Agenda item

Tram lines to Beeston and Clifton

 

Councillor Patricia Ferguson asked the following question of the Portfolio Holder for Planning and Transportation:

 

Nottingham City Council’s ambitious transport project to bring 2 new tram lines to Beeston and Clifton will be an amazing opportunity for Nottingham when it is completed, but it has caused significant disruption for many residents living along the tram routes. Will the Portfolio Holder for Planning and Transportation join me in recognising the hard work and effort that has so far gone into resolving issues when they arise on the route? Will she also reiterate her call for the tram company to ensure those who have been most affected by tram construction work are given special and the most preferential opportunities to secure maximum benefit from the new tram services when they open to the public?

 

Councillor Jane Urquhart replied as follows:

 

Thank you Lord Mayor and thank you Councillor Ferguson, I know this issue is one which is close to your heart and an issue on which you have been campaigning for some time. Significant progress is of course being made to build our two new tram lines and it is expected that much of the main, and much of the disruptive work, will be completed by the end of the summer.

 

There are many examples of the construction company taking extra care and responding to the needs of the local people, I’m sure that everyone was pleased, for example, to hear of the way contractors assisted a resident of Lower Road / Fletcher Road in Beeston to get to her wedding with music and an archway formed by JCBs and decorations on the road. Of course, there are other things in various areas like attention to detail once the rail and the track has gone into the road, making sure that the streets are looking great when those rails have gone in. There are regular local meetings, sometimes with groups of local people but sometimes with individual local householders to address particular and specific issues about the way that the tram interacts with people’s individual properties. There is, of course, the active support that the contractors have given to communities events and occasions in Beeston, Chilwell, Clifton and the Meadows.

 

I am also aware that the tram consortium will be sowing poppy seeds at appropriate places alongside the tram tracks as part of our wider World War I commemoration events across the centenary year. This huge level of construction has inevitably caused disruption for local people living and working along the route, but of course, it has already benefited Nottingham considerably through both job creation and contracts awarded to local firms. To date, around £42 million worth of contracts have been placed with businesses in Nottingham city, another £44 million with companies in Greater Nottingham and a further £44 million across the east midlands. A couple of examples here are Bulwell based Omega Red, a market leader in electrical earthing and lighting protection systems and McCann Limited based in Chilwell, a leading civil and electrical engineering company, who have both won orders of over £2 million providing lighting and signs for the system.

 

This positive benefit to our local economy has of course been widely recognised, recently by the Chamber of Commerce who said that, “the tram works in Nottingham provide a significant number of contracts to local and regional businesses and provided during a time of recession and continue to do so into recovery which is good for both the city and regional economy.”

 

Once the construction is over, this will then allow all the exhaustive testing, commissioning, safety test and driver training on the new routes to take place. City residents, particularly those are adjacent to works, and who, it is fully acknowledged have experienced significant disruption, will then get a real sense of the tram network and I am sure will start to consider the benefits that it will bring to them. I fully agree that the Tram Concessionaire Tramlink should ensure that local residents are offered every opportunity to fully benefit from the tram system, through comfortable, fast and frequent tram services, including the highest quality, information and travel planning advice, including – and I suspect that this is the bit that everyone wanted to hear – the availability of favourable ticketing arrangements and I will continue as Councillor Ferguson has asked to press for that and to work actively with Tramlink to ensure that happens.

 

Queen’s speech post general election

 

Councillor Michael Edwards asked the following question of the Deputy Leader:

 

Could the Deputy Leader outline to Council what policies affecting Nottingham might be included in the first Queen’s speech after the next general election if Labour were to win?

 

Councillor Graham Chapman replied as follows:

 

Thank you Councillor Edwards for your question. Being a member of the Labour party over the last four years has been frustrating, like waiting at the proverbial bus stop where you wait for four years for a policy to come along and then we get ten all at once. Now, I won’t go through all of them but you will get five at least, the ones that I think will have the most effect. Firstly, the freezing of gas and electricity prices until 2017, there is an enormous amount of poverty building up in the city, there is a lot of debt and this is one of the major issues, particularly at a time when the energy companies, and it is interesting that three years ago the energy companies were making £8 per household, last year made £56 per household and recently they declared that they made over £100 per household. Now, nobody is telling me that you cannot have a freeze which is going to impact seriously on their ability to invest.

 

Secondly, building homes which we desperately need in the city, we need low cost homes and we actually need social homes. One of the reasons we need social homes is because the housing benefit bill in the city is going up and I have just found out that the housing benefit bill nationally has gone up £1.1 billion. Most of that is going into the housing market and into landlords’ pockets. Now, there are some good landlords, and there are some bad landlords but at the moment excessive amounts are going to landlords’ pockets at a time when we should be building social houses because the cost of rent of social houses is far less than the cost of rent in the private sector. It does not make economic sense and it does not make social sense, so we need to be building social houses for the city.

 

Making work pay with the minimum wage and also providing tax breaks to firms who pay the living wage. I also think that we need a public procurement policy which is basically saying we should get our goods and we should ply our services from those firms who are providing a living wage and it needs to be a national policy but we do need to be funded to be able to do it. The other point about it is that a low wage economy does not give you growth, this city is suffering from a low wage economy which we will hear about shortly, people do not have disposable incomes and they do not purchase. If they do not purchase people do not invest so it is essential that we move onto a living wage.

The next one is backing small businesses by cutting business rates and reforming the banks. I don’t agree with cutting business rates but I agree with a rating revaluation. I don’t know where we are going to get the money from to cut business rates but I do know where we would get the money from for a revaluation because a revaluation would benefit the north and the midlands compared with the south because there has been no revaluation since 1996 and firms here would benefit enormously. One of the firms down south, with a higher turnovers and higher profitability, would simply have to pay some of the bills but that is only fair because there hasn’t been a revaluation since 1996.

 

In addition to reforming the banks, I would be looking for a regional development bank so that they can share some of the risks of investment within the city because at the moment the City Council is taking far too much of the risk and it needs to be shared with government. The most important issue is to do with jobs, particularly for young people but also for the over 40’s who are struggling to get jobs and often get overlooked. There would be guaranteed jobs for the young and unemployed with more apprenticeships, I would like to see the restoration of the Future Jobs Fund which we have maintained in the city but are struggling to maintain as we do it year after year through an underspend in the budget and it is not a stable way of doing it.

 

I would also like to see the restoration of one of the other schemes which was very successful - the Education Maintenance Allowance which helped a lot of working class kids go to college to get the skills the city needs. One very simple thing we would like is the abolition of the ‘bedroom tax’; that is guaranteed and that will happen. If it does not happen, there will be some very serious trouble in the Labour party, so that has to happen.

 

So, they are a few of the buses that came along all at once but low and behold, during the week appearing from the gods, John Cruddas appeared at a meeting with Graham Allen, Michael Heseltine and Vince Cable, and it was a very interesting meeting indeed. I have gone through 3 or 4 years of listening to Labour politicians saying nothing and listening to opposition politicians saying quite a lot and it was a wonderful experience to have the whole thing inverted. John Cruddas was quite inspirational and he said that we are going to get a single capital pot instead of all the messy bits of funding streams we are getting at the moment which is preventing us from investing in the long term. There will be a single capital pot regionally for us to invest in, in other words we will be going back to what the Regional Development Agencies (RDA) used to do before they were abolished. There will be the devolution of responsibilities for Further Education and skills locally, and to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for job search powers, which I am looking forward to  because if there is one priority for this city it is the devolution of those responsibilities. We can handle these responsibilities a hell of lot better, they will not necessarily come to local authorities but they will certainly come to localities.

 

Long term pots for early intervention will be established because at the moment it is too fragmented and is in several pots, impossible to manage and it needs to be long term. You cannot move from palliative to preventative with the short term funding we are getting at the moment. The same will apply to the health service, where there will be a much better integration of long term funding of social care, mental health and acute budgets and that is exactly what the Local Government Association has been asking for today and if that happens there will be saving down the line as well as far better services.

 

Finally, something that was not mentioned is that we need fairer funding for local authorities. There has been a discriminatory approach by the current Government towards councils in the south and those away from the south. It has been an absolute disgrace and that needs to stop and there needs to be some reversal. There are councils down south who are doing all sorts of exciting things and why are they doing these things we cannot afford to do? It is because their funding is far higher, their rateable value is far higher, the numbers of houses that are being built are far higher and it is about time we got rid of the discrimination by this Government towards urban areas and, particularly Nottingham. The poorer you are under this Government the more you have lost, and that needs to stop.

 

My final point is that we have over the last four years had a Government that has divided society, and I know it is a cliché, but the rich have got richer and in many cases it is the very rich that caused the economic problem in the first place. The poor have got a lot poorer and there has been a division between the young and old. The young have suffered because the old vote and there has been a certain amount of protection of elderly persons, and that is not a bad thing, but it has been at the expense of young people. There has been a division between the public and the private, the public sector has been denigrated and been impoverished. The private sector in some areas has benefited but actually in other areas it has lost out because it depends highly on the public sector and that is what the Government hasn’t understood. There is a great deal of disunity and a great deal is division sewn by the current Government and I am hoping that this will be part of the healing process, but I also say to you that part of that healing process is that the economy will benefit. A divided society, an impoverished society does not create economic growth as it should do. A united society, a more equal society where the wealth is better distributed actually in the end gives you better growth. That is what I hope the Labour government will start to develop.

 

Advice Nottingham – children of Nottingham

 

Councillor Ginny Klein asked the following question of the Deputy Leader:

 

Could the Deputy Leader tell Council what are the findings of Advice Nottingham on the impact of changes to social security on the children of Nottingham?

 

Councillor Graham Chapman replied as follows:

 

One of the marks of a civilised society is how you treat your children and in Nottingham there is a problem as 42,000 Nottingham City children live in families where there are no adults who work or where the household income is low. I don’t want to give the impression that there are 42,000 children in families where parents do not work, because we have got such low incomes in Nottingham, then it is quite easy to qualify this by saying working households and that is where most of the children live, it is not a good thing but I do not want to mislead people.

 

In May 2014, Advice Nottingham published a report entitled ‘Children in an Age of Austerity’ and it looked at the effects of welfare reform on children. The aim of the report was to evaluate how changes to benefits and welfare policies, introduced by the Government’s Welfare Reform Act 2012, have affected children and families in Nottingham. Evidence used in the report was gathered from information received from Advice Nottingham clients, local schools, and key commentators in the area of social policy, children’s rights and child poverty.

 

Its findings were: families subject to the ‘bedroom tax’ are experiencing financial hardship; disabled parents and parents of disabled children are facing financial hardship due to changes in the way disability benefit is being awarded; non-resident parents/carers face financial penalties for under-occupancy or losing the room their children use, potentially reducing parent-child contact; families reliant on benefits are struggling to meet their requirement to contribute to Council tax, often for the first time, resulting in financial hardship and debt, and we are seeing the number of people in debt rising; families in rent arrears face losing their homes due to possession orders. This is a problem that has not yet happened on large scale like it did in the 1980’s but it is a problem in waiting and you just wait for the increase in interest rates which may or may not happen before the general election, then you will see some serious problems and far more possession orders. Parents subject to benefit sanctions are relying almost entirely on food banks to feed their children.

 

Other findings include: half of schools saw an increased uptake of free school meals which is a very solid indicator of what is happening; extracurricular Activities – half the schools reported an increase in parents seeking educational grants in order for their children to take part in extracurricular activities. The recommendations are that non-resident parents who have a room designated for their children should not be subject to under-occupancy rules. Families re-housed as a result of domestic violence should not be penalised if they have ‘surplus’ rooms. Benefit sanctions should be applied less arbitrarily, at the moment people are being subject to all sorts of petty justification for the withdrawal of benefits, and our caseloads are full of them.

Help should be offered to all parents whose benefits have been sanctioned.

Department of Work and Pensions staff should aim to accommodate requests to expedite decisions for clients with dependent children. All families with children should be able to access hardship funds.

 

What has Nottingham City Council done to respond to the changes to benefits and welfare? We have an Evictions Prevention Protocol between Nottingham City Homes (NCH) and housing associations which has gone a long way to prevent large scale evictions and I congratulate Councillor Liversidge on the work he has done. 

We have a Sanctions Protocol that has been set up to investigate instances of sanctioning when presented by the Council’s Employment and Skills team. I congratulate Councillor McDonald and Councillor Chapman on the work they have done on that front.

 

Discretionary Hardship Support Scheme - the Council has monitored demand and expenditure of the Scheme during the first year and as a result of quarterly reviews, amendments have been made to open up the eligibility criteria so far more people are accessing them, so we have changed that. In 2013/14 80% of successful discretionary housing payments were made to tenants who were under occupying, that is where most of the money has gone so we have prevented large scale evictions.

 

Advice Services - the Council has invested approximately £1 million in Advice services across the city and that is having a tremendous effect and we are doing enormous amounts of work keeping people out of poverty. Nottingham ‘Right Size’ – between Nottingham City Homes and the housing associations is a scheme which has reduced the impact of the ‘bedroom tax’. Employment and welfare support programme – is the programme to get people off benefits and into work and support those who cannot work to enjoy the best quality of life they can and to make a contribution to the life of the City and to improve the level of financial capability within our communities and reduce dependency on crisis, irresponsible and/or expensive lenders.

 

All of this infrastructure is there to plug a gap in the free market system which leaves people on low pay and then blames them for it. It is also there to repair the damage done by ill-thought out government welfare policies, the results of which are only just beginning to emerge and it is costing millions of pounds, is socially divisive and is creating a great deal of stress, not just poverty – it is causing stress to families and to children, it is not just about having no food but mental health as a consequence of poverty and a consequence of the strains of just living day to day.

 

The irony of all of this is far from getting the state from out of people’s lives, which is what I am told this Government is all about, and far from reducing dependency, there is more intervention into people’s lives than ever before and there is an increasing dependency as people get more and more into debt and become more dependent upon the state in order to help them. This dependency will continue for the next couple of years unless there are some serious changes to policy.

 

School attendance rates in Nottingham

 

Councillor Carole Jones asked the following question of the Portfolio Holder for Children’s Services:

 

Can the Portfolio Holder for Children’s Services tell us what the City Council is doing to improve school attendance rates in Nottingham?

 

Councillor David Mellen replied as follows:

 

Thank you Lord Mayor and can I thank Councillor Jones for her question. School attendance is a key priority for our city and the majority of our schools have been judged ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted, but if the children are not there to receive what the school has to offer then that grading is immaterial. Nottingham compares badly with all other authorities when comparing attendance and for the sake of the children and for the sake of prosperity of our city it is something we must all play our part in addressing.

 

Of course, school attendance is not the sole responsibility of the City Council, that has to be shared with schools who need to do what they can to support, encourage and even cajole pupils to coming to school, but it is the primary responsibility of parents who’s legal duty it is to ensure that their children go to school. It is a basic part of caring for a child and a basic responsibility of being a parent. However, we do have a moral responsibility as the City Council to do whatever we can to support schools and parents to maximise school attendance, so what have we done?

 

Schools have been prioritising attendance together locally and are funding shared resources such as family support workers or school attendance officers to address the priorities of families and schools. The City Council has supported and equipped such arrangements, sharing data and initiatives with school staff and those employed between schools to work on promoting attendance. In partnership with schools, we have implemented a City Schools Common Attendance Protocol to ensure that common practice is being embedded by Nottingham schools. This means that school absence is treated similarly no matter where your child attends. We have implemented a new colleague ‘check and challenge’ practice guide to ensure consistent challenge to parents in all settings. So, if someone from Nottingham City Homes visits a property to carry out repairs and finds a school aged child at home who they think should be at school, this can be challenged appropriately. If a CPO comes across a child during a school day they have the appropriate information to ask the right questions.

Fourthly, we have also implemented the Priority Families programme in Nottingham. This programme involves families facing the greatest challenge in our city and we are currently working with over 500 families who face either worklessness, involved in anti-social behaviour or whose children have poor school attendance or sadly sometimes all three. This programme has resulted in significant improvements in the attendance of the children of many of these families. We have also introduced a new, shorter school holiday pattern which gives a longer break in the middle of the autumn term and a shorter summer break. The first indication of this pattern suggest that it has helped improve attendance in the autumn term last year.

 

Despite the cut-backs across the city, we retained 13 Education Welfare Officers across the city who work with schools, pupils and families to support regular school attendance focussing primarily on unauthorised absence and they help to sort out problems in school, at home or help prepare cases for prosecution if required. Now, these Council initiatives, together with work carried out in every school have resulted in improvements in attendance for the city, the latest data for the autumn term shows that we had a 16% improvement of overall absence in the last year and a 34% improvement in persistent absence since 2012. The improvement in overall absence equates to almost 2 days being attended by every pupil, the improvement in persistent absence means that we have a 1,000 fewer persistently absent pupils.

 

However, we need to acknowledge that Nottingham still has a significant attendance issue, Ofsted criticised attendance as being poor in 6 out of 7 of the secondary schools inspected at the end of last year and we remain at the foot of league tables measuring comparative school attendance. We still have a long way to go. This is why, along with a refresh of all attendance policies, we have launched a public campaign recently. There are four strands of the campaign run from June 2014 through to December 2014 mixing carrot and stick messages across primary and secondary schools. The first phase was ‘Get in School’ or ‘I’m in school’, which involved a zero tolerance approach, week of action across primary or secondary schools, flyers and letters home to every parent and unveiling banners and posters in schools.

As many of you will know, councillors and many senior officers visited every primary and secondary school in Nottingham to meet 100% attendees. I am grateful to members around the chamber and to officers for playing their part in this campaign last week when every school agreed to be visited had an officer or councillor attend the school. I know that 45 councillors and a similar number of senior officers took part last week, it was great to see pictures of council representatives congratulating those with full attendance, learning the barriers to full attendance and what each school is doing to break down these barriers. There will be three other parts to the campaign, one which will focus on employment, making sure that the way to get a job is to get the skills and to get the experience of school. To get inspired, to really reward by using this building and our civics to congratulate winners of the Lord Mayor’s attendance award and in the autumn a carrot approach titled ‘Get the Gig’ which is centred on secondary pupils where classes of children will get rewarded for good attendance by being able to come to a concert with a well known chart pop act at a secret location in the city centre.

So, Councillor Jones, we are doing everything we can, our children’s education is really important to allow us to let up on this challenge and I’m hoping that in time this work will lead to reports of further improvement coming to Council in the future.

 

Nottingham Castle’s Heritage Lottery Fund award

 

Councillor Steel asked the following question of the Portfolio Holder for Leisure and Culture:

 

Would the Portfolio Holder agree with me that while the news about Nottingham Castle’s awarding of Heritage Lottery Fund money is wonderful news, in order to make the most of this opportunity we must open up the view of Nottingham Castle from across the city? Would he agree with me that in order to achieve this aim it is imperative that buildings such as the Central College building on Maid Marian Way and Collin Street NCP car park are demolished?

 

Councillor Dave Trimble replied as follows:

 

Thank you Lord Mayor and can I thank Councillor Steel for his question. It is indeed wonderful news that the Heritage Lottery awarded £12.95 million to Nottingham Castle and it would also be fantastic to open up the views to the Castle by removing some of the buildings that are in the way. It is however, still public money that is needed to do that and however much we would like it, and I would, we cannot promise an open cheque book, it is public money and we still need to be prudent.

Secondly, it needs to be noted that Property Services does not come under my portfolio. So, it wouldn’t be me who would lead on this but perhaps I should ask Councillor Steel how much he would set on the cheque book in order to get rid of those buildings.

 

Home Office and National Union of Student’s Alcohol Impact Scheme

 

Councillor Georgina Culley asked the following question of the Portfolio Holder for Adults, Commissioning and Health:

 

Would the Portfolio Holder join me in welcoming the Home Office and National Union of Student’s Alcohol Impact Scheme and in congratulating the University of Nottingham for taking part in the pilot scheme? How will this potentially benefit residents in student areas and also residents in other parts of the city, such as his own ward, where there is a smaller student population?

 

Councillor Alex Norris replied as follows:

 

Thank you Lord Mayor and can I thank Councillor Culley for her question, I share her pleasure at this news and the good wishes to the University of Nottingham here. The Alcohol Impact Scheme is a National Union of Students pilot programme that seeks to create a social norm of responsible alcohol consumption by students. Funded by the Home Office, the University of Nottingham I am happy to say, is one of seven pilot universities.

 

The benefits for students are clear: better learning, better enjoyment of their first major period away from home and the best possible preparation for the world of work. This initiative as I understand is primarily a campus based one however, the benefits for the rest of us I think are very clear. A more balanced night time economy experience which is something we in this chamber have spoken quite a lot about and most importantly peaceful communities where people living very different lifestyles can happily coexist and we know where the major concentrations of students are, but as Councillor Culley correctly says, many of our wards have little pockets – I have a halls of residence for Nottingham Trent University in my ward

 

Tackling the impact of alcohol in our city is a priority for this Council. Members will know that I very much favour a ‘Goldilocks ‘ approach to this – if we’re too hot and let people do what they want, we know the impact that it has on the city centre and on communities, but if we’re too cold and say that it is time for everyone to go to bed at 11.30 pm we know that that takes away one of the best elements of the city which is its night time economy. So, we have to find ways of landing in the middle of that and we think we’re getting there. We take it on at both ends: the health of the individual and the general impact on the community of those individuals' behaviours.

 

This pilot will slot nicely into the range of things we are doing to tackle the impact of alcohol. We have a Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy action to raise awareness of the risk of excessive alcohol consumption among students through targeted health promotion work - this is shared with the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University, with the Crime and Drugs Partnership and the Framework Last Orders service. The scheme will also augment the delivery of the city’s alcohol strategy Safe, Responsible, Healthy: Nottingham’s Approach to Alcohol as well as the work of partners such as Nottinghamshire Police as expressed in the Alcohol Strategy of the Police and Crime Commissioner. In short, very good news and we look forward to working with the university to make sure that it has the maximum impact.