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Agenda and minutes

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Contact: Ola Adeoye  020 7527 044

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Items
No. Item

278.

Apologies for Absence

Additional documents:

Minutes:

Apologies were received from Councillor Gantly for lateness

279.

Declaration of Substitute Members pdf icon PDF 212 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

There were no declarations of substitute members

280.

Declarations of Interests

If you have a Disclosable Pecuniary Interest* in an item of business:

§  if it is not yet on the council’s register, you must declare both the existence and details of it at the start of the meeting or when it becomes apparent;

§  you may choose to declare a Disclosable Pecuniary Interest that is already in the register in the interests of openness and transparency. 

In both the above cases, you must leave the room without participating in discussion of the item.

 

If you have a personal interest in an item of business and you intend to speak or vote on the item you must declare both the existence and details of it at the start of the meeting or when it becomes apparent but you may participate in the discussion and vote on the item.

 

*(a)   Employment, etc - Any employment, office, trade, profession or vocation carried on for profit or gain.

(b) Sponsorship - Any payment or other financial benefit in respect of your expenses in carrying out duties as a member, or of your election; including from a trade union.

(c) Contracts - Any current contract for goods, services or works, between you or your partner (or a body in which one of you has a beneficial interest) and the council.

(d) Land - Any beneficial interest in land which is within the council’s area.

(e) Licences- Any licence to occupy land in the council’s area for a month or longer.

(f) Corporate tenancies - Any tenancy between the council and a body in which you or your partner have a beneficial interest.

 (g) Securities - Any beneficial interest in securities of a body which has a place of business or land in the council’s area, if the total nominal value of the securities exceeds £25,000 or one hundredth of the total issued share capital of that body or of any one class of its issued share capital. 

 

This applies to all members present at the meeting.

 

 

Additional documents:

Minutes:

There were no declarations of interest

281.

Minutes of Previous Meeting pdf icon PDF 78 KB

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Minutes:

 

RESOLVED:

That the minutes of the meeting held on 28 June 2021 be confirmed as an accurate record of proceedings and the Chair be authorised to sign them

282.

Chair's Report

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Minutes:

The Chair stated that he would be attending the Environment and Regeneration Scrutiny Committee on 15 July to consider the Net Zero Carbon 2030 presentation. He stated that as social distancing guidelines were still in place any Members who also wished to attend should contact the Clerk, however the meeting was being webcast if Members wished to view the meeting in that way

283.

Order of Business

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Minutes:

The Chair stated that the order of business would be – Communal Heating – item B2, followed by item B1 – Partners PFI presentations and lastly item B3 Work Programme

284.

Public Questions

For members of the public to ask questions relating to any subject on the meeting agenda under Procedure Rule 70.5. Alternatively, the Chair may opt to accept questions from the public during the discussion on each agenda item.

 

Additional documents:

Minutes:

The Chair stated that as the meeting was being webcast and because of COVID restrictions still being in place any members of the public with questions should notify these to the Clerk following the meeting for response

285.

Scrutiny Review - Partners Improvement ( HR and Digital Services) pdf icon PDF 995 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

Jon Cumming, Director of Digital Services was present for discussion of this item and made a presentation to the Committee. Rob Willis, Law and Governance was also present, and made a presentation to the Committee

 

During consideration of the presentation the following main points were made –

 

Digital Services

 

·         Aim of the project is to migrate the records and data from Partner organisations into the equivalent systems in LBI by 4 April 2022 – United Living for Gas, Rydon for repairs, Hyde for management of service charges

·         Provision for incoming staff with Islington IT equipment

·         It is important to ensure the systems accommodate the growth in transactions with no loss of performance. The key PFI contract end date is the 4 April 2022 but need to factor in other significant dates and allow for a long run up

·         Digital services recognises the importance of this project to the Council, the PFI2 partners and particularly residents. Dedicated resource in the form of a project manager and a data analyst has been provided. In addition technical specialists will be working with the vendor community to ensure a successful transition

·         Members were advised of the Data migration conceptual plan timeline and the high level summary of data matching activity

·         A number of challenges were highlighted, the issue of time drift where data captured by Partners has drifted from LBI roots over 15 years. Contractual end terms – PFI2 contract requirements for data are dated and do not include enforceable standards for repatriation. Partners are working with Digital Services to deliver a good standard of data transfer

·         Digital Services is confident that the system data will be in place by time of transition. There are concerns about how some scanned documents within the repairs system are stored and how easily they can be migrated into Council IT systems, and linked to the right property. Members were advised that although these are mainly historic documents, which should not affect ongoing repairs, it would be useful to still track back on specific property issues. Will need to split scanned documents with tenancy files to support information and storage and access standards. This restructuring will require manual work over some time

·         Meeting was informed of the progress so far, that it has successfully engaged key internal and external stakeholders and communicated key data items and documents identified to Partners and begun work to transfer these into Council core systems. Universal property number identified as the key latching point against which all data and documents required from external partners should be indexed to facilitate loading. Commitments have been obtained from Partners against LBI timescales and details of their plans to achieve this within the stated timescale have been provided by some of the Partner sub-contractors

·         Initial test data has been received from United Gas repairs and reviewed by Digital Services

·         Resource Planning – consultancy days with the providers of LBI core systems, to prepare the systems for bulk loading. Additional capacity and new servers, staff to assist with  ...  view the full minutes text for item 285.

286.

Communal Heating - Presentation/Report and Evidence from TMO and TRA pdf icon PDF 274 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

 Garrett Mcentee, Housing Directorate was present, and introduced the report, and made a presentation to the Committee. Paul Harris Harry Weston TMO co-operative was also present, and made a submission to the Committee

 

During consideration of the report the following main points were made –

 

·         The Council has responsibility for maintaining its communal heating systems serving around 4700 homes, and employing contractors to deliver this service

·         The previous contractors were taken over by the Mears Group in October 2018 and work has taken place to have a good productive working relationship to resolve contractual problems with the previous contractor, however these issues were not getting resolved and notice was served to terminate the contract. The Council procured a new provider GEM Environmental Services, formally taking over responsibility for the contract from May 2020, however they did assist with the maintenance of boilers from October 2109 which was extremely valuable to the Council

·         GEM have done extensive work and dealt with substantial challenges linked to connecting the communal heating plant rooms to Bunhill 2 Energy Centre. This work is out of the scope of the GEM contract for which they were appointed, and this has resulted in a lot of extra work, and meant that work planned on boiler plant has not taken priority. Connection to Bunhill 2 remains a priority and to address this further steps have been taken to appoint additional specialists and contractors to assist on the Bunhill 2 project. Despite the focus on Bunhill 2 GEM have managed to service all of the boiler plant rooms as directed by the contract, and achieve 100% compliance in terms of gas and safety notices

·         Repairs data – In April 2018 a decision was made to manage the new communal heating contract on a new IT system called One Serve. This is an industry leading software package, which allows details of works undertaken to be collected and shared, updated and monitored allowing for improved business processes and a good customer experience

·         Currently Islington has 57 plant rooms, providing a communal heating service and most of the plant rooms provide heating and hot water. In most cases individual hot water is delivered to storage tanks within dwellings. Heat Interface units have recently become more popular, as they can provide hot water on demand at mains pressure and greater efficiency over traditional systems. However unless there is suitable space in the plant rooms for communal hot water storage, HIU’s will not include stored hot water so, although very efficient, they can result in almost instant loss of hot water in the event of boiler breakdown

·         Noted information provided in the report on boilers and infrastructure. Details of the significant breakdowns that have caused an outage for five days or more since April 2018 were noted, and this is the trigger point for payment of compensation by the Council. It was noted that there have been relatively few occasions when this situation has arisen

·         There are many thousands of callouts and there would  ...  view the full minutes text for item 286.

287.

Work Programme 2020/21 pdf icon PDF 47 KB

Additional documents:

Minutes:

RESOLVED:

That the report be noted