The deadline for questions to be submitted to the Monitoring Officer is 23 December 2020.
Minutes:
Question from Councillor L-J Evans
When Cabinet considered the Climate Action Report there was no mention of the Economic Impact Assessment and the Environmental Impact Assessment for the 2019 Bournemouth Air Festival. Why wasn’t this included and a question added to the Public Consultation as to whether or not our residents want it to continue.
Response from Cllr Mike Greene, Cabinet Member for Transport and Sustainability
The paper considered by Cabinet was about reinforcing this Council’s twin objectives to make its own activities Carbon-neutral by 2030 and to help ensure the whole BCP Area is Carbon-neutral by 2050 at the latest. As such it would not contain Economic or Environmental Impact Assessments of individual events. Nor were any asked for during the extensive discussions about the paper held by the Overview and Scrutiny Board.
The paper also explains how Carbon emissions are grouped into three classes or “Scopes”. Those associated with the Air Festival are mostly contained within Scope 3, which we expect to be studied in future years.
The Bournemouth Air Festival is enjoyed by more than a million people over four days and has brought £30 million of business annually to BCP.
In light of what has happened during COVID, I believe it would be misleading to include a question which suggests we would consider removing our local tourism industry's star attraction at this time.
As a supplementary question Councillor Evans asked the Portfolio Holder why the public was not allowed to give their views on this issue. Councillor Greene reported that of course the public were able to have an opinion on this. He explained the difference in approach taken by the current administration in the fight against climate change by taking residents with them.
Question from Councillor Mark Howell
Extensive consultation by ward councillors regarding the active travel measures introduced in Poole Old Town over the summer has revealed that one of the major concerns of local businesses is the poor cleanliness levels and safety issues associated with local multi-storey car parks, particularly Quay Visitors. Customers have expressed their concerns about these issues and said that they would deter them from returning to the area. A senior council officer has confirmed that council employees responsible for maintaining and cleaning the car parks feel unsafe when carrying out their duties due to the presence of people using the car parks to sleep, take drugs or carry on other activities that are not appropriate for a car park. Do the community safety and transport portfolio holders accept that these concerns are valid and what do they propose to do to upgrade the Quay Visitors and Hill Street car parks to a standard appropriate for a premium tourist area, which I hope they agree Poole Old Town should be marketed as by the Council.
Response from Councillor May Haines, Portfolio Holder for Community Safety
The Council is aware that homeless people do use the MSCPs for shelter and use it as an opportunity for the outreach services to be able to engage with the homeless, assess all their needs including health, and try to find permanent solutions moving them into housing rather than to keep treating the symptom. This approach continues with closer partnership working.
The Civil Enforcement Officers (CEOs) undertake morning inspections of all Poole MSCPs and ask any rough sleepers still in situ to collect their belongings and leave the car parks, any that become abusive or refuse to move are reported to the police. We have worked with the police for many years and find them supportive but appreciate that their response times will depend on the number of available officers, and higher priority incidents.
Patrols are then undertaken during the day to try and deter and remove persons begging in the car parks and any other groups causing a nuisance or anti-social behaviour reporting instances to the car park control room who log each reported occurrence and report to the police as required.
Although all activities undertaken by the enforcement team have been risk assessed by trained competent members of the supervisory team it should be acknowledged that dealing with these types of situations and behaviour can impact on our own staff’s mental health and wellbeing and we as an employer have a responsibility, in addition to the support services available, to provide training to give them the skills to undertake their duties safely as detailed below.
· Ongoing - all staff undertake conflict management training, providing them with the skills they need to recognise the early signs of aggression, how to defuse the situation and consider their own health and safety.
· 2014 EDAS Essential Drugs and Alcohol Services facilitate drug awareness training for all CEOs.
· 2016 All Poole CEOs undertake Emergency First Aid course.
· 2017 Whilst responding to a report of anti-social behaviour in Quay Visitors MSCP a member of the supervisor team discovered one of the known drug users unresponsive in the stairwell called an ambulance and continued to perform CPR until the first responders arrived saving the person’s life.
· 2019 As drug use and homeless people can often have complicated conditions that impact on their mental health, all Poole CEOs attend a one day course facilitated by the NHS on Mental Health awareness, to help them understand some of the behaviours and needs of the people they encounter in the car parks.
· 2019 Supervisors and Engineers have been trained and equipped to deal with the removal of sharps and their disposal.
· 2020 Introduction of body worn CCTV cameras to deter aggressive behaviour towards lone workers and record evidence for use in potential prosecutions.
Parking Services understand that homelessness and antisocial behaviour are complicated issues, affecting many areas of the community and as such have always sought to develop partnerships with internal colleagues such as Safer Communities, Street Scene, Social Services and external organisations such as the Police, Dolphin Centre, St Mungo’s outreach workers and the NHS, that has led to joint operations and initiatives as detailed below.
· 2007 Parking Services introduce a new procedure for the removal of goods from car parks to allow us to legally remove belongings left by homeless sleepers using TORT law specifically, the Interference With Goods Act 1977 Section12 enabling us to keep fire exits and stairwells clear and improving the appearance of the car park.
· 2015 Worked with Safer Communities team undertaking joint visits to issue warning letters to persons repeatedly not complying with requests.
· 2015 Meeting with the Dolphin Centre management to develop a more productive and supportive response to each other’s common issues.
· 2017 Operation Doorway a joint operation involving Dorset Police, the immigration Service, Safer Communities and Parking Services.
· 2017 Following on from a case meeting we met with St Mungo’s outreach team to discuss car park issues and how they might be able to assist.
· 2018 MASH (BCP Multi Agency Safeguarding Hub) approached Parking Services to assist with locating vulnerable people including a pregnant heroin addict known to sometimes be a rough sleeper in our car parks whose baby was due and had gone missing.
· 2020 Agreement with Legal and general to allow their cleaning and security to assist in Shoppers 1&2 and Dolphin car park stairwells.
· 2020 Community Safety Accreditation Scheme has been introduced in Poole. Parking Services have been working with them to address issue of begging and antisocial behaviour including drug abuse in MSCP.
The car park cleansing team are employed and managed by Environmental Services to date we have not had any reports of concerns raised for their staff’s safety and would expect ES to have risk assessed their teams duties.
To make the car parks inaccessible to pedestrians and vehicles overnight could be achieved but would cost a significant amount to install and maintain. With regard to future large-scale decisions regarding the physical nature of the Car Parks, it would be expected that these decisions would come out of strategic workstreams as part of Poole Town Centre Generation work and take account of all needs relating to them.
We are committed as a Council to creating a cleaner area that we are proud of.
Councillor Howell indicated that he was surprised that the Council was using the MSCPs as a holding area for rough sleepers. He referred to the comment that Cllr Haines had made that improving and securing the car parks was expensive and asked if the detail of the analysis and the costs could be released to Councillors so they could make their own judgement. Councillor Haines emphasised that the comment that car parks were being used as holding areas for rough sleepers was incorrect, but it was known that rough sleepers used multistorey car parks. The Portfolio Holder confirmed that she would work with officers to obtain the information requested on the costs and analysis of improving car parks and circulated to all Councillors. (Note this information has now been circulated to all Councillors).
Question from Councillor George Farquhar
What time frame should any Member expect to receive a reply (or acknowledgment) to a question made of Cabinet Plus Executive members in their Portfolio roles?
Response from Councillor Drew Mellor, Leader of the Council
There are many different ways replies can be given to correspondence, so I don’t think it is for me to prescribe a timeframe. Respectful due consideration should however certainly be given to all correspondence.
Councillor Farquhar asked what would be determined as respectful time to respond and referred to a response provided by the previous Leader and the expectation of swift responses. Councillor Mellor referred to his above response.
Question from Councillor Andy Hadley
BCP Council has expressed a desire and an intent to be a “Smart place, creating digital solutions to improve the lives of our residents, the vibrancy of our communities and the prospects of our local businesses”.
I understand that our traffic-light partner holds huge volumes of data about how our junctions are being used, and this should provide accurate and historic flows of traffic across their sensors, including traffic volumes, red light jumping, pedestrian requests to cross, and perhaps even the instances of pedestrians giving up and crossing in gaps. Reliably for detecting bikes is I understand more difficult, and the manual traffic counts are infrequent and costly.
Given the impact of Covid-19 on travel, it seems inappropriate to continue to use historic models that may now prove just history if our working and living mobility is permanently changed. Can the relevant portfolio-holder(s) please advise:
a) Rather than relying on historic traffic modelling, how we can maximise use of this rich source of information to monitor and predict traffic flows?
b) Is this information being routinely collated with Air Quality, health indicators and other available datasets, and mapped?
c) How can we ensure that the existing and innovative Smart Place information is presented and available for public access, both to assure transparency, and to encourage innovation and analysis by schools, university students, interested members of the public and businesses?
Response from Councillor Mike Greene, Portfolio Holder for Transport and Sustainability
The Covid crisis, with intermittent lockdowns and changing work patterns, has inevitably meant traffic flow on the BCP network has not been following normal patterns. At times it has been up to 70% lower than usual although in the period before Christmas traffic volumes increased to close to pre-Covid levels in some areas. This wide range backs up my personal belief that it is too early to jump to conclusions about how dramatic any permanent shift to lower traffic demand will be.
Much data does indeed exist through automatic onsite monitoring using fixed and mobile traffic counters, but as Cllr Hadley suggests, this can be supplemented. For example, bluetooth technology has been installed on some traffic signals and this can be used to measure journey times. Connected urban traffic control systems also enable the routine collection of traffic flow data and our significant CCTV network can monitor traffic conditions. Congestion data is available through Google mapping and other sources, and this data can be analysed both live and retrospectively using various proprietary software tools. MOVA and SCOOT traffic signal technologies are also used to collect live traffic flow data and automatically adjust and optimise traffic flows at many of our busy traffic junctions on a continuous basis.
Additionally, the Council is currently involved in a data trial with our private sector partner, Vivacity as part of a DfT funded national trial. Sensors are currently placed on Castle Lane East between Cooper Dean and Iford Roundabout, plus two sites on Castle Lane West near the East Way junction. Artificial Intelligence algorithms can interrogate this data in real time and use it to predict increased congestion and adjust signal timings to prevent or mitigate congestion before it arises. Evidence suggests that in practice this means that network capacity could be increased by as much as 20%.
The Council collects Air Quality data from a network of dispersion tubes across the BCP area, and these are monitored carefully. In most cases the locations have been chosen to correlate with areas of high volume traffic so I expect that overlaying is routine. However, I have not yet been able to determine how rigorously these datasets are correlated with specific traffic datasets. Once I have this information, I will share it with Cllr Hadley. As Cllr Hadley is aware, investigation is ongoing into the use of other sensors too.
The Council is just starting to develop its Smart Place programme and the current focus is primarily on building minor 5G and gigabit fibre networks with very little data being gathered to date. This will change significantly as the programme is developed and grows, increasing the need to manage data carefully. This means striking the right balance: sharing data with the public and third parties for wider benefit and innovation, whilst ensuring individuals’ and infrastructure data is protected from any hostile threats. The Council is now working closely with the Centre for Protection of National Infrastructure and the British Standards Institution to develop a comprehensive Smart Place data governance framework that aims to get this balance right. By working with these agencies, it is hoped that our Smart Place data governance framework will become a blueprint for councils across the country.
It is also important to emphasise that whilst making the most efficient use of the current road network information-gathering assets, changing patterns of working and behaviour present real opportunities for lifestyle alterations. The Council is working hard to deliver further unprecedented improvements to sustainable travel facilities and the congestion, environmental and health benefits that those modes can help bring.
Councillor Hadley referred to the access to relevant data and asked for a commitment to make data available to the public. Councillor Mike Greene indicated that he partially shared that view but emphasised that there was a balance on freeing up data and data protection and that the Council was working with the relevant agencies on this issue.
Question from Councillor Lisa Lewis
In addition to the £50K planned to be spent on the initial bid, what are the total upfront costs of preparing our local area for freeport status expected to be?
Response from Councillor Philip Broadhead, Portfolio Holder for Regeneration, Economy and Strategic Planning and Deputy Leader of the Council
At this stage, the only additional costs are to pay for Cushman and Wakefield to develop and submit our proposal into Government’s process. Everything else is being covered as Business as Usual. The Council is pleased to provide this initial seed funding to enable the development of our proposal.
This stage is the first gateway only. If our proposal is successful in getting through this gateway, further work will be required to move through future gateways in the process which will include developing an outline business case (as outlined in the Government’s guidance). There will be costs associated with this however these have not yet been detailed, as it is dependent on reaching the next stage. We are working in partnership with several organisations and would expect that any preparatory costs would be shared between us.
Councillor Lewis asked if preparations for freeport status would require substantial additional investment in infrastructure such as roads including
refurbishment and expansion, security measures and a more substantial business case study after the initial bid. The Portfolio Holder reported that currently the Council was in the expression of interest stage. He reported at the O&S Board that the Council would be putting forward a bid for a smart freeport and would be looking at digital infrastructure rather than physical infrastructure. Councillors were advised that if the Council was successful the Government was likely to issue further funding.
Question from Councillor Lewis Allison
Do you have any initial projections for how much net economic gain or the number of jobs the freeport will to bring to the local economy?
Response from Councillor Philip Broadhead, Portfolio Holder for Regeneration, Economy and Strategic Planning and Deputy Leader of the Council
The full proposal for a BCP Freeport is currently in development, so this detail is not currently available. The first step, and the one we are considering at this stage at Cabinet, is for us to put forward an Expression of Interest, with a detailed business case to follow if we are successful in the first round.
Cushman and Wakefield, who are preparing our bid along with our key partners, will be describing the key target sectors and estimating the employment impacts (accepting that net additionality is based on assumptions) as part of that proposal.
Question from Councillor George Farquhar
Access Dorset estimates there are 80,000 residents of BCP with accessibility needs.
South Western Railway as the Train Operating Company has identified they had miscalculated the budget for the installation and commissioning of two passenger lifts at Pokesdown for Boscombe Station in the Ward I represent.
This is a shortfall of approximately 50% of the actual Contractual requirement in the Franchise Agreement circa £1.6million.
SWR are in an Emergency Measures Agreement which will conclude on the 31st March 2021. At that time SWR will no longer exist in their present form.
Instead it is anticipated the Government will go to a Direct Award agreement and the £1.6m in SWR budget will be lost.
Being aware of this risk, SWR have approached the Council to price match their budget shortfall to submit to the Department For Transport in an effort to secure agreement to install the lifts using the budget they have but cannot unlock due to the EMA.
What documented efforts has the Portfolio Holder taken to secure such funding from the Council or elsewhere?
Response from Councillor Mike Greene, Portfolio Holder for Transport and Sustainability
Following a long campaign led by Cllr Andy Jones, Ben Smith, who submitted a public question to this Council meeting and the Pokesdown Community Forum, I was delighted to have been part of ensuring a commitment to introduce lifts at Pokesdown Station was included within the franchise agreement which SWR won.
Both in my time as the responsible portfolio holder at Bournemouth Borough Council and in my short time holding that role within BCP Council, I have urged SWR to honour the commitment they made. It was their responsibility to provide the lifts by 2019 and, in my opinion, it is quite disgraceful that they won the franchise on that basis but have tried repeatedly to walk away from it.
Cllr Farquhar was at the same meeting as I was on November 19th when I first heard SWR’s suggestion that £1.6 million which they had allocated to the project might be “lost” if not spent before the Emergency Measures Agreement (EMA) comes to an end. For SWR, or indeed the Member asking this question, to believe the Council would be able to find an equal or greater amount to top-up SWR’s funds could at best be considered naive. A more cynical observer might even see it as a diversionary tactic to push the problem back to a time when SWR are no longer the Train Operating Company. At that same meeting SWR confirmed too that the EMA means any diversion of the allocated £1.6m to any other project would be subject to consent by DfT, which would have only limited likelihood of success. The consensus emerging from that meeting was that SWR should look to provide at least one of the two lifts in the hope that the second could be provided at a later date.
I will continue to press SWR to honour their commitment to provide the lifts at Pokesdown Station and believe that obligation should be carried over to whichever Department or business takes on the Train Operating Company role after the EMA comes to an end.
At the same time, discussions are continuing with DfT, aided particularly by the Member of Parliament for Bournemouth East.
Councillor Farquhar asked as a supplementary question what documented efforts had the Portfolio Holder taken to secure funding from the Council or elsewhere – indicating the he would exercise his right under Article 2 paragraph 5.1 of the Constitution to access documents to discharge his function as a Councillor. Councillor Greene referred to his response and reported that there were various discussions going on with SWR and Councillor Farquhar had been present for some of them. The most important point was to note that any discussions needed to involve not just SWR but the Department for Transport as well and that negotiations were likely to be both difficult and nuanced and that was the correct way of going about it including involving the MP.
Question from Councillor Lewis Allison
What is the expected impact on BCP Council income, especially with regards to collecting local business rates?
Response from Councillor Philip Broadhead, Portfolio Holder for Regeneration, Economy and Strategic Planning and Deputy Leader of the Council
The full impact on the council income is still to be established and would be part of the development of an outline business case, if our proposal makes it through the first gateway. However, one of the potential incentives for businesses in a Freeport Area is 100% Business Rate relief on certain sites for 5 years. The Government guidance as part of the application process says that Local Authorities will be compensated for this by Government. So, businesses would benefit, but locally we would not lose out financially.
Furthermore, there is the possibility for local retention of Business Rates, half of which is currently passported through to national government. This would of course be reinvested locally.
Finally, any increase in economic development in a local authority area naturally generates income to help provide services. The better the local economy, the more taxes (including council tax etc) are collected.
The freeport bid is one of many examples we are currently working on to inject positivity, opportunity and growth into the various parts of our local economy. If we are to bounce back from the COVID crisis, we should do more than just bounce back to the same position. We should use all the opportunities we can to leapfrog our area into an even better position.
Councillor Broadhead, in response to a question on when full details would be available, reported that if successful following the first stage that the next stage would be to progress to the full business case and he would be looking for as much support as possible to inject the detail into the project.