In accordance with Procedure Rule 11, opportunity is provided for Members of the Council to ask the Chairman, the appropriate Cabinet Member or the Chairman of a Committee any question about a matter which the Council, the Cabinet or the Committee has powers, duties or responsibilities. Questions must be sent in writing to the Monitoring Officer at least 3 clear working days before the meeting.
At Council meetings, there will be a maximum question time period of 30 minutes. Questions will be selected by the Mayor, using the criteria agreed by Council.Any questions which are accepted, but which cannot be dealt with during the allotted period will be answered in writing. Questions must be brief, clear and focussed.
Minutes:
The Following questions had been submitted in accordance with Procedure Rule 11:-
Question 1 from Cllr B Murphy to the Cabinet Member for Environmental Services
Refuse Collection on 30 November 2011
Whilst we are grateful to our employees who ensured the delivery of services on 30th November and, at the same time, we acknowledge and respect the right of those who took industrial action on a matter of legitimate concern, why did the Council not have a contingency plan to avoid inconvenience and anxiety to taxpayers by ensuring the continuation of vital public health services to them, in particular the collection of putrescent refuse material in the Tytherington and Bollinbrook and other places in Cheshire East?
Response
The industrial action affected a significant number of households across the Borough and that meant it was impossible to catch up on the missed collections without disrupting many other residents within the Borough whose collections were scheduled for the subsequent days. In transforming our waste collection services over the past few months we have moved to a completely new system and the collection rounds have been designed to optimise collection efficiency, based on a fortnightly collection. To introduce additional collections over and above the fortnightly cycle would increase operational costs and this is an area that the Council has tried very hard to reduce.
To provide additional collections to catch up, the added work would need to be done either after the normal working day or at weekends. This work would then be classed as overtime and this is paid at a higher rate than normal working time. This means that there would be additional revenue pressure on Council budgets to provide additional collections and any savings in salary costs resulting from the day of industrial action would be more than offset by the cost of paying overtime.
Furthermore, there would have been practical barriers to managing and disposing of the waste if it were collected during the week after a normal day’s work or at weekends eg the opening times of the landfill sites and garden waste deposition sites.
Although we were unable to catch up on the normal waste collection services, if we were made aware of any residents who had specific needs, e.g people who were extremely ill and had no way of disposing of extra waste themselves – and were in severe difficulty, we did our very best to assist them.
The plan for this week is collect all waste materials placed out for collection on 14 December 2011 as this coincides with the fortnightly collection schedule for those properties affected by the industrial action. A memo has been issued to all front line staff to this effect.
Supplementary Question
Cllr Murphy asked, in view of the likelihood of further industrial action, whether this matter could be referred to the Staffing Committee for further discussion.
Question 2 from Cllr D Brickhill to the Cabinet Member for Procurement and Shared Services
Places Payroll
Please account for the massive 66% increase in the Places payroll from £33M pa to £55M pa following this year’s reorganisation when several non statutory functions were taken in to the Directorate.
Response
The pay budget for Places and Organisational Capacity has increased due to the Council’s restructure of services across the Council’s Corporate Management Team. Following consultation a number of services have been transferred to the Places and Organisational Capacity Directorate and this has more than doubled the headcount within the Directorate.
All of these services previously existed elsewhere within the Council’s structures’:-
Supplementary Question
Cllr Brickhill asked whether it could be assumeed that virtually all the increase was for non-statutory services and Councillor Mason, in response, stated that he did not think so, but there would be significant savings and that fourteen senior management posts have already been taken out of the structure.
Question 3 from Cllr P Nurse to the Cabinet Member for Adult Services
Deaths from Cold Weather and Fuel Poverty
What estimate does the Portfolio Holder for Adult Services have of the number of elderly persons who died in the winter of 2010-2011 in Cheshire East from conditions of cold weather and inability to heat their homes?
What action is the Portfolio Holder taking to identify vulnerable elderly persons, who suffer from fuel poverty, so that they can receive help to stay warm and alive?
Response
Every year, Cheshire East sees a 20% rise in the number of deaths between December and March compared to the remainder of the year. This equates to about 55 additional deaths in each of these four months.
About a third of these deaths are due to cardiovascular disease. Cold weather causes the blood to thicken, which increases the risk of death from heart attack or stroke in people who have pre-existing cardiovascular disease. Cold weather also lowers people’s resistance to influenza infection, which is an important contributor to excess winter mortality. Flu is dangerous for people of all ages who have chronic medical conditions, as they are eleven times more likely then healthy people to die if they catch the infection.
In order to reduce the number of winter deaths, many more people need to have their annual influenza jab (as at the end of November 2011, over 45% of people with chronic medical conditions and 23% of people aged 65 and over had still not attended for their flu jab). Protective measures against cold should initially be targeted to those who are clinically most at risk, some of whom will be in younger age groups. These protective measures include maintaining indoor warmth, and also actions to minimise the risk of becoming cold when outdoors.
The Authority is currently working with partners to finalise its cold weather plan (in response to the Government’s Cold Weather Plan for England 2011/12, the first co-ordinated plan supported by the Met Office Cold Weather Alert Service). The aims of the plan are to reduce winter mortality in vulnerable people through appropriate preparation and alerts.
The plan encourages local areas to mobilise civil society so that neighbours, friends, relatives and individuals themselves seek to protect against avoidable harm to health in the winter. Additionally it aims to reduce the pressure on the health and social care system during the busiest months of the year through better co-ordinated preparation, and anticipatory actions when routinely interacting with vulnerable people. Partners are sharing information on vulnerable people to ensure that those most at risk are clearly identified
We have a Stay Warm, Stay Well, Stay Safe campaign and regular media alerts to raise the profile of local services and what local communities can do to identify and support those who are vulnerable. This information is available today and will be in Members Brief as well.
Supplementary Question
Cllr Nurse asked whether the Portfolio Holder considered that the reduction of £50 in the winter fuel allowance per household would result in an increase in the number of deaths. Cllr Domleo responded that, unfortunately, he did not have this information.
Question 4 from Cllr D Flude to the Cabinet Member for Safer and Stronger Communities
The Proposed Gypsy / Traveller Site, Parkers Road, Crewe
The residents of Crewe East have petitioned the Council [1500 names] and held a public meeting with their MP Edward Timpson opposing the Council’s proposed Gypsy /Traveller site at Parkers Road.
When is the planning application for this site going to be considered by the Strategic Board?
Response
The planning application for the proposed Gypsy and Travellers Site has not yet been submitted. It is being finalised at present and we expect it to be submitted shortly after we have had the opportunity to circulate more information on the proposal to the local community.
Once the application has been received, we anticipate it will be determined at a meeting of the Strategic Planning Board approximately eight weeks after the date of submission.
Question 5 from Cllr D Flude to the Cabinet Member for Environmental Services
WardensQueensParkCrewe
The Friends of Queens Park Crewe recently presented to this Council a petition in regard to their concerns about the safety of visitors to the park relating to the reduction of park wardens.
Concerns were also raised by local primary school pupils attending a Democracy Day at the Municipal Buildings in Crewe who stated that they did not feel safe in the Park now that the Park Wardens are not patrolling.
Recently members of the public have been locked in the park at closing time!
The questions listed below are raised after consultation with the Friends:
What is the cost to this Council for the Private Security Company who are contracted to open and close the Park?
Who does the secondary cleaning of the public toilets?
Who is patrolling the area of the park and adjacent Tipkinder area?
Who is providing the safety checks and litter clearance at the adjacent BMX track?
Who is doing the daily inspection of the playground equipment in the Park?
Who is monitoring the 4.5 acres of the park lake, and who is providing safety cover?
Who is combating any antisocial behaviour?
Other concerns are drug and alcohol abusers and inappropriate sexual behaviour in toilets, who is doing regular visits to combat these behaviours?
Cllr Flude indicated that she was content to receive a written response to her question, which would be circulated to all Members of the Council.
Question 6 from Cllr S Jones to the Cabinet Member for Adult Services
Care Quality Commission
The Care Quality Commission has admitted in the press that they have only completed half of inspections planned for the past twelve months. The reports about the variable standards of quality in both residential and domiciliary care for the elderly are a matter of serious concern. At Full Council in July 2011, Cllr Rod Fletcher proposed a Notice of Motion on my behalf which asked the Chief Executive of Cheshire East to write to the Care Quality Commission expressing our concerns about their lack of capacity to fulfil their inspection role and the impact this was having on the quality of residential and domiciliary care being provided for our elderly residents in Cheshire East. Copies of this letter were to be sent to all Cheshire East MPs. Has this letter been sent and have any replies been received?
The Notice of Motion asked for a Task/Finish group to be set up to scrutinise the inspection of care services in Cheshire East to ensure that our contracts were being honoured and that the Authority is receiving value for money as well as for those people purchasing their own care packages.
The Government is very concerned about the number of complaints being received about poor quality services being provided to the elderly. They are planning to introduce a points system based on comments received by both clients and their families to grade care homes. Surely we should be very wary of residential and nursing homes being treated like restaurants. Why is the Notice of Motion proposed in July not receiving the urgent attention it merits as the good quality of domiciliary care is central to our policy of aiming to help the elderly stay in their own homes as long as possible thus reducing the need for residential care.
Response
The Notice of Motion requested a task and finish group be set up to investigate this concern. This was remitted to the Local Safeguarding Adults Board who received this request at its November meeting. The independent chair of the Board with officer support will convene a multi agency group to prepare a response from the Board to this Notice of Motion. This will be convened early in the New Year. The Chief Executive would wish to review the outcome of this work before writing to Care Quality Commison and Cheshire East MP’s. At a recent compliance meeting with Care Quality Commission, we were informed that Care Quality Commision were reporting an increase in inspections in our region and were on target to achieve 62.5%.
A task and finish group has also been established to scrutinise residential and nursing care home arrangements within the Borough. This will be considering both the quality and cost of such services. In addition to this our Supporting People and Contracting team are visiting all provision in a planned way to carry out mini checks on basic elements such as registration, staffing. To date they have visited 47 homes out of 93 as well as 17 domiciliary care providers out of 78 this is additional to registration inspections. Where we have safeguarding concerns with homes we work in partnership with Care Quality Commission and other specialists such as infection control, fire, environmental health. LINks also have an Enter and View role and work with Care Quality Commission. This approach provides local monitoring as well as regulatory inspection both of which are important.
I have great sympathy with Cllr Jones's complaint about the delay in getting some action following the Motion being moved in July 2011. It would appear to be a common problem with all Notices of Motion, and I will raise the matter formally to see what can be done to speed up the handling of Notices of Motion
Supplementary Question
Cllr Jones requested to be kept informed of the outcomes in respect of this Notice of Motion.