Agenda item

(Director of Governance) to consider the attached report.

The Director of Neighbourhoods, Mr Macnab introduced the Quarter 2 update on the Key Performance Indicators specific to this Select Committee. The Committee went on to review each indicator that looked to be in trouble and to question any inconsistencies that they came across.

Councillor Bassett pointed out that the percentages in paragraphs 6 and 7 of the report did not add up to 100%.

NEI002 – what % of all household waste was sent to be recycled, reused or composted? -  Councillor Bassett asked if we were still seeing fallout from this year’s earlier collection problems affecting our recycling figures. Mr Durrani, Assistant Director (Technical Services), said that even if a collection was missed they would still go back and collect it later. This slowdown was part of a general county wide picture emerging. The general public were getting recycling apathy; also a lot of our recycling was green waste and this was the wrong time of the year for this. It was noted that plans to collect food waste from local schools would be still classed as household waste.

Councillor Lea asked if our move to 4 day collections had made any impact on fly-tipping. She was told that no difference had been detected.

NEI004 – what % of our district had unacceptable levels of detritus (dust, mud, stones rotted leaves, glass, plastic etc.)? – Councillor Neville asked if there were any indications that the actions on the improvement plan were beginning to work. Mr Durrani replied that they checked over 900 sections to arrive at a figure, they were looking for overall improvement and not focusing on any one section. They inspected impartially, but proving any improvement was difficult. They were now getting to the stage where Biffa could be hit by the financial penalties that were put in the contract. These were big enough to make the company take notice. They were in for the full 10 years of the contract and this should focus them.

Councillor Bassett asked how it related to the work Essex Highways did in clearing drains from leaves, mud and dirt. Mr Durrani said that this was particularly relevant in rural areas and was an issue, but our monitoring was very strict.

NEI010 – What was the net increase or decrease in the number of homes in the district? – the construction rate of new homes is generally outside the control of EFDC. Councillor Patel again asked that the wording for the corrective action be looked at as it appeared that we were encouraging more building of dwelling by grant planning permission without any deeper consideration.

Councillor Waller asked about the number of dwellings in applications granted and therefore in in the pipeline but had not yet been built. Mr Bean, the Planning Policy Manager, said that he would find out and put it in the minutes (see below).

Subsequent to this it was reported that:

·         In the period from April 2011 to end June 2015 there were 953 net new dwellings.

·         Planning permission exists for 918 (net) as of yet uncompleted dwelling units. However for official five year housing supply purposes, we are required to apply a 10% non build rate, and exclude anything likely to be completed within this monitoring year. When these factors are applied, our official five year housing supply figure is 747. Permissions granted since 1st April this year have not yet been included in our monitoring.

NEI011 – What % of the rent we were due to be paid for our commercial premises was not paid? – Councillor Patel asked if we had a KPI for the recreational premises we had. He was told that we had very few premises of this kind and they generated very little money compared to the commercial premises.

Councillor Bassett questioned if the target of 3% was realistic and was told that this should be considered at the end of the year when next year’s targets were being considered.