Excerpt of Tower Hamlets Council meeting held on 15 October 2024.
This meeting of Overview & Scrutiny discussed a number of important items relating to the council’s performance in Quarter 1 of 2024/25, including updates on the delivery of the LGA’s Corporate Peer Review Challenge action plan, the council’s progress on tackling temporary accommodation rent arrears, the Youth Justice Plan, and the Cumulative Impact Assessment policy.
The committee received an update on the Local Government Association’s (LGA) Corporate Peer Challenge (CPC) Action Plan, and questioned whether the report, which was written by council officers, was impartial, highlighting a reference to the council inheriting a budget deficit as an example of what they perceived to be an overly political tone.
‘In 2023, the council started with a quite significant deficit, exceeding circa £38 million.’
The Chief Executive, Steve Halsey, explained that the wording had come directly from the LGA’s own report, but agreed to consider suggestions from the committee about how the report’s tone could be improved.
The committee also raised concerns that a section in the report on the council’s commitment to diversity and inclusion did not go far enough, with Councillor Amy Lee arguing that it was “personally insulting” given that a number of female councillors had raised concerns with the LGA about how they had been treated in meetings.
‘Women in this council went and spoke to the LGA and talked about their experiences in this council, talked about how they’d been treated in these committees. They talked about the knock-on impact that that was having in the community.’
The committee also questioned whether sufficient attention was being paid to performance in service delivery, rather than just financial performance. Mr Halsey explained that there were a range of existing mechanisms for monitoring and managing service performance and agreed to provide more detail about these to the committee at a future meeting.
The committee also discussed the council’s performance on tackling rent arrears. The committee heard that an internal audit in October 2023 had identified £11.94 million in rent arrears dating back to 2012 and an additional £8.9 million in more recent arrears.
The committee was told that the council has set aside £18.8 million in its Medium Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) to cover bad debt. An MTFS is a document that sets out a council’s financial plans for the next three to five years. The MTFS includes details of the council’s expected income and expenditure, as well as its plans for borrowing and investment. The committee also heard that the council had set up a team and procured new software to help recover the debt. This had resulted in £1.3 million of the more recent debt being recovered.
Committee members questioned the cost-benefit analysis of chasing smaller debts and how these decisions are made.
‘Is there a point where it doesn’t become affordable for the council to chase it? So you’ve talked about 35 officers, you’ve talked about putting a lot more investment into it. If it’s a debt of £500, I mean we should be chasing this debt, but you’ve got an officer spending 20, 30, 40 hours doing this. Where’s the cost benefit analysis, at what point is that?’
Abdul Razak Kassim, the Director of Finance, explained that the council was using the new software to identify the most economical debts to chase, which would then inform decisions about writing off unrecoverable debts. Mr Halsey added that the 35 additional officers were not just focused on recovering existing debt but were also working on preventing residents falling into arrears in the first place, and intervening quickly to help those who are struggling to pay their rent.
The committee also received a report on the Youth Justice Plan for Tower Hamlets. Susanna Beasley-Murray, the Director for Children’s Services, explained to the committee that the Youth Justice Plan has four key priorities:
Child First: Embedding a child-first approach in every aspect of the Youth Justice Partnership.
Consistently Good Practice: Continuous raising of practice standards to achieve improved outcomes for children.
YJS Health Offer: Coordinated access and intervention to universal and specialist health provision to meet children’s holistic health and wellbeing needs.
Post 16 E2E Offer: Increasing children’s participation in post 16 education, training and employment to support children’s aspirations, desistance and safety.
The committee were told that the number of first-time entrants to the youth justice system in Tower Hamlets had fallen by 40% in the last 24 months. This was below both the London and England and Wales averages. The committee heard that this was a significant achievement for the borough, and reflected the hard work of the Youth Justice Service.
However, Ms Beasley-Murray told the committee that the re-offending rate had increased to 35.8% which was above the London and national average. She argued that this was partly due to the impact of the smaller cohort of first-time entrants on the calculation of the rate.
‘If you look at the box underneath, previously, those children that were first-time entrants, when we had a bigger number of children that were first-time entrants, we therefore had a bigger cohort of children that could then reoffend, because you have to become a first-time entrant before you can then reoffend.’
The committee also questioned the length of time children were assigned a youth justice support officer for and whether bonds between young people and officers were broken too quickly. Ms Beasley-Murray explained that the service tried to keep children with the same youth justice support worker but that they did not exit children on a “cliff edge”, and ensured they continue to receive support from other services, such as social workers, where appropriate.
The committee concluded its meeting with a discussion of the council’s Cumulative Impact Assessment (CIA) policy.
CIAs are a tool that can be used by councils to manage the concentration of licensed premises in an area. The CIA policy sets out the criteria that the council will use to decide whether to grant a new licence or vary an existing licence, taking into account the cumulative impact of existing licensed premises.
Tower Hamlets currently has two CIAs in place, in Brick Lane and Bethnal Green. A CIA effectively creates a rebuttable presumption against granting new premises licences or variations to existing licences in an area if they are likely to add to existing problems. Each application will still be considered on its merits, but the applicant will need to provide more evidence to the Licensing Committee to demonstrate that their proposal will not add to problems already being experienced in the area.
The report proposed retaining and expanding the CIA in Brick Lane and removing it in Bethnal Green.
Several members of the committee asked about the possibility of introducing a CIA in Hackney Wick, which is located on the border with Hackney.
‘If you could talk a bit more about the analysis that was done to decide against this, I’d welcome you to come to Hackney Wick in Fyshinde on a Friday night outside Hackney Wick Station. I appreciate it goes into two local authorities, but the area is not like it was five, ten years ago, and there is a lot that goes on there.’
Tom Lewis, Service Manager for Regulatory Services, explained to the committee that the Home Office guidance on CIAs was updated in 2018 to require a greater degree of evidence to introduce one. This was because there had been some legal challenges to the use of CIAs, which argued that they were discriminatory and that they did not take into account the individual merits of each application. The Home Office guidance now states that, “CIAs should be based on robust evidence of the cumulative impact of licensed premises in the area, and should be reviewed regularly to ensure that they remain appropriate.”
Mr Lewis explained that while the council recognised concerns about crime and disorder in Hackney Wick, it had been working with the police and the Community Safety team to address these and had installed additional CCTV using money from the Late Night Levy. A Late Night Levy is a charge that local authorities can introduce on licensed premises that sell alcohol late at night. The money from the levy can be used to fund services that address the impact of the late-night economy on the area, such as extra policing. The committee heard that the council was continuing to monitor the situation in Hackney Wick and would consider introducing a CIA if there was sufficient evidence to support it.
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