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.
Minutes:
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 also help to develop these local links.
· Cllr Connor expressed concern that, according to a report recently provided to the Corporate Committee, 11 out of the 24 audits completed in 2021/22 had sub-standard assurance levels including in important areas such as safeguarding and cybersecurity. Cllr Ahmet said that this question would require a written response from the Chief Executive. (ACTION)
· Cllr White queried what practical differences would result from the place-making approach as opposed to the previous emphasis on regeneration. Cllr Ahmet said that it was about an approach for a whole area and the overall offer for people who already live there, rather than the past approach which had sometimes been experienced as regenerating an individual estate and bringing new people in.
· Asked by Cllr Gunes about neighbourhood models for community health provision, Beverley Tarka, Director for Adults, Health and Communities, explained that the Council was working with neighbouring Boroughs in North Central London on the implementation of integrated care systems. This included an approach based on services working together in neighbourhoods and localities instead of the old approach of working in silos. Building trust and strong relationships with local communities were key and so services being visible and providing a health and social care offer in local neighbourhoods was an important part of this. She added that the overall approach would require organisation-wide culture which would take time.
· Asked by Cllr Simmons-Safo about long delays for assessments for children with special educational needs (SEN), which she said had worsened since the pandemic, Cllr Ahmet agreed that there needed to be some analysis done about the current scale of assessment delays and suggested the involvement of both Children’s Services and the Children & Young People’s Scrutiny Panel in exploring this further.
· Lourdes Keever reported on a presentation about tackling inequalities from Tower Hamlets Council made to a Children & Young People’s scrutiny panel evidence session on child poverty earlier in the year. This had involved the implementation of an integrated, holistic programme to identify inequalities and determining appropriate interventions. However, she understood that the costs of implementation were considered to make this difficult to replicate in Haringey. Cllr Ahmet said that she wasn’t familiar with this particular programme but that much of the work of the Council was focused on reducing inequalities, citing the locality work and the role of the public health team as examples. Beverley Tarka added that a lot of work was conducted in Haringey to identify areas of deprivation and health inequalities and there was a variety of approaches used to address these. However, the Council was always open to learning and she would be happy for her team to study this programme. It was agreed that details of the presentation/report would be circulated for information. (ACTION)
· Yvonne Denny raised the issue of repairs in the east of the Borough including the poor condition of a residents’ room in Seven Sisters which had no running water and damage to front doors of some residential properties. She said that it could be difficult to get the Council to carry out repairs and observed that this was an example of problems with the basics as had previously been discussed earlier in the meeting. Cllr Simmons-Safo and Cllr Bevan offered to connect Yvonne Denny to the local Ward Councillors and the Cabinet Member for Housing and suggested that she provide details to them after the meeting. (ACTION)
· Cllr White raised concerns about responsibility for transport issues which he said was divided between two different Cabinet Members and two different Directorates making it overall strategic control difficult. Cllr Ahmet responded that Cllr Mike Hakata had overall Cabinet responsibility for transport issues so there was not a problem in her view. He also had responsibility for strategic environment issues including LTNs while Cllr Chandwani had responsibility for the operational side of this. Cllr Ahmet added that many areas of policy were interconnected and often required Cabinet Members and officers to work closely together. However, she encouraged Members to raise with her any specific areas where the arrangements seemed to be confusing.