Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. So, welcome to Bifrost. I want to deploy. So, my name is Miguel Mejado and this is my colleague Dimitri Tancer. We are both principal software engineers at Rehat. You may recall me from, well, I'm not sure I'm a explorer, but I used to be the curriculum editor before. It's been a long time since I've been on a face-to-face open Slack summit. So, I'm really glad to be here back in Berlin. Basically, I wanted to tell you a little bit about you, but what is Bifrost? What is Ironic? And how are we using those to deploy a lab? Well, I'll be basically letting Dimitri go ahead for, you know, the Ironic and Bifrost part interactions. I've got a demo, hope it works. I hope you will be able to learn something and be able to contribute back. So, thank you, Dimitri. Thank you. Okay. Let's start with a short introduction to Ironic. I actually hope that many of you already know what it is, but anyway, short repeating. So, Ironic is a bare metal provisioning service under the OpenStack umbrella. Ironic can be used as a world back-end for Nova, providing you the same API for virtual machines and for bare metal, for virtual machines, yeah, for bare metal machines. There is a project to use Ironic inside Kubernetes. It's called Metal Cubed. We did a presentation earlier today about that. And it can be stand-alone. For example, with Bifrost. Ironic is a major project, more than eight years in production, public labs, reshows and institutions, small labs and many other folks use Ironic. There were awesome talks from CERN about how they use Ironic. Unfortunately, it was in the past, but check out the recordings. Just to be on the same level, I'll repeat some concepts from Ironic so that you understand what we're talking about later on. A node is a representation of a physical machine. So, use Ironic API, create nodes and run actions on nodes that corresponds to actions on physical machines. Ports are network interfaces. Port groups are representation of bonding. And we also mentioned thing called config drive, which is a Nova concept. It's essentially a way to provide information to your instance. In our case, we are writing them to separate partitions on the machine. Ironic consists of many components. The critical one, so it's restful API and open stack spirit. We have conductive instances which handle nodes. And we have an in-ram disk agent, which you start a node to do actions. It's called Ironic Python agent because it's for Ironic and written in Python. You also have a lot of extra components such as Ironic inspector, which is hardware introspection service. Everything Ironic is doing is doing through drivers. They're a whole family of different drivers which are actually designed as hardware types and hardware interfaces. I won't go into details about that. You can find a lot of information on the network already. We separate a huge variety of technologies, standard generic technologies like APMI, old school, hardware management. Redfish is the next big thing, HTTP, JSON, everything you like. We have limited support for SNMP for power actions. And we have quite a bit of vendor drivers. Just to name a few, Dale HP, Fujitsu, Huawei and the Nova have specific drivers in Ironic for more actions that the standard ones are providing. And we have a thing called Ironic staging drivers, which is a repository for unsupported drivers. And by first actually support installing that too. Let's talk about stand-alone Ironic a bit. Ironic can be used with no or some OpenStack services. You can, for example, plug in and out Neutron, Glance, Cinder, Swift, Nova. Or it can be plug-in for Nova. It can talk back to Nova. And we have over the time developed some specific features for stand-alone case. This includes HTTP basic authentication. And it includes support for using static or external HTTP. It includes support for images, not from Glance, but from HTTP, HTTPS and file locations. And some other. And with this short introduction, I'm going to talk about Bifrost. And Bifrost, the name coming obviously from the North mythology, although I know we pronounce it in the wrong way. I think it's actually Bifrost. But who knows. So Bifrost is a set of Ansible playbooks to first install Ironic itself and optionally some additional components like Ironic Inspector, Keystone, Staging Drivers. It's fully powered by Ansible and also a set of playbooks to use Ironic. So it's all in one. You install, you use, you'll see how easy it is when it shows the demo. Since recently we also have a small CLI that makes it easier to use Ansible playbooks in the most common cases. So we prepared some good defaults for you if you don't want to figure out all the hundreds of options we have. Ironic system support currently includes Stream9. We just deprecated Stream8 because of Python 3.6, which opens tech no longer supports. So if you use Bifrost, if you need Stream8, use Bifrost Yoga. Ubuntu LTS, currently Focal, we are working on the next one, which is, I forgot the name, and the event stable, whatever the latest table is. Yeah, the idea is that you literally run a playbook and you start from zero to a data center with ideally one playbook. A bit technical details on how it's done, especially compared to normal OpenStack installation. We use a combined API plus conductor process. So in OpenStack, you usually separate API surface from like workers, conductors, engines, we didn't do it here, just one Ironic. No RebitMQ. I know we already figured out on the MetalCube talks that people don't like RebitMQ. So no RebitMQ, they use GSM RPC. In case of Bifrost, we use NGINX for several tasks for IPX itself. IPX is GTP-based, I think, virtual media, which is next big thing with Redfish. We serve instance images with the same NGINX and we use it for TLS termination. Then we have DNS mask, which we also use for two purposes, for DHCP and for TFTP. And we don't use it for DNS, so just a bit, that's a bit ironic, isn't it? We use static DHCP and we rely on being able to use BMC to set boot device to local disk so that it doesn't boot into the RAM disk again. As I said, we support some additional services. Ironic Inspector is a part of Ironic ecosystem, obviously, we support that, but we also support Keystone, just in case you want a bit more than HTTP basic authentication, or you want to use a service catalog. We support Ironic Permissius exporter. We don't support installing Permissius itself, but we support the exporter that can provide you with metrics from the BMC of your hardware to your Permissius. And on top of what Ironic can do naturally through its API, we have playbooks that do some additional features. We integrate with this image builder for building your instance images. So you can provide some parameters to Ansible and the image will be built for you. That applies to both IPA image and instance images. Of course, if you don't want to build your IPA image, we publish once on our both OpenStack work and Bifrost can use that. We automate config drive building. You can detect your local SSH public in embedded automatically. You can provide also static networking parameters and Bifrost will catch them and we'll use them. It will be done through inventory. Then it will show you the inventory. And the most exotic feature, we can also do optional DHCP allocations in DNS mask. So when you have your inventory, have MAC addresses and you have desired IP addresses, we can also configure DNS mask. For these MAC addresses, you'll get these IP addresses. Sad things. IPv6 support is absent. It should be easy. IPv6 works as ironic. We just need to do something about Bifrost because there's a lot of APV4 code everywhere. We're kind of multi-node ready, but there's no playbooks to install Bifrost on several nodes. Nodes here, I mean nodes on which Bifrost is installed, not ironic nodes, sorry for confusion. Bifrost is a single controller of things. And we would love to have optional support for OpenStack projects or maybe non-OpenStack projects to, for example, Neutron, but we don't have that. So it's on ironic installed so far. If you want to contribute, come to us. And on this positive note, I'll pass the mic to Daniel. So I want to give you a little bit of a context. Basically, I'm a networking guy. Most of my background is on networking, so why the hell did I start with ironic? Well, mainly because I'm lazy.   So, well, I tried to do so.  So at some point, I just gave up and I decided to give it a try. We know to ironic, which I have done for OpenStack for a long time. But again, I'm lazy. So I really don't want to install a full-flex OpenStack. I don't want to install a full-flex ironic. I don't want to have, you know, the API running or whatever.  So, by first, as Dimitri was saying before, you have like, you could do these things in two ways. I'm going to be showing you both. So the first thing you could do, you're lazy, you may even be more lazy than me. So just use BITROS CLI. So you don't have to know anything. You just have to go, basically, launch that command. And it's going to be doing most of the things for you. The caveat, again. So when I first started this, I thought this was working on CentOS Stream 8. And then I found that PIP didn't install my libraries. And I found myself into a living hell of debugging PIP and what was going on. Again, that was because of Python 3.6 support. It was deprecated.  So that should work, too. But it's not really supported, probably. But, you know, yes, Python 3.6 plus, let's say. Regarding the drivers, this is going to be using IPM and Refish as the default ones. If you want to install some, you know, more fancy stuff, such as NIDRAC, you could do so. But it would require some minimal intervention, let's say. So what does this BITROS CLI command do? So install Python binaries and then install the NSIBUL collection. In case you don't know what NSIBUL collection is, it's basically a set of rows all set together. One of the things that we could improve at some point in BITROS is to allow the usage of NSIBUL execution environments, which would probably simplify much more all the dependencies things. Basically, it's a container-wide system with all the dependencies built in directly. So you would be able to trigger that from whatever you could. Again, let's say you just want to go and test BITROS CLI, but you don't even have a bare mental server. You don't need those. You could just ask, you know, a tool called Shushi Tools, which would basically go and run a virtual VMC for you, and it would, you can just run BITROS CLI in a way such that it would create just two test nodes for you. You just need a couple of RAM. I mean, this is not Kubernetes, so not 100 plus RAM. So yes, I guess if I'm having a laptop with maybe 80s of RAM, which I guess it's an industry standard. So I really hopefully that any contributor would be able to have at least 80s of RAM in the laptop. So, recap in. How would you, I don't know nothing. I just want to run BITROS. I want to test it because I think it's cool. And I want to test Ironic on my system. So how would you do this? You just have to, well, know a little bit of Git, just clone the repo. Well, I may be assuming that everybody out here knows what export OS cloud means, but it might not be the case. Basically, it means that you are using OpenStack Client in this case. So it should have a file that would be basically done for you later on, which is called Cloudstone Jamel, and it would have a Jamel file basically containing the configuration for your cloud. No OpenStack here, but you still need to do this. And you also are supposed to, when you do this, it would just go, you need to source the beautiful environment, assuming you're one of those. Okay, there we go. So, BITROS VLI install, and then here we are going over the complex route. I'm going to be showing you a simple run on the demo, assuming it works. But you can specify the network interface and the DHCP pool that you are going to be using for our DNS mask. So, in the end, let's assume you want to do something a little bit more fancy. In the end, this is all ansible, case-on, inventories. So you may have just, you know, one of those JSON files that you can modify then in any way you can. So you just got to pass those to BITROS. You could choose the driver. In this case, I'm showing here IPMI, but you could use Redfish, iDRAC, or I don't know if there's any more fancy drivers, probably there, but anyway.  So, but this basically, this works in two, one to two and a half steps, because once you've got all these, basically you need to enroll your nodes. That means that you are, you know, giving access to buy first for them to control those and then deploy them. And well, if something goes terribly wrong, you could either un-enroll them. There's some cabinet about, you know, that's maintenance mode, whatever, which I think it could be more simplified, but maybe you won't even need those because you may be able to just, you know, redeploy. So that's the first one, enroll, then we'll just go, don't mind the parameter for passing to the Ansible playbook because you don't really need those, but at some point it'll be passing to deploy in a state, then basically you'll have to wait a little bit so they finish and call back, and when they call back, you can just go and see them as active. By the way, there's also a parameter that you could pass to the reference slide which is dash, dash, wait, if I record correctly, and then just wait for them to be completely deployed. So that said, that might not be enough for you because, you know, but I run my own playbooks and I want to customize my environment. I just want to, you know, deploy a system. I want to do things with them. So again, here comes Ansible. So this installs Ansible for you so you don't need to do anything fancy. It also goes and you use Ansible Galaxy to install every needed collection for you to use and it'll be configured Ansible for you. So don't think about Ansible base or whatever, you know, it's all done for you so you don't mind. But the power of this is that if you already got a couple of playbooks that you go for your own usage on your system, you could just reuse them, even make your own Ansible collections and just go and deploy. And that's, trust me, that's so much, much, much easier.  How would I be able to, you know, run these things again? If you see, this is pretty much the same as we were commenting before, like with, you know, Bifro CLI, but just running Ansible playbook directly. So at first you export the file where you are storing your configuration in the JSON file, then just run and roll, deploy and as I said before, if something really goes wrong, you want to debug or maybe you just don't want to debug, you want to try, you just go and see, relounce, redeploy dynamic demo.  So, let's see. Let me know if the font is big enough for you. Okay, let's see. I'm gonna be starting us by here. So I just need, this is a CentOS Streamnime. Again, .use8, it's not supported and it will fail miserably and you'll be, you know, terribly frustrated, don't. So, this is super fast. Thank you, folks, for the network here. I like the KubeCon. So we are basically going to enable Apple and Apple Next Reapers here. Let's say that they're installed. Okay, they are. Now we're gonna basically do a Columbi first. Go over there. And, okay, so again, we are going to go, for instance, we like to create a minimal setup for apps to test.  It'll trigger two VMs, use Instruction Tools, it'll install those. And later on, we'll be installing, like, graphics, by first and then running itself. So you would have, you know, the API and the other component running. Okay, so this is now installed. Let's install the test. You see, you know, this is pretty much both proof because it tells you every step that you need to follow. So if I could do it, trust me, you could do it yourself too. Okay, let's say that Ironic is running, it is. Let's say that Ironic is back door. And again, this is a little bit different from OpenStack because if you were using a full-fledged OpenStack, you will see much more components. This is not the case with bad first because basically we are trying to minimize the workload here. So it's, you know, basically, it's kind of a theme person of Ironic. Okay, so we got now two, let's say bare metal, fake bare metal machines running, they are not running yet there, but the definitions are over there and we've got social tools running too. So we are gonna be basically hooking up into the BMC. Activate this. Export it off-cloud. As we were speaking before, like, basically this comes built in with two different drivers, which are IPMI and WordFish. If you want to add any additional drivers, you could pass any options to the Ansible playbook, any Putyaska trigger, even those staging ones. I don't know. Those staging ones comes like as a proof or are experimental or... Which one? The drivers on the staging, are they experimental or are they supported? They're constantly experimental, yeah. Okay, so maybe don't try those. So let's see what an inventory looks like. So it's pretty much what I was showing you before. You could even, you know, wanting to use host groups. You want to use specific properties. But in the end, you are basically setting, like, the machines, the configuration for the IPMI, passwords, SSH keys and so on, but you could just use a lot of specific configuration should you want to. So let's enroll these things out. I'm not using the dash, dash, white here. So should I be using those? That option. By first would hold on and wait until the whole deployment is complete or failed, hopefully not. Because they shouldn't, because we are super-duper developers. But in the case, this is not the case here, so let's see what's going on. You see, now we got basically two different bare-metal machines available to the ironic. So you could just basically go ahead and deploy an OS into those. As the image was seen before, we are assuming some defaults to that, but you could use any emails that you would like to use. You could just modify the defaults as well. But we are just doing something simple here, so let's kick the deployment. Let's see what's going on. Okay, let's see. Oh, they are deploying already. Placing fast. At some point, this should just be going to... This is doing something. It's... IPA is running there, so the arachnid Python agent is kicking off things there and it's basically waiting to be calling the IPA again so they enroll it there. But they are active. So, well, basically that was the quick demo we wanted to show you here, guys, here. But as the image was saying, there's a lot of work to do here. So things you would like to contribute here if you'd like to. Well, one of the things that I would really like to see here is, well, these playlists were made before the Ansible execution environments were even designed. So it would be really cool to have one execution environment that you could just run, just stock arise, or use implement or whatever you want to call it. Just cry obey, let's say, to run all these things. So if you are using Bifrost on your environment and you know you've got some things already done or we're really looking forward for you to contribute it back. And again, so dependencies. I hit the dependency issue with Python 3.6 here. That shouldn't be the case in Ansible execution environments because the Python version would be really hard coded. In a formal session from here, Dimitri and Yuri, which is basically the PTO of Ironic. So you can blame him about everything. We're discussing about Python packaging. Even though I love Python, I'm also a goal developer and I have to say that I was totally lazy when I discovered that I could just go, use GoMod Bander and forget about dependencies when they're using, you know, copying the maximum version and even version and so forth. That's somehow a pretty complex system that could be somehow avoided if you are just using your own execution environment. So I think that would be really cool for newcomers because they wouldn't have to care about that at all. That said, I guess that was the email, but questions so far? Could you go there please? Is there currently a way to like have the nodes auto discover by just pixie booting and then enrolling in Ironic without providing an inventory? Which, sorry, what did you say? So the question was about auto discovering through pixie booting. Yes, there is such a way. It's a mode of Ironic inspector which is enabled. I think there's an option to enable that. It's not on by default. You can enable it in Byfrost. It works. The usual problem is to know the BMC credentials. So Ironic will enroll the node for you if we populate introspection data. But to manage it, you need to have these credentials. And some vendors actually have them well known. In this case, we can write a thing called introspection rules, which is a mini language inside of Ironic inspector that defines the rules to execute on freshly introspective nodes. And you can say, if this is newly inspected and the vendor is Dell, set root calvin, for example. If we don't have an easy solution for credentials problem, it will be harder. But yes, it is supported. Thank you. The other thing then because I come from the mass canonical world, where when you have the nodes just pixiboot, they get discovered and then they do, as you say, they just run ipmetool and set the username and password for the mass service. But you can do something similar, I suppose, with Ironic. So the question is about just configuring credentials automatically, right? I think that's what Manus is doing. We had that, we dropped it. There's a lot of interesting issues around that, starting with the fact that it only works with IPMI. Okay. There's a ratfish who cannot do that. It works sometimes. And also, something we're trying to avoid in Ironic is to be primarily responsible for your BMC credentials. That's not the role we really wanted to take. It could probably integrate as Barbican, but yeah, we're not quite there. And there were also issues with that. So if it breaks midway, your hardware is in a weird state. So we made a conscious decision not to do that. Thank you. But you can write a plugin for Ironic Python Agents to do it. If you're really curious, I can explain you how to do that later on. Thank you. Can I use something else but Libyert, like OpenStack VMs? So for the servers, when you created the two VMs in Libyert, can I use my OpenStack credentials somewhere? But well, I created the VMs with VRSates and I'm using SushiTools, which is a tool to create a fake virtual VMC. But this is meant to be used by, you know, like bare metal servers. If you can, I assume it should somehow work. I didn't test it, to be honest, creating VMs with Nova and attaching that to SushiTools. Give you a try. I could have like a specific turn on for that and another one consuming. SushiTools has an OpenStack backend. So SushiTools itself supports using Nova instead of Libyert. Bifrost doesn't expose that. So if it's some hackery, you can do that. Okay. Thanks. But yeah, please keep in mind, that's only for testing. Bifrost is for bare metal. So if I wanted to do like using OpenStack clouds for running my bare, fake my bare metal, I could just use SushiTools directly. That's what you mean. So SushiTools is a library. SushiTools is an emulator. SushiTools is what provides fake Redfish BMCs here, but it's backed by Libyert VMs. You can change the backend to be OpenStack. That will require some configuration. Probably Bifrost doesn't do by default. Thanks. Is there a way to upgrade the version of I-Running with Bifrost or not? If you want to upgrade to a major version of an existing deployment of I-Running using Bifrost, can you do it with the tool? Yeah, pretty much every time, in the spirit of Ansible, every time you run install, it installs the latest version. So if you have an existing installation, for example, install using yoga, get pulled by Frost to that, you run install again, it will update everything to that. Okay, that's perfect. Thank you. We even do upgrade testing in the CI and we even have some workarounds in our playbooks for great issues. So that's supported case, yes. Sorry. So I think it was mentioned and we didn't do that, that this is running on SEUL, on the CI, so every I-Running patch in the end is really running by Frost over the CI. So I think it's pretty much bone proof. Any more questions? Okay, then thanks all for attending and enjoy the run.


Axe has begun testing a dollar per year charge. It's referred to as not a bot for new users and they're only testing it in New Zealand and the Philippines. Axe says the plan is meant to reduce spam, manipulation of our platform and bot activity. Why is it a dollar for new users? That's just good policy. When you add in a charge, you tend to grandfather in people beforehand, at least for a while. Why only two countries? Because you're testing it. The big one is this legitimate spam deterrent. If you're wondering, will this stop every bot from appearing on X? The answer will be no. There's plenty of bots that will pay the fee. Will it reduce the number of bots and spam on X? Yes, it will because there will be lots of them who won't want to go through that or are operating at such massive levels that it would be prohibitively expensive for them to do it.


with the Golem project. So I think Golem project is with Ethereum almost from the beginning. In fact we thought about Golem project shortly after learning about Ethereum because I believe that Ethereum is the technology that makes the concept possible. So as this is our third DEF CON already I will only describe the concept, the basic concept very shortly. So Golem is to be a market for computing power where anyone can like set an offer to sell the time of a machine of computing and anyone else can use advantage of that and buy this this time by computing a heavy computing task on the provider machine. So there are two very important parts of this equation. There are hardware providers and task requesters or or requesters that's how we call them but there is also the third very important element that we have a little bit overskipped in the communication recently who are software developers and we thought that as we are on a DEF CON after all maybe we should tell you more how we plan to integrate software developers into the equation. So like with like with every like with every complex system with many players you need to have some features and some incentives which makes players to use the features and in our case we have feature as a Golem is a flexible platform to deploy and monetize software that's for software developers of course and also Golem is a tool to sell a hardware time or buy hardware time if you are in need of some. So this is the basic concept. We have made actually quite a good progress since the previous DEF CON, DEF CON 1 where Piotr Janek presented our probabilistic nano payment scheme. We have a live public alpha version at the moment running on our testnet so you are welcome to try it to see the code on on on a github and yes and there is one great thing you will be awarded 100 ether if you join but this are our testnet ether so there were worth nothing but still you can like do some rendering with that because what we have integrated so far is it's a blender blender is a open source rendering software so you can render yourself a picture or a movie and you know pay that with that with our testnet eaters. So so those are the basis so now where is where is where is the big story for today. For the big story I would like to tell you a little bit about history so 80s were great time limo fancy haircuts but also like the beginning of the personal computers era as we know it now so what happened in in the early 80s in early 80s IBM created the facto standard for personal computers standard that exists to this day this standard was eventually reversed engineered by IBM competitors and hardware market as we know it now emerged and the biggest winner of this hardware wars was a software company Microsoft our our sponsor today and and the truth is that that the Microsoft was able to take advantage of that because standard for hardware emerged so in fact hardware alone doesn't matter like it doesn't matter at all hardware is worth as much as software running running on this hardware and if there is a standard for hardware then software can take advantage of it like it happened with with the personal computers and then Microsoft so like I don't want to to say that we are like creating standard for using every machine because there are many standards for that many protocols but what we are trying to do we try to connect all those standards on the one platform with one standard way of exchanging value using Ethereum network for software and for computing power and if this is simple for some computing power you can ask how it is possible to integrate any software with the centralized system and this is what I want to show you very shortly today so we need great software like beautiful software built by engineers by software developers like you to take off to make our golden network great and to make Ethereum great and to do that we will need to concept which is golden application registry and golden transaction framework so application registry is a very simple concept in fact that you register on chain your integration like you identify yourself your your application some basic information that enables user to find the application and to install the application to run it and anyone can certify that anyone can say that this code is good or can anyone can say that this code is bad that is malicious and blacklist it and this is up to the user who to trust so this is like the centralized trust non trust network in fact and this is how we want to make it possible to any developer deploy software for golem what is more there are very many different possible integrations with many different reward schemes if you think about how software companies are licensing the software this there's like any possible scheme you can imagine like per user per computer per hour per day per per year anything is possible so we are not going to implement in our transaction framework any solution possible we will provide of course for our integration examples how that can be done for every party but in fact we think it should be possible for developer to integrate any reward scheme which is which is compatible with some general standards and I think those standards can be summarized in just saying that it should be measurable it should be for it should not enable you to do anything dangerous to other parties so and of course over time I think that the coming integrations will create a kind of set of templates that will create in fact this transaction framework that anyone creator we couldn't use later and in fact this is those both concepts are very very powerful because this will enable you not only to deploy your application on golem network but also use other parties integrations in your integrations following their reward scheme so this is like again one more place where all the puzzles will meet together and I think this is what will make both Ethereum and golem's trunk because as I can see on this conference everything we built here is this is built of many different puzzles I will update you that we are another company that is using IPFS for example maybe not in the integration which is live at the moment but definitely we are going to integrate with IPFS quite soon and as we as Ethereum community can benefit from using each other integrations and solutions and software I think the same is true for applications running on the golem network and of course like golem is not for every application at least at the beginning it's for heavy computing mostly but I think that over time we will make it possible to to run more and more very interesting things very interesting integrations so what is the plan I see I have still some time left so I will tell you what we plan next as I said a month ago we released our first alpha which is working but still a lot of work to be done we hope to eventually add that to release during the it it's hard to promise but I hope this will be not yours but quarters rather maybe months and this will be the the first leaving golem network focused on on rendering because we believe that computer graphic rendering alone is like major industry that is very interesting use case itself and then we will focus on providing you that's developers with tools to integrate with with golem and and deploying any any application that can take advantage of of golem and Ethereum as soon as possible so if you want to know more about the project we we have our github open that that's obvious that's that's actually that obvious that I don't have that on the slide but you can also visit our web page our Slack or our blog where we update on the progress of the of the project thank you very much


If you care about the eradication of poverty, sustainable growth, the one thing that we really need is data. It will help policymakers to assess whether the policies that they have in place at the moment are working. As you and you wider, we've put together the government revenue data set. We looked at the relationship between changes in the tax structure and economic growth rates. And we found that existing beliefs which were based on studies that only considered a richer subset of countries don't hold whenever we are able to employ new data which included more low income, more developing countries. In fact, we find considerable differences in the results across income groups. A key lesson for tax research is that you cannot take tax data from different sources alongside each other at face value. The user needs to understand how they, for example, treat earnings from natural resources or social security contributions. It differs from source to source. In Vietnam, WIDER has collaborated with a number of domestic and international institutions to design and implement the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey. In order to get this data, we had to build good working, trusting relationships with the local government and also get the central government to use that data. So the big lesson from the efforts that we have made is that you need long lasting, committed relationships with the local government at all levels.


Felly, dyfodol yw'r amser, a fyddwn i chi'n cymdeithas ystod yn gyfafelio gyda'r cyfaint, a fyddwn i chi'n cymdeithas ystod yn gyfaint, a'u cymdeithas i'r cymdeithas ystod. Mae'r cymdeithas ar y chymdeithas. Felly, ychydig wnaeth eu ddweud ar y llwyf yn gyflwyno i'r labtau, llwyddon, ac yn gyflwyno i'r rai. Felly, efallai cychydig i'r cymdeithas ar y chyflwyno i'r cymdeithas. The camera follows the microphone after it's been switched on so councillers and officers are advised to wait a few seconds before speaking to allow the camera to catch up with the microphone. Those who are participating in the live stream please indicate if you wish to speak via the chat column. Please do not use the chat column for any other purpose other than registering yourself to speak. Please make sure your device is fully charged and that you switch your microphone off unless you're invited to do so otherwise. Please ensure you've switched off or silenced any other devices you have so that they do not interrupt proceedings and when you're invited to address the meeting please make sure your microphone is switched on. After you've finished addressing the meeting please turn your microphone off, speak slowly and clearly and please do not talk over or interrupt anyone else. Members please note if we need to have a vote for any particular reason we'll do so via the microphones in front of us only those members who are present in the chamber will be allowed to vote. I can confirm that we are quarret so we'll proceed but before we start with apologies I just wanted to take a couple of minutes just to make a quick announcement for those that aren't aware the previous head of HR season Gardner Craig has left the council. I just want to thank her for her service at the council she's been a long serving member of South Cams I think over 15 years she's been with us. And she's supported this committee very well over the years. She was the real driver behind the disability confident initiative that we are now part of. And also the various surveys that the staff surveys that the council has run over the years so I just wanted to register my thanks as chair of the committee for her support for the committee over the years and she'll be very much missed. Council Williams John Williams you want to say something. Thank you chair. I'd just like to add my you know as you to thank Susan as the lead member for finance and staffing she's been enormously helpful to me. We you know we successfully negotiated last year's pay increase and she's given me enormous amount of advice on staffing matters so you know I echo what you say. Thank you councillor councillor howl. Yes thank you chairman again I would also like to be connected and echo what you've already just said. I worked with Susan for many many years and was portfolio holder for staffing and I can't remember what. Staffing at one point and worked with Susan very closely during that time period and all the time she's been giving very fair very good advice and I wish her the very best of success wherever Susan has gone. It'll be very much our loss from there again I think she was an excellent officer so. Yeah absolutely she'll be sorely missed thank you. So with that members we'll move on to the business ahead of us today and we'll start with apologies for absence please. I'm pleased to say chair that we have no apologies and every member is present. Great thank you very much item two decorations of interest. Do any members have any interest to declare for any items on the agenda today? No. So we move on to three minutes of previous meeting members we have the minutes from the meeting held in July on pages one to four of our agenda. Does anyone have any comments or alterations they wish to make? No okay then I'll sign those as a correct record at the end of the meeting. So we move on to the substantive business and we're looking at the retention and turnover report for quarter one of this year which starts on page five of our agenda. And I believe we have Jonathan Corbett I believe you'll be presenting this to us. That's correct. I'd just like to share my screen I've got a presentation that I will be on the screen for everybody. Thank you. Good morning everyone. This retention and turnover report provides an analysis of the turnover of staff for quarter one of 2021 to 2022. That's the first of April to the 30th of June. The goal of the report is to highlight trends, informal recruitment decisions and support development of an effective results strategy to achieve our goals. In terms of the turnover, the main turnover statistics that were highlighted in this particular quarter, the rate of voluntary leavers has increased to 3.95% in quarter one. This is above the target level of 3.25% and this is the first time it's reached this level in the last two years. At the moment, the rolling average hasn't increased significantly because there's been a very significant increase in just one quarter. But it will, by analysing the rolling average, be able to indicate if the higher turnover remains a long term trend. The areas with the most significant turnover in this time period were shared waste, HR and corporate services and housing. One point to note about the stability index is following the introduction of our new HR system itrend. We are unable to report on our stability index until we have full year of post history because we don't have 12 months of post history within our system. However, we can resume reporting on this in quarter one of next year. Given the high level of recent turnover, our stability index is likely to be in excess of the target of 80% which suggests a potential need to review current retention initiatives. In the last quarter, at quarter one, we had a 44% exit interview return rate, which is in line with the average over the last two years. I believe that we discussed, it was mentioned at the last meeting, the option to state no reason specified has been removed and so shouldn't appear in the next quarter to report. In terms of involuntary levers, the most important point or the most notable point really is that there were three redundancies in quarter one. These were the three members of the catering team within the facilities as a result of the closure of the canteen at Camborn. The exit interview data shows that several people cited similar reasons for leaving in this quarter including a desire for more career progression, a higher salary, change of role and more job security. The most valued features of working for Southcams were working hours, flexi time and working environment. The areas that scored the least favourably were salary and professional development, although that is in comparison to the other factors. However, the vast majority of people would consider working for us again and relatively few respondents rated any of the factors as poor. When you look at the UK labour market trends in the CRPD report for May 2021, so roughly the same period of time, it shows there is a continuing rise in positive net employment intentions. There has been an increase from a rating of plus 11 points to plus 27 from February to May and there's been a very sharp decline in redundancy intentions and a rise in recruitment intentions. There's a much more positive job outlook than six months ago and the recruitment intentions in the public sector remain high at 81%. It reflects the general trend of rising recruitment intentions and higher turnover across the UK labour market as a whole. There's been a jet and the CRPD attributes this to the general improvement in economic outlook as businesses have reopened following the COVID-19 lockdown. In terms of recruitment during this period of time, recruitment of vacancies remains high at 84% success rate. We had one new apprentice starting during quarter one, although new opportunities have been advertised and successful recruits will be starting shortly. At the moment, there are 32 agency staff across all departments with 22 in Greater Cambridge Shared planning alone. This is a significant increase over the last six months and almost all of this is related to the increase within the planning service. The casual worker bank recruited four new casual starters in quarter one and that's helped to reduce our reliance on agency workers somewhat. Appendix E of the report has been amended. It now contains ethnicity statistics for South Cams District in 2011 following the feedback received at the previous employment and staffing committee. This shows that black and minority ethnic employees are slightly underrepresented as a proportion of the known total of the local population. Although the fact that 10% of employees haven't disclosed their ethnicity means that or hadn't disclosed at that time means all the proportions are off. It's not fully reflected in it. It's hard to gain exactly what the exact proportions are. However, when the new census dates from this year has been fully published, we'll be able to update the comparators so we'll have a much more up to date reflection of what their true statistics are. Finally, we've got the new HR system has enabled more thorough reporting on the council's employee profile. We've been able to report on a number of protected characteristics from quarter one of this year, which we hadn't been able to do before. The most significant variations that we found in quarter one were related to age. The 29% of leavers in quarter one were under the age of 30, although they only count for 13% of the workforce. And of the seven voluntary leavers amongst this group, all of them stated they had a new job offer were relocating or the position was not what they had expected. There was a slight over representation in terms of male leavers in quarter one, but this was largely the result of an increased turnover of shared waste, refuse loaders and drivers. This was mainly due to personal reasons such as relocation, new job offers and to maintain a better work life balance. There were no significant variations in leavers based on ethnicity, disability and religion compared to the proportions within the council at the moment. Does anybody have any questions? I will open up to members if there's any questions or comments they wish to put to you. We'll start with Councillor Daunton. Thank you for a very good presentation and a very thorough report. I'm looking at page 15 paragraph 29, which talks about the common reasons for voluntary turnover and more career progression. I'm just wondering how we can handle that because clearly if you want to stay within the organisation some areas need a professional qualification. So if you wanted to move from housing to environmental health in order to progress in environmental health you'd need a professional qualification. So what can we do to help those people who want to move within the organisation? Do we offer help with professional qualification and how is career progression discussed? Yes, absolutely. One of the things that we have obviously is our annual PDR cycle where employees can discuss with their manager about different options they'd like to pursue in terms of their career, future development for the next 12 months. It's something we've been encouraging and we run annual training courses both for employees and managers to get more out of that particular process. We also have an ability for any employee to request particular professional training that they'd like. They can submit an application form and it would be considered as part of a training budget. So if someone was moving into a new area they want to develop in, there is the option for somebody to be supported to learn the necessary professional qualifications to form that role. I'm just another supplementary question. So we've heard in the past about staff moving from the call centre, getting the experience of answering queries and then moving into one of the divisions departments in the council. Is that still happening successfully? It would be something I perhaps would need to look into a little bit further and determine about contact centre levers over a period of time. I wouldn't be able to confirm that in the detail but I can certainly speak to the contact centre managers and determine if that's happening and what's been happening in specific detail. But it's a good point that contact centre employees, that's generally one of our, you know, I would say an entry level position and it would be, it's a very good place to learn those essential customer service skills and go forward. So I will follow that up for the contact centre. Thank you. Councillor Heather Williams. Thank you, Chair. I've got a couple of questions. They mainly relate to page 14 and 15 which I think is the same in the paper as well as the online sometimes are different. So it's also paragraph 25, 26 and 28 that I'm looking at. With paragraph 25, I think it would be helpful, although I'm normally cautious of percentages, but I think it would be helpful to know how the percentage of the department that has the agency staff. Because if it's one in 50, then we're going to be less worried if it's one out of two, for example. So I think that would help to have that information supplied with that for future reference, please. On paragraph 26, the casual worker bank, I think that's great to see that that's working. It's a really good initiative and hopefully it would be good to see some more positive results out of that because I think that could potentially be a real winner for the council. In relation to page paragraph 28, we're looking at the turnout rates. I do wonder if it's right to be sort of comparing it to the last two years because they're very COVID driven years. And we know from a lot of the data and information that because of a feeling of job security and those sorts of things, people were naturally more reluctant to leave their professions or their jobs in all sectors if they had some form of job security. So I know it's saying it's risen significantly, but I'm sort of wondering if it's possible to look at sort of a pre COVID comparison to give us some reflection as to where it's actually going. Because I think it's probably not quite fair to compare it to the COVID period where I know a lot of people were just pleased they had a job. There weren't looking for elsewhere in those circumstances and there weren't the opportunities. We weren't competing as a council, we weren't competing as much. I think I remember Councillor Howe saying if lots of people were applying here that was not good news for our economy. Because I don't know if that's quite how I think it was a valid point actually that if council intake starts going up that's normally not a positive figure for the rest of the world. So with that in mind of that sentiment, we have some pre COVID figures to compare it to please. Thank you, chair. Thank you, Councillor. Jonathan, I'm not sure how easy those figures are to come by, but I think you've heard the request there. I'm not sure if that would be possible for the next set of data we'll be looking at. Yes, I can take the history of turnover levels because one of the things we've done is being taken. For the last two years we've been delivering these for the last eight quarters, I can certainly do that. I can say as a summary that the turnover for the last two years has been significantly lower at a level or lower than the 3.25%. So this is the first time it's reached this level, but happy to provide that information. I believe that actually there may be in one of the graphs of the report, in one of the appendices, there is a record of the rate of turnover as it's changed over the last couple of years. But if not, I can certainly provide it. Okay. Yes, Councillor Williams. Thank you. Mine was sort of a percentage of the department. So is there a dynamic that shows rather than a trend? Is it 22 out of 200 or 22 out of 25? Because I think our level of concern would be very varied depending on what those figures are out of. Thank you. That's fair. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Jonathan. Councillor Howell, please. Before I say my question, I think we should clarify what Councillor Williams, Heather Williams stated. What it is, I always believe that if there's a public sector job equivalent that we have here in South Cams such as planning and law, and suddenly we have a lot of applications from lawyers and planning officers, that means that things in the private sector are quiet and they start to come over here. That's what I always try to say. But yes, I do stick with that. Absolutely understood. Just a quick question, really. And it follows along what's already been said. So on page 11, paragraph 15, it says there, in contrast, salary and professional development have been laced favourably. Now, not so much career development but professional development within their own career, whether it be paying their fees for any professional organisations people are member of, or increasing their ability and knowledge drain within that area. Is that something that we've got to look at in the future? Because that's something we can address quite quickly as opposed to salary and other factors that have been brought up. Thank you, Simon. Thank you. Jonathan, if you want to comment on that? Yes, certainly we are in a method of every year we take, we ask people as part of their PDRs to complete any particular training or anything that's going on at the moment. I know because I've been overseeing the training budget for the last two years that we've run over 200 courses or 200 learning events. And we've also been keen to run, ask employees and managers what sorts of things that they would like to improve their professional development. So we're always taking that type of feedback. We've also run a number of HR courses specifically and we're looking to develop some more ones in future to help managers that are new to their role and perhaps haven't had those same type of shadowing opportunities that they might have had had everyone been in the office. Yes, thank you, Chairman. Thank you for that. That's really as appreciated and that information is good. The one thing I want to ask, and it's just gone off slightly on a tangent, if we put somebody on a substantial course, we always used to sign them up to if they left within a certain time period, they had to pay back the difference in the money. I can see nodding the feds gone on there already. Is that we're still doing that? Do we actually do it? That was the question I'm asking. Yes, I believe we do, yes. It would be something that would be agreed as part of the, if someone has applied to attend a more substantial course, we would. Okay, thank you. Councillor John Williams, please. Thank you, Chair. We'll just pick up on some of the points that have been raised so far. I mean, certainly on progression within the organisation, that's an area clearly that has come up, and as the Cabinet Member for Staffing, I will be looking, taking that forward, and we'll see whether or not we need to have a special review of that. On the point of Councillor Hall made and about retention of staff at the moment, I don't think we'll see a true picture until probably quarter three, because don't forget we have recently increased pay, which won't actually start to work through until the third quarter. So it'd be interesting to see, given that other councils that are in the joint negotiated in J&C have yet to settle, it'd be very interesting to see what effect our 2.5% pay increases had on retention. So I think until quarter three, we'll start seeing a true picture of the effect of COVID and other economic effects. And then the third point I'll just pick up, I went initially into public service, not for the money, but for the pension. And it's unfortunate that nowadays that's not true. You don't get a final salary pension anymore, even in public service. And I suspect that the benefit of having that is no longer there, and therefore we have to compete on salary or wages. And I think local government is going to have to wake up to the fact that we are in a competitive labour market and we don't want to go back to the situation of the 1970s and 80s, where local government was short of staff because it could not compete with the primary sector. Thank you. I don't think any questions there, but some comments I think tonight. Councillor Persil. Thank you. It's evident that staff are leaving the organisation partly because of lack of professional development opportunities, as well as limited career progression. I wondered what, if anything, is being done around utilising the apprenticeship levy for development opportunities for our existing staff. We are doing a great deal in terms of developing apprenticeship levy. I believe we've already run a full cohort of the management apprenticeship scheme for new and aspiring managers to complete, and that's something that we can then reclaim the money at a later date. We're also running a new cohort and looking at developing very specific new apprenticeships for different areas and different disciplines. So it's something that we are looking to expand because of how successful our first cohort has been. Thank you very much. Members, I don't think there's any further questions. So we've just been asked to note and comment on the report, and I believe we have done. Jonathan, thank you very much for your time today and your input. That's been very useful. Thank you very much. Thank you. Members, we'll move on to item five on the agenda, which is the quarter one report for sickness absence, and that begins on page 35. Lindsay, welcome. I believe you'll be presenting this today. Yes, I'm presenting this today on behalf of Chloe Whitehead. Chloe was the report author, but she's been unable to attend today due to a clash with another meeting. So yeah, I'm going to present the report on Chloe's behalf today. So just to confirm this report that covers the period from the 1st of April through to the 30th of June this year. It's the quarterly performance monitoring report. As it says in the report, now that we've successfully implemented our new HR payroll system, it's given us the option to break down the stress absences into three different areas. So it's stress, anxiety and depression, whether it's personal or work, or it could be work and personal. So that helps us better identify the causes of the stress-related absence. It does mean, however, that the reports are showing a decrease of 178 days attributed to stress and depression and mental health. Because that category is not being used anymore, however, there is only an actual decrease of 65.5 days. Then moving on to our performance indicator figure, for this quarter that is 2.03 days per FTE, and that's based on 584.7 FTE. That is an increase of 48.77% compared to quarter four, but it's also an increase of 37.44% compared to quarter one last year. That's shown on the graph in the report. Just to say, our absence figures have been steadily increasing since January this year, and they're now at the highest they have been in the last 12-month period. The reason for this, we feel, is probably as a result of lockdown gradually easing, and people are obviously going out more, and they're mixing more, and then they're more being subject to various bugs and viruses and things. Then, just in terms of the number of days, so in quarter one, the absence, the days lost for absence, sorry, was 1,186.5 days, which is an increase of 491 days. At the moment, we're not able to show the breakdown between long-term and short-term absences, but as our new HR system's been implemented, we are developing the reports, and we're hopeful that we will be able to report on this in the future. Then, in terms of numbers of employees who have had absence in the period, there was 132 employees had absences, however, that meant that 524 did not have any absences during the period. Then, thinking about what support is in place for absences related to stress, depression and mental health. During quarter one, the HR team have delivered various managerial masterclasses. One of this is entitled Managing Stress, and another one is around managing sickness. We continue to deliver these training sessions on a quarterly basis for all managers. Feedback from those that have attended has been very positive, so as I say, we're continuing to deliver these. When we are notified of a member of staff who is off with stress, depression and mental health, a member of the HR team works with the manager and the employee to put the relevant support in place. That can be either using one of the wellness action plans that we use, a stress identification tool. We consider whether a referral to our occupational health provider is necessary. The council also has two different types of council and we can refer staff to. One is through our employee assistance provider. That's telephone based counselling. Or if other employees would prefer to see somebody, it's video face to face at the moment, rather than in person, face to face, we have our Evolve counselling service that we can refer staff to. And then we also arrange welfare visits. Again, that may be virtually or it could be in person depending on the circumstances for all employees who are off with long term absence. And then in terms of support for musculoskeletal absences, all staff, whether working at home or in the office, complete a DSE assessment. And then also there is separate manual handling assessments for our manual workforce based at the depot. And again, if a member of staff is off with that nature of illness, we would refer them to our occupational health provider for advice and guidance on what they are able to do and what support we need to put in place. Just moving on through the report, there's a table which shows the summary of isolation and days lost to COVID. In terms of working days lost to COVID, all employees who reported isolation were based at the depot. It's likely that there could have been other staff that were isolating, but because we're working from home at the moment and if they're well enough, they were still able to work. But obviously our depot-based staff, because of the nature of their job, if they need to isolate, they're not able to work. So that, I would say, that's how that figure's there. And then again, in terms of support that we're providing, I've highlighted some of the things that we've been doing, and we're continuing to think of other things that we can do, how we can best support our managers and our employees while we're continuing to work from home. And yeah, that's kind of the highlights that I just wanted to cover from the report. So I don't know if anybody has any specific questions they'd like to ask. Yeah, thank you for that, Lindsay. If you mind holding on, I'm sure there will be some questions for you, and we do have one straight off the bat from Councillor Dawnton. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the report and for the presentation. I want to tie together the previous report and this one, because in the previous report it was mentioned that one of the benefits that staff feel is flexible working. And if we extend that to home working, the increase in home working, has there been any tracking of whether or not home working is actually lowering stress or increasing stress? And a sort of a bit of research really on the effect of home working. And I'm not aware if any tracking has been done, but that's a good point, and that's certainly something that we could look at moving forward. I think that would be really important, because it's going to be very different in different circumstances, and it might really be very useful to do a survey based on that. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Lindsay. Councillor Heather Williams, please. Thank you, Chair. Just one thing I want to clarify on page 54. It looks like there should be another graph at the bottom. I'm not sure if that's something we should have or shouldn't. So I'm just wondering if you can clarify. I don't know if you can see on the paper there's kind of like... I think it's a continuation from the page below. I appreciate you're looking on your iPad. Yeah, because I'm doing the page three things. Yeah, so we can just clarify what that random blue bit is I've got on the bottom of my screen, please. I think it's likely a reprographic error. Oh, right. OK, yeah. It makes sense if you've got the paper version. Right, Jo, thank you for that. And the other thing was, in looking at the impact, obviously, influenza and coughs and colds and things, obviously we're going to naturally see that going up just anyway. But there was a big flu vaccine rollout at the council last year. And I'm just wondering will that be happening again? Because I think that obviously could really help with those figures going forward. Given I've been in hospital twice with flu, it's not pleasant and is a long recovery as well afterwards. So hoping that's going to happen. Thank you. Yeah, actually that is already happening. We had our first flu clinic on Wednesday of this week and we've got another two planned in November. So that's, we're working with our occupational health provider and they are based in the marketing suite on the business park. And then staff, any member of staff that would like a flu vaccine can come and have that done. Councilor John Wiggins. Can I add that democratic services have been in touch with us? Someone called me last week to ask if I... So can you check with them, Edward, because you should have been contacted? I haven't, but then I do have slight email issues still ongoing. So it's a bit... You might have got my email, John, sometimes you get my emails. I haven't been contacted yet, maybe it's just a younger continuum. You and I are in the upper batch of a patient. Yeah, it was a phone call. I haven't had one. It's age-related, I think the oldest first. We'll leave that one there. We'll wait for our call, Henry. There has to be some benefit from growing older. Councillor Hill, please. Thank you, Chairman. Well, I think it would be fair to say that we've never used so much red ink with regards to this report, but then again we've been through an unprecedented time and we just can't compare these stats to anything else we've ever done. So, you know, we just got to accept them and move on, really. We've got to be fair about this. The only quick question I want to ask is, obviously some staff can work flexible times, and that's great and I'm a big fan of it, but some staff, it's impossible for them to work flexible times. How do we try and help those staff along? And I'm going to give the Refuge Collectors, it's been the obvious example, I'm thinking up the top of my head, but I'm sure there's many others. What can we do to show them that we're trying to help them as well as those who've got flexible time and work in? Thank you, Chairman. Thank you, Lindsay. Yeah, I mean, obviously as you say, we can't do the same kind of flexible working for our Refuge staff. However, there are some members of that workforce that work in time really suits them. They really like starting early in the day and then working at six and finishing at two, for example, if they may have children in school or whatever. So that is actually something that they are comfortable with. In terms of what we've got in place at the moment, off the top of my head, I can't think of anything specific, but I do know that the team managers and the operation managers at the depot are in regular contact with the Refuge staff that if they did have a need to leave early one day or something, where they can, they will agree that with them if they had a medical appointment or something like that. So they would kind of work that with their manager. But yeah, it is something that is difficult because of the nature of the role that they carry out. Yeah, please. That's fine, that's excellent.  I mean, I have to bow to the officer's report here, but that's difficult. But in fact, we kept in mind for those members of staff that unfortunately can't do things for time, then we can look at something for them as well. I don't know what, but that would be great. But thank you. Thank you, councillor. Members, I don't think so. John Williams, please. Yes, thank you, Chair. Just one quick point. On page 37 of the agenda pact, there's a table which shows total days lost to stress, depression and mental health. And it will appear, and I can understand why this has happened, that all days lost up until the first quarter of this year were down to stress, depression and mental health. Obviously, that's not correct. So I suspect that we should have had a different colour for those given that we can't break them down because we can't pair with previous years. But it would suggest that up until the first quarter, because it's the same magenta colour that everything was stress, depression and mental health until then. That's showing that previously, it was grouped as stress, depression and mental health. Whereas now, we can break it down into whether that is personal or work or work and personal. So that's why it looks different in quarter one for this year. Essentially, we've just started asking what the cause of the stress is. I think it needs to make, that's just a note on another paragraph, maybe, to explain that. That can be clarified for the next report. Okay, yeah, no problem. Thank you very much. Members, I think that's all the questions we had. So Lindsay, again, thank you very much for the report. Thanks for standing in for Chloe. We appreciate your time and your input. Thank you. Members, we're on to agenda item six now, which is an update on the disability confident task and finish group. But if you may have seen the email that Patrick Ray kindly sent round from councillor Cheung Johnson, who heads up the task and finish group, giving us a brief update. I'm not proposing to run through it all, but one thing she did ask for was whether this committee would like to have a discussion around whether the task and finish group needs to continue, given the fact we now achieve level two in the disability confidence scheme. So I suppose that's something for us to discuss and make a recommendation on today. Councillor Hill. Chairman, as much as I would like to discuss and make a recommendation, I think we need to really look at what is level one and two and what is level three for and about. My experience in the past has had level one and two on all things, on all different things in the team, and normally quite easy and quite administratively. And after that it gets a little bit more challenging, and that's where the real difficulties and the real impact we can have on the different organisations and different people who use our facilities can make a bigger impact on helping them. So I would ask politely Chairman if we could not make a decision today, but rather have a small paper with just what is one and two and what is three and four. So we can actually look and see then, yes. If it's just out of proportion for us, then the answers are no, but if it's small again, small increments, then we can say yes. The paper comes to the next meeting just describing what needs to be achieved to reach level three, and if that realistic, then we can have a discussion around realistic whether we think that's possible or not. I would prefer that. As Chair, I'm content with that. Members, is that a good way forward, do we think? I'm seeing nods, so Councillor Hill, thank you very much. Patrick, we've got that to the next meeting's agenda. That would be useful. Members, I think we've reached the end of the meeting. Just to note the date of the next meeting, it's the 14th of January, so pretty one of the first committee meetings of the new year. Again, I thank everyone for their time, and us officers, members alike. Thank you very much, and see you all in January. Thank you Chairman.