Issue - meetings

The Policy Manager presents a report to provide Committee with information to monitor and review Council performance, and to focus on key performance indicator ‘Sustainability (environment)’.

Recommended                     -   That the comments and recommendations of the Resources Overview & Scrutiny Committee be noted and actioned, as required.

The Policy Manager submitted a report to provide a performance update on the Council’s Sustainability Environment Key Performance Indicators as part of the Council’s performance monitoring review. 

He reported that the Corporate Performance Review held in 2024 had recommended that the Council monitored its performance progress.  Subsequently, a performance review report had been submitted to the Resource Overview & Scrutiny Committee held in January 2025, at which the Committee had recommended that future Performance Review reports should only focus on elements of performance.Subsequently, the theme of this report was Sustainability (Environment).  This covered recycling rates, household waste, fly tipping, housing repair, vacant dwellings, carbon emissions, Green Flags and air pollution. 

The Policy Manager referred to appendix 1 of the report which listed the Sustainability theme’s KPIs (eight indicators) and compared performance over the past 5 years, benchmarking and providing Service Manager commentary.  He explained that of the eight indicators, three had seen an improvement in their direction of travel, four had stayed the same and one had seen a downturn compare with previous years. 

The three indicators that had seen an improvement in performance were: the number of fly tipping incidents, the number of complaints of housing disrepair and the number of Green Flag parks held.  The indicator that had slightly dropped was the household recycling rate.  This had seen a slight drop from 32.2% to 31.6% although this was still below the Lancashire average of 39%.  The Committee was informed that this figure included garden waste and would be affected by each borough’s housing stock and garden type.  In a positive light, Hyndburn did have the highest rates of dry recycling across Lancashireand residual household waste which had remained significantly below the Lancashire average. 

The Committee had submitted a number of questions, in advance to the meeting, which had been responded to and referred to the following issues: 

·         Fly tipping could be effected by volume as well as the number of incidents – could this be included in performance monitoring? 

·         Fly tipping of mattresses was a problem, was a delay in collecting bulky waste a contributory factor to this? 

·         Was there data on the fly tipping of bulky waste? 

·         Could data on ‘housing standards disrepair’ be broken down into further categories? 

·         Why do the performance indicator rates show garden waste and residual household waste to be comparably worse than neighbouring authorities? 

Committee Members also asked additional questions at the meeting as follows: 

·         Is there anything that can be done to target air pollution, particularly pollution from traffic in the Clayton Triangle area.  

·         With reference to Household Waste Recycling rates, could the Council do more to educate residents to boost rates of recycling. 

·         People did not want to pay for disposing of their waste so this often led to fly tipping.  Was the problem of fly tipping worse on private land?  Could data be provided? 

·         Could an improved bulky waste disposal service and better advertisement of the service help  ...  view the full minutes text for item 107