The Chair invited Cllr Andrew Judge, Cabinet Member for Housing and Sustainable Development to speak about his priorities for the coming year.

We aim to become an exemplary housing borough, delivering beautiful well-designed low-carbon and truly affordable homes. We will use the land that the Council owns already, and perhaps land that we can assemble, to build homes for social rent and shared ownership and other intermediate forms of ownership of the highest quality.

We aim to set up a housing partnership with housing providers local colleges and firms to promote the retrofit of homes using the London retrofit model aiming, to share expertise on how to access grant funding, build capacity retrofit and renewable energy technologies and look to establish apprenticeships in green industries.

We are continuing participation in the warmer homes program with grants for home improvements for both homeowners and renters.

In terms of housing needs, we want to maintain the position of having low numbers of homeless households in temporary accommodation and to continue to develop and expand rough sleeper services and work with partners to ensure low numbers of reported rough sleepers in the borough and that rough sleepers get the support they need.

I have been asked to undertake the role of tenant’s champion making representations on behalf of tenants and signposting them to agencies who can give legal advice.

I am keen to introduce selective licensing and an empty home scheme.

In response to Panel members questions:

·         We'll do our best to approve more affordable housing, seeking to influence developers at an early stage to deliver affordable housing on their sites. We are also seeking to build homes on our own and/or with other housing providers.

·         In relation to selective landlord licensing, a paper is anticipated around autumn time.

·         With regards to expanding the provision of electrical vehicle charging, currently planning policy only stipulates ten percent of parking spaces need to be EV compatible and we've yet to see what the inspectors will permit in terms of our local development policy. If it proves to be inadequate, then we might have to consider some separate planning measure as the months unfold.

·         There's been a considerable backlog in the past with planning enforcement cases and we need to work through that backlog as rapidly as possible and as an administration we'll do our utmost to put sufficient resources in.

The Chair invited Cllr Natasha Irons, Cabinet Member for Local Environment, Green Spaces and Climate to speak about her priorities going forward:

Waste and our relationship with Veolia - In the short term we'll be focusing on the delivery of the action plan that was in response to the service improvement notice. The action plan includes looking at the additional night-time economy staff, tackling the scourge of green sacks and some issues around the fix my street tool.

We are looking at reprofiling some of the street sweeping schedules and we will be looking at having neighbourhood environment officers who will know the wards that they work and will understand where all the hot spots are and will be visible to residents.

Focusing on the fly tipping strategy, a massive priority for me is our treatment of flats above shops and being more focused on communications and engagement.

In the long term that will this municipal year we will need to review our arrangement and our relationship with our waste contractor and consider next steps and officers have been charged with providing us with all options.

A source of pride and a source of joy for me and for most of us is our parks and our green spaces.

In the short term:

We're on track to plant over 3000 trees this year.

Phase one of our tree strategy is soon to be published. Phase one is focused on council-owned trees, because we didn't have any management plans for that in place so we're rectifying that and then in phase two we'll look at trees on private property and our policies around that.

We are upgrading our paddling pools so hopefully this summer most of our paddling pools will be upgraded and then

Soon we will launch our trial of alternative methods for weeds killer such as foam or manual extraction, to see how much it costs and see what the practicalities of that are.

In the medium to long term, we'll be looking at um upgrading our play parks and our multi-use games areas and developing a green spaces strategy and biodiversity strategy.

Moving on to the climate emergency, I'm committed to delivering on our election pledge around having an environmental impact assessment on our new policies and looking at how green bonds can play a part in Merton's financing of green initiatives.

Retrofitting and cutting our emissions from buildings is a huge priority. We know it's going to cost something like £2.7 billion pounds to retrofit every single building in Merton. Now we can't fund that ourselves, but we do have the power to convene people around the table to see what we can do.

In response to questions from Members of the Panel:

·         As part of the fly tipping action plan and strategy, we have plans for more cameras and to review the types of signage we have.

·         Agreed to look at whether water refill stations could be installed in the parks

·         There are several neighbourhood recycling centres - we don't have them everywhere due to the misuse of them for fly tipping.

·         South London Waste Partnership are reviewing all of the recycling centres across the partner boroughs to try and make them more accessible

·         Birmingham introduced mobile recycling centres which we are looking at

·         We are working through the various ‘fix my street’ reporting issues.