Agenda and minutes

• Councillor Matin
• Councillor Begum
• Co-opted member Mr Alloysius Frederick

Members are invited to declare at this stage of the meeting, the nature and existence of any relevant disclosable pecuniary or personal interests in the items on this agenda and to specify the item(s) to which they relate.

Personal interests were declared as follows:

Ø  Councillor Sheth declared a number of personal interests as outlined on the website.

Ø  Councillor Ethapemi – spouse employed by NHS

Ø  Councillor Rajan-Seelan – spouse employed by NHS

Ø  Councillor Collymore – Member of ICP Board

Ø  Councillor Fraser – works for an organisation that had received funding from HAF

Ø  Councillor Tazi Smith – employed by health provider

To hear any deputations received from members of the public in accordance with Standing Order 67.

A deputation was received from Roundwood Youth Club in relation to agenda item 8 – Brent Youth Strategy and Provision.

Representatives from Roundwood Youth Club began their remarks by highlighting that over 85% of a young person’s waking hours were spent outside of school or formal education settings. Roundwood Youth Club had been open for more than ten years, and the Club was home to many different activities and support groups helping young people aged 11-19 years old to flourish in a safe space. The Club had been denied access to the site for 4 weeks in October-November 2023 due to discrepancies between Roundwood School, the venue for Roundwood Youth Club, and the Council’s assigned representatives for youth provision, Young Brent Foundation. The Club had also been denied access during the school holidays. As a result, representatives felt this had caused disruption in training for upcoming mixed martial arts gradings and competitions as well as training for new youth workers. The lack of access had also affected Duke of Edinburgh volunteering hours and left over 60 other young people with no safe space to go. Representatives asked the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee to scrutinise the Council’s arrangements with Roundwood School and Community Centre and for the Council to revisit the promises made to Roundwood Youth Club when the site became a school.

The importance of young people seeing peers and having a routine was highlighted by representatives, and the lack of access to the Club had resulted in stress and had a negative impact on the mental health of young people using the Club. There had been a loss of sense of community, a loss of a space away from home, and young people felt restricted socially. The Club helped young people stay off their phones and the representatives highlighted that a healthy mind from a young age promoted a healthy adult life away from addictions.

The representatives also highlighted there was a range of different backgrounds attending the Youth Club, which created a diverse environment for young people to learn about each other’s cultures.

The representatives highlighted the range of skills they had gained from Roundwood Youth Club, such as self-defence, self-respect and discipline. The Club was a free space for young people in Harlesden and when it had closed the users had been worried it would not reopen. They felt that Harlesden needed these types of groups so that young people had a space to spend their free time away from the streets where there could be negative influences. Youth Club gave young people the opportunity to do multi-sports, youth games, cooking, receive advice on jobs and training, and receive support from youth workers. Alongside this, there was the opportunity to train young leaders, coaches and qualified youth workers. The venue also supported families with a food bank and family wellbeing programme. It was felt that the Club was now a fraction of what it used to be due to youth service cuts, and the Club had  ...  view the full minutes text for item 3.

To approve the minutes of the previous meeting as a correct record.

The minutes of the meeting held on 22 November 2023 were approved as an accurate record of the meeting.

There were no matters arising.

The Chair amended the order of business to take item 8 – Brent Youth Strategy and Provision - first, in order for officers to respond to the deputation made by Roundwood Youth Club and for Brent Youth Parliament representatives to participate.

This report provides an update to the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee on the delivery of performance, outcomes and opportunities identified since the implementation of the Brent Youth Strategy 2021-2023 and outlines the proposed plan for the Brent Youth Strategy refresh (2024-2027).

Councillor Gwen Grahl (Cabinet Member for Children, Young People and Schools) provided some political context to the report which detailed Brent’s revised Youth Strategy. She highlighted that youth services had faced challenges over the past 14 years as a result of austerity programmes which had caused a reduction in funding for youth services. The report highlighted the specific situation in Brent where most youth centres closed in 2015 following a cut of £900k to provision. The national charity, UK Youth, had found that more than 4,500 youth worker jobs had disappeared, 760 youth centres had closed, and over £1billion per year had been lost from the sector in the past decade. Alongside this, the government had implemented updated  statutory guidance for local authority responsibilities in relation to youth services in September 2023.

In continuing to introduce the report, Councillor Grahl detailed that there was a big demand for youth services across the borough, and the Council benefited from partnering with the Young Brent Foundation (YBF), who helped Brent to deliver a meaningful offer by co-ordinating opportunities for youth provision with many different community and voluntary sector organisations. She felt that YBF had been innovative in finding different sources of funding and had developed some outstanding initiatives over the years. The Children and Young People Department had also applied for other sources of funding available to them, such as the Holiday Activities and Food Programme (HAF) and the Mayor of London’s Disproportionality Project. The refreshed Youth Strategy aimed to strengthen some of those partnerships and opportunities, and had ambitious aims around public health and tackling the climate crisis. In concluding, Councillor Grahl highlighted that, too often, youth services were spoken about in the context of tackling violent crime, and she wanted to discourage that approach so that youth services were seen as a vital source of wellbeing, creativity and connection for young people, and which delivered a range of outcomes that could be a lifeline for some of the poorest children in the borough.

Nigel Chapman (Corporate Director for Children and Young People, Brent Council) added that, in the absence of a funded youth offer, the Council’s Youth Strategy focused on partnership with the local community and voluntary sector. The report detailed the progress made from the previous strategy and how the Council aimed to move into the next phase with the voluntary and community sector, using the voice of young people.

The Chair thanked colleagues for their introduction and invited Chris Murray (CEO, YBF) to contribute to the introduction. Chris Murray began by highlighting the collaboration between the local authority and voluntary and community sector, which had been growing each year. YBF had supported a My Endz programme to be funded through the Violence Reduction Unit called ‘One Flow, One Brent’ which had brought in just under £1m to the borough. YBF was currently looking at a Youth Futures Foundation programme around youth employment, or under-employment, for young people under 25, to help children flourish in their abilities to find  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7.

North Central London Integrated Care Board and NHS England (London) Specialised Commissioning are consulting on proposed changes to maternity, neonatal and children’s surgical services. The report sets out the options and the possible impact of the proposals on Brent residents, and outlines the approach to consultation and how residents, staff and stakeholders can give their feeback.

Sarah Mansuralli (Chief Strategy and Population Health Officer / Interim Deputy CEO for NCL ICB) introduced the report, which detailed the proposals to consolidate maternity and neonatal services, known as NHS Start Well. In introducing the report, she highlighted that North Central London Integrated Care Board (NCL ICB) recognised that this would have implications for both staff and residents using or working in those services, but there had been some detail lost in the overarching narrative around the proposals that she wanted to clarify. Having listened at many stakeholder engagement activities, there seemed to be an assumption that the proposals were being driven by an attempt to achieve cost reductions and efficiencies in the NHS, but she affirmed that this was not the case. Instead, the proposals focused on creating high quality services that offered personalised care to deliver improved outcomes in maternity and neonatal health. To deliver either option that NCL was consulting on would require approximately £40m in capital investment, and a substantial revenue investment into workforce. There was also a public perception that consolidating the workforce onto fewer sites was due to recruitment and retention challenges within the NHS. She highlighted that, whilst consolidation would improve resilience on sites, the purpose of the proposals was to ensure that staff saw and treated the right amount of cases to maintain their clinical competencies. Due to the low volumes of births on some sites currently, maintaining clinical competencies was a challenge, and this drove staff to go to other units where they could maintain their competencies, exacerbating existing retention challenges within the workforce.

There was a number of improvements the proposals would deliver for both NCL and North West London (NWL) populations, and the Royal College of Midwives was clear that personalised care, together with continuity of care, was critical in improving outcomes in maternity and child health. Without significantly improving both the workforce and facilities, it became difficult to provide that level of care and give time and attention to deliver personalised care that responded to the diverse needs of NCL and NWL communities. NCL ICB appreciated that there was a variety of perspectives on the proposals, and assured the Committee that they had been clinically developed by the professionals delivering the services, and that the models of care represented best practice as well as evidenced based clinical standards, which would ensure that maternity and neonatal care met the recently published standards in the three year maternity plan. NCL ICB was engaging extensively with populations in all affected boroughs and Brent and Harrow were a key part of that.

In continuing the introduction, Rob Hurd (Chief Executive – NWL ICB) explained that inequalities in maternal and child health were fundamental to this programme of work, and the impact assessment and acknowledgement of those for the most deprived communities, including ensuring no detrimental impact, was forefront as the ICB went through the consultation. In relation to NWL ICB, colleagues were working with NCL ICB and Brent Council to ensure  ...  view the full minutes text for item 8.

This report updates the Community and Wellbeing Scrutiny Committee on the Council’s preparations for inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).

Councillor Nerva (Cabinet Member for Public Health and Adult Social Care) introduced the report, which provided an update on preparations for CQC local authority Adult Social Care Assurance. The Committee heard that this would be the first formal statutory inspection of Adult Social Care that the Council had received in ten years, but there had been a peer review conducted the previous year to prepare. In concluding the introduction, Councillor Nerva highlighted that inspectors would be interested in the delivery and leadership shown across services, including partnership working with local health services.

The Chair thanked Councillor Nerva for his introduction and invited comments and questions from those present. The following points were raised:

The Committee asked whether there was any evidence of differences in performance and commitment for agency workers compared to permanent staff. Claudia Brown (Director of Adult Social Care, Brent Council) believed that there was a difference, and when the Council had permanent staff it had the ability to raise stability and the standard of service. The Social Workers employed through the Assessed and Supported Year in Employment (ASYE) went through a set of criteria and were trained in order to set the standard of practice going forward. There were also social work apprenticeships which helped the Council to grow its social care workforce.

In relation to agency workers, the Committee asked whether there was an inter-borough initiative to keep agency staff costs down across London. Claudia Brown responded that in Adult Social Care there was no London Pledge, but there was agreement by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS) that all boroughs would stick to a particular rate to pay agency. However, this had not been as successful as hoped, so ADASS was now looking towards the potential for a London Pledge for Adult Social Care.

The Committee noted that, in preparation for the CQC inspection, there had been an acknowledgement of funding constraints. The Committee asked what the impact of those constraints was on the Council’s ability to have a good judgement from the inspection, and how much of the result might be due to funding issues compared to other factors within the service. Rachel Crossley (Corporate Director Care, Health and Wellbeing, Brent Council) explained that some of those funding constraints impacted on workforce, for example, if the Council could pay staff more then it could retain more staff and invest in more training, but she felt that Brent had done good work in managing that market. Brent’s key focus was around practice standards by driving consistency and working with managers around supervision and case reviews, which did not cost money. Councillor Nerva added that the Council had made a commitment to ‘parity of esteem’ between children’s and adult’s social care and the local authority was now paying an enhancement to attract staff on a permanent basis. The Council was able to put resourcing into staffing in this way, but the other issue was around cost of care, and he felt there was  ...  view the full minutes text for item 9.

This report updates members on the Committee’s recommendations and information requests and captures any scrutiny activity which may have taken place outside of formal meetings.

The Committee noted the recommendations tracker.

Notice of items to be raised under this heading must be given in writing to the Head of Executive and Member Services or his representative before the meeting in accordance with Standing Order 60.

None.