good. I got within a few weeks the information I needed so I could go back to the architect etc and rejig the application and put it back in. I know that she should have probably gone for a pre-app first but at least that was, I felt really positive comments so they do exist. I do also want you to know as a planning service that I think that's a really positive step in the right direction. Thank you. Thank you Judith. Councillor Hawkins. Just to say very quick thank you for that. We do like to hear such comments and I would encourage them to send that comment so we can do something positive with it. Thank you. Thanks. Councillor Martin. It's really a question on the impact of the fact that we have parish councils to deal with when dealing with planning applications. A great planning service has the ability to compare applications within the city where there aren't parish councils for the areas outside. I would be interested to know, recently we have taken an interest in improving the relationship with parish councils and had in particular to deal with more applications where the parish is objected in our planning service. Has this had an impact? What sort of impact? Is it easier within the city outside because of that extra level of consultation? Do we have more delays because of that, because of the greater level of intent? The more intense interest in the applications coming from a structure which is there to comment on the applications which obviously creates a great political interest in it perhaps you should say. I just wonder your comments on that whether that has had an effect and whether it does have an effect. Councillor Hawkins, would you like to keep that one off? I'll leave that to you, Mr Kelly. Thank you, Chair. What I would say is I don't think we have at this moment in time empirical evidence to take a fully informed view. I suppose anecdotally it's probably fair to say I spend more of my time managing those relationships with parishes simply because there aren't parishes in the city. So, from a Southcams perspective, it obviously takes an element. It's a layer of local government, an important one, and quite understandably we're looking to try and engage with and support parishes. And they have a number of questions and challenges to our planning process. There is a slightly different process in the city in that although they don't have parish councils, they have residence associations and the protocols in the city provide for a review mechanism called a Development Control Forum, at which any body securing a certain number of signatures can seek a forum meeting in which developments are reviewed. Now, it's fair to say there are fewer forums than parish council meetings and so on, but I'm slightly comparing apples with pairs. As we go forwards and we've got a time recording system in which we're trying to increasingly seek to understand exactly what our officers are spending their time on. I suspect we might be able to refine it to understand the amount of extra time spent doing work related to supporting our parishes. But at this moment in time we don't have that information that would allow me to make an informed view that I would suggest people could rely upon. But it is a very distinct difference and it's something that we will be looking further at as we seek to make the very best use of our time. But also, importantly, through the shared services agreement, each of the authorities seeks to understand what it's spending its money on. Thank you very much. And our final speaker is Councillor Jeff Garvey. Thank you, Chair. I'm going to pay some tribute to our former chair of the council Douglas O'Lacy and his long running campaign to get some standard deviations built into data on what usually it was about time to answer the phone. But I mean, one of the things that occurred to me in relation to this is that, and Stephen Kelly has talked about, the sort of long caseless that a lot of the officers have on their desk. And one can imagine within there, and because of that, there are some real shockers in terms of the time it takes to get back to some of our residents just in terms of the courtesy of replying to an email. And I expect if we had a metric that said, you know, what was the average time to respond to an email, it would perhaps be quite acceptable. But within there, there would be some cases that are really unacceptable. And I worry that those cases do a kind of disproportionate damage to our standing with our residents. And I wondered whether there's some way within the IDOC system to sort of track those and maybe actually take those away from the skilled officers and just give them to somebody whose job it is to explain why the officer is under pressure and haven't forgotten you, et cetera, et cetera. And I remember in my career, I've dealt a lot with patent agents, and it was just so nice that you could absolutely rely on them, never to miss a date to respond to the examiner, et cetera, because they had systems in place to make sure that could never happen. And I just wondered if we could do something there. Councillor Hawkins. I will defer this to Mr Kelly. Thank you. Stephen. Thank you. We are looking actually because I think that's a very important point. Some applications get determined in 40 days, some applications in 300 for a range of reasons, and it has a very profound effect on the average. What we are exploring is whether or not we can perhaps capture the upper and lower quartiles or the extremes through presenting the information slightly differently rather than it just presenting an average, because I think it's far more meaningful to understand the longest and shortest time periods, but actually look at the kind of upper and lower quartiles and the averages that that creates. So, within the, we've got a bit of a project going on at the moment in the shared planning service around what are the best performance metrics. I don't think, as I said earlier on, the government's performance metrics are the best measure of how we're doing. And how can we perhaps start to, as we look at our processes, build those more reflective metrics into the performance management regime and the way that we work with our teams and our staff? We have no more speakers. We are asked to note the contents of the support. Perhaps I could just draw your attention to the fact that we look forward to a greater level promotion perhaps for the customer portal. We'd like to see the no amendment highlighted, and we look forward to receiving the data of other councils in due course. But with that, can I thank you for your contribution, Councillor Hawkins? And Stephen, thank you very much, and I hope you managed to get out of there before they locked the doors. Thank you very much indeed. And I ought to welcome Councillor John Williams, who joined us partway through that item. Thank you for joining John. You're very welcome, and it's extremely timely, as we are now about to move on to the investment strategy, which is set out in your paper as agenda item 8. Perhaps I might therefore ask you to introduce it. Thank you, Chair. As you know, I think I promised at a full council meeting some time ago now that we would be reviewing and updating the investment strategy policy to take account of not only the changes in the public works loan board rules, which if we are to continue to borrow money from the public works loan board, we will need no longer to be able to invest in and borrow money from them for commercial yield, and obviously we wish to continue to borrow money from the public works loan board. So, we are no longer continuing with what we have called stream one, which is the investment in commercial properties purely for you for income. As a result of that, we had a review of stream two and three, and you'll see from the report that we organised and we categorised the investment portfolio into service investments, which are basically our own companies like Herman Street, where we loan money. And then for them to be able to fulfil our wish to see houses that are affordable to live in for everybody across every type of house, and Herman Street fulfills a very important role in providing very high quality open market rented housing. The second stream, commercial investments, we will continue with commercial investments, but they are for basically to generate economic growth and to strengthen the current local economy. And then we have our third stream, which is our partnerships, and that's not really touched by this, but there are some changes. So, it's not just about abiding by the new public works loan board rules. We have taken the opportunity to have a complete review of our investment strategy. Investment strategy accounts for something like a quarter of our income at the moment, so it's very important to us. And I think Peter is going to do a bit of presentation on this, so I'll hand over to Peter Madden. Thank you. Peter, welcome. Hello. It's all right, I was looking up there. So, just a couple of slides just to give a bit of context to some of the figures. So the first one is looking at the investment income levels that we've achieved, if you press the next button. It's basically looking at the investment income levels that we've achieved since 2014-15, which was when Ernest Street came into existence. So you'll see, obviously in the first year, that little blue bar is 30,000, and up until this year, the estimate for this year is about 5.4 million, so you can see how the investment strategy and the income related to it has grown significantly over the intervening periods. And if it's not clear, but yeah, so the blue area relates to Ernest Street, the orange to the commercial reds, and those are primarily the stream-run investments, and there's a little grey bit at the end that relates to the ice rink. So it's, as a picture, it shows how important now they are being constrained from our investments are to the authority. It's very helpful. Thank you. So if we move on to the next slide, this is just showing our former stream-run investments and the amount that they cost. With 270 Science Park, there's an element of 4.2 million in there for refurbishment, so the purchase price is a little over 8 million, and then since purchase we've been refurbishing property. So we've spent a little over 47 million on those properties in the intervening period. And then the next slide is just looking at the yield. So the first slide looks at the gross yield, so this is assuming that all of the rent is paid and all of the areas are occupied. So you'll see it's around about 6 and just over for the four properties there that we're showing. 270 Science Park is deliberately omitted from this slide because obviously we weren't anticipating letting that out at this stage. And then the final slide looks at the yield if we take into account voids and non-payments. So for the bitron building, for example, it's about a third of that property is currently void. So if you take that out, you can see that the yield is somewhat lower. And at com we've had some difficulty recovering rent due because of the pandemic and the current arrangements that we can't serve notice on them. So you'll see that both the yield in those two areas is affected quite significantly at the moment. There's just a bit of additional context. As John said, the most significant element of the change is in relation to the PWLB consultation that came out last year. The government had for some time been unhappy with the level of investment that local authorities had made in property primarily for yield. So they instigated the consultation and the response that came back on the 26th of November last year, so nearly a year ago, was that any council that wish to borrow from the PWLB for any reason, and it's quite possible that we might want to borrow from the PWLB particularly for housing purposes, they're not able to invest in property that is primarily for yield. Even if we don't need to borrow for that purchase, so if we use our own cash, we still cannot do that if we wish to borrow from the PWLB. The difficulty in the intervening period has been getting clarity around quite what this all means, and I think it's probably fair to say back in November last year that clarity was pretty much non-existent. I think we've now got to a stage where we have quite a bit more clarity, though not complete clarity. So the strategy that stands and is proposed now is that we don't invest in stream one for the reasons just outlined. There are one or two other amendments such as the introduction of a response investment policy and one or two other things that they've updated there. There is some checking and some figure work still to be finalised, but we thought it was worth bringing this to this committee at an early stage to get comments and views of the committee on the strategy in the general direction of it, so we'll pass it over to members. That's very much in doing. Just before we do, can I just make one minor comment? There is a little inconsistency in the title of Adele Gritton on the front sheet. She's described as the head of economic development and commercial investment, whereas on the structure on page 75, she's described as the head of economic development and investment. Perhaps at some point we could get those. Just get them stabilised. Members, I think I saw Peter Faines and go first. Peter. Thank you, Chair. I think I may have misunderstood some part of the presentation there. The first thing was in relation to slide one. I was a little confused by the units being used. Maybe just my eyesight. Sorry, I assume so. Yes, I assume so. But I was also a little confused as to where Omen Street now comes, which streams that in. I thought I'd got that one, but it went wrong. How are we treating that? Yes, so we'll be treating that as a service investment on the basis that it's a wholly understood situation. If I understood correctly, if we borrow from the Public Works loan board at all, we can't invest for yield at all, even our own cash. Is that right or have I misunderstood? So the crux of the matter is if it's primarily for yield. If there is a yield that's a by-product or part of a wider scheme. So for a generation, for example, if there is some yield as part of that, that is fine. Housing is another thing that the PWL will be quite comfortable with if it's for a housing purpose. There's a number of things they're quite happy with. I think the problem is none of this has actually really been tested so far. So this is still a grey area. Right. Councillor Jeff Halby. Thank you, Chair. Through you, I wondered in relation to these two main chunks of investment, obviously Omen Street has been established as an entity at its own right. So in that case, we can be certain that we can measure the money that's gone into it and measure the money that is coming out in terms of investment return. But can we compare these two as apples with apples? And would we strictly not have to look at the opportunity cost of any investment officer time or the cost of due diligence, et cetera, that might have gone into generating the commercial property return? And has that been done in terms of the bottom line figures that you presented? Councillor Williams, did you want to respond to that? If I understand Councillor Halby right, that is something that is done when we consider, at the report stage, when we consider purchasing that particular property. But, yeah, I'm not quite understanding what Councillor Halby is getting at, to be honest with you. Yeah, Councillor Halby, please. Well, I suppose the point is that if we were to, well, it looks as though we're not going to do any more of this, but if we were going to do it as a continuing way of generating revenue from investments, then obviously we would have to deduct from the return that we get from those investments, the ongoing cost of officer time in setting up those investments. And I just wondered if that's included in the figures or not? Yes, it is. Councillor Brandon. Thank you, Chair. I just wanted to clarify a couple of things. Mr Maddock pointed out that on the question about where does service investment go, you seem to imply that service investment through you, Chair, to Mr Maddock, that service investment went into a particular stream, but I didn't gather which stream that was. And the second one was just a small point on page 77. I have to say, the amount of amendment in this report is actually quite reassuring. It suggests that people are working very hard to make sure it says what it should do, so I'm quite encouraged by that. But just a little typo slipped in on page 77, Appendix for Commercial Regeneration. There's a missing E in the title there, just proofreading thing. And going on from that, I wanted to understand, we're talking about scope of investment, and this is now, I'm not quite sure what stream it is, because stream 2 has been crossed out on page 77. And so I'm looking at the bottom of page 77 and going over the pages to, this is basically a description of the scope of investment. Excuse me. And on page 79, we've got bullet C where it talks about projects where the intention is to inject further investment beyond the initial purchase price. This could be through refurbishing or repurposing the acquired asset. For example, purchasing an office building, the intention of converting it, say, into residential or other uses for yield. And I think, if I've understood the immense correctly, this is an acceptable purpose for a stream, but I'm not quite sure what stream it is. However, my concern is that I am deeply concerned that any thoughts about converting office buildings into residential purposes, there's the element of the fact that that might be allowable, I think, for yield. So perhaps we've come under the OK category for public works loan board. But what I'm really worried about is the principle of converting office buildings into residential developments unless they're eminently suitable to be converted in that way. So I'm just trying to work out what this means, you know. That was somebody who could clarify. Thank you. So as regards the stream system with abandon that completely now, because obviously stream one was the investments primarily for yield, stream two was those where that we were going to refurbish something like 270 Science Park and then stream three was the investment partnership. So that we thought while a stream one has gone, it's quite difficult to then call them one, two and three and four. It's something else of abandon that entirely and gone to the idea of a service related investment, a commercial and regeneration type investment and then the investment partnerships. So we're spitting it up rather differently than we did. So we still got three types, but the comment on that that's just an example. It's not something that we would necessarily do. And it's just trying to demonstrate that if somewhere in the country there was a property that we were going to be acceptable to the PWLB as something that they could lend for, but whether we would do it or not would obviously be up to the particular scheme and whether it was sensible or reasonable. Councillor Bradlin, do you want to come back on that? Thank you for that clarification, Mr Maddock. So I'm assuming that that's OK as far as the Public Works Loan Board is concerned, because in that it's providing hope at housing. I have to say I share that concern of converting offices into residential. When they were constructed, of course, they were constructed as offices and have totally different requirements than residential. So that particular area is one that I think we ought to look at very carefully, whether it should be included. I'm happy to remove that example if members may wish. We'll see when we come to the end of it. Councillor Van der Waith. Thank you very much. I'd like to ask a question of qualification before getting onto the strength of comments, which is largely along the same lines as before. My understanding about the Public Works Loan Board restrictions is that the location and the purpose is quite important rather than just sort of the overall, whether it's a confidential investment with a sort of high yield. For example, some of these sites on the Science Park, obviously our main motivation when we made those investments was yield, but there might be other advantages within the district. They're converting them in one case to provide a different sort of business accommodation. So could those sorts of things still be justified? So could some of those investments... It's a hypothetical question, but could some of those investments have been justified under the new rules, do you think, or even those ones are there a little bit to borderline to take a risk with? I think possibly. I mean, quite clearly, if there was an investment outside the district, then there would be a presumption from the PWLB that that was not acceptable. If it's within the district, then it's quite possible you could run an argument around employment, possibly again regeneration and repurposing, and those would be acceptable. So I think it would depend on the degrees of regeneration and repurposing that you're doing, but yeah, quite possibly you could... Do you want to make a more general comment, which is that one of the questions that the investment strategy was dealing with originally is... But when we're making some investment, there's a balance between the yield that you get back and some other public policy objectives. With some, like, tweaking the layout of an office, the public policy objectives are relatively limited, and so therefore it's important to have a good yield, but with others you might be getting more sort of social benefit and so you can accept a low yield, and that's what we were trying to achieve with stream one, stream two, stream one, there was a minimum of 5% yield with stream two, we would accept a lower yield if we were getting some other benefits, and that was a fundamental part of the strategy. So obviously for the reasons that you've been describing, we can't have that sort of set out like that. So the proposal is to effectively amalgamate anything that's investmenty into the commercial regeneration part, but what we're, I think, risk losing is the ability to think about that balance between yield and public benefit. And now, for example, I think there's a requirement for all of the commercial regeneration investments to have 5% yield, whereas obviously we were, we could clarify that if I misunderstood, whereas previously we would have accepted a slightly lower yield if we were getting more benefits, so does that mean that we're going to be possibly making, looking at fewer opportunities to make investments which do have a wider benefit? And then if we're not building that yield benefit balance into the strategy then, then we've got to take into account the yield into our assessments of each individual investment. And so the table for making the criteria matrix on page 89, for example, that doesn't include yield in it. So I'd be concerned that then we're effectively saying everything has to have 5% yield in order to be considered at all, which might mean we do miss out on some opportunities that do benefit the council financially, but also have that bigger benefit, wider benefit. So obviously this is my first reading through this, first discussion about it, so I might have misunderstood some of the nuances and sort of leave it in how it is set out, but this is my concern that we're not, we've lost the structure around that balance between financial yield and other benefits. I'm going to ask Councillor Williams if he'd like to come in. Yeah, thank you. If you look at paragraph 7.31, it's very helpful that we've shown the changes in red, but if you see in paragraph 7.31, regarding stream 1, which is the old stream for purely commercial, then that obviously was 5%. But then if you look at paragraph 7.3.2, you'll also see that stream 2 investment, which I believe are the investments that Councillor Van Der Reit is talking about, but it's also 5%. And what we're proposing is that the current, the new service investment stream, which is I'd say loans to our own companies, or loans to things like the ice ring that produce an amenity for the council, we are looking at 2.5%. And that's on table 8.45%. Thank you. Councillor Van Der Reit. Yeah, there's a wider point about how we analyse the balance in the new strategy that I think is interesting. But on the percentage, the way this percentage applies to stream 2 did have 5% yield requirement. I'm pretty sure that when we adopted the strategy in the first place two years ago, it wasn't that percentage. I don't know what's happened in the meantime. That's not my recollection. It's in some way of checking the facts on that. Is the previous strategy published somewhere as a standalone document? Because of existing strategy? Yeah, so the existing strategy, the existing strategy I think came to the October 19 cabinet, so you could probably see the existing strategy there, but I can certainly check that point out. I'm sure you can check that out in a minute. Councillor Richard Williams. Thank you very much, Chair. I've just got a couple of short points. One is just to ask for a bit of clarification around something on page 59, our agenda pack, which is paragraph 3.2. The contingency allocation has gone up from 75,000 to 250,000. That jumped out at me, so I was wondering if we could have a little bit more explicit of why that's gone up, whether it's because there's an expectation, more volatility, or whether there's some other reason. So I'd be grateful for a clarification for that. The second point, really, is a question for Mr Maddox. Just his slides, the second and the third slides. I'm assuming that the yield on your last slide is okay. It was over 5%. I just want to give those figures. The final slide we talked about, the yields with voids. I'm assuming that's okay. That's within what you expected. I was wondering if it was good, bad, or indifferent, really. And the veteran building, just a quick question on that. Do you expect the void level there to fall? I'm just saying this at the moment. With regard to the first question, so the 75,000 we refer to there as a general contingency we had within the budget. So it wasn't specific to the investment strategy. And we felt that was a bit low, that it was increased to 250. So that's basically a general fund, general contingency. So as regards to veteran building, I think it's about a third that is currently unoccupied. So obviously we would look to let that as quickly as we possibly can. I think it's fair to say because of the pandemic, we struggled a bit. But we're trying to engage with people. At the moment we haven't got a 10 of us interested. So there is obviously a concern there regarding letting that part of the building. And that's obviously something we need to push ahead with as soon as we possibly can. Sorry, can I just come back on the middle point? But just assuming on that average yield in 5.3%, that's within what you expect. I see that. Yes, it's not as good as we would like, because obviously of course it's beyond. So that is just about all we would expect, because say on the previous slide you see that both of those were originally expected to be over 6%. Yes, that was my question because I worked that out as about 87% of what the figure on the previous slide was. Oh, I see that. Yes, it is. Yes, it's within that second graph. OK. Councillor Nigel Caffard. Thank you. Just a point of clarification. Looking at the documents, fairly obvious that we're encouraged to invest money in a much wider range of facilities. To some extent, what we've done in the past, which is fine, we've looked at commercial investment to look at buying existing office buildings or sign parks and putting our money down and getting the yield. It looks to me as if we're encouraging local authorities like this to take a very active role in actually developing infrastructure in their areas. Now, that carries risks, but it also carries opportunities. I mean, for instance, the way that we are doing in general, we may, and this requires clarification, we may, for instance, obviously through the party's wish to invest in them in a solar panel. In fact, in your solar panel, you may have seen that before in a power station generating electricity from renewable sources in the sense of actually going into partnership with a developer to achieve that. I mean, I'm just looking at one on page 77, which says a key outcome of the investment will be the generation of economic growth for providing facilities and infrastructure. This includes the delivery of environmental benefit to the area. So, it does seem to, as I say, open up a whole range of possibilities which we haven't in the past thought or were able to consider just wondering what your comment was on that. I think one thing that was really quite helpful from the latest PWLB guidance was that they were pretty clear that green investments were okay because of the wider benefit that there was from it. Again, it was quite interesting because I had actually posed a couple of questions to the PWLB about six or seven months ago trying to assess what sort of things fell within scope. It was quite helpful that they came back and clarified that if it was a green type investment within the district, they were quite happy about that. But if we were trying to invest in something of a green nature outside the district, then that was obviously likely to fall foul of the rules. So, I think there are some quite wide things that would be allowed under the new regimes, under the new regime. So, things like this do look like a real go in relation to the PWLB as long as it's something that's within the district. Councillor Martin Carr. Councillor Carr, got it. Some of my thought on one of the elements I was going to ask, but another one that I'm interested in is how you deal with defining... How you deal with existing commercial investments that you've made, such as Science Park, and also within Urban Street, where you've invested in how it's outside the district, which presumably would not be acceptable now if you were trying to invest. You'll come to a period in the future when these need management, when they need upgrading, when they need to spend money. Will you be then hindered in borrowing money to maintain the commercial investment you've already got? How will you deal with that? I feel... It's unclear to me what the position will be. Will you have to sell the investments? What will you do? So, again, in the consultation, they made it clear that any investments that were made prior to the 26th of November, they would still be prepared to refinance any loans or support loans with PWLB borrowing, because it was obviously prior to them when the rules came in, so they made it clear it's not retrospective. It's only from the 26th onwards. Councillor Clare Daunton. On page 76, there's a map of the area, the investment target area. And I wonder, and at the bottom, the sentences in the south of the district, the commuting area could include a number of districts outside the county. Could that word could be should include a number of districts outside the county, because people are... The travel to work area is much broader than this red line. What are the restrictions on including a broader wider area? I've got a second question. I think I just had a slight question in my own mind as to whether that would be acceptable or not, and what I am actually going to try and get a bit more clarity on that, so it's quite possible that we should put should. I'd just quite like to get a little bit more clarity on that, because we have to do that pretty quick. That's my second question. That goes back to Councillor Chamberlain's earlier remark concerning the type of the road for Adele Gritten. You talk about the investment team and working with other parties. I just want to understand a little bit more about the balance between the investment team in-house, and I assume includes yourself and Adele, and then other advisers from outside. How does that work? What is the investment team? The investment team, as it says, is headed by Adele. That sits under Anne Ainsworth now. That doesn't sit within my area now. A Mac team includes colleagues that were formerly in the investment team, so we've got a number of colleagues that reported to the former head of that team. They are now within Adele's team, so that team comprises all of the people that were working on this prior to the transfer. We have external consultants such as Carter Jonas who assist with the management, so they manage those contracts as well. So all of that is run within the investment team, and obviously myself and other colleagues work very closely with them, and indeed myself and Peter Campbell and others within the council are assisting and creating this strategy so that the number of officers that have been involved in this. Just to understand, so that when there's a change, you're able to be flexible, the team is able to be flexible when there's a change in the strategy, as there must be at the moment with the change in the public works loan board. Councillor Jeff Harvie. Yes, thank you, Chair. I just wondered, in some sense, we are a sort of public sector equivalent in this kind of field of operation, similar to an investment bank, I suppose. And if we were an investment bank, our shareholders would be asking us if we'd yet signed up to the principles of disclosure covered by the task force on climate change related financial disclosure. And indeed, I think Mark Carney said last year sometime that the time has come to make this mandatory for particularly public quoted companies under the regulatory umbrella. And I know it kind of doesn't so obviously apply to us, but when you think about the way that climate change and the pace of it is picking up, it would be foolish actually not to be continually monitoring that. I mean, if you example, although we're not investing in, for example, obvious assets that could become stranded like oil companies, that kind of thing, actually it could affect the way that we acquire property through urban streets. You could imagine that were we considering that, we might decide not to buy houses on floodplains, for example. So I just wonder whether we should actually start to think about that. So normally we would revise a strategy on an annual basis, but clearly if something significant comes along in the interim, then we can look at revising it sooner than that. So something like this it may well be that in the form of time we do need to review the strategy in the light of what comes out of that. So maybe in six months time there might be a reason to review it again. So I think it's been a little while since we did it, but I think there are good reasons to think if something significant comes along. I think that's a well-made point and that probably ought to form one of the recommendations that we might send forward. I believe Ann Ainsworth would like to comment. Ann, please join us. Welcome. Thank you very much, Chair. It was just to add a little bit more to the question around the economic development team and the commercial team and what we've been doing there. So essentially as Peter was explaining, Adele and the business support team have now moved underneath me in the council structure. And then we also added our colleagues who were in the investment team previously. So this was the team that sat under David Usby and had a number of colleagues who've been delivering on project management around commercial aspects and looking after some of our assets and our investments for us. And the purpose of doing that was to bring together those two skillsets so that we could create a true economic development team that looked at both physical assets and infrastructure but also in terms of our support for businesses and our work with businesses across the district. And then our wider work with partners who cover both remits such as the combined authority. So when we talk about the investment team now, we're talking about a broader team comprising the business support team and the investment team as were. And we're also looking at the skillsets that we'll be requiring for the future. So we're doing a review of what we will need to make sure that we have the offices and the skillsets in place to deliver on the future investment strategy. Thank you, Chair. Good. Thank you. And that's very helpful if it's important. Councillor Peter Fane. Chair, thank you. I asked a question earlier on in relation to Urban Street. For the record, I should have declared that I'm the director of Urban Street. Thank you. Councillor Aidan Van der Wy. Thank you very much for letting me come back. Especially as it was a point of accuracy but what I said I am very confident that my statement previously about the yields required in the current investment strategy was correct. I just checked the investment strategy that was adopted by council in November of 2019. The minimum target yield to stream to investment is 2.5%. So there's an issue there in relation to content of the report, the proposed strategy that I think needs to be ironing out before it goes from the next stage. But I would appreciate some view on how this balance between commercial yield, financial gain and wider public benefit is dealt with in the new investment strategy and whether the yield needs to be incorporated in some way into the quite-area matrix, which I didn't get at this point. Probably one for Councillor Williams. Thank you, Chair. We really must get away from the current three streams. This is a different setup to what went for. And if you look on, as I say, if you look on the table on 8.45, that sets out the yields that we are proposing for the new criteria, for the new classification. And the classification that covers service investments, which cover things like amenities, housing and that sort of thing, is still 2.5%. What I think has been referred to is the fact that what was previously streamed one investments, which were purely commercial investments and were looking for a yield of 5% or more, those have flowed into the commercial investments, which we will be looking at and justifying. 270, for example, 270, to my mind, can be qualified under the new public works loan board rules because what we've done is we are providing units for start-ups. We're taking an existing office block and we're dividing it into five units for start-ups. That was done under the previous commercial investment stream one, which was looking for a 5% yield and we have basically just transferred that across to the new commercial investments category, which is looking for improvements for growth, et cetera. What we're saying is that we are looking for a 5% yield on those business growths. Now, maybe the council believes that we should be looking for less yield when we come to support business and growth in the area, but I think it's felt that there is sufficient, we don't need to do that. We would, there is an expectation that for those types of investments that a 5% yield is acceptable. Let's say when we're looking at more socially, you know, the provision of more social amenities, then we are looking at 2.5%, which is no different to what we did what we're doing now because we haven't adopted that, the new strategy yet. That's my view, that we actually still have 2.5% yield on those social things under the new service investments. There's no change there, and that's what I mean. You may take a different view. It's in black and white. It might be in black and white but if you want to go there, John, the table in 8.4.5 does not accurately represent the changes from the previous investment strategy. Stream 1, I'm looking at it now, Stream 1 had 5% across there, Stream 2 had 2.5% and Stream 3 had 5%. The first row and the second row have been inverted. That's in terms of the black and white. The other point is the types of investments in what is now commercial regeneration are largely the same as what is in Stream 2. You should be saying that the service investments are just Stream 2 moved over, but they're not. Investing in social capital, rebuilding council-owned assets, building homes and commercial premises is what Stream 2 was. The requirement was 2.5% on that and now it's been put up to 5%. If you're telling me that that's deliberate, then I want to know a bit better explanation of that and how we are going to try and balance between losses to commercial financial gain and those social benefits, which was the whole point of Stream 2 and which is not set out, I'll say it, if you're going to argue with me about that, it's not set out clearly about how we do that. It's obviously not entirely clear, so perhaps we have a chat outside the meeting, maybe, but obviously what we're saying here is that Stream 2 may well have been 2.5%, but commercial investments in Stream 2 are not the same thing. They have been different things entirely. Perhaps if we have a discussion outside the meeting, maybe we can. Thank you, and I think at that point I've just got two very quick questions on the next item we're going to be talking about empty homes. I wonder if one of the areas that we might include in our investment strategy is whether we could actually acquire by agreement some of those empty homes and make them available for people to live in, perhaps through Ermint Street. I'll leave you that one to think about. And just in terms of the space, the commercial office space that we have available, can I just confirm at this time it's approximately one third of the Victorian building and the whole of number 270 on the hybrid-sized park? Yes, thank you. Those are my questions. Can I just make the point that one of the things that a couple of us have expressed concern about is the office conversion to residential? I think that's something that we ought to look at. Certainly I believe that Councillor Harvey's point about climate change is a very important one. We ought to be looking at that. Clearly there is an issue to be ironed out in these investment rate returns. I'd just like to see that resolved. But with that, am I correct in reading that the majority of the meeting is content for those comments to go forward to the Cabinet meeting on 6 December? Agree. Thank you all very much indeed. Thank you very much for your contributions. Is everybody okay? Does anybody need a pause? Sorry, can't hear you. Does anybody need a pause? Is everyone happy to continue or would you like a break? I'm happy to continue. Thank you. Agender Item 9 is the empty home strategy and we're joined online by Councillor John Batchelor. Councillor Batchelor, would you like to introduce your report? I would indeed here. Thank you very much. Hopefully this isn't a contentious item. So it's the empty homes strategy and it's essentially formalising the process for us to try and bring back into use empty homes in the district. This isn't a huge problem. We have currently 870 properties that have been empty for more than six months. In the context, that's 0.3% of the housing stock in the district. Of those, 663 have been empty for six months to two years and 207 have been empty for more than two years. Now, as long as these properties are kept in good order and the relevant tax is paid, then there is very little that we can do about bringing them back into use. It's the choice of the owner to do as he wishes with those. So what this strategy is basically looking to deal with is a small number of what one might describe as nuisance properties that have been left to deteriorate and are becoming an issue locally. There's really quite small numbers of these. In the last year or so we've had no more than five to ten complaints from the public about this sort of housing in that time. So what can we do about bringing housing back into use? There's two tools that are available to us. The first is if the owner of the property refuses to actually repair and deal with the situation, then there is a course for us to actually take over the property and make the repairs and the tidying up ourselves and we then charge the owner. The other course of action last resort is to go for compulsory purchase. I might say that both these courses of action are time-consuming and expensive, so the rule tool that we attempt to use is actually persuasion since that is a good deal cheaper. So that's basically what the strategy is about. I've given the bones of that if, Chair, you would like some more flesh on those bones and we do have Julie Fletcher with us who's head of housing strategy who I'm sure could give us fuller explanation if you wish. Thank you. Thank you very much. I think we'll probably ask for questions from members and if it's necessary for you to call upon Julie to respond, then I'm sure you will do so. So, members. Councillor Stefan. Thank you, Chair. I take the point about it being a relatively small number in South Cams, but nevertheless where they are in the significant status repair and being neglected for many years they do cause a lot of upset and anxiety for neighbours and the parish council. I'm doing that because you have a number of options here EDMO and CPO listed on our page 109. I wondered how often those are actually used or are they ever used and what is the trigger for actually doing one of those things when a property has been a nuisance for many years. In our ward at the moment it's been empty for 10 years and we have tried to work with officers to get that resolved and there was a little bit of an initial tidy up but then the owners disappeared again. What point do we say we've got to do something and let's use one of these causes of action. Actually I'd also like to say I thought the Chair's suggestion at the end of the last item was a very good one a golden opportunity to fit them out with the best possible insulation and stuff and then use them as an investment. Thank you. Councillor Batchelor did you wish to take that or? I'll start with that certainly. I'm sure that all members will have anecdotes about nuisance properties in their area. I certainly do. So when I was told that we only have five to ten complaints a year I was really quite surprised. I'm sure I'll call on Julie in a moment who may add something to that. It's not a simple matter by the properties. There has to be cooperation and if there isn't cooperation then you have to go through a substantial legal system. Now this comes at the moment under our general enforcement people with environmental health and sometimes with planning. There is a proposal here now to actually employ somebody who can spend full time on pursuing this because when we do take this course of action it is very time consuming. I don't think we've done it very often but I'm sure Julie could add some detail to that if that's okay with you Chairman. Thank you Chair. Good evening everybody. If I may just add to Councillor Bachelors what he's summed up really in terms of the we only have five to ten complaints a year in terms of empty homes but like you say for a village where the impact on that neighbourhood is still an impact and it's not good. We recognise that I think really in terms of at the moment within the council we have various different departments working at different times on different strands regarding an empty property. What we're looking to do is be much more proactive in that and as Councillor Bachelors said we're looking to hopefully recruit a dedicated officer who will be the point of contact for all sort of complaints to do with empty homes and we'll be able to co-ordinate that much better. We've also got an internal enforcement working group now which again brings together all those departments to make sure we have a much more joined up approach because I do feel that was slightly missing probably previously so we've looked at that and we've tried to strengthen on that. Finally there's a partnership forum that we're looking to establish with Huntingtonshire and Cambridge City which is really around best practice looking at individual cases and looking at what's the best course of action. In terms of compulsory purchase orders and empty dwelling management orders as far as I'm aware in my time here and it has been for quite a considerable time actually I'm not aware that we've ever actually done any and I think nationally it's very few and far between as well. I think the issue is that you need to measure a lot of evidence gathering over a period of a lot of years to be able to take that through to the courts to get any sort of resolution on that. So it is really difficult and you have to prove really in terms that it's got to be because of the public interest. There has to be a real public interest in terms of taking something like that through to the courts and just on that point I understand that we are looking to do a corporate enforcement policy and that's going to give a bit more guidance in terms of what that public interest test would look like. So it's not something we've done in the past and as Councillor Batchagor has said it is very staff intensive and very costly so we do have to weigh that up again as well. I think I've answered everything that was asked. No, thank you very much, yes. Thank you. Councillor Claire Daunton. Well I think Julie's mostly answered my question which was about the challenging buildings working group and it sounds as if it hasn't really quite got off the ground yet. I guess yes, you're nodding. And I suppose then have you been able to gather any evidence concerning how South Cam's hands this kind of thing in relation to other councils? Do our other councils more active in pursuing empty buildings? If I may answer that, Julie? Julie, please do, yes, thank you. Just on that I know that the city council are probably more active to be fair than South Cam's because of the more sort of urban area and the intensity perhaps of some of the empty properties and the issues they have with empty homes. So they do have a natural empty homes officer I understand who has a dedicated resource to that and that is something that we want to look at and then we can be much more proactive I think than what we've been before. In terms of success rates though in sort of going to court and taking CPOs, et cetera I understand that I think they've tried previously at the city but have had some real difficulties in taking that through. So I think the forum really is about learning from each other and that experience because I think it's not an easy route to go through in terms of trying to take that enforcement. Julie, John, can I just ask is it your intention to bring this position forward in the budget for the next year? Yes, thank you. Good, thank you, so that might well help. Councillor Peter Fein. Thank you. I would just mention that complaints that I've had as a councillor in relation to long-term empty properties owned by the council. I'm glad to say that those are now under repair but I suspect when it says in the first paragraph letters were sent to all owners of properties registered with council tax, the owners of those particular properties maybe didn't get the letter. I mention that because I think it's important and I don't think it's reflected in the stats to look at the nature of ownership as well as the current status of occupation. We have of course a lot of social housing not just owned by the district council. We have a lot of jointly owned property where there may be particular problems because of course the owners of that if they can't live in it themselves, they can't let it because we have a policy of not lifting the government against letting and they can't sell it because those properties are very difficult to sell and so sometimes they remain empty for a long period without the owner being able to do anything about that. There was reference, John Butler referred to the two tools to bring houses back into use. In fact, as Judith Fletcher said we haven't used either of those. There is I think a third tool which was referred to both by Steve Hunt and by you chair which is of purchasing by agreement and I think we should be open to that. We have as I understand it a policy of not purchasing by agreement even when offered at a discount. John and I have been talking about a particular case of that and I think we should perhaps consider whether if it isn't practical to compulsory purchase or indeed do an EDM over it might be practical to purchase by agreement probably at a discount and we should not set our faces against doing that just a suggestion. Thank you. I'm not sure there was a question there wasn't Peter. Chair the question was whether the suggestion you made and that Councillor Steve Hunt made of purchasing by agreement could be considered. Thank you. John, I think that's one for you, Councillor Fletcher. Yeah. There's other routes for this. I mean the early ministry is the obvious one and also by Shire Homes. I'm not sure it's really part of this strategy but I'm sure Julie might wish to add to that. Yes, please, Chair, if I may. We do have in the strategy in terms of signposting to both Ehrman Street housing with the potential to purchase properties but obviously Ehrman Street housing is reliable for them to purchase that property in terms of they've got to get that yield on that as well in terms of the rental yield and making sure that it's going to make their money as well. So there are issues there with the properties in to disrepair and needs a lot of work doing then again that's a cost to Ehrman Street if they were to purchase that. So they have to balance that up and they have to look at that because we also signpost to our Lettons company, Shire Homes Lettons whereby the owner keeps the asset but we let out the property usually to people who may be faced with homelessness and we can guarantee the rent on that. So that's also quite a good avenue in terms of helping to bring properties back into use. In terms of purchasing properties at a discount if we were offered a discount then I'm sure someone like Ehrman Street that would probably be very attractive to be fair as I say it's got to be the price the price is right really in terms of that we don't have any resources set aside within the council to purchase through the HRA so we tend to put all of our funds into new build now because actually economies of scale it's much more viable to do that. Briefly, this is relevant to paragraph 6.2 on page 105 in relation to Shire Homes that in particular case I was referring to part owner properties and there is a lot of demand for single bedroom flats that doesn't work for Shire Homes or for Ehrman Street as John will know from a particular case we've been discussing and therefore I think if we're to investigate this other option of purchase by agreement we need to consider how that can be done not merely to assume if it can't be done under the HRA then Ehrman Street or Shire Homes will pick it up we know that they won't. Thank you Peter. Councillor Anna Bradden. Thank you Chairman. I have a couple of questions here and they relate to the data I also wanted to say thank you very much I suspect it's Julie Fletcher's team who created this excellent questionnaire so thank you very much for the questions that you asked the way that you asked them and the way that you presented them because I think it's all very clear so thank you very much for that and for that reason since it looks such a very straightforward questionnaire I'm really kind of curious as to why I mean we know this don't we with questionnaires but I'm surprised that there's only been a 30% response rate and so I've got a question there but I'll come back to that but the other one is that and you've explained why 27% of the respondents answered they're no longer the owner of the property and that comes out of the fact that you only sort of check every couple of years when council tax gets changed but so actually this data only refers to 122 respondents and yet we know there's 830 something or rather in total so this is sort of like a sixth of the total empty properties so right this is a shooting in the dark question perhaps maybe for Julie but it's kind of why haven't the other five six responded maybe Councillor Batchelor would like to direct that one but have we any idea why the other five six didn't reply do you want to take that one first? Chair sorry if that's okay Councillor Batchelor did you wish to respond or Julie? Well I think Julie will give the response but obviously we don't know a negative do we? But I wonder if Julie might have some insight Yes all right Thank you Chair to be honest Councillor Bradman I don't know why they don't respond I think a lot of it is some of them who own the empty property they've got plans for that empty property they know what they want to do with it they're quite happy having to pay double council tax it's not a real issue for them so therefore they're not really bothered to engage with the council if I'm honest in terms of that respect that's the only sort of reason I can really think of to be fair I mean one of the things we did say before was we used to have a grant scheme to actually help people bring empty homes back into use but it was only a £10,000 grant and we would then there was a restriction that we could then let that property out for a certain period of time but there was no take up so there feels like there's real sort of apathy I think within the district in terms of those owners of empty homes to actually engage with the council and actually bring them back into use they've got reasons why they're empty to be fair but it's not all of them I accept that so if I may come back with my second question to you so thank you that's the sort of feeling I'd got from the data too that actually they're not fussed so because we've got it in lots of places in the data so we've got on page 115 why is it currently empty I'm trying to sell it is the vast majority at 40 with 24% it's being repaired and then over the page at 116 what do you plan to do with property I want to sell it but actually cost of repair not being a problem you know that they're quite happy they can do that themselves but does the property cause you any issues lots of people said no it doesn't cause any issues but the problem is that means we've got properties that are empty that are not providing housing and you've said it in the report it's not a problem for the owners but it's a problem for us knowing that such a large proportion of our housing stock is not being utilized and so and indeed looking at the data on page 117 you know 663 of these properties have been empty over six months if you're dealing with probate or trying to sell it or whatever but 207 have been empty for over two years and what I'm slightly wondering is South Cams we know is a very attractive area for investment because people know that property property prices are likely to stay high and so what I'm slightly concerned about and I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it is are people just sitting on properties because they know that they're going to be secure in terms of their value or and there's nothing wrong with that they might want to hand them on to their children or whatever or live in them in due course but what I'm slightly concerned about is I wonder do we have any feeling about whether any of these properties are being bought up and simply kept as investments in land in this district for the future and this might be and I know we have no control about who buys houses but I just wonder is this something you've said people are not bothered about having twice the council tax and I just wondered whether we've ever thought of putting that up any higher because actually what we want to do is engage with these properties and enable them to be used for housing in the district not just as investment properties for some very distant future so I suppose sorry I'm getting to a question honest you know have we thought about increasing that multiple of council tax at all to encourage people to bring these into use or is it maybe money from overseas that's just giving somebody a stake in South Cams and do we have any control I suspect not I mean do you have any thoughts about that of you I would have thought John yes thank you very much for that and let's keep it in proportion what we're talking about with the houses been empty for more than two years is less than 0.1% of all housing in South Cams so it's not a large number no evidence that there's any plots as far as I know to hold large amounts of land for any other reason so I don't know if you wanted to add anything to that Julie could I come in John if that's okay oh it was Peter Campbell yeah to be honest Councillor Bradman we don't know what you've raised and the role for the proposed empty Homes Officer will be initially carrying out some additional research and door knocking much more in depth than we're able to do with the existing resources so we can't answer your question now but hopefully within the first six months we'll be able to get back to you with that but I'd also like to come back to the earlier point about the council buying properties the challenge will be that if the council was to buy properties there are a number of barriers not least being the affordability and the viability for the council to buy and rent out properties we are limited that we can charge but more than that is that when the right to buy rule or the use of right to buy receipt rules were changed relatively recently what they also did was put some really tight restrictions on how the right to buy receipts could be spent and there was a widespread restriction on using the money to buying existing houses so it's very difficult to see how buying on the open markets would stack up financially for the council Thank you Peter Councillor Martin can't Councillor Fane has already referred to a point that I was going to do but there's two points I really want to look at EDMOs when we had the problem which Councillor Hunt referred to in our local village it turned out that the house was empty because of a marital affair to come back to the wife and she knew about it but really hadn't done anything about it but it appears to me that the reason why nothing has been done is because she couldn't face the business of doing it up she's not necessarily, she's not everybody's expert in doing that it's a specialized field and yet the obvious way out of that because very likely she wants to maintain her ownership of the property as you say it might be for children later on for all sorts of reasons is via Shire Homes but Shire Homes were only taking lease property which is already managed and restored and it seems to me that there is an opportunity that we ought to be looking at because we have already a council housing service which deals with managing and doing that property and refurbishing property so we should have the skills available to be able to do that and the simple thing is to lease, we cover all the costs of improving and a margin to cover our costs and that would give the person take all the property concerns out of the property concern not to bind up the property internally and would get the property back into use because after all the tenant the owner will then get an income from the property which had been sitting there and doing nothing up to now and they've been paying councils that sort of thing so that struck me, in terms of the survey that struck me that it may be one sixth of people replying but you're going to have inevitably bias results because the sort of person like this who doesn't want to be dealing with it is not going to be responding so the problem people are not going to be responding and you're going to have bias results and hopefully that your officer will therefore be able to follow up these things and see if we can find out more the second point was about EDMOs the officer who came out and dealt with this had previously worked for Saffin District Council and commented that they had used them a lot but nationally they're not going to be able to help you had dealt with the system and it worked relatively smoothly so it is possible to use them, clearly some people have managed and I think it would be worthwhile looking into that and seeing how it is that in those authorities which do do it successfully because it obviously is potentially a very useful tool so these are really more comments to you that I suggest Thank you very much Martin That was our final speaker on this point so we have I think considered in some detail your proposed strategy and a number of us have made the point that we would like you to consider purchased by agreement and also Councillor Bradlin's point that you might wish to look at increasing the council tax on those properties which remain empty for a period of time but subject to those and other comments that have made is everyone content that we approve recommend this to go forward to cabinet and for public for further I think public consultation first of all Thank you all very much indeed so we come then to item 10 on the agenda which is the work programme I don't propose to spend a lot of time on that this evening I'll ask you all to consider it there are some gaps there please don't see that as a sign of meetings with little to talk about because there will be items coming forward in due course item 11 is to note the date of the next meeting which is on Thursday the 16th of December in this room at starting at our normal time of 5.20pm with a pre-meat on the Tuesday prior so that will be the 14th at 4pm with that we have concluded our business for this evening can I firstly thank the officers for joining us and helping us out my thanks to the cabinet members who joined us thanks too to our chief executive who's been here and thank you all members for your contributions to this evening's meeting thank you very much have a safe journey home