Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee - Wednesday 26 November 2025, 7:30pm - Wandsworth Council Webcasting

Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee
Wednesday, 26th November 2025 at 7:30pm 

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  1. Webcast Finished

Good evening, everyone.
And welcome to the Wednesday, 26th of November, 2025 edition of the Environment Overview and
Scrutiny Committee.
I am Councillor Jamie Colkley, Councillor for St. Mary's and Chair of the Committee.
I am joined today by Councillor White, the cabinet member for environment,
as well as Paul Chadwick, the Executive Director for Resident Services.
As a housekeeping note, I ask that members of the committee introduce themselves when they first participate in discussions or speak.
And same with officers when they're called to present their reports.
So starting with Morehousekeeping, I have had apologies just from Council Jeffries so far.
Are there any other apologies or not?
No, okay.
So first item on the agenda, we have the minutes.

1 Minutes - 23rd September 2025

So are there any objections to confirming the minutes of 25th of September's correct record?
No, that's taken as a correct record.
And are there any declarations of pecuniary, other registrable or non -registrable interests?

2 Declarations of Interest

No declarations there.
Okay, so we can start now for the first substantive item of tonight,

3 Cleaner Borough Phase 2 Update (Paper No. 25-406)

which is agenda item number three, which is the Cleaner Borough Phase Two update paper number 25 -406.
And I believe the first presentation on this is coming from our director.
So first we'll have a couple words from Councillor Wyatt and then we'll go to Natasha Epstein for a presentation.
Sorry, yeah.
So this paper sets out the current situation with our two waste contracts of refuge collection and street cleaning.
It talks about the two phases of our Cleaner Borough Plan.
A big part of this is the refuge collection and how initial issues around splitting the
waste collection into three sections after the introduction of food waste collection
across the borough.
This is a good storey of a continued improvement and also the contractor and the workforce
responding with hitting targets, increasing tonnage and improving recycling rates.
Impossible without that initial decision.
It also talks about the approach to improving the housing estate service.
And there does remain some issues around cleaning, fly tipping and collection in some places,
but I look forward to the presentations by the contractors and would like to thank them
for their positive attitude and approach and working with our officers to produce innovative
and productive positive change.
Thank you, Councillor White.
Ms Epstein, do you want to start us off with the first presentation?
Okay.
Thank you, Chair.
So, as you mentioned, this is an update on the Cleaner Borough Plan 2.
It does touch a little bit on Cleaner Borough Phase 1, which was, as Councillor White mentioned,
was the rollout of the extension with the CERCO contract and the introduction of food
waste to the low -rise properties.
So some of the high -level benefits of that
is the recycling rate has increased from 22 .8 % to 29 .27%.
And that is one of the biggest jumps in recycling rate,
certainly at the moment in the industry,
and in any local authority over the past few years.
So that change had a few challenges on the way.
But actually, this was the main aim of it,
to get huge amounts of recycling
and the associated disposal savings as a result of that.
So Cleaner Borough Phase 2 was approved in October 24
and that had several other objectives
focusing on getting MSPIN numbers down,
so several interventions,
which I'll go into in a bit more detail.
The MSPIN is now at target
and has been at target for the past couple of months,
but as Councillor White said,
there was continuous improvement.
It was a significant change for residents, for operational staff, and for everyone to
get familiar with new services when there hadn't been a change in the borough for as
long as people can remember.
To maintain weekly collections was one of the key objectives, but the actions that were
put in place was tighter contract management, so we regularly met with the contractor throughout
the whole implementation of the new services on a daily basis at the very start, reducing
that frequency when the service began to settle, identifying problems and putting in solutions
to fix those problems.
One of the first problems in the first few weeks was the fact that we were overwhelmed
with recycling.
So in the process of rolling out a food waste service, everyone saw additional communication
material and bought into the recycling services.
So we had to add some extra rounds to cope with that additional capacity.
That again created a bit of disruption.
People were used to a vehicle coming at a particular time.
That vehicle changed its time and just created a bit of a perfect storm.
We also invested in more monitoring offices.
So we previously had three.
We've now moved to a model of five.
So one can work in each area.
And I know that that has worked really well with the contractors
to help improve the service as well.
So, improved collection and supervision.
So, I'll go into some detail about the additional supervisory staff on the contract to really
get into the detail of fixing all the problems.
Additional data -driven.
So, this was one of the biggest changes moving from what was paper -based service to data -driven
service in cab technology, and that was a huge step for everyone.
the designing of the back office, the front office website,
the staff getting used to using in -cab devices.
So that technology shift was a huge change
and is wherever improving it.
And that leads to better pathways,
so reporting of exceptions around where residents
might be using wheelie bins incorrectly
or things of, haven't got access to a location.
So that closed loop helps to fix things more.
So, white space is the in -cab system to really get into the detail of that data and then
further improvements on reporting. So, all of that resulted over time in continuous
reduction of missed collections, which we know was a problem, focusing on where there
were repeat problems, putting in processes to manage that, and now there will always
be missed collections. You cannot have 100 percent perfect service where there's so many
people interacting with it, but they're now at target.
So one of the next parts of the Cleaner Borough
was focusing on street cleansing
and in particular fly tipping.
So we have increased town centre cleansing,
so more town centre cleansing and emptying of litter bins
has resulted in 20 % more tonnage of street cleansing
being cleared in the last two quarters.
And associated with that, an 18 and 16 % reduction
in reported fly tips.
So effectively, the fly tips are being cleared
before they're getting a chance to be reported,
which is good.
And it's not necessarily fixed the problem completely,
but at least people aren't getting cross
that there's a fly tip that's been sitting on the street
for a long period of time,
and they're not having to report it,
or are proactively removing it before they've got there.
Also, more monitoring.
A designated CCTV operator has been appointed,
and he's fantastic whenever we get a fly tip.
He's looking back through the footage to identify if you can find a vehicle to try and prosecute people.
Also, we published a really good news storey where we did issue the £1 ,000 fine to catching people.
Obviously, enforcing fly -tipping is really challenging.
Lots of fly -tips of someone walking a bag down the end of a street and it's really hard.
You might see them on camera, but it's really hard to identify.
and therefore, unless you're there handing them an FBM while you're there, it's really
hard to enforce. So the CCTV office focus on those large scale vehicle fly tips where
you can actually prosecute someone. The Cleanup Bureau also introduced a private land clearance,
so we get quite a lot of noise from very visual areas that are private land, but you can see
them from the public highway and they create a bit of an eyesore. So it's not our responsibility
to clear from private land, but we acknowledge that that was causing some complaints and
some problems and affecting people's livelihoods. So we have very strategically, where that
has been flagged by councillors, always investigated by my officers, trying to find landowners
to take responsibility, but we have gone in and cleared those in 17 occasions, and that
will continue. We'll have a small pot of money. It's not particularly expensive, but has a
really positive impact.
We also acknowledge that flighting on housing estates is a challenge, and we have been working
with our contractors, so Krinkels will talk about what we've been doing on the Alton
estate in a minute.
Another objective was expanding mega -skips, and the number of mega -skips have been expanded,
particularly focused on housing estates.
We know that they're less well used on housing estates, but we're still working on that.
We've also worked with a reuse partner to try and encourage a more circular economy.
It's great that people can get rid of material in a mega -skip because they haven't got a vehicle to get to Smuggler's Way.
But ideally, and often there is a lot of very reusable items, so Collect Free Use is a partner that have now been coming along to mega -skips since June.
And we're focused, as I said, to increasing that on estates.
Another part was the two free bulky waste services that was launched in January, proving to be very, very popular, with about 150 collections being completed a day.
We previously only had 35 slots, so we increased the capacity by adding extra vehicles, and over 22 ,000 collections have now been completed.
completed. We did a survey with people that had used the service and 4 .79 stars out of
five was a reasonably good survey sample, so we're really pleased.
Obviously, as we said, bulk -uaste is popular. It's less popular on estates and we've got
some really good mapping data that shows where people are booking where they live, so we're
people on housing estates to use bulky waste.
It's not surprising because they haven't got anywhere
to store that material.
Even if they booked a bulky waste collection,
it might still look like a fly tip
and get cleared as a fly tip
before the bulky waste crew came.
So we're working on doing some designated
bulky waste collection points on a couple of trial estates
to see if that helps improve things.
As I touched on, we've increased
the cleaning in town centres.
so increase the frequency across all high streets,
sometimes going from once clean to four times clean,
sometimes going from four to eight,
but just increasing the frequency.
So hopefully you'll notice that you've seen that
across the borough.
Also 30 new litter bins have been installed.
We did a litter bin engagement exercise
asking residents where they thought
an extra litter bin would be needed.
We did propose some sites, but it was an open question, so they could suggest anything.
That's been perceived very well and again has put litter bins, not necessarily in places
that we would have put them before, but clearly where there's a need next to a bus stop
or a school route or somewhere where there's often litter dropped on the floor.
Pavement washing is an area of the street cleansing contract that wasn't previously
included so we've enhanced that service to allow all parts of the borough on a cycle
to be cleansed and we've trialled a same day cleansing.
So at the moment we clean the residential streets one day after the collection and we
know that our collection methodology makes a little bit of mess on our streets sometimes,
sometimes from foxes, sometimes from the circles crews and often that will sit on the streets
till the following day when crinkles clear up.
We've tried a trial.
It's proved very successful.
It's complicated because you have
to make sure that they go after the Serco refuse crew.
There's no point cleaning before the crew have been through.
But that is proving to be successful.
We identified that residents in Flats
Above Shops had some challenges in terms of their rubbish
and recycling as well, generally putting it out every day.
So we've moved from a once -week collection
to a second collection. This was launched in October. We worked with the council tax
team to get permission to send directly addressed letters because we know that these residents,
if you put a leaflet through their door, will not engage. That's proved to be very successful
as well. We had a small patch in Ballum where there was some misunderstanding about collection
days. It's the edge of a zone, so some people on one side of the road have one collection
and then the other side of the road have a different day.
So we've just been working with that
and our monitoring officers have been keeping an eye
on that so far.
Our second stage of that will be to try and move
towards getting the waste only out on those collection days
so that our streets, our high streets in particular,
are cleaner for more days during the week.
Connected to all of this is obviously Pride in our Estates.
So we've done quite a lot of work on our estates.
That was part of a paper that was agreed where we increased capacity for rubbish and recycling.
We've installed nearly a thousand new bins across the estates over the last year and a half.
And we are working on an enhanced food waste bin washing.
So food waste has been rolled out to about 95 % of the council estates now and we're at 70 % of the borough.
So, but we acknowledge that our normal bin washing regime for food waste bins is perhaps
not often enough in the summer.
So we're just working on a new solution for that.
The paper approved bin enclosures for the priority estates.
There were previously a lot of very wooden enclosures with gates that were all falling
apart and just looked really untidy on the estate.
So procurement was done and Storm were the successful provider and those enclosures have
been installed across most of the priority estates.
CERCO also, we added a new part of the extension was to clear all recycling left next to the
bins.
This wasn't previously included and we noticed that that was causing a lot of complaints
about overflowing bins because the excess would be put by the cleaners after it had
been binned straight back in the bin.
So almost as soon as it was been emptied, it was full again.
So that clearing of excess waste has helped reduce the number of reports of missed collections
or overflowing bins.
There's always a question about why we don't provide our estates properties with Zacks like we do with the low -rise.
The main answer is they have a container to do it, but we thought we'd run a trial,
so we ran a trial on the Willing -Willison estate.
It didn't prove to make any difference, and actually by providing bags,
it creates a bigger challenge that people can't put material through an aperture.
So we chose not to blanketly deliver sacks to everyone in estates.
It is expensive to produce them.
Obviously we don't like producing lots of single -use plastics,
but we have made it available to everyone to collect from the library.
So we're not saying that people in estates can't use the sacks.
We're not just blanket delivering them.
We also did some work around rubber chutes and potentially closing rubber chutes.
They're very challenging on estates.
They often get blocked and they discourage people from recycling because it's much easier
to put your rubbish down the chute and you have to bring your recycling down.
But obviously that would always be done in consultation with the residents and they chose
not to support that locally.
It's something we'll continue to investigate.
A number of neighbouring boroughs have closed all of their chutes so it might be something
that we progress in the future.
All of the trial on the Willing -Willison actually demonstrated an increase in people's perception
of recycling and reduction in dissatisfaction.
So we did several interventions including the sacks, but also more bins, more capacity,
and just some general comms.
So that is being replicated across the borough.
and then over 300 enclosures, 200's been installed already,
and an extra 100 are on order to be installed
on the councilor's dates.
So it's been a very busy couple of years,
lots of things delivered.
Every time we've found something new,
we've tried to find a new solution to fix another problem,
and we will keep doing that.
So if you do have more things that you'd like us to fix,
come to us.
So I've got speakers from CERCO who's going to give a little perspective from the operational
side and then from crinkles around the street cleansing side.
And then we'll do questions at the end, I believe.
Okay, thank you.
Hello.
It's working just here.
Hi, nice to meet you.
I'm Frank Hummer from the operations director for CERCO.
Thank you Natasha for that.
Some of the areas actually Natasha's covered, so I'm going to skirt through some of my parts
and I will go to some other parts that are probably of interest.
So if I can go into the white space and the improved technology
that we introduced into the contract.
So the onboard white space device,
it enables the crews to see the work live.
They can close it off live so we can see that back in the office,
but it also enables them to log exceptions.
So should there be a contamination,
should there be a problem in the street or an area,
they can log that as well.
At the end of the day, we feed that information
through to the client daily, so they receive that information.
And then we work closely as partners
in terms of trying to develop or evolve any issues that
are encountered from that part.
Some of the challenges there were, new ways of working.
So we didn't have in -cab devices before in the old contract.
We had quite an old fleet, as you know, as well.
So there were some issues around those.
And some of the workforce are not necessarily
that tech savvy in the general sense.
So a lot of the education was around trying to use the devices, teach them in the right
way to better use the devices.
And actually, I think to be fair, they've actually grasped that quite well and moved
forward with the use of those devices.
Some of the other things we've also introduced actually, which we're really pleased with
actually, we've got some of what we call a live lane technology we introduced onto the
Wandsworth fleet.
We haven't got it widely on our Serco fleet yet, so we're introducing it onto new vehicles.
And effectively, we had an incident that took place in one of our other contracts where
an employee walked from the back of the vehicle and got struck by a vehicle.
So what we've done with one of our partners, we've developed a live lane technology
where effectively there's flashing lights at the back of the vehicle that warns the employees
there's something coming down the side of the vehicle, so they're fully aware of that.
Hot off the press, last night we was at the CITTI awards and we won the award for innovation
for that technology actually, which is fitted to the ones with vehicles.
So I think we're really pleased about that.
And obviously it shows, obviously we've done it
for the right reasons for securing the safety
of our employees and making sure that hopefully
we can limit instances taking place.
Not everything's foolproof, but I think it's about
trying to reduce those opportunities
for these things happening.
And then I think the other thing that actually
the Whitespace piece has added was improved data analysis
on the contract, so I wanna cover some
of the performance elements.
The data analysis from the Whitespace has enabled us
to focus on complaints and missed collections per wards,
per areas, we can focus on specific parts
and actually have targeted focus on areas
that need to be reduced.
And we see that through some of the work
that we do and cover.
That's generally on the innovation.
Performance, I think Natasha touched on the key points.
We had challenges at the start, there's no doubt in that.
Changing methodologies of delivery, change of vehicles.
We've created 30 plus new staff for the new services.
And then what we then done was we tried to do a blended with the staffing of having people that knew some of the areas so that we didn't lose that continuity.
Obviously, you're never going to get perfection on that because the way the rounds are structured and
then there was all that which I think caused some of the problems we had in the early days.
However, I think as Natasha said, because of the targeted enforcement, because of the improved technology,
because of the use of the systems are working closely in partnership with the authority,
with the cancer effectively what we've been able to do is get down to now the objective targets which are in the extension.
But obviously we want to drive that further, so we want to continue driving that lower down so
that we're improving on the target number and continuing to develop and deliver a better service for the authority.
As part of that, we also increase the supervision.
And so when you're adding in new services,
new vehicles, additional staff,
you need more people to monitor that.
So we increase the supervision and the monitoring of it.
And then obviously, like I mentioned earlier,
we have the targeted approach in terms of wards and roads
and high -miss collection area rates.
And obviously, one advantage we do have actually
with the white space, it enables you to highlight,
I'd call them vulnerable customers,
i .e. assisted collections.
So it's highlighted out on the device.
So they know then they have to positively close that device,
to close that collection off on the tablet.
So it's actually highlighted above just on the road name
and then on the actual property number is mentioned
that they know they need to,
that that's an assisted collection,
they need to do a special collection there
rather than a normal standard collection.
And then the other thing as well
that we're obviously quite proud about,
we obviously now got Fours Bronze.
So that was part of the extension we agreed to do.
So we're Fours Bronze accredited now in Wandsworth.
that's effectively a fleet recognition system,
which means you have to have basic criteria,
but it's also training staff on certain modules,
which is as set module as part of force.
That's all been accredited now, that's been achieved,
and you have to refresh that each year in effect.
So that's proving that you've got the necessary equipment
on the vehicles, which we have.
And obviously, the staff are trained to receive
the training, and then we have to submit that
and you get C credit accreditation from that.
Other part we had was the depot.
The depot was obviously, there was a lot of changes.
I'm sure people are aware that it was quite an old depot.
It hadn't had lots of loving, it's probably fair to say,
in that period of time.
There was a significant work that was carried out
in the depots where the key parts for us was
we had to work in the same area
whilst the depot works was being carried out,
which at times was significant.
It was fair to say so that was quite challenging but obviously we worked closely with the council
and the officers directly in terms of trying to make sure that we agreed plans to ensure
that we still were able to deliver the operation.
The poor management teams, the contract management team to be fair, we have a traffic management
plan per depot, they probably have to change it daily sometimes because of changes that
are happening but that was one of the circumstances that needed to be carried out and the health
safety challenges around that and obviously space is just a premium we know that's just you know in
London alone let alone anywhere trying to find spaces is quite valuable so having that space is
quite important but I think in fairness you know big significant movements in the depot the staff
which is a key part of that change actually they feel like they're working somewhere that's a nice
environment it makes it better it puts them in a better mindset and clearly when they're going out
to carry out the work they're in a better mindset it's just it's just a natural feeling that that
feeds it through. And then what we've also focused on the last year and just before that
was actually staff wellbeing and engagement. So what we've done is we've introduced twice
a year we have health kiosks that we take to the depot which are affected by the type
of kiosks you'd have at a gym where it takes your blood pressure, it takes your readings
and it will give you a printout of your, whether you want to know that or not, but a lot of
staff engaged in that proved very, very, very popular actually.
In the ones of depot we had 70 % of staff that used it, so it was quite a significant number.
We introduced a back in action service so we have a physio service weekly that is free
of charge to our staff.
So obviously they're doing a lot of manual handling, manual work and rightly so we feel
it's really important that they have the ability to be able to utilise services that sometimes
at the moment can be quite challenging to get into in the current climate.
So we've introduced that as well.
We also introduced uniquely a Staff Appreciation Day.
What we tended to find is a lot of our days will be,
thank you, well done, there will always be a but, however don't forget this, however
don't forget that.
We introduced a Staff Appreciation Day which is just about saying thank you.
There's no signs, there's no other subliminal messages being put out.
It's just about a thank you, and it's just about a thank you to the staff for what they're doing and how they're working in the contracts.
And recently in Wandsworth we reduced a Tutti Fruitti Tuesday.
So we provide free fruit for all of the staff on a Tuesday taken up to the mess rooms and it's proven exceptionally popular.
A lot more popular than we thought it was actually, in fairness.
it would be and then we'd like to think that that's linked with the health
kiosk and perhaps just people thinking about lifestyles and the elements that go
with that and one of the things we're looking at introducing going forward for
early 26 is a hydration programme as well about hydration and keeping yourself
hydrated as well and then the other thing I just wanted to pick up on two
other things actually on the staff piece I think they're quite important you know
the contract manager has done 20 plus years worked in Wandsworth and the rest
the team have done a significant amount of years as well so it's a resilient team that
has a continuity that understands the contract and understands the council.
I think that's a really important part and I think that's one of the main reasons why
we were able to get to where we did towards meeting the targets and meeting through the
challenges that we had and working collectively and collaboratively.
That's a really important part.
Then the last piece I'll say on staff, so it's staff engagement.
we carry out a staff engagement survey and as part of the staff engagement survey we
ask the staff to fill in about 20 questions, 25 questions in different categories.
Ones of last year had a 98 % completion rate and actually to be fair the people didn't
complete it there, I'm not sick at the time, it was actually 100 % that was working and
actually interestingly their engagement score was 82%, the average for CERCO is 72 % so it
showed that the staff were generally happier
in the general sense than they were
for the average for CERCO,
which again I think is a real positive
and probably quite interesting piece of information.
And finally, obviously we've just got some various,
as part of the extension there was a number of areas
of social value that we're looking at working on.
Part of the extension we introduced new social value officer
which is working very closely with the authority,
with the council to deliver and try to look for new opportunities.
Obviously it's part of apprenticeships, local recruitment and we're looking in areas in
terms of, I've had a lot of staff that have actually taken apprenticeships and were loaders
and have succeeded in being HGV drivers, so through apprenticeship schemes.
So it's about succession planning, developing staff from within as well.
So I probably spoke quickly and loud, so apologies for that.
Thank you.
Good evening, everyone.
My name is Nico.
I'm the operations director for Crinkles UK.
Similar to Franco, I will touch on a certain aspect of the majority of the points that
Natasha has covered tonight and perhaps just look at it from the operational perspective.
We will start with the enhanced services.
That has made an immediate visual impact in the borough.
It has been extremely successful and that is very clear from the feedback that we have
had and very positive feedback and compliments on the condition of the streets.
Recruiting new staff to fill the newly created position was challenging and initially we
had to reach out to recruitment agencies.
Street cleansing has always been seen as not too much desirable to work on the streets
really so us as a company we need to ensure and what we're doing is how we make it more
attractive for the staff to join our team really.
There are a number of benefits that we offer to the staff and in order to make it more
appealing, we implement flexible working hours, part -time work to sort of reach out to a number
of people.
And recently we have actually managed to successfully fill all the positions with permanent staff.
Of course it doesn't end there.
We need to ensure that we retain those staff and hence why we are constantly ensuring that
we review as a company our policies and the benefits towards the staff we currently have.
But overall, it has been extremely positive.
The position has been filled and the Cleaner Borough campaign so far is going all to plan.
Moving on to the pavement washing, which has been another enhanced service during this
period.
The operation is generally quite slow, mainly down to the fact that the majority of the
pavement haven't been washed previously and have been around a long time, and I don't
remember the last time they were done, hence the reason why the operation itself is quite
slow.
However, we have made a difference, and you can see – perhaps you may have noticed yourself
in certain high streets where we have managed to get the team to work on the jetwashing.
You could see the visual effect that it has had on the high streets.
We are working with Natasha's team to identify areas throughout the borough where we can
where we can prioritise and spend time to jet wash
a number of high straits or other areas.
Similar to CIRCO, we're working together
with the client officers for the digitization
of the straight cleansing routes and rounds.
We have our in -house programme, we call it MSS,
that offers all the teams special apps on their phones
or tablets where they can click each route
that they complete.
It gives them the ability to take photo of the roads
that they have completed.
It's live data so you can see exactly where they've been,
the time they've been there and what they've managed to do.
there is the option to take photos before and after the work has been completed.
Recently, following the Wandsworth Council's wonderful new logo,
all street cleansing vehicles have been rebranded with both the Wandsworth and the Kringles logo.
I will touch in the end the change of name from Continental Landscape to Kringles.
We have a focus on a number of additional assistance, especially with Alton Estates.
Natasha mentioned how we have assisted with that project.
There's been a number of clearance on fly tipping, where historically the fly tip was on the increase,
and they want cleared as swiftly as needed.
Our teams have been there in their state and has made a quick visual impact
and reduced the number of fly tips.
Also, we have improved the timeframe between the reported fly tip and the clearances.
We have also carried out some clearance on private lands that has been specifically requested
by the Council.
Another area that may not be too significant for some, but for us as a contractor, was
the installation of the bollards in the causeway, which, thanks to Natasha, we've been trying
to do that for many years and we haven't been successful. That was causing a real operational
issues because a large number of cars were parked in there. It was free parking, basically.
However, they were causing obstacles for our vehicles. Often our larger fleet couldn't
access the entrance or couldn't come out, which meant that at time there was delay on
operations.
We have worked closely with Natasha and we've got the ballads installed, which has meant
that now the fleet movement, it's clear and it avoids any obstruction or operational delays.
I mentioned early on about the change of name.
So most of you would have known us as Continental Landscape.
We've been doing ground maintenance services across the United Kingdom since 1989, but
recently, specifically 9th of January 2025, we changed from continental landscape to crinkles.
We are exactly the same company, no changes.
The reason, the main reason for that was that our role in the industry has expanded.
It includes a number of other services and not just grounds maintenance as the previous name suggested, continent landscape.
We engaged in tree maintenance, cleansing services, playgrounds.
So it was necessary for our name to reflect our commitment
in providing innovation towards diverse facilities,
including the cleansing.
It also affirms our association
with our parent group, Krinkles.
So Krinkles is the original name
and they are our parent company,
so we just adopted the parent name.
It's worth mentioning that as a company we've always believed to grow through acquisition rather than organically.
Sorry, apologies, we don't grow through acquisition, we grow organically.
and all our contracts that we have has been retained or acquired through tender.
We haven't purchased any other companies.
Hence, and over a period of time, it appeared as if we were one of the smaller companies in the industry.
So, we felt necessary to join with our parent group as crinkles in order to sort of show
our strength in the market.
So, no changes to the senior team and no changes to our operation, just simply the name.
I will touch a little bit on staff welfare.
So again, that is extremely important to us and we've taken a number...
Sorry, Mr. Martinez, I just want to cheque how much longer do you have to go?
Literally 30 seconds.
Okay, all right, thank you.
Time did well, I guess.
So, yeah, just on the staff welfare, I will touch briefly.
We ensure that we have a dedicated mental health officer in each contract that we have.
We are providing Christmas vouchers to all staff.
We carry out annual appraisals where we do listen to the staff and ensure that we implement
any ideas that they come forward with really.
and we also provide free hearing tests to all our staff.
That's it, thank you very much.
Great, thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Epstein,
for your brilliantly detailed presentation on the plan.
There is so much content in there,
and thank you to you and the team
for summarising it so well
and giving us so much information,
and thank you to our external guests as well
for giving us more insight in the operations
of both Serco and Kinkles.
So now with the presentation done,
we'll open the floor to questions.
May I ask for members, try instead of asking one question
to Ms. Epstein, one question to Mr. Murphy,
one question to Mr. Modicevich,
if we just sort of stick to how many questions you want
for each individual rather than having to bounce
between each person.
So try and keep it to the person if you can.
So, I think, Councillor Brooks, you had your hand up first.
Thank you very much, Chair.
Councillor Ethan Brooks for Thamesfield Ward in Putney.
I understand within the circular contract, this is a question for Ms. Epstein, that when
the service undergoes a variation, as it has done as we rolled out this phase of the Cleaner
programme that initiates a grace period call it when to allow the contractor to
bed in those services would it be possible to tell us how much how many
weeks since the beginning of this phase of the cleaner borough programme have has
been under those bedding in periods thank you and so the grace periods
reasonably standard in the industry for service change and it's a standard three -month period.
So the grace period will have started from day one of the service change, the 6th of
June, I can't remember the exact date but about that date.
And so roughly three months from then till the end of September, so June, July, August,
and then part of September, that's the grace period.
And after that point, so that allows the contractor, we know that there are challenges to, you
address challenges, to fix challenges, and after that point, KPI deductions are applied.
So the grace period means that there's no financial deductions.
We still monitored the performance because that tells us how the service is going, but
the actual deductions, the financial cost wasn't charged.
Just to clarify, so there wasn't a longer period of time in that grace period than the
initial 12 weeks?
Thank you very much.
Councillor Osborne.
Yes, Councillor Rex Osborne from Tooting Broadway Ward.
It's an excellent paper and it tells a good storey and it's been presented in a way which doesn't seek to hide anything or pretend that there haven't been problems and I welcome that.
I'm going to say some things which may sound a bit churlish in the circumstances.
You may think they're criticisms.
They're not exactly criticisms.
I want to pull out some challenges, put it that way, which I do because I want to – I
mean, in some instances I'm keen to see if I can tweak the system a bit and make minor
improvements.
But there are some instances where I'm looking for more analysis, I think, and I want to
to throw in some difficulties because of that.
But let me make a general point here about refuse collection,
I think, in local authorities.
If you look at Wandsworth, Wandsworth
is a populous borough, effectively an inner city
borough, where there are some areas of very high footfall,
like Clapham Junction and Tooting Broadway.
All kinds of activities taking place, a massive churn in the population, the residents turn
over by about a third every year.
And all that kind of activity is going to – all those facts are going to present enormous
challenges to a waste service.
And I think there are challenges for the contractors, challenges for the officer team, challenges
I think for the councillors in a lot of instances, we pick up a lot of the complaints.
But most of all I think actually challenges for the residents of the borough.
And at the end of the day we have to remember it's for them that we're doing all this.
and they're the people we're trying to help.
If we look at the position from the point of view of the public of what's going on,
if you're a new resident, a complicated system, it has to be a complicated system
because we're dealing with such a complex, complex borough,
now with 21st century requirements of recycling and food collecting.
It's got to be complicated.
And I think people can be forgiven for sometimes not quite knowing what the system is
if you're a resident, especially if you're a new resident.
And I think that presents an enormous challenge to everybody, including the residents themselves.
And it puts pressure on what our communications are.
I think it puts pressure actually on how we deal with something that's gone wrong.
I don't mind if officers and contractors come to us as a council, come to an OSC like this
one, a committee like this one, and say, look, there has been a problem, because there are
bound to be some problems in such a complicated and enormous system.
But we have come up with a solution, and we're going to see if that solution works.
And maybe the solution works, and maybe it doesn't.
But if it doesn't work, we'll come up with another solution.
But we will always engage with the committee and explain what's happening.
I think that's fair. You can't ask more of a system than that, I would say.
I would also say that, again, if we're looking at the public...
We have members of the public who aren't always helpful,
sometimes in a wilful way, perhaps.
But more often, simply because they're a bit confused.
And I think we have to make careful judgments about how we deal with the public on these matters.
Sometimes it's right to take a firm hand with members of the public,
because they've presented the rubbish in a poor way or something like that.
But sometimes I think we stray over a little bit, we're a touch too harsh,
and we need to be a bit more understanding about the problems in the street.
I mean, I'm pleased to say that we tend to talk about whether rubbish has been properly
presented or not properly presented these days.
There was a time, I don't think we use the term any longer, but there was a time when
we used to talk about people committing a misdemeanour of having lost control of their
rubbish, which always struck me as being a bizarre thing to say.
I've been fined by my counsel because I lost control of my rubbish.
I tried very hard.
I said sit and be good rubbish and stay and all the rest of it to try and train the rubbish
but I turned my back and the rubbish ran off.
You know that just doesn't, it just didn't make any sense.
So it's about presentation of the rubbish these days and I think that indicates a degree
of moving in the right direction, being a bit more understanding of the problem from
the point of view of the resident and actually I think that's important.
The other thing I'm pleased to hear about tonight is all the staff welfare issues,
because I think it is important to see things in terms of the problem for the teams, for the crews,
and the managers for those crews.
Absolutely no doubt whatsoever, these are jobs which have all sorts of problems associated with them.
Dangerous jobs in some ways, and jobs which can cause back problems.
There is a danger, I think, of infection sometimes, dealing with the kind of refuse they're dealing with and so on.
And for both Serco and crinkles, I think those are things to take into account at all times.
But there are some...
Councillor Sporn, do you have some questions to go forward?
No, I'm making a speech actually.
Okay.
I will raise some questions.
There are, I think, some issues.
One is the way the statistics are gathered and presented.
I'm pleased to say that the statistics are now done on a ward -by -ward basis, but I wonder
if we can go further.
I'd be interested in seeing those statistics on a street -by -street basis.
And the reason I say that is to improve on analysis.
Sometimes it might be about what's happening with the crew, I see that.
But actually sometimes I think it might be about the geography and the configuration of that street.
And therefore, you know, we're looking at other insights into what's there.
I'm interested to know, sometimes we do double dusts,
which if people don't know what a double dust is, if you've got a problem with missed collections in a street,
then after the vehicles have been around and collected refuse,
they come around again later that morning and collect everything.
And I'm concerned about that, first of all because it's another vehicle journey and also because all the different types of refuse are getting mixed up together
and we're not making the distinction between different types of refuse that perhaps we should be.
I'd be interested to know how many double dusts we're still doing.
Are they still necessary?
Because we should be trying to eliminate them by dealing with the miscollection problem.
I would add that one extra positive about what we're doing at the moment is the new
monitoring officers.
And I say to all councillors, if you can establish a good working relationship with your monitoring
officer, then it solves an awful lot of problems
on refuse collection in the ward.
I have two that overlap into my ward.
And they deserve a shout out, actually.
Haley Hansen and Kees Kamele are doing a fantastic job
as monitoring officers and getting stuff out of the way.
And the thing that, an area where I'd be interested in some more analysis is this business about,
when we miss a site, sometimes it's about private land I know,
but it seems to me that there are kind of sites that are kind of borderline.
I mean I've got one at the moment which is problematic because it's right on the border with the other bar at Merton.
And the monitoring officer is focused on it and trying to deal with it.
But it seems to me that we should not have piles of rubbish being missed simply because
they're in this kind of limbo, this hybrid status somewhere on the border between one
bar or another or between different types of category.
And if I look at the street cleaning in particular, again, I understand the problems from the
point of view the people who have to go out and do it. But at the same time I
have one job. They go along the street and if something's not supposed to be
there they pick it up. And I mean I've got I've got a couple of photos here one
taken straight after the the refuse teams came round and there's a pile of
something in the street. The next day at about the same time after the street
It should have been swept.
It's still there.
I came down that street this evening on the way here,
and I have a photo on my phone of that same pile.
They should have seen it.
They should have cleared it away.
They get one job, and it's not being done.
And I'd be interested to know why we've got that problem.
It's not an isolated case.
It happens frequently and ought to be dealt with.
And finally, I've picked up in conversations with the crews and with others that sometimes
with street cleaning we have extra problems.
There's something they refer to as leafing, which I think means they've got extra problems
when there are leaves in the street and so on.
And you know, I've got to say to the contractors, in particular crinkles, I think, in this instance,
You know, around about this time of year, most years, we get a lot of leaves in the
street and an organisation ought to have anticipated that well in advance before that became a
problem on street cleaning.
So there are a number of challenges there which I'd be interested in hearing addressed.
But I guess the chair thinks I've gone on too long and I'll shut up.
Thank you Councillor Osborne. Ms Epstein do you want to come back on those points?
Yeah, so I agree. Communicating with residents is a challenge.
Often people copy what their neighbours do, so if someone's doing something wrong on their street, I'm terrible.
I never know what week it is. I go and see what bin my neighbours put out and then I put mine out.
It's not complicated, it's only one every other week,
but you know, you're compelled to do that.
So we have tried to get people,
when we've had face -to -face contact,
to put messages on their street WhatsApp groups,
because then they've got contact
with their local residents.
Because as you said, often it is a very local issue.
We can run reports based on number
of missed collections by road,
and so we do look at the roads
that have got the highest number of missed collections.
It's not missed per 100 ,000 in terms of the normal KPI, but we do look at actual total
number of missed collections.
And Wandsworth is unique.
I call it, it has bespoke collection points.
You can literally leave your rubbish wherever you like and we have to hunt and find and
go and get it.
Sometimes it's in a bin, sometimes it's in a bag, sometimes it's around the corner, sometimes
it's through a back gate, which we tried to close off, but that's what they were doing
before.
So there was all of these challenges around hunt and find for the rubbish is a bit of
a challenge, but I think that's what we've kind of worked on presentation.
And initially, sometimes the crews saw a big pile of bags on the street, so they thought
that was the resident put it out.
But actually, because like you said, there's so many flats, so many different properties,
that actually all the bins on the property were full, and then the pile on the streets
as well.
So it's just taken a bit of time to come to grips with that.
Double dusting.
So we've only done that in situations
where we know residents are put, there's
high numbers of missed collections,
and we think residents are putting it out late.
And so the intention is that they only
double dust for one or two weeks,
because the message is to communicate
with those residents, with the support from the monitoring
officers, to explain that they need to get their rubbish out
by a particular time.
So yeah, it's a short -term attacking.
That's one of the measures that we put in place
to reduce missed collections and raise awareness
of what correct presentation is.
Some of the other things that you said.
Street cleansing, I don't know if Nico
wants to come in on that.
I don't know why that person's walking past that,
whether they don't realise it's theirs.
But I think if you see those things, flag it with us.
We can raise it with the contractors.
we can cheque, we can monitor, we can investigate why, and then we can fix it.
So yeah, just flag anything like that.
Leafing, yes, always a big challenge for street cleansing.
Never the same. No leafing season is ever the same.
Now, next year, I encourage you to watch how leaves fall,
because last year they all fell really early, because it was really hot,
and then all of a sudden there's a storm and they all fall at the same time.
So we stand up leafing resources. We try to stand them up early because we knew that they were falling earlier
But you it doesn't matter how many resources you've got it's never enough to cope with when the leaves come down
Because they all come down and everyone wants their the leaves cleared from their street at the same time
So we have a programme we work through that programme as quickly as possible
We've got extra resources on top of the normal street cleansing
But I think the street cleanses that you spoke to he's got his beat
you know, in his normal cleansing of that beet is almost threefold harder because there's
so many leaves in that beet. And it's great that we've got so many trees in Wandsworth,
but yeah, it is quite a big challenge in, so I don't know if you wanted to add to the
kind of leafing challenges.
Thanks Natasha, I mean you covered it very well, but I would like to go just back to
the previous issue with the waste and then litter really. It would be nice if you could
share the exact location and perhaps the photos that you have so I can take it away and ensure
that the investigation is taken and identify what the issue is and make sure that we put
it right.
In terms of the leafing, yeah, Natasha is spot on.
Each year is different depending on the weather, how frosty it is, how windy it is.
Unfortunately, as much as I could talk to the trees, they don't tend to listen to me
and they will decide to let the leaves go at any time really.
We do bring a number of additional resources and fleet machines, large machines during
the leafing season.
Each team have their roots and rounds, so on top of the leafing we still have to carry
carry on with the normal sweeping round. So yes, the challenge is doubled up during the
leafing season. However, we aim to finish all the leafing within a couple of months
or by Christmas all the leafing should be completed, which generally speaking, it's
really fast in Wandsworth. In a lot of other boroughs, the leafing season extended to over
three months period. So in Wandsworth we ensure that we finish by Christmas time. And then
January we just go back and just give that final polish to the streets. Christmas streets
indeed, yeah.
Great, thank you for that. Councillor Apps.
Thank you very much, Councillor Apshaft in Queenstown Ward.
So firstly, Ms. Epstein and Mr. Chadwick, I'd just like to thank you for your energy
and commitment and problem -solving attitude and also resilience, because I know it's been
quite a journey undertaking such a major change to the service, so thank you very much for
that.
And I'd also like to say thank you to Serco and Krinkles and your teams.
We really appreciate it, it's a tough job.
And we really, as residents,
we really depend on you doing that for us, so thank you so much.
Firstly, I would just like to say, I don't think anybody's talked so much about the recycling rate yet.
but I do hope that we're going to win some sort of,
I'd be very surprised we don't win some sort of most improved award and best in class.
So that's been really good to see and was obviously an important objective
that we set out at the beginning of our term.
So it's good to see that.
But I wanted to ask you, firstly, I'm a big fan of like learning from,
you know, particularly when things maybe don't go as you planned,
like learning from that experience and think about that in terms of the future.
So think about like something that you might do differently
or something you would change
if approaching the service change again.
I actually have to say I was really interesting
about the leafing because I've actually got a resident
who's often complains about the leaves.
And so I cycled up the road the other day.
And it was about 5 .30 and the guy was still out
clearing the leaves.
And I thought, goodness bless you for doing that
because obviously he was working late.
It was really dark.
So it was just impressive to see,
but I was also very interested to hear about the leaves
and how you cope with that.
But also, how is the planning going
for Christmas trees, which has gone better
in the last couple of years than it did in the previous one?
So it would be good to hear how the plans are going
for our collection on that.
Thank you.
And there's certainly always stuff to learn.
I've done several service changes,
and it doesn't matter how much you plan for, there's always something that you haven't planned for.
So certainly at Cindy, my assistant director and I were discussing this, that we,
when we rolled out the food waste service, all the service information was in the food waste caddy.
And if someone wasn't necessarily interested in doing food waste,
we think they probably didn't even look in the caddy.
So therefore they didn't get any of the comments about the fact that there was different vehicles.
So we would in future deliver a leaflet to every address.
Now we've used council tax data to communicate with the flats of our shops.
I think that personalised address data is really important.
You know, if you get something that says too occupier or too resident,
how many times do you actually read it?
You know, hopefully we're all council officers, so we would take that effort.
But no, most people wouldn't bother.
And as you mentioned, our high churn of population is really challenging to communicate with
that as much as we tell people that, you know, getting that message, continuous messaging
over.
So, yeah, plenty that we could learn from.
Also, I think managing people's expectations around the change, that it changed, is difficult
for everybody.
And I guess to reassure you that we would always be trying to fix it as quickly as we can
Council about him
Thank you chair a
Question actually if I'm enough
But also I'd like to make a few comments isn't that boring of me
There's a picture. Did you also introduce yourself? Sorry I will indeed
Tony Belton, Councillor Batsy -Partwood, thanks for that.
I've done it to you a couple of times, but thank you.
There's a picture here on page 11 of the report, as it's presented to us, of enclosures on the Alton Estate.
And it merely reminds me of a particular problem I have at the bottom of Waybridge Point.
Some of you wouldn't be obviously in no way at which point.
The cabinet member knows about this because I've written to him about six times.
And it's four, okay.
Smart exaggeration is allowed, surely.
So I've written to him and I know he's aware of it and I know he's working on it.
but this picture is so much better than the sight that this gentleman gets immediately outside at his front door every day.
These things happen, I'm not making a big point about it, I just mention it in passing.
What I want you to say more generally, I'm very pleased with what you said about staffing, all of you.
I sometimes get up and watch the old -fashioned delivery and the black sacks and the white sacks
and look at it and think about all the people who complain about dustbin.
Just up my bit of street, there's more physical effort that goes into that
than the whole of my working months.
So how many people could take that all day?
I mean, so that's really good what you said about staffing.
I do appreciate that very strongly.
One other brief comment.
I've operated, I've had slightly, two brief comments,
sorry, I've had slightly longer than most people here
are doing with these things.
And in my working life, which goes on quite a lot,
I've worked in two teams which were really exceptional.
And those two teams made nostalgia in my working life
about those great periods.
from your presentation I thought you sounded like a great team.
You just all sounded very enthusiastic, very positive.
One of the best presentations I had. Keep it going. This is so important.
You'll remember it. I just guarantee you'll remember it.
And the other thing, see, I've...
What are... I mean, it's my constituents as well, members of the committee.
What is it about leafing?
It's one of the pleasures of my life, walking through leaves and kicking them up.
And, OK, there was more of a pleasure in my life when I was a tenth in my current age.
But nonetheless, I still don't... And we go on about it.
Of course it's a problem, and I'm glad you sorted out appropriately. Thank you.
I mean, the first one that comes to mind would be dog waste hidden underneath the leaves,
but I'll let Miss Epstein come back on that.
Oh, I realise there are problems. I'm not silly about it.
Thank you for your positive comments and yes we will fix Weybridge point. I know it is a challenge.
We know that that was the purpose of enclosures and we know fly tipping hotspots are tiresome for people that have the same location and it is challenging for us to fix as well but we will keep going at that.
and leafing the biggest challenge is once they get wet and then they become slip hazards.
So that's the biggest reason why we try and get them off as quickly when they're dry.
They're also much harder to sweep up when they're wet as well.
So it's a race against the rain to prevent any accidents.
That's the most important thing.
But also blocking gullies as I'm sure Henry will moan about.
No, no, no.
Thank you very much, Chair.
Councillor Caddy, Southfields Ward.
So yeah, I'd also echo what others have said in terms of congratulating the team on the
improvements that have been made, and particularly with the missed collections.
Obviously, the rates have improved significantly, so it might sound a bit churlish, but I have
got a question that a lot of people have sort of fed back to me, and I'm not sure about
the answer. Are the teams supposed to pile up big sort of piles of bags between cars
when they do the collections? Because there's a couple of streets on my street where I live,
but also streets in my ward, which are very narrow, very heavily parked. And people have
reported, you know, sort of 6 .30 in the morning, whatever time it is that the bin men come,
there's kind of beeping in the road because all of the passing spaces have been filled
up basically with bags of sacks. And so cars come down and can't, you know, can't pass
each other and it obviously causes a bit of a problem.
So I don't know what the policy is because I don't know if,
you know, whether to tell people to report it
and say that it shouldn't happen or whether it actually is
what is supposed to happen.
So we call it pulling out and it's reasonably common practise
for a SAC service and particularly where, as we said,
we've got all these bespoke collection points to try
and make sure that they clear all the SACs.
But also, as you said, we've got very congested streets,
and refuse trucks take up a lot of space.
So their aim is to try and get through the street
as quickly as possible.
So by having the sacks pulled out and close to the vehicle,
they can load it as fast as possible
and try and not cause too much congestion.
Appreciate that they shouldn't be scratching cars,
but hadn't really thought about the fact
that they were blocking pull -in spaces as a result of that.
So we have put a, so there's some controls on pulling out.
So they're not allowed to pull out before 6 .30
when the collection starts.
So if they are pulling out before that, do let us know.
They're also not meant to pull out more than 60 minutes
in advance of the crew.
So the main time is when, because we do two loads,
so when the vehicle goes off to the tip to offload,
the loader stays around to pull out,
to carry on working to make it efficient.
So that is the main time, but also, as I said,
to try and make it more efficient when they're
in the road.
But if you've got particular challenges,
we can try and reduce pulling out or not stack it in the road.
I think Franco would say it shouldn't ever
be stacked in the road.
It should always be stacked on the pavement.
So we can certainly do some monitoring
and have a look at the road and just
try and make it better for residents.
Thank you.
And I can share the names of a couple of the roads with you.
I did feedback to the residents that it helps the lorries move more quickly,
but they said it doesn't really matter to them how quickly the lorries use,
because they can just turn around and go the other way because they're not blocking both ends.
But it really matters if they're driving down and they meet another car and then there's nowhere they can,
you know, sort of pass and you just end up with sort of road rage at 7am
with cars backed up in the street.
As Natasha said, it is quite common.
It can be an issue, certainly in the London Boas as well.
We try to get through a road as quick as possible.
Unfortunately, people, you know, sometimes they leave five minutes late, whatever it may be,
and you end up, you do end up with some threats and we've got some issues.
We've had some sort of threats to staff and been put in very difficult situations.
So the pulling out enables us to be able to limit the time we spend in the street.
Thank you.
Councillor Boswell.
Thank you very much, Chair.
I'm counsellor Sheila Boswell to Tingbeck Ward
Two questions just really quickly for you
Natasha the first one is food waste roll out in flats above shops
In my ward in Tooting Beck it takes in the top end of the high street and it gets really really
Messy in that area in any way and I am concerned
That we are going to be starting to do this and the months after Christmas
A lot of what you've said is reassuring that you're not going to put the communications
in the bin.
You're actually going to write to people individually.
But I wanted to ask maybe what can we as counsellors do, because obviously when I get complaints
about the rubbish, sometimes I'll go and try and actually talk directly with the residents,
or I'll write a little note from me for a group of flats saying this is the day you're
to put your rubbish up. Just personal, so we're thinking the same thing. But yes, some
reassurance that we've learnt that when we do something new that it will go smoothly.
And then the other question, it's really, really great about the picking up from private
land where there are fly tips and being flexible and not just saying, well, that's private
land. It's not council, so we're not picking up. But as I understood it, you are recovering
the cost from the landlord or attempting to. So I just wanted to know about that as well.
Thank you so much. Two questions, no speech.
So we always try to attempt to recover the costs. It's not always practical. So where
possible, we would always try and recharge. Actually, in Richmond, we had a really successful
situation recently there was a pile of rubbish that was nearly as big as this room that had
built up over about ten years on an area of private land down a back alley and we thought
Richmond were going to have to pay to clear it because it's causing an eyesore and the
enforcement officers served notices on the landlords and they cleared it up.
And this had been a problem and no one had been able to fix it and we served a notice
and they fixed it and so that was a real success storey.
So we'll use that learning in Wandsworth as well,
that those notices wherever possible
to try and get them to take action.
The food waste in Flats, Flash, so Flats above Shops,
is proving to be a little challenging.
That's why we wanted to do the second collection for the waste
and recycling first.
We obviously have a statutory obligation
to provide everyone with a food waste service
by the 1st of April next year.
We have been watching Westminster, they've been doing an on -demand service where you book a collection and you hand a caddy.
So the biggest problem is you cannot have a caddy on a high street after collection.
So the book collection, you hand the caddy over and then empty it and then hand it back.
Huge challenges around that. Obviously you have to be at home.
We know lots of our people that live in flat swab shops are not working from home.
Plus also now Defra has said that that would not be a compliant service.
So we were looking at that.
That's gone out the window.
We're trying not to put housing units like we've put on our estates on our high streets.
Henry's not happy about me putting bins on high streets.
And the requirement is that you really shouldn't make people walk more than 30 metres to a
bin.
So then you'd have food waste bins sort of dotted along our high streets.
So we haven't quite got a perfect solution.
Where flats above shops have back alleys,
that's absolutely fine.
We can put bins in back alleys.
We have looked at lamppost -mounted little bins.
So we went to a conference a couple of weeks ago
and that was an option that we're currently pursuing
that are not, because you don't need this big housing unit
for the number of flats above shops there.
So we're still working on a solution.
We will be three quarters of the way there.
We've talked about this, that in reality, if we are at 97 % compliance by the 1st of
April, I can't imagine Defra are going to come knocking on our door to say you haven't
done everything.
And this problem is not just the Wandsworth problem, this is a nationwide problem.
So if Westminster can't fix it, then we're all going to have to do it collectively anyway.
But we are still working on providing those residents with flats.
because the main thing is that the food in the refuse sacks is the thing that gets attacked.
So if people want to reduce spillage, use the food waste service.
That is the best way to do it.
And that's your role.
If you can get more people to use the food waste service,
then we'll have less spillages on our streets.
Can I just comment?
Yeah, sure.
Also, thank you so much.
All of that is really reassuring, but obviously, yeah, it's going to be a big change
And there will be hiccups, no doubt.
I'm sure that you have included this as well, but
I found one instance where flats above shops, and
they kept telling me we haven't got anywhere to put our waste.
There isn't anywhere.
And so because I was on the planning committee at the time, I thought I'll go and
look at the original planning application and see if there was bin space built into this build.
And of course there was, but the landlord was using it for something else.
So I just, it's anecdotal, but it solved a problem for about six or seven flats on
our Pertuting High Street.
So yeah, not working in silos, working together.
I think that's why we wanted to put in the second collection.
We knew that these flats haven't got space to store their rubbish for a whole week in
what is inevitably a fairly small flat.
They haven't got anywhere outside to put it.
That was the purpose of the second collection to effectively, they just bring out their rubbish for that second collection.
So that's our first step, but it's not the final step.
As we said, we'll try and contain round in -service roads wherever we can as well.
But yes, if you can make sure the SPD, obviously we don't tend to build that many more flat -spo shops,
or maybe we are, that make sure that there's always sufficient space for waste.
And we get consulted on as a team in all planning applications
But sometimes what goes in the plan isn't necessarily what's built on the ground afterwards
There's always some challenges
Councillor French
Good evening Katrina counsellor Katrina French for first downward
I wanted to say thank you for such a far presentation and all the
Harder hard work that's gone into the the change of service
Just a few points that I wanted to pick up on.
One was around the fly tipping and encourage that we're being very responsive.
We can see nationally that it's not just a ones off issue.
The issue in Oxfordshire highlights that it's happening everywhere.
Recently I had a resident that had left some rubbish because the bin was overflowing and they had received a fine.
Thankfully the fine had been rescinded because there had been no ill intent.
But I do think that we need to be ensuring that we're working a lot closer with housing.
And I know I've raised this with Councillor White, because especially for people in council estates or
social housing, their immediate areas, what they see and if it's not on the high streets, often forgotten about.
So just making sure there's much more joint out working and that the refuse collection is happening.
I think of Christmas coming, it's a time of a lot of cellophane, a lot of cardboard boxes.
just being very proactive to ensure that we have the appropriate number of bins in the areas.
So that was the first thing, more of a comment on the crack down and fly tip and really welcome it,
because wherever I go I'm taking a photo and reporting stuff.
But it was disheartening to hear a resident that had tried to do, that had done the right thing, but it ended up being fine.
But thankfully it's been rescinded.
The second thing was around mega skips and plans just for the new year, I suppose.
Because Christmas is always a time where people decide they want out of the old, in with the
new, a couple of sales going on.
Just ensuring that we've got really strong comms for people to understand these things
will be coming up in the new year.
So instead of fly tipping, just keep it there and really encourage that we're doing partnership
work in so that things that can be recycled, reused or kept in the buying economy, that's
being done.
And the final thing is bulky waste and identifying,
I don't know if it's the,
is that where we're going to identify spaces
where on estates where it could be used?
I think this is a great idea,
but also just cautioning that it may send the message
that it's okay to fly tip slash legally fly tip
but I thought that was the space.
So it's a very thin line between what is approved
and what is unapproved.
So really keen to monitor how that's rolled out.
And also it's insured in, is it grey spaces
or basically spaces which are hidden
but don't add to becoming an eyesore for residents.
So some comments there more than a question.
And then for Franco, thank you both for,
is it Marco and Franco?
Nico, sorry, I think it was Os.
Thank you both for highlighting
what you're doing for staff.
Unsworth isn't just about its residents,
It's about the people that work and study in the boroughs are really encouraged to hair
Especially for people that have been doing this work for decades
Mr. Belton, Councillor Belton is not the only one it seems doing work for decades in Munsell
So really commended to have that you're treating your staff rate very well. My understanding is that there were some changes to a
Holiday and how things were taken to ensure continuity
Could you just provide some reassurance that no one's all packed off to go to Marbella
over Christmas and we're going to be left with a whole load of cellophane on the streets?
Thank you.
I can assure you that they're not going to Marbella, they're going to Dubai, no, on a
civils note.
In reality, no.
Paying them really well.
Yeah, the staff actually, they're contracted to work at bank holidays and it's actually
part of their T's and C's.
So they'll actually be here anyway and they'll be working in the busy periods and Christmas,
Needless to say waste collection is a very busy time for obvious reasons that we all know.
So I can assure you that with a bit of ample staffing it will all be there working.
I did just want to mention that the contract has a guy who's 75 who's collecting rubbish.
So if you want to stay fit, you know, being a rubbish collector is the way to keep you going.
I think Dave, the contract manager cheques in with him almost every week saying,
Are you sure it's still okay?"
And he's like, yeah, yeah, I'm fine.
And doesn't want to go on a light round or anything.
So yeah, he's been there for a really long time.
He's very passionate, very passionate.
And has very interesting views sometimes as well,
but he's a very good worker.
So I just wanted to touch on the bulky waste on estates.
So yes, it is a challenge.
You know, they haven't got anywhere to put their bulky waste.
They haven't got space in their flats to store it.
We were discussing this earlier.
Now I've got a loft, I've got a shed, I've got a garage
that is all full of stuff, but people in flats don't have any of those locations, so they
have to get rid of their stuff straight away.
I agree it could be a bit of a nightmare, which is why we want to trial it first.
Even just how that waste is shoved in that area, it could be a bit of a mountain, so
we're going to have to monitor it, we're going to cheque that it works.
It is some places have got an old drying room that's unused and some places they put up
a wooden enclosure so it will be screened from view so it's not so obvious.
What we highlighted is that often on estates the cleaners move fly tipping from around
the estate to a key location ready for collection but then it looks like a fly tip itself because
because it's in a very visible place,
and then other people will add to it,
so it sort of magnifies the problem.
So that's where this kind of lets get a strategic location
that's a bit more out of the way,
might then encourage external flight ifters
to do industrial -sized flight of things.
So it just needs a bit of work.
And as you were speaking, Natasha,
what came to mind was our relationship
with housing through some of the residents' associations
and some of those community champions
that already know what's going on or raise it, just making sure that we get the buy -in
and then they're able to disseminate the messages through, you know, WhatsApp groups or just
through neighbourly chats.
But on one of the estates in Tooting, it's not my ward but I know it very well, there
is an enclosed area which I think, and I'll drop the chair and council away an email where
that probably could be trialled.
And I'd really be encouraged that isn't just the big estates, that some of the low rises
as well and have the opportunity to be part of a pilot or to have this testing done.
Thank you.
Someone asked about Christmas trees earlier and we didn't talk about Christmas trees.
Yes, we have a plan.
Thank you for the praise that it has improved.
That is because we've got extra vehicles out and extra resources.
The abandoned tree reporting has worked really well.
The drop -off sites are all working really well.
So we're ready to go live with that.
So it should be as smooth as last year, if not better.
Councillor Cook.
Thank you, Chair.
Jonathan Cook, Lavender Ward.
Just a question on paragraph 29 and a quick follow up.
So thank you for the presentation.
It's great work here.
but obviously quite a substantial budgetary commitment,
two and a half million pounds.
Can I have some sense of how that breaks down?
How's it been divvied up into the various areas?
So for example, paragraph 14,
what was the foregone income by making that service free?
What revenues were we getting before,
which we no longer get now, but some broader context as well, please.
Sorry, so bulky waste collections were £26 per collection, so most of them were charged,
but because we were only doing 35 a day, as that was our cap before, so the loss of income
is not as much as the 20 ,000 collections, so we are doing more collections.
So it is a reasonable amount of lost income, but has some benefits of that.
A lot of the things that have been saved have been funded through waste disposal savings
because of the extra recycling we're capturing, because of the extra food we're diverting
from waste disposal.
That money has been reinvested in extra rounds, the circular rounds, and then contributed
to the cleaner borough as well.
So there is general fund, but that goes across all of the services that we've rolled out.
That didn't really answer your question.
Thank you, but not really.
So there's still been a net cost of two and a half million?
Yes.
There's a lot of money.
So if that's the net cost, just I'm trying to get some sense of where did that money go.
Just in broad terms, where was it spent?
Probably about 40 % on bulky waste. Flats above shops is also quite expensive.
The street cleansing, probably about 40 % has gone towards all of the cleansing operations across the board.
So that's the extra sweeping in town centres and the enhanced fly tipping services and the jet washing.
So because it has been so broad, some pockets are quite small, some pockets are quite big, but overall it's quite a large spend.
Councillor Bokes.
Okay, Councillor Osborne.
Quick question on the food waste.
If a family finds that its food waste is exceeding the capacity of its food caddy,
shall we have a system where the family is able to ask for an extra one?
Yep, I've got a bulge caddy for my bulge weeks, as I call them, when I had an excessive amount
of potatoes or a large chicken.
So yeah, there's no limit on the number of caddies.
If there's a large number of people in households or they do a lot of vegetable cooking at home,
yeah, we're happy to give second or third caddies.
If they're producing through, then we might need to have a chat about waste minimization.
But yeah, no, that's fine.
No limit on that.
It would be useful maybe as a general rule of thumb if someone requests an extra caddy
then inside that caddy is a lower leaflet about waste minimization.
So it would be useful for a free chance of education.
Councillor Apps.
Yeah.
When Councillor Cook asked that interesting question, I was reflecting on kind of, you
You know, sometimes there's certain new services can cost,
but there can also be savings as well.
So for example, reducing fly tipping
by making sure that people book in services.
We'd rather they did it that way so that it's planned
and so that it's not a mess on the streets
than they dump their stuff in a corner.
But I'm aware that some people still do.
I mean, obviously sometimes it's people
and vehicles arriving, but sometimes it is neighbours
who are just putting things out in the street.
So do we have any plans for communicating further
about the free bulky waste provision?
So we've got lots of comms leaving it up to Christmas,
as you said, because obviously collections always change.
Despite us telling people collections change every year,
people forget and put rubbish out all along completely
the wrong days.
So a part of the Burrow magazine is a leaflet on bulky waste.
Also in the home life, the estates magazine is more information on the free bulky waste.
We've got posters that have gone up on the estates as well, so just general comms.
We've got a comms officer who's drip feeding messages on a regular basis.
We'll do our normal Christmas comms around making sure you're recycling, taking off all the plastics.
So we always put out some general reminder, particularly it starts now Black Friday, all
the extra cardboard, and it doesn't stop until the end of January in terms of all the extra
rubbish and recycling.
You know, sometimes it's food, sometimes it's cards, sometimes it's wrapping paper, but
yeah, it's like the leafing equivalent for waste.
Are there any more questions for officers?
Okay, great.
So thank you again for their input and is the report noted by committee?
Okay, thank you.

4 Lead Local Flood Authority Update (Paper No. 25-407)

That moves us on to agenda item number four, which is the lead local flood authority update.
That's paper number 25 -407, and I believe we have initial presentation from Ms. Althuss.
But first, while she takes a seat, we have Councillor White.
That's also going to give a brief intro.
I'm so quiet over in the corner, Jamie forgets me.
Okay, so the flood paper, this is a paper that's very timely as we notice weather events
and how we are responding as regards flooding.
It sets out how we are introducing sustainable urban drainage systems, pocket parks, permeable
services where possible in our parks, gardens, and rolling out pocket parks.
And increase our permeable green spaces.
Living on the River Thames edge with other rivers above and below land,
it's important we work to increase resilience in the community.
And that must include the community's involvement.
But this is a paper that's relating to how we're coping with all of that.
And as I say, it's going to be a real, could be a real issue if we don't deal with it properly.
So it's, as I say, very timely.
Thank you, Councillor Wright.
Ms. Office, do you want to take the lead?
Good evening, councillors.
First of all, I'd just like to apologise on behalf of London councils, as they were
due to provide a brief update on the London surface water management strategy, but they
couldn't be here tonight.
I'm therefore going to provide a bit of context on what it is about.
So in July 2021, London faced two devastating storm events that flooded over 2 ,000 properties.
It caused extensive damages to homes, businesses and critical infrastructure.
Beyond the £281 million lost in insurances, the floods also had a profound human impact,
disrupting lives and displacing communities.
In reality, the number of properties may be much higher, as sometimes residents and businesses
are shy in reporting a flood incident.
London's lack of resilience to surface water flooding is a result of many factors.
Historical reliance on the sewerage system in its current form has resulted in the assumption
that future flood risks can be managed in the same way, whereas that is not the case
with climate change affecting future flooding increasing it in the future.
We will see that increase.
Launched in May 2025, the London Surface Water Management Strategy was introduced.
The development and delivery of the strategy is led by the Flood Ready London Partnership,
which is made up of the Environment Agency, London Councils, London Fire Brigade, the
of London, Thames Water, and Transport for London,
supported by the Thames Regional Flood and Coastal Committee.
The aim is to work across boundaries,
deliver resilient places by empowering people
and coordinating delivery.
Focusing on the paper itself, it provides an update
on the progress of the Diamond Estate off Queenstown Road.
Following the most recent events in 2021,
a flood action group was formed,
which involves Thames Water, the EA,
the National Flood Forum, and most importantly,
local residents in the area who have been
and severely impacted upon.
We have made good progress on this front.
It is accepted the only viable solution
is for a large -scale attenuation feature,
which Thames Water is leading,
and Thames Water have started their modelling phase,
which is currently ongoing.
The team is currently delivering SUDS,
which stands for Sustainable Drainage Systems,
on Old York Road as part of the public realm works,
and there are aspirations to do something similar
on Mitcham Road in Tooting.
The team is also supporting the climate change team
in the delivery of parklets across the borough and the Community Bluescapes project with
their endeavours on the Alton Estate.
Separate to this, Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act was due to be enacted
in 2024.
This would give the LLFA the SUD's approving body, the SAB role, which would enforce inclusion
of SUDs in all developments over 100 metres squared.
In doing so, the LLFA would then adopt the SUDs.
However, there has since been no movement on this.
Similarly, the new national SUD standards were released by DEFRA earlier this year,
which have more detail on amenity, water quality and biodiversity, as well as the current information
on water quantity and flood resilience.
Currently, boroughs are estimated to roll out the use of these standards from January
2026 in planning application reviews.
Finally, in Appendix 1, I'm keen to share with members the good SUD's work delivered
inside and outside John Burns Primary School.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for the presentation
and I absolutely welcome the updates from the report.
I lived on the Diamond Estate in 2021
when the flooding happens and the water level
was about two inches away from flooding my house.
So it's definitely good, especially to see
that there is hopefully going to be some progress
in Heathrow Park pending the Thames Waters investment.
Do we open in the floor to questions now?
Do we have any questions?
Councillor Apps first.
Thank you very much.
I must, it's not what I'm going to ask about,
but I note the work being done in my ward
around the Diamond Estate,
and I really hope we can make progress with Heathrow Park.
I think it'd bring a lot of relief.
And it's a shame we can't do resilience measures
at the same time.
I understand the funding model,
but in such extreme circumstances,
it would be good if we could throw everything at it, really.
But really, I wanted to ask about the Alton and page 15,
paragraph 12.
It was interesting to read about really productive
co -production work, where we're actually
using local residents' intelligence
and kind of long time information where often we hear from residents, they say,
well, why did nobody ask us?
Why did nobody ask us what the situation was with the road here or the flooding there?
So it's good to hear about that.
But I wanted to know, in order to make that really work, how are we gathering all that intelligence from local people?
And how are we reaching out, say, to maybe older people who might live on the estate,
who might have seen numerous flooding events
and making sure that we capture all that information.
Thank you.
So I'd just first like to pick upon the point
of the resilience measures being incorporated.
I think it would be good if we could incorporate
all of those, but the Heathbrooke tank
will store a lot more water than the resilience measures,
so it is kind of, we're trying to put the investment
to create the best benefit for the area
and the catchment as a whole.
I actually have an update from Thames Water from today.
So they've said that to provide a bit of background,
it's in response, the tank at Heathbrook Park
would be in response to recurring and severe
hydraulic flooding along the Heathwall trunk sewer.
The hydraulic model is currently under detailed review
to ensure it will be sufficiently accurate
to be used to develop options and solutions
to reduce the risk of flooding in the wider area.
A meeting has been held with residents
in the Diamond Quarter to understand flood history
and how they were affected by the flooding.
And the programme is currently forecasting
a verified model ready for use
for developing solutions in mid -2026.
And reduction of the flood risk,
reduction of the risk of flooding to properties in the area
is the kind of main benefit that that will be providing.
And we'll see if we can use wider environment agency funding
to provide wider benefits as well, like the urban greening.
Thank you.
Councillor Kirk.
Thank you.
On paragraph four, I'd just be curious to know more about Clapham Common storage opportunities.
Is there something there already which is possibly a solution?
Presumably, that would involve pumping as well because it's much higher ground.
Yes, thank you for your question.
And so previously we were looking at property resilient measures, so property levels specifically.
But since we'd heard from Thames Water that they were leading on this larger scale storage
tank within Heathbrook Park, just to the north of the Diamond Estate, we decided to kind
of collaborate with them on that with funding from the Environment Agency, because that
would provide the greatest benefit.
But I'm not sure in regards to your question in terms of if there's other storage in the
area.
I don't believe so.
I'll pick that up, Chair, if I may.
So there was some appetite potentially with storage capacity and on the common, and we
are working with Lambeth because they currently manage the common, and Lambeth and Thames
Water are in discussions.
We're hoping that as part of the London -wide strategy, this will be considered as a potential
opportunity further down the line for the present.
And the London -wide water management strategy is focusing on central London, so we're not
are currently in the area.
Just getting back to Councillor App's point
about the alternate state.
So the team's Community Blue Scapes,
it's a partnership, it's led by Richmond Council,
and it involves WWT, and so their local centre
is the London Wetland Trust, and Barnes Common Limited.
So the team has been delivering engagement exercise
and in close collaboration with the housing colleagues,
because housing team, as part of the regeneration
and projects, they have often regular events,
and we piggyback of those to engage with local residents,
residents associations, to discuss ideas
and potential opportunities for introducing
either rain gardens, swale, some planting,
and potentially growing food on the estate.
So it is that co -design and co -production
where we start with a blank page,
engage with residents, get their feedback,
and work with them to develop ideas and proposals
for the area.
We've also engaged with the consultants
who are looking at the regeneration programme.
So typically our team would only get involved
at a planning stage where developers
and the planning applications for the council
to consider whether proposals are fit for purpose
in terms of flood management point of view.
But here we've had the opportunity to engage
with them early on and to help inform their designs
and what the council would desire or like to see
and to make the proposal a little bit better
before it goes to planning.
Councillor Boughton.
Sorry about this, but this is a bit of nostalgia that might help.
I've been through, for various mad reasons, the book of Wandsworth Council ever since
it was created in 64 -5, depending how you date it.
And there is definitely talk somewhere or other, and I desperately try to recover it,
But in my mind, I mean, there's definitely talk about a facility on Clapham Common at the north end of Clapham Common.
And it was being discussed quite seriously at some point or other in the past.
I just can't remember the details.
I mean, I acknowledge, as you said, that it's on the top of the hill.
But there was definitely talk about it.
and there was some geological reason for it, which I cannot remember.
But that aside, perhaps Mrs. Cheung might like to question me on it.
I'll try and work back through our papers a bit or something, see if I can find something at some point or other.
On the other thing, I happen to be the chair of the Planning Applications Committee,
I'm very interested in things that Councillor Apps was talking about.
I was first horrified when we had to approve.
The car park on Queen Mary Hospital, which if you know it is massive, and I asked about permeability and there wasn't any at all.
And there was nothing we could do about it.
And at a much smaller level, we all know about front gardens and back gardens being paved over and no permeability.
I think looking at the planning regulations
and the planning system, after all the private sector
does a lot more investment in development
than the public sector could ever do.
Every single one of us does it at some time or other.
The regulations and the planning system
are very fertile ground.
I hope you, all strength to you if you can pursue that.
Did the officer want to come back on that?
Or is that just, is that not?
I think it's important to highlight that sometimes officers are constrained by what regulations
are there and what we can administer.
But as my colleague has mentioned, the Schedule III of the Floodwater Management Act and the
new regulations surrounding the different national standards for sustainable drainage
systems you know these are the tools that officers will have it's the
suppose though you know once they enacted upon and there's a we will be
in a more in a better position to to criticise and and to support
developments in in driving to better urban water management come back on that
very briefly chair I kind of I meant to imply if there are gaping great holes
come back to us because we're in the political world and have the ability on both sides to lobby people in Parliament about what needs to be done.
Thank you Councillor, we'll definitely keep that in mind if there's any more challenges in terms of the new national standards that will roll out around January time.
Councillor Roberts.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for the presentation.
On paragraph 16 of the paper, we have an estimation of the capital spend on the interventions
on the alternate state coming in at around £350 ,000.
Could I get some more information over what sort of information those might be and why
they might reach that sort of cost?
Thank you.
Thank you, Councillor.
So that £350 ,000 is a very high level stab at potential costs of delivering a whole series
of interventions.
If I can use the John Burns Primary School as an example, the phase one and phase two
works were in excess of £500 ,000.
So that's intervention inside the school and outside the school.
So there are considerable costs when implementing rain gardens and when you're picking up surface
water runoffs from the roofs, et cetera,
and to try and manage that.
Because in London, we sit on London clay,
it's not very permeable.
Sometimes we have to dig and to provide attenuation
beneath the ground.
So it is a whole series of interventions,
whether it's on buildings, or whether you're doing a swale
on a bit of green, or rain gardens
in a current parking space.
It's a whole series of things.
We haven't really mapped out fully,
because we're still at a very high level feasibility stage
following engagement of residents on the estate,
but it is ballpark figures for the time being.
But what I would say is that it's earmarked,
but there's nothing's been signed off,
and that we will get signed off,
and the council itself has full control
whether or not to support the projects
that's been developed.
Thank you.
Councillor Osborn.
Yeah, I was gonna have another churlish moan,
but actually I mean I'm concerned to learn about there's been a new Aviva
report on the insurance implications of flooding and there's some research at
Reading University where they're saying what we're doing now is great for now
but it's not going to be any good in 2070 and 2080 and we we are going to be
facing serious dangerous climate events between between now and then which we
need to prepare for. But actually you made all those points more eloquently
than I would have done so that's in the report. What I'm interested in is your
reference to Mitcham Road which I am very concerned about and I was also
going to raise. There is a development in Mitcham Road which I'm concerned that it
is not fully taking into account the history of flooding at Amen Corner and
and along basement flooding at Amen Corner
and along Mitcham Road pretty well every 10 to 15 years
since the early part of the 20th century.
Can I ask, when we're preparing a report like this,
what is the liaison, for example,
with the planning directorate about what concerns
we might have about a flooding threat in an area like that
and the nature of the planning applications
that are coming in.
Thank you for the question.
Yeah, so I think it depends on the size of the scheme
in terms of whether planning application approval
is required and the kind of impact it's gonna have
on the local area.
So I think, yeah, that's what we would take into account
before going through the planning process.
And then there's also the engagement with resident groups
and local environment groups as well.
that's all what's factored in before the scheme goes
through the feasibility to design.
Chair, if I may just add to that.
So the planning process, there are various guidance
that we scrutinise based on what we publish.
But more importantly, the lead local flood authority
is one of his main roles is actually to investigate
flooding post -event and then look at risk management
authorities responsible for it and what measures
we could do to help reduce flooding in the future.
So there is that challenge where sometimes
a little bit attached away from the planning process,
but we do review what they submit,
whether it's in compliance with the national guidance
and local guidance.
In terms of interventions on Mitcham Road,
I know councillors are very keen to introduce
more rain gardens and greening on the road itself.
Officers as part of the Public Well team is looking at that.
So we want to support local businesses,
we want to improve walking and cycling facilities,
we want to improve the highway safety,
and greening is a big part of that.
So currently we've installed quite a lot of plantists
on there as sort of quick wins
and to help people appreciate what we're trying to do
in the town centre.
But we are hoping to do some more substantial consultation
and later in the year at the church corner,
if I can call it that, just on the corner of Church Road,
where there would be opportunities to engage with locals
and to look at ideas, how we can incorporate
as part of the programme designed
to better manage surface water.
Councillor Apps.
Thank you, sorry for coming back again,
but Councillor Belton reminded me of something
that I think's relatively important.
It's a bit of a Mia Culper moment for me
because in sort of more than a decade ago,
in fact quite a good time,
not before a decade ago now,
we had some work done on our house,
we applied for planning permission,
We then got the work done and then I very happily paved my back garden,
which admittedly is quite small, but nonetheless we did pave it.
And yeah, absolutely, because I didn't know better is what they say,
know better, do better.
But I didn't know better at the time and I kind of go out to my back garden,
I regret it every day and I think, oh, about digging up the carbon now.
You know, and I do think there are key life moments when people are making these decisions,
when we can intervene.
If I had received a leaflet, an email,
something of that nature from the council saying,
these are environmental aspects to bear in mind
when you're doing your, as you're planning your new home
or your newly developed home.
So I just wanted to kind of say that we should be thinking,
I would like to see more regulations that say
you can't do these things, but failing that,
I would like us to be able to at least advise residents
So that people can make the right choices and they're equipped to do so.
Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
Yeah, so I think we've updated our web pages recently to have more information on the benefits
of not, you know, the benefits of deep -having, for not having sort of the grey space and
greening the urban spaces.
But I think that is something that we could try and get across more widely and maybe do
kind of a piece in the Council newsletter or something similar, maybe a letter drop,
especially when our schemes are going ahead
in those local areas, we could really target that
to kind of raise that awareness.
Yeah, I think that's a really important point
and I think from my experience
in the planning committee,
a lot of these sort of front garden pavements
come under permitted development rights,
which means that they don't need to submit an application
so we can't intervene early.
So the sort of importance, it's really important
that we find a way to communicate with them
so they know about that,
so they have the option to make the choice.
Councillor Apps, did you wanna come back?
Did you wanna come back, Councillor Apps?
Okay, cool.
Councillor Brooks.
Thank you, I was actually gonna ask a similar question,
just that I know there's a biodiversity
supplementary plan document being considered.
I just wondered whether there was either that document
or similar such documents that the council produces to guide the decisions of the planning
departments that interact with this sort of work that could be coming up in the future
or will again, will have to be renewed, that we should make sure colleagues across both
sides are aware of when they're working on those.
I don't know which officer wants to take that.
Thank you for that.
So in terms of biodiversity,
I think there'll be definitely much more guidance
when we start rolling out the national sub -standards
in January because currently there's too much of it,
well, not too much, but there's only really a focus
on the quantity, water quantity
and the flooding side of things,
and there's not the sort of detailed time
for the review of the benefits in terms of biodiversity
and amenity and making the spaces better.
So that will definitely be rolled out
from around January time onwards,
and we can kind of discuss with other boroughs
and get lessons learned from them as well in how they found it,
rolling that out.
But yeah, I think just by nature of recommending
that SUDs are incorporated, that will, by definition,
improve biodiversity anyway, because it's typically
involving greening the grey.
And so there is benefits around biodiversity by doing that.
Can I just briefly point out that you
can't bring this too much to the planning system.
For a lot of things, concreting over the back garden,
you don't need planning permission in the first place.
And for a lot of other things,
you'd go to your architect or whatever,
and for other things, garden sheds, who knows?
And they'd say, no planning application required.
So we need general information,
not just aimed at people with planning applications.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
And maybe also those contractors,
those architects that people go to
when they want to work out what to do with their garden,
and maybe we should also provide them
with the information as well,
so they're likely to pass that on.
So yeah, I think these are all really good points raised.
Did anyone else wanna come in for some questions?
Okay, I think that's everyone.
So does the committee note the report information?
Great, thank you very much.

5 Battersea parkrun Year 1 Evaluation (Paper No. 25-408)

Our final paper is on agenda item number five is the Battersea Park Run Year One evaluation.
That's paper number 25 -408.
I believe...
Okay.
Well, just wait.
Yeah, sure.
So, yeah, while we're waiting on the guest speaker, Councillor White.
I'll fill the time.
So I'm pleased to introduce this report which provides the first year evaluation of the
Battersea Park Run initiative since its launch in October 2024.
This free weekly 5K event was designed to promote physical activity, community cohesion,
and inclusive participation as part of the Wandsworth Moves Together strategy.
The findings show that Wandsworth Parkrun has delivered significant health, social,
and economic benefits.
In its first 42 events, we've seen over 24 ,000 participants, including 3 ,394 first -time runners,
supported by more than 870 volunteers.
Junior Parkrun has also been a success
with over 1 ,000 young participants since May.
I would like to personally thank Will Marks,
who looks really great next to me in the photograph.
Parkrun, the director, for joining us this evening,
and he'll share some of the other highlights
and successes with us shortly.
While initial concerns around park access, vegetation and facilities were raised, these
have been addressed through improved event management and ongoing dialogue with stakeholders.
The event remains one of the top ten park runs in the UK and officers will talk through
some of the next steps with us.
In summary, Battersea Park Run has become a valued community event, delivering measurable
benefits with minimal disruption and we will continue to refine and improve it moving forward.
Thank you.
Thank you, Councillor White.
Ms. Sargent, are you starting on the presentation?
I think our guest speaker Will is actually going to start first.
Okay, excellent.
Great, thank you.
I don't know if we've got the slides, but if not, you might have people got them.
If you go to the next slide, please.
So, yeah, as the Council said, I'm Will.
I'm the event director of Battersea Parkrun.
I've been doing that since last year in October when the event has started.
As you probably know, it took sort of a fair few sort of months and years before that to
get it off the ground, so it was great to do that last October.
Just very briefly, so Parkrun is a global charity that has, as I sort of got on the
slides there, about 2 ,600 events globally.
Majority of those are in the UK, about 800.
It is a free weekly 5K.
I think the free bit there is the most key for participants.
No time limits or ongoing equipment required.
Just turn up with their bar code, can run, walk, jog, or volunteer.
Each participant can go at their own pace.
At Battersea, the average time is around 30 minutes for a 5K, but people walk around,
people sprint around, all sort of varied on that.
Also, no abilities or requirements to participate.
Either people in sort of wheelchairs have done it,
visually impaired runners, deaf runners, et cetera,
at Battersea, so it's a very inclusive event as well.
And finally there, just all events are run entirely
by volunteers, the majority of those are local
sort of one -to -one residents as well.
And just to sort of exaggerate that point in the bubble,
just a second from the right there.
For each person that participates in Parkrun in the UK, Sheffield University have done
some research that indicates that the benefit to the UK economy is £689, both in positive
economic benefits and offset health demand as well.
So obviously that's a really big positive as well.
If we go to the next slide, just a couple of pictures from the past year, so top right,
There we go, that's from our birthday,
first birthday parkrun in October this year.
The eagle -eyed might notice Keely Hodgkinson
in the bottom right as well when she volunteered
with us a couple of months ago.
And then that bottom left there is when we had
our deaf awareness takeover, so all of our briefings
were done in BSL.
And the BBC also did a documentary about
deaf participation in sport using Battersea Parkrun
as one of their examples, which was great.
Next slide please.
And then again some really more positive storeys.
The group on the bottom right are part of a group
called 5K Your Way which is a cancer support group
that go around to different park runs
and have been at Vasti a few times now.
And then top right is another good positive success storey
of where a participant had a cardiac arrest
during the park run and luckily our defibrillator
was with him in about 10 seconds
And then he was reunited with the ambulance crews that were also there. They were just sat around the corner luckily as well
So again another positive outcome for that
It's the next slide, please
The councillor talked a few a few through a few of these but actually it's higher than when we wrote the paper
And so we've had 46 events so far at Batsy a few cancelations due to sort of other events in the park
But yeah, on our launch we were the most popular parkrun in the whole world, which was exciting.
Very rarely do we get to beat Bushy Park, which was the sort of home of parkrun set
up in 2004.
But we are regularly now in the top three.
Yet to understand why Southampton is always second, but we tend to sort of have about
1 ,100 participants a week at the moment.
Yeah, 26 ,000 participants.
I think the key numbers are nearer the bottom, actually.
So nearly 4 ,000 people have done their first ever parkrun
in Battersea Parkrun, which is a really good indicator
of sort of new exercise that necessarily wouldn't have
happened without parkrun.
And then that bottom number I think is especially useful.
So while we can't access the actual sort of postcode data
for our participants, we can see how many register
when they sign up for parkrun, which parkrun they choose
as their home parkrun, so essentially their closest.
And that number there, nearly 7 ,000,
has been rising pretty steadily since we started in October.
So I think that's a really good indication
that more and more local people are coming to the parkrun.
And since May of this year, every week we now have
more people that have visited Battersea Parkrun
participating at least once before
than people that are doing it for the first time as well.
So again, another good sort of proxy to show that
Certainly in the last six months we're getting more locals than sort of tourists or visitors, which I think is a definitely good thing
and the final slide and
So these are a couple of bits that we've sort of been been working on over the last few months
And so we partnered with two local GP practises and Battersea fields
Practise being one of those right next to Battersea Park
And we're working out sort of how to take that partnership forward in the most productive way
but Parkrun have what's called a Parkrun practise.
So this sort of, Parkrun is used as part of the prescribing
of the GP, the sort of leaflets and adverts
about Parkrun in the GP surgery.
The staff take part and patients as well
can be prescribed to Parkrun as part of things like obesity
and sort of things like that.
Deaf awareness I sort of covered earlier,
but we are sort of regularly looking at opportunities
on how to sort of make the course as accessible as possible.
I think the sort of very simple course that we have at Battersea, which is just two laps,
makes it a really perfect course and the wide paths, especially for visually impaired runners
as well, so they quite regularly run with us, which is great.
We've also seen a steady increase in the number of Duke of Edinburgh students volunteering,
so depending on whether they're doing their bronze, silver or gold, their commitment with
us can be up to a year, which is great, and we try and make sure that they're working
towards run directing a particular park run by the end of their time with us as well so
you can really see their sort of confidence building.
And then finally economic impact.
I think there's some really good quotes in the paper already that you'll have read.
But certainly from the sort of cafes both in the park and the surrounding area I think
they are fairly keen on the number of runners that have come on a Saturday at 9 .30 to their
cafes which is great.
And just finally covering off some of the sort of points that the council have raised
that we're still working on.
So I mean having 1 ,100 people in the park for that period of time is obviously, I think
we're never going to sort of have zero disruption by that happening.
We are sort of continually working to minimise that.
I think worth saying that the sort of vast majority, probably 90 percent of the participants
at Battersea have finished within about 40 minutes.
So the sort of peak of the disruption is 9 a .m. to 940 every Saturday, and outside of that it's fairly minimal and fairly manageable.
Keeping off the grass as well, I know that was another sort of worry from some of the other stakeholders, but we have worked with the council to get some signs produced, and I think that's far better now with our messaging on that.
I don't think this is necessarily ever was an issue but it's still not an issue in terms
of car travel and the car parks are very rarely used by people coming to Parkrun.
I'd say the majority are either running their cycling or using public transport but we're
keeping monitoring that with the Parks Police.
And then finally I think the one where probably we've still got a bit of a way to go is just
the Keep Left messaging.
So I think it sort of, at the moment it sort of depends on,
when we put a big effort in it, it does get a lot better.
So I think it's just about sort of keeping our marshals,
making sure that they're reiterating that,
using our social media, and we've invested
in quite a lot of signs as well
that are sort of keep left around the park.
But we're still with enable and the council looking at
sort of extra cones and that sort of thing,
just to make sure that even though the paths
are really wide, we're just taking up as little of that as possible. So I will probably stop
there.
Thank you very much, Mr Marks. Ms Sargent, did you also want to come in?
Yeah, thank you. The world's covered quite a lot of it already, but I was just going
to pick up on some of the ongoing work around the event, which is in section 3 of the report,
which references some of the initial feedback
that was received from the community
and how these concerns have been addressed since.
As Will said, initial community concerns
included park access disruption, vegetation damage,
parking congestion, and lack of toilet facilities
being some of those things.
Mitigation measures have been implemented
to improve event management, signage,
changes to parking restrictions,
and continuous engagement with our stakeholders
to address these concerns effectively.
There's also been infrastructure enhancements, for example, additional bike racks and temporary
toilets.
And as Will said, access and traffic congestion in the park has been managed closely by the
Parks Police.
Bring us on to the next steps and recommendations towards the end of the report.
Ongoing engagement with stakeholders is vital for gathering feedback and fostering that
collaboration in terms of identifying solutions to issues as and when they arise.
A review of some of the operational elements will be undertaken before the end of the year.
This will focus on a review of the course layout and starting point and continuing with
a feasibility study to identify options for additional toilet provision within the park
and reviewing the overall programme around running events in the park also.
This is so that we can enhance participant experience and event efficiency and to reduce
the environmental impact.
We'll also continue to work closely with Parkrun and our partner, Enable, to monitor
the impact of the event's effects on park users and local businesses to ensure positive
community benefits are sustained in the long term.
And if it's okay, we'd like to finish the presentation before any questions with showing
a video as well.
F -L -B -O -K.
Fingers crossed.
.
In the meantime while waiting for the video, I just again want to thank the speakers for
the introduction.
I personally have done the Battersea Park run several times.
I really enjoy doing it.
I've had nothing but positivity from all of my friends that I love running and I'll
stop filibuster now.
Come, volunteer all year, thank you for being part of this journey and let's keep moving together.
As they say, we're celebrating by doing park runs with my friends.
It was my first time running the Battersea Park Run. It was a great morning, good energy.
I couldn't believe how many people's hung up as well, it's insane.
I was excited to be here at Battersea Park to celebrate the first year of park runs.
I really loved it, you just got to run with lots of people.
I've made a lot of friends here and I love the community.
I
Think thank you very much for sharing we can start now with questions so counsellor caddy
Thank you very much chair, I just want to say that I absolutely love parkrun I think it's absolutely brilliant
I've got a part one just around the corner from me on Tooting Common
I regularly do it
But I also regularly walk on the common or my dog
while the race is going on.
And I would say that one of the biggest things
about parkrun is how considerate it is
towards other users of the park.
And one of the things I think this paper reflects
and the comments that we've heard from officers reflect
is how seriously parkrun takes its relationship
with the community and takes seriously
some of the sort of concerns and criticisms
that people have.
I've always found that they've taken it very seriously,
worked with local people wherever they can.
And yeah, I'm not going to rehearse all the benefits that you've pointed out, but I think it's a fantastic innovation.
And it's very rare that something like this kind of gathers so much energy and so much momentum and does so much good for the community.
So congratulations and keep going.
Councillor Bolton.
This is actually in my ward, so I represent the 14 ,000 people who live immediately next
to it, that is Battersea Park, and I've got quite a lot of correspondence about it over
the last year or so.
Let me say straight from the beginning, I'm totally in favour and always have been totally
in favour.
And on the whole, most people were positive.
But there was certainly a substantial proportion
of constituents who bothered to contact me.
That's a minimal number, let's exaggerate this.
But I'm talking 20, 30, 40, something,
who were really concerned about it.
And that's died off completely.
I mean, it's just gone together.
The one comment that was made,
and I'm pleased to hear what you said about it,
which people did complain about,
not just to me in correspondence,
but at the special neighbourhood team policing meeting,
at residence association meetings I've been to,
couple of other things, has been, frankly, urinating,
and the public convenience issue.
And there was quite a bit of that to begin with.
I think you've probably covered this in what you've said about provision of temporary,
presumably public conveniences.
And it's not your fault, by the way, that the Council closed all the public conveniences
20 years ago in the parks.
That's not your fault.
But it was the major complaint.
I'm just pleased to say that whatever you've done, either people have just got used to the issue, possibly,
or it has become a non -issue because I haven't had any correspondence about it now for a few months.
Councillor White, you want to take on that?
Yeah, I thought Councillor Bell was going to introduce his comments by saying I made my first park run in 1966, but he didn't.
My first park run actually was in Richmond Park running for a local school there and that was well before 19 whatever you said.
Ms. Sargent, do you want to come back on that? On Councillor Burton's points?
I guess just to reiterate what we said earlier in terms of looking at toilet provision, I suppose that isn't an isolated thing just to do with park run,
that's probably toilet provision in the park more generally anyway, but that feasibility work is underway now
and hopefully there'll be some additional toilets identified
that we can put in place.
Yeah, yeah, that'd be much appreciated.
That's a common feedback I've had
as well as the starting point,
so I'm really glad that both of those have been identified
and that we're working to find a solution for that.
Do we have any more questions?
Councillor French.
Councillor Katrina French for Fersdown Ward.
I'm really excited that this is happening.
It's great to have physical exercise.
I just wondered in terms of like demographic data,
do you take anything in terms of people
that have been socially prescribed
or have a disability?
Is that information that is collected
to understand how many people who may identify
as being disabled or actually being active?
So it's a bit tricky because I think,
so when you sign up for Parkrun,
Parkrun is a sort of charity, have that data,
but they don't have access at the local level.
So we're sort of, as you can see,
we try and use the data we do have,
which is not on disability or demographics.
But we can certainly, especially with the parkrun practises,
we can certainly build in some of the data on that side,
because that's very much just between us and the GP practise.
So we can certainly look at that going forward.
And I can feed that back to parkrun themselves
as well about whether we could get
some sort of at least generalised cut of that
for London or something like that as well.
Thanks.
I think that would be just really useful to be
able to understand who may have been inactive
or have a disability and that they're
able to access such a great amenity.
And then I think you said it before,
but we don't actually know how many people from the bar
use it per se.
But this is the closest number is
that I see your closest park run and gives us
an idea of proximity.
OK.
Thank you.
Any other questions?
Okay, brilliant.
Well, thank you very much for your presentations.
Keep up the brilliant work with Park Run.
It's all really appreciated by us.
And does the committee note the report?
Noted.
So that's the final substantive item.
We've moved on to the last item, which is number six,

6 Work Programme (Paper No. 25-409)

which is the work programme.
Did you want to comment?
Thank you, Chair.
Just very quickly on the work programme,
members will notice at the very bottom of the document,
paragraph four, there are responses there to the committee
from cabinet to key lines of inquiry that were previously raised.
That's just there to close the loop essentially,
just to inform the committee that the cabinet is taking those key lines of
inquiry into consideration. I'm happy to take any questions on those and members
will also notice for the February meeting we've got the climate emergency
action plan update which will be quite a substantive paper and should be a really
good paper that will cover a broad range of areas and obviously welcome any other
feedback if there are any other items that the members are interested in. Thank
Thank you.
Thank you.
So, do we have any points of interest?
Councillor Cady?
Yeah, I was just going to suggest, I mean, we all know the kind of horrendous financial
settlement that's coming our way and the kind of financial challenges that the council are
going to face.
And I would imagine that this department, in conjunction with lots of other departments,
are going to have a very serious work programme of savings.
I wondered whether it was an area worth exploring as a committee in terms of the kind of ideas
that might be implemented in terms of not just savings,
but also revenue generation,
ideas about how to streamline systems,
use new technology that's coming down the road
to try and contribute to the enormous budget gap
that we're gonna end up having.
Thank you, Councillor Caddy.
So you want to focus specifically on the environment side
because it's sounding quite finance committee based,
those sort of suggestions?
No, no, it would be solely for the environment committee.
So it would be the budget area that's covered
by this committee essentially.
Because obviously this committee knows more about
what goes on and how it operates and understands
the functioning of the system within the environment area.
Okay, yeah, thank you for the suggestion.
We won't be deciding tonight.
We've still got time to discuss it, take it offline.
Do we have any other suggestions from other committee members?
Councillor Apps
Yeah, I think it'd be really good to have a look at we haven't had to look for some time at some of the
New developments around play parks and as it's the year of play
I think it'd be really appropriate to look at that look at how that feeds into sport in general and access of activity
I'd also included that things like the latch mere and
Fitness area which is B, which is quite important to local people in my ward
Okay, so
So yeah talk about leisure and play
So I guess that would be sort of an outline of what we've done and then opportunities to feed in
Yeah, I think one thing counsellors really know is their own ward so it'd be good to get ideas for the future to
Okay
That's another good suggestion.
Did anyone else want to come in on either of those points or to offer a suggestion of
their own?
I just second what Kim said about the need to look within this portfolio area about how
we make sure that whatever financial situation the Council finds itself in is managed in
in the most successful way it can be.
I think that will be very important.
I know we have been scratching our head for ideas
about what agenda items to put in February.
This seems like a very apt time,
especially in the context we'll be facing.
Thank you.
Yeah, it definitely seems like a good idea to explore.
Like off the top of my head,
it maybe sounds a bit like something
that could also be done in a task and finish group.
So, but we could also, yeah, we'll have to take this offline.
Those are both good suggestions and we can sort of work
because it'll probably be a bit much having the climate
emergency plan and then a further two items.
So we can take this offline, maybe set up a meeting
and then we can discuss those options.
Council Caddy.
This is gonna sound really sharelish.
So I apologise in advance, Chair.
But one of the things it's probably worth noting
is that we do all read the papers,
and obviously a lot of the information
that we sometimes get presented by officers
is already in the papers,
and it would be really great to perhaps have less time
in terms of presentations,
assume we've all read the papers,
and then we can have a slightly more in -depth discussion.
We might have more time, perhaps,
to discuss some of the key items.
It's just a suggestion.
Yeah, I think that's a very fair point.
and I was previously assured about the length of time
for some of the external speakers.
So we can definitely maybe try and put more formalised time
in to try and make sure that we stick with in that future.
Thank you very much.
Cash maps.
Without wishing to get into a debate,
I do kind of take the other view,
which is I think we should make sure our committees,
I know they're not widely watched,
but I think we should make sure they're accessible,
and people watching it or looking at it
wouldn't necessarily have access to all the information.
Although I do take Councillor Cuddy's point
about a lot of it is repetition of points in the paper.
So what I'd say is can we ask speakers
to add colour to things that they've put in the paper
and maybe bring examples and kind of present it
in a slightly different way
which gives us a fuller understanding.
And then that way, hopefully, we can both allow somebody to watch the committee and understand what's going on,
but probably benefit from it as committee members too.
Yeah, I think that's a very fair point.
I think officers, when presenting a paper, the best thing they can do is sort of give the big picture overview
and add more of an overview and then external speakers, they add another dimension to the debate.
and that way we don't go too much into what we've already read in the report,
but we still get an overview for people that are watching publicly.
Councillor Boughton.
I quite strongly agree with Councillor Caddy, and let me put it this way.
Lots of people become councillors on both sides,
because they want to make a difference, or they want to change the world,
or have ambitions to do things at their own level.
I mean, it may be at the really big level, but at the local level, whatever.
And one of the frustrations, perhaps I've avoided it for
most of the years I've been on the council for fairly obvious reasons,
is when you're on the council, you have fewer committee meetings you had before.
You have less chance to speak at any time.
And you don't have a chance.
After all, we're not just here to listen to the officers, because we have read the papers.
We're here to share between us why they think the way they do, why we think the way we do, and to try and hammer things through it.
So I think it's pretty important that we make sure councillors have benefit them as well.
They are, after all, not insignificant players in committees of councillors.
Okay, definitely noted and agreed, Councillor Burton.
Any more comments?
Okay, so is this report noted?
Okay, that concludes tonight's business.
So thank you everyone for your attendance.
Thank you for all the speakers tonight and good night.