Issue - meetings

Report of the Director - Finance and Corporate Services

The Chair of Communities Scrutiny Group presented the scrutiny request for The health of our town and village centres.

The Chairman agreed that West Bridgford Central Avenue be included as part of the scrutiny item.

The Group agreed for this item to be taken forward in the scrutiny work programme.

The Chair of Communities Scrutiny Group and the Chair of Growth and Development Scrutiny Group presented the Housing association customer service and maintenance request on behalf of Councillors Parekh, Brown and Upton.     

The Service Manager for Corporate Services said that Officer feedback on this scrutiny request was to ask for more clarity about what outcomes Members would wish to achieve from the scrutiny work, with the suggestion that Members identifying the main problems and what the scrutiny hoped to achieve would be beneficial to focus work. She said that as there were many housing providers in the Borough it would not be possible to invite them all to attend a meeting and as such Members may wish to highlight specific ones that they were having issues with or perhaps specify if they would wish to invite the largest ones. She suggested that clarification of objectives would be helpful and that discussing requests with Officers before submitting them also helped to focus what the scrutiny process could achieve.

The Chair of Communities Scrutiny Group explained that when Councillors were approached by residents with problems with their housing it could be difficult for Councillors to make contact with the housing providers and they were often frustrated about how to best help them. The Chair of Growth and Development Scrutiny Group said that residents expected Councillors to be able to influence outcomes but that they often felt that there weren’t able to do anything and wanted to understand how they could help residents and address their issues.

The Chairman said that the Council had a duty of care to its residents and that as the Council had appointed housing associations to provide social housing, Councillors needed to be able to scrutinise the system. She suggested that Councillors could assess what the main issues were and which providers they had most issues with and then filter who to invite to attend a meeting. She suggested contacting the Director for Neighbourhoods to help clarify the function of the scrutiny request.

The Service Manager for Corporate Services confirmed that contact details for the Borough’s housing providers were available on the Councillors Portal and agreed to circulate a link to the Group and include it in Councillors Connections.

Members of the Group asked if it would be possible to have information on which housing providers were working in which areas and the Service Manager for Corporate Services said that she would take this request back to Officers.

The Chair of Communities Scrutiny Group presented the scrutiny request for Playgrounds built on new developments. He said that whilst he had received feedback from Officers that this information may be covered through existing documents such as the Design Guide,  ...  view the full minutes text for item 17