Diary Date - Yardley District Committee

Yardley District Committee
Thursday 18 July 2013 - 2pm
Committee Rooms 3 and 4, Council House
And you can now watch online here.

As this is the first meeting of the year, we have some administrative business to take care of as part of a pretty packed programme.

 Items on the agenda will be

• Election of chair
• Appointment of district corporate parenting champion
• Fire Services and Police representative 
• Regulation and Enforcement devolved services out turn 12/13
• Yardley District Budget Monitoring - April to May 2013
• District Income and Expenditure Report 12/13
• Tackling anti-social behaviour locally
• Housing Department Annual Tenants' visiting programme
• Special Educational Needs Commissioning
• Council housing investment programme - environmental improvements 
• Feedback on £2m community chest top slicing for youth unemployment action programme 
• Leisure facilities transformation 

This is a meeting open to the public and we've certainly seen significant use of the online streaming - far more have watched online than have attended these meetings in a year. 

Yardley District Committee
Thursday 6 June 2013 - 12 noon
Committee Rooms 3 and 4, Council House
And you can now watch online here.

Items on the agenda will be

• Birmingham Youth Service
• Local Services Performance Report
• Neighbourhood Strategy for Birmingham
• Neighbourhood Advice and Information Service Review
• Work programme 2013/14

This is a meeting open to the public and we've certainly seen significant use of the online streaming - far more have watched online than have attended these meetings in a year. 

Diary Date - Yardley District Committee - Thursday 28 March 2013

Yardley District Committee
Thursday 28 March 2013 - 12 noon
Committee Rooms 3 & 4, Council House
And you can now watch online here.

Items on the agenda will be

• Revenue Budget Monitoring 2012/13, period 11
• Revenue Budget 2013/14
• Local Services Performance Report
• Tenant Engagement - Establishing a district housing panel
• Wheelie bin, recycling and refuse collection services - district consultation
• Birmingham Youth Service
• Amey - Highway Trees overview
• Work programme update 2012/13

This is a meeting open to the public and we've certainly seen significant use of the online streaming - far more have watched online than have attended these meetings in a year. 

Future meetings planned in:
6 June 2013; 18 July 2013; 12 September 2013; 21 November 2013; 16 January 2014; 27 March 2014

Diary Date - Yardley District Committee 24 Jan 2013

Yardley District Committee
Thursday 24 January 2013
2pm - Committee Room 6, Council House

Key items of interest (check the agenda for full list):

• Revenue budget monitoring (April to December)
• Local Services Performance Report
• Fleet and Waste Management
• Newly Devolved Services - Regulation and Enforcement
• Amey - Consultation on Highway Programme 2013-14
• Reform of Special Educational Needs Provision and the role of the Parent Partnership

This is a public meeting and the chair has the option to allow members of the public to speak. 

Diary Date - Yardley District Committee - 22 Nov

Yardley District Committee
Thursday 22 November 2012
2pm - Committee Room 1, Council House

Key items of interest (check the agenda below for full list):

• Adult education service
• Housing repairs performance report
• Revenue budget monitoring (April to October)
• Birmingham Development Plan - consultation on growth options
• Update from Amey

This is a public meeting and the chair has the option to allow members of the public to speak. Sadly, this meeting isn't going to be streamed on the web as we've yet to get the committee rooms set up to do that. Hopefully that will not be the case in the near future. 

Report - Yardley District Committee

A belated report back, I'm afraid. Our first meeting in the Council House, in the Chamber - moved at quite short notice in time and space. This perhaps didn't help with the number of members of the public attending - which I think amounted to four (although from memory, I'm not sure they could be called civilians). From next time, we should also have live web streaming available to spread visibility (perhaps we should allow interaction by Twitter....)

The minutes are now available on the Council website. To be honest, this meeting was still about setting up the parameters for the operation of the new district structure. In particular, the performance monitoring framework is still being established and we'll start to see that bear fruit over the coming months, along with an increased district focus on housing. It was noted that we don't need a complex report - essentially we should move to a system of reporting by exception, so we should expect detail on areas that are not achieving against agreed targets. We've also got the ongoing consultation into the future model for tenant involvement in neighbourhood management.

We're now also getting much more up to date financial data - no longer will it be three months behind reality, the aim is to provide it up to the end of the last month (not even quarter). Also, we've now got the financial 'savings' allocated out to each service area, rather than being grouped under a single, rather incomprehensible heading. We're still facing significant 'pressures' in this year, largely down to delays in introducing new operating models for various services, which have been the subject of 'Rapid Service Reviews' that have thus far proved to be as rapid as a dead snail nailed to the floor.

The other key issue raised was the District Convention, to which key stakeholders across Yardley will be invited, on the 10 November 2012 at South Yardley Library. This will review performance and then help create a direction for the future of the district.

Yardley District Committee - 26 July 2012

A largely administrative agenda for this inaugural meeting of the new Yardley district committee, which is still controlled by the Liberal Democrats, but now has four Labour councillors. The range of powers devolved thus far to the district is interesting to the geeks amongst us - I questioned whether we had the new powers to define Dog Control Areas under the Clean Neighbourhood and Environment Act 2006, which repealed the Dogs (Fouling of Land) Act 1996, although the existing areas continue until replaced by a new control area. Anybody who knows what s78 of the Public Health Act 1936 says about scavenging in alleyways - without looking it up - deserves a prize. It actually refers to the authority being able to clean up any courtyard or alley that is owned by two or more people and charge them for the privilege, so might actually prove more useful than you think.

There was some cross-party agreement on the need to get localised performance information on housing - Cllr Willis (LD, S Yardley) and I both serve on the Contract Performance Committee and we had the pleasure of the housing contractors attending our last meeting and it is fair to say that the performance indicators need some work as assessments of how well our contractors are performing across the city for our tenants. Cllr Anderson (LD, Sheldon), newly elected as ward chair, agreed to continue as corporate parent champion for the district - a part of the role of councillors is as a 'corporate parent' to all looked after children.

Almost finally, we moved on to the outturn of the 2011/12 financial year, which sees the district ending with an overspend of £741,000 on a controllable budget (outside the fixed service level agreement costs for things like waste collection) of around £4.1 million. This was supposed to be reduced by the inclusion of Community Chest "underspends" from 2011/12 of about £166,000, but that figure did not take into account any commitments made in 11/12 that had not been paid within that financial year. Acocks Green was supposed to have an underspend of £32,000 for last year, but I know that the real figure is closer to about £10,000 - due to some projects not proceeding and some other underspending within projects not requiring the full grant - and I would expect similar figures for the other wards. The Labour group objected to this use of funds, especially as this would reduce any money left in this year's spending and this part of the report was rejected by the committee.