Announcements
To receive announcements and business brought forward by the Mayor, Leader, and Members of the Cabinet or the Chief Executive.
4.1 By the Mayor:
4.2 By the Chief Executive:
4.3 By the Group Leaders: Any apologies for absence
4.4 Council Leader and Members of the Cabinet:
Councillor Williams Leader of the Council
Councillor Banks Community and Regulatory Services
Councillor G Sutton Planning and Infrastructure
Councillor Elliot Finance and Resources
Councillor Griffiths Housing
Councillor Williams Corporate and Contracted Services
Councillor Anderson Environmental Services
Decision:
4.1 By
the Mayor:
None.
4.2 By
the Chief Executive:
None.
4.3 By
the Group Leaders:
Councillor Williams gave apologies on behalf of Councillors Imarni
and Oguchi.
Councillor Tindall gave apologies on behalf of Councillor Link.
4.4 Council Leader and Members of the Cabinet:
(Full details are in the minutes under Announcements of the Leader and Cabinet).
Minutes:
4.1 By the Mayor:
None.
4.2 By the Chief Executive:
None.
4.3 By the Group
Leaders:
Councillor Williams gave apologies on behalf of Councillors Imarni
and Oguchi.
Councillor Tindall gave apologies on behalf of Councillor Link.
4.4 Council Leader and Members of the Cabinet:
Councillor Williams, Leader of the Council
The Leader presented his update as follows:
Since the last meeting in November I think national news has been dominated by two particular items; one obviously being Covid, being primarily the one that’s on most people’s minds and prior to the start of the new year to cut the country’s position and negotiations around Brexit.
Locally there has been discussion around the local plan but I think it’s being covered in other parts of this evenings agendas so I wanted to take this opportunity to update members and colleagues on some of the actions the councils taking in relation to dealing with issues in the last few weeks as the Covid situation has worsened both locally and nationally. My report was drafted a couple of days ago but up to then we had a total of 5854 cases of confirmed Covid within Dacorum with 703 on those occurring in the last seven days between 1st and 7th January. Because it takes time for tests to be processed the figures for the more recent days are provisional, the indication is that the test figures are proving to be relatively high. We know both locally and nationally that some of the significant areas of infection are schools and supermarkets, and locally we’ve had a significant outbreak at The Mount prison which have been recorded and Hertfordshire Public Health have been carrying out testing there in order to determine the number of people who are actually infected there and to help the prison service with isolating and dealing with those issues. More locally I just want to run through some of the aspects of the council’s response and our involvement with assisting other colleagues in dealing with issues as they arise. The council is fully involved with our IMT (incident management team) in dealing with issues locally. We are represented on various tactical meetings across the county so we are aware of issues as they’re arising. The councils track and trace service is due to be up and running by the 18th January and we have recruited two of the three staff members required to run this service locally. Colleagues won’t be surprised to hear that one of the main areas of pressure within the council is on our Environmental Health staff who have been taking on and dealing with a significant workload in relation to enforcing various Covid restrictions, visiting supermarkets and other outlets to ensure that we are Covid compliant of mask wearing and rules are being enforced. I’m pleased to say the results to date have been encouraging with higher levels of compliance, and there will be a rolling programme of enforcement visits to supermarkets which I ... view the full minutes text for item 4