Issue - meetings

To receive a verbal update from the Leader of the Council on her priorities for the forthcoming year followed by a question and answer session.

Cllr Peray Ahmet, Leader of the Council, provided a summary of the key priorities for the Council’s new administration. She emphasised the need to get the basic functions of the Council to work well and to be responsive and effective. Examples of this included customer services, housing repairs, parking permits, bin collections and potholes.

In terms of themes, Cllr Ahmet highlighted co-production and engagement across services and specific projects as a central point of the Council’s administration. This would require a culture change in the organisation and the Council’s relationship with residents to enable deeper engagement, including with communities that are seldom heard.

Cllr Ahmet referred to the following specific priority areas:

·         Early years – including the need to improve health visiting.

·         Children & young people – including re-establishing a Haringey Youth Council and creating more apprenticeships.

·         Place-making – this involved creating a sense of place and improving those spaces. Improving infrastructure, health provision and building Haringey as a cultural destination would all be a part of this. 

·         Climate change – there was a need to be more ambitious with this agenda including through the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) which would be rolled out in August with exemptions for those who were most adversely affected. There would also be further work to insulate Council homes, to plant more trees and to co-design community gardens.

Cllr Ahmet then responded to questions from the Committee:

·         Cllr Connor asked what kind of governance structure would be put in place to support the Council’s co-production work and provide a set of principles that would be visible to residents. Cllr Ahmet said that there were pockets of good practice already and that the aim would be to incorporate this into work across the Council. She said that this would be as much about organisational culture change as about what could be written in a document. Communication channels such as social media would be needed to improve awareness of co-production with residents and to ensure that conversations with residents happened before projects/services were designed.

·         Asked by Cllr White for further details on how seldom heard communities would be engaged with, Cllr Ahmet said that access, including language barriers, was a key issue and so practical measures to overcome such barriers were needed as part of an overall community development approach. Maintaining relationships with two-way conversations on a long-term basis was also important and this could be supported through mechanisms such as a Youth Council. She added that getting the basics right with services, as mentioned earlier, also had a role in maintaining good relationships with local communities.

·         Cllr Simmons-Safo commented that links with key trusted influencers could be an effective way of building relationships with hard-to-reach communities and asked how the Council intended to do this. Cllr Ahmet agreed and said that this was an important part of knowing your local community and their needs. There was a piece of work ongoing which would help to build understanding of this while the new locality approach would  ...  view the full minutes text for item 8