To consider adopting the draft South and East Lincolnshire Councils Partnership Asset Management Strategy 2023-2028.

Councillor Richard Fry, Portfolio Holder for Finance presented Members with a report to consider adoption of the draft South and East Lincolnshire Councils Partnership Asset Management Strategy 2023-2028.

During his introduction, Councillor Fry stated that as sovereign Councils and as a Partnership, the Council recognised that effective use of its land and property assets formed one of the essential ingredients for high quality service delivery and creating and ensuring value for the Council’s residents.  The Council’s aim was to manage a well-planned and well-maintained property portfolio, ensuring that it could demonstrate value for money and more importantly, that by using assets well, secure wide value for the community.

Members were referred to Appendix 1, pages 69 to 78 of the Agenda refer, which presented the draft South and East Lincolnshire Councils Partnership Asset Management Strategy 2023 – 2028.  The draft had been considered by each sovereign Council’s scrutiny function and had been presented to each Council’s executive body for referral to the respective Council for formal adoption.  East Lindsey’s Executive Board received the draft on 22 March 2023 and resolved that the draft South and East Lincolnshire Councils Partnership Asset Management Strategy 2023 – 2028 attached at Appendix 1 be endorsed and recommended to Council for adoption, Minute No. 85 refers.

Member were advised that the draft had been purposefully crafted to be high level in that it sought to set the guiding principles for Asset Management across the SELCP and only sought to set a focussed number of high-level actions in order to shape and drive the detailed work necessary within each Council to manage and maintain their respective assets.

Whilst it was intended to supersede each Council’s highest-level Asset Management Plan, it did not immediately supersede the various process and policy documents that sat below those plans as that would require a ‘detailed review of the detail’.

The recommendations were duly proposed and seconded.

During discussion reference was made to the following:

Councillor Jackson highlighted two of the guiding principles of the strategy, detailed on page 72 of the Agenda as follows:

·       Generate efficiency gains, capital receipts and most importantly, maximise revenue income in order to ‘self-fund’ repairs and maintenance as far as possible and use any surpluses to support other council services;

·       Reduce carbon emissions and improve environmental sustainability wherever and whenever it is reasonably practicable to do so.

Councillor Jackson highlighted that through Audit and Governance Committee and the Council’s investments in property funds, it had learned that it was the absolute link between looking after the sustainability of buildings and generating profits in commercial property and was something that the Council should take forward with its approach to assets, including the environmental impact and how affordable it was to live and work in them.  It was also considered that this would matter if assets had to be disposed of in the future, in particular how green they were.  In response, the Portfolio Holder for Finance thanked Councillor Jackson for her comments which were well understood and agreed to follow these up.

Councillor Makinson-Sanders queried in the case of devolution whether community assets would be absorbed into the ownership of a new organisation and whether safeguarding of assets had been taken into consideration when writing the strategy. 

In response, the Leader of the Council advised Members that he was aware of mechanisms in place that referred to assets being put into community trusts to secure them for the future, however stated that this was a discussion for another time.

Upon being put to the vote, it was

RESOLVED

That the draft South and East Lincolnshire Councils Partnership Asset Management Strategy 2023 – 2028 attached at Appendix 1 be adopted by the Council.