Agenda item - Public Involvement

To consider the following matters raised by members of the public:

(a)           Petitions: 

To receive any petitions presented by members of the public.

(b)           Written Questions:

To receive any questions submitted by the due date of 12 noon on the 8 November 2024

(c)           Deputations:           

To receive any deputations submitted by the due date of 10am on the 4 November 2024

(A)          Petitions

1)             Lack of short breaks, holiday activities and after school care for children and young people with SEND in Brighton and Hove

95.1      Cabinet received a petition signed by 1390 people requesting the council to provide short breaks, holiday activities and after school provision for all children and young people with SEND aged 0-25 and their families, which is suitable for all levels of need including children and young people with complex needs.

95.2      Councillor Alexander provided the following response:

First of all, I would like to thank you for coming today and for tirelessly advocating for disabled children and their best interests, A concern and a passion we share and unless someone has experience of caring for a disabled child they can struggle to understand the worry and concern and exhaustion that simply ensuring they get their fair share in terms of education and childhood experiences causes parent carers. Your petition has raised awareness and understanding.  

It is also crucial to acknowledge the value of our PACC – Parent Carer Council who have effectively lobbied, influenced and where possible worked alongside us as a council to ensure that the interests of parent carers and children are heard every day as we make decisions and service changes. It is important to acknowledge that they are a vital part of the successful service delivery we ran this summer which I will outline.  

I also know that this was intended to be heard back in May before the summer holidays and our transfer to a cabinet system means that it is being heard now when we will be responding to it having undertaken a summer of activities. I still believe that this gives us an important moment to reflect on what we did have in place. And, going forward we will continue to work with PACC to develop the offer and to develop trust and confidence in the reliability of the offer and that you will be heard when we need to make changes.  

During the 2024 summer holidays, a total of 678 sessions were accessed and of those 418 were specialist sessions for children and young people with complex needs, this also included our in-house provisions of Drove Road and Tudor House. This compares to during the 2023 summer holidays when there were 300 specialist and targeted sessions delivered by Extratime. 

Parents’ wishes and young people’s needs have been accommodated as much as possible often in creative and bespoke ways, through 1:1 support and mainstream providers. 

Based on feedback we know we need to address the following gaps as we move forward into 2025/26: 

·         Requirement for longer sessions in the holidays 

·         More sessions for complex needs, under 8s and over 18s 

·         Family fun days 

·         In-house 1:1 support  

We areworking with our special schools to deliver after school clubs and we are working with the Wraparound Childcare team to develop the offer further stability to families and confidence in that offer.  

Thank you so much for bringing this petition to us, thanks to PACC for their hard work with our officers to develop what we had in place and please continue to speak up where you see a need to improve.  

95.3      Resolved- That Cabinet note the petition.

(C)      Deputations

1)             Concerns about school admissions proposals

95.4      Cabinet received a deputation outlining concerns in relation to proposed changes to catchment areas and to cut places (PANs) in the city’s schools.

95.5      Councillor Taylor provided the following response:

Thank you, Adam, for your deputation but more broadly, thank you for your work on this.

I said it on email to you in response, but for those on cabinet who haven't been following the twist and turns of this Adam’s a professor at UCL and spending his time doing research and has published three or four pieces on this subject, which is much appreciated by the city.

clearly the deputation was submitted when potentially this was going to come to this cabinet meeting, which is it is not, but it is clearly important to hear the deputations so I'm glad it's been brought.

I will briefly set out where we are which is that we had an engagement exercise, which has closed in which we didn't have proposals. We had a set of principles a set of indicative models or options that could be considered and we had an engaged in exercise that had a very, very high level of response, something like 2,600 responses, which I think is that the highest level of responses in our new your voice system since we launched that system a couple of years ago.

So good and high level of engagement. Where we are now is that if we were to take something forward for under the current cycle to take effect in 2025, we would take it to a Cabinet meeting in December.

I will draw out a couple of issues that Adam has raised. In terms of further engagement on what's happening now, the engagement has closed is I and officers are meeting with lots of different groups to talk through some of the detail of what came out in the engagement and what the next steps might be and I think it is really important to do exactly that, draw on both the experience, knowledge but views and input of all of those different groups as we start to form the policy.

In terms of some of the concerns that were raised in the deputation, which are consistent with the number of issues that are raised in the engagement and that we will see in the engagement when we publish it. Journeys is clearly one of them in consideration of transport and I'll just say now we're we won't give responses to what's going to necessarily happen, but heard loud and clear that one of the proposed models in particular clearly concerned parents about the implied distances of journey time, which would be in that model and we completely understand that and acknowledge that in terms of data.

What I think we will do, and we may even do this before we get anywhere near a proposal, we might publish everything from the exercise, including further detail on data. We publish all of that, I think, before getting towards a proposal on data. I mean, what the data will show is not particularly inconsistent with what we presented in the engagement, so I would generally disagree that it's a false premise. Actually, the premise where we are starting from is each of us is fairly close, we probably agree broadly on what the problems are in the city. What the data will show is that we were a relatively high performing authority overall with a very large attainment gap, so with 152 local education authorities in the country, we have the 17th highest attainment gap so nearly in the top 10% of attainment gaps. There are different places you can be on that scale. You can be an authority that is a low performing authority with a high attainment gap. In other words, generally the schools are not doing great and your attainment is not very good and within that there's a big gap, so those from non-disadvantage groups doing, you know, much better comparatively to those that are disadvantaged, but within the system that doesn't do very well overall. You can be like us, which as I say, is a high performing authority, but with a big gap, you can also be low performing with a low gap or you can be where everyone wants to be, which is a high performing authority with a low attainment gap, and that's the goal. That's what everyone is trying to grasp for and indeed that's not theoretical, that exists one hour up the road in London, which is a many of the London boroughs have exactly that they do as well as us overall or better in attainment, but much, much smaller gaps between different economic backgrounds of families, and that's what we trying to achieve. And that's what we tried to set out in the engagement. I never said we were bad performing authority. I said, very specifically, we do better than average on overall attainment, but we have a gap, but we'll tease out that data that Adam is talking about in terms of exactly where we sit, and we'll publish more of that.

Other things that were mentioned is a systems wide approach I mean, yeah, you are absolutely right. This is a complex question that has an interplay between school admissions, between geography, travel times, school budgets, a socio-economics, generational poverty, it is complex The fact that we have religious schools and the fact that things can be appealed to the Adjudicator means that the council has to take a system based approach but doesn't control all of the levers in the system. So, it's a tricky question and that's what we trying to draw out, that's what we're trying to get to. But all I can really say on that is to give a commitment from myself and from Cabinet, that yes, any proposal that comes forward in the future will be well researched, well evidenced and try to take a systems wide view of the issues. And as you are implying, Adam, and as many have said, don't do something that does more damage in trying to correct issues that have existed in the city and that I'm glad that we're now facing up to as a city. I mean, there's been lots of criticism of the engagement in itself, but the engagement has got us talk in about this issue and it's a deep issue in the city and I really think we need to address it and I've been really pleased that even the parents sort of expressed concerns about some of the proposals have been saying, but we're really invested in trying to tackle these issues. We don't want an unequal city, and we don't want unequal education, so that's what we've got to build on in the next stage.

95.6      Resolved- That Cabinet note the deputation.

2)             Transparency concerns over Patcham Court Farm sale

95.7      Cabinet received a deputation raising concerns about the future of Patcham Court Farm.

95.8      Councillor Taylor provided the following response:

Thank you for your submission and your deputation today and I will start by saying to residents throughout the process that led up to planning and during planning, thank you and well done for raising your concerns. That is a really important part of our democratic process and our planning process and whilst it will have felt to you the decision of planning didn't go your way clearly, it's really important to say that as councillors, whether at the Planning Committee or today at Cabinet, we do listen to residents concerns, we understand them and you're quite right to be raising all of these concerns. So, thank you for bringing this deputation.

The first bit is to make clear is the distinction between the planning process and the cabinet decision, which I know you will understand, but for the public there's two distinct things going on here. There was a planning process which is determined by the Planning Committee, which is a quasi-judicial process, and many of the issues that have been talked about relate to planning and I'll come on to those.

What is before Cabinet today is the decision on the use of the land, which as you say, is owned by the council. We have to be clear on that distinction as we go through. For many of the things you talked about, I will address in my overall presentation later, but I'll pick it out a couple of things.

In terms of us preferring corporate deals over housing, that is very much not true. The evidence of this council is that we're buying and building social houses, we are buying housing that's already been built, we are buying back housing in outlying areas of the city at something like one a day, so we have a very, very strong focus on social housing. So, I don't think it's credible to say we're not interested in housing.

In terms of corporate deals, well, what the council has to do is we have to manage our budget at all points, and as you will see councils all over the country, including this one, are in a difficult financial circumstances and we have to ensure good proper use of our land and our assets.

In terms of jobs in the city, you raised an option is to move to Shoreham and Shoreham is not in the city, so that would be a net loss of jobs to the city. It's not desperately far away, but it's not impossible to see that many postal workers who live in the east of the city may not want to go and work Shoreham. So, it is retaining jobs in the city and that's an important part of consideration.

I also want to address the concerns about the integrity of the Planning Committee process. Now clearly, we are the Cabinet, we don't chair the planning process. I do want to respond on behalf the council corporately. We need to be clear that the council, as the local planning authority, has a proactive duty to work with applicants in relation to planning applications with the aim of identifying mitigations that will enable the council to support applications. That is the national planning policy framework, which is clear that the starting point for applications is a presumption in favour of sustainable development. That's the framework in which the council operates. Negotiation dialogue with statutory consultees is a key part of this process. All of the representations received during a consideration of the application was summarised in the report that went to Planning Committee. Dialogue between Brighton & Hove Bus Company and the local highway authority as statutory consultees are not considered to be inappropriate and considered to be normal exchange to ensure that there are mitigations in place, including the scheme that was presented to Planning Committee.

Southern Water did raise concerns about amending the wording of a number of conditions that they had requested during the application process the conditions in the report were retained as requested by Southern Water and so therefore there was no later objection. The final comments on the national highways reflect the additional information that was received during the consideration of the application. Then just to address the point about time given to those speaking against the application, they were limited speaking rights at committee and residents were afforded three minutes to speak to Planning Committee, which is the same as what the developer was allocated. Following the public participation, which is a section of the meeting, Members are then given the opportunity to seek clarifications, ask questions, and this can be of residents or the applicant. Now clearly, that tends to be questioning of the applicant, and so that's why there was more dialogue towards the applicant, but the same amount of time to present was allocated to each. This is normal in committee process so that members of will be informed and understand all matters when making a decision. Thank you again for your deputation and as I said, the next item on the agenda is the substantive item where we will talk more broadly about the issue.

95.9      Resolved- That Cabinet note the deputation.