Issue - meetings

David Ayton-Hill presented the report and highlighted the following points:

• Of the 11 key business measures for the committee, nine were available now but two would be received later in the year
• Three were on track and six were not. Covid-19 affected some of these
• The ones highlighted were the ones that improved from the previous year e.g. the number of businesses supported and growing through WCC programmes
• Unemployment rate was falling but there were significant vacancy levels in Warwickshire and some businesses were struggling to recruit
• Household waste recycling and composting were below target but more waste was being collected. This was because of the amount of people working from home
• The recycling centre fire affected recycling numbers in the south of the county and every district/borough was now charging for green waste collection
• There were driver and labour shortages because of Covid-19 as well as some industrial action. These all caused the recycling rates to be lower 
• Work was now being done to increase these rates back up

In response to Councillor Sinclair, David Ayton-Hill said that the Power BI system would say what was being done to improve the areas that were failing. Some areas could not be improved by WCC due to external factors e.g. unemployment. 

Councillor Chilvers noted that the reason the biodiversity target was missed in this report was because there were three types of biodiversity habitats (low, moderate, and high) and some things were moved to high from moderate, but others went to low. The positive thing for the verges was that amenity grassland counts as ‘low’ biodiversity, but this would increase to moderate with wildflowers. Scott Tompkins concurred with this but noted that WCC does not own highway land they just took a bit of it to maintain the road network.