Issue - meetings

Report attached

The  report before Members supplemented the presentation attached as Appendix 1, which set out the Council’s performance within the remit of the Environment Overview and Scrutiny Sub-Committee for Quarter 3.

The Sub-Committee had previously chosen five performance indicators to measure, these were:

•Improve air quality in the borough by reducing the level of NO2

•HMO licenses issued

•HMOs enforced against

•Total Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) issued in month

•Response rate for PCN Challenges and Representations

Air quality monitoring and reporting against air quality objectives are undertaken based on a calendar year. The Service has developed an Air Quality Action Plan (AQAP) to improve local air quality.

The service had its first anti-idling action day at Hilldene School on 31 January and St Josephs school on 5 February. This  involved staff and trained volunteers talking to parents in vehicles at school pick up time and advising them on pollution associated with vehicles idling and asking them to switch off their engines.

The number of new HMO applications received had been very low as the compliant landlords had already come forward to licence, leaving those wishing to evade licensing or probably operating poor quality HMOs.

A consultation had been completed to extend the additional HMO licensing scheme to borough wide as well as introducing a small area targeted selective licensing scheme. Proposals would be reported to Cabinet in Spring 2020.

Enforcement of HMOs in Scheme 1 continues: 7 HMOs were issued final penalty notices in Quarter 3 equating to 15 separate penalty notices, 1 prosecution case, 3 Prohibition orders and 2 Improvement Notices issued.

There continued to be poor compliance levels in Moving Traffic Contraventions (MTC) locations (7,094 of 23,538 PCNs issued in Quarter Two for MTC) across the borough.

MTC PCN issuance dropped in December due to a technical issue between the camera supplier and Chipside. This had since been resolved and everything was working well again with issuance back up.

It is appropriate and important to monitor PCNs issued to identify trends and help ensure traffic and parking enforcement continued to contribute to road safety and smoothing traffic flow. However, it remained inappropriate to set a target for numbers of PCNs to be issued.

Action to be undertaken in 2019-20 would be the relocation of the MTC cameras to other sites from those sites where the council had achieved compliancy.

The Sub-Committee noted the report