The Head of Environment and Leisure introduced the report which set out the Environment Committee’s remit, including the services it had oversight of, and of current issues and major pieces of work relevant to that remit.  He drew attention to paragraphs 3.3 and 3.4 in the report which set-out current issues and large pieces of work which took-up a lot of the staffing resource.  The Head of Environment and Leisure invited Members to ask questions.

Members made comments and raised the following questions:

·         Welcomed that air quality issues were being looked into, but the Council were following Government standards, rather than the World Health Organisation (WHO) standards which were significantly tighter than Government standards;

·         supported tree planting schemes, but concerned whether maintenance of the trees was included within the schemes?;

·         acknowledged that the proportion of missed bins in the Borough was small, but to the individual resident, this was an issue for them; and

·         requested further information on brown bins being missed as this scenario seemed to happen more frequently than missed blue or green bins.

In response, the Vice-Chair acknowledged the statutory duties of the UK’s legislation and was aware that the WHO had different limits.  The Council had recently joined other councils in the UK100 group to lobby the Government to move to the WHO’s standards.  The Mid Kent Environmental Health Manager also advised that the Council was working as diligently as they could to achieve the targets set by Government in terms of air quality, and aimed to be aspirational like the UK100 group.  The Council was working with other Kent local authorities to secure Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) funding for projects to help achieve this. 

The Head of Environment and Leisure explained that a new Greenspaces Officer had recently joined the Council and there were plans to plant 6,000 trees, on top of the 5,000 already planted.  There was a three-year maintenance programme built-in to the costings.  He acknowledged that there was a backlog of works on existing mature trees, but now there was someone in the vacant Greenspaces officer post, it was hoped that this would be rectified soon.  The Head of Environment and Leisure spoke on the new waste contract and the intention to design out many of the current issues.  He explained that out of 140,000 bins collected each week, the number of missed bins was small.   He said that bin collections were prioritised in the order of green-blue-brown.  The brown bins were last in the priority list as within the scheme of residents subscribing to have a bin, an additional bin collection could be added at the end of their subscription period when there was an issue of a missed week.  The priorities were based on the fact residents wanted the smelly refuse taken as top priority, followed by blue recycling bins.  Currently, the supply of drivers was an issue, but going forward it was hoped that there would be more resilience.

Resolved:

(1)      That the report be noted.