Agenda item

The Committee considered the report which provided a detailed overview of the Council's response to the COVID-19 emergency and the help and support it provided to residents, partners, local businesses and staff. It further detailed all the elements of response so far, lessons learnt and the approach for the next phase of the pandemic.

The Chairman and Leader of the Council, on behalf of all Councillors thanked the Director of Public Health and her team on all the work, effort and time they’d put into responding to the pandemic. He further extended thanks to all those involved as part of the emergency response, this included not only officers but the voluntary sector, NHS responders, Faith Groups, individual volunteers, charities and many other organisations. 

The Chief Executive spoke of the huge challenged faced nationally and locally for Barnet and wished also to place on record a thank you to everyone involved in particular the Director of Public Health and her team.

With regards to the detailed recovery plan, the Committee were advised individual Theme Committees would receive updates on the recovery activity in their areas of responsibility.

The Director of Public thanked the Public Health team, council officers, council services and organisations that mobilised together to responded to the pandemic. She took the Committee through the slides in Appendix A, highlighting key areas and provided a summary of some of the lessons learnt both culturally and technically. Further highlighted were some aspects of the next phase such as recovering the economy as this had wider public health implications and keeping schools open by providing them with as much support as possible.

She explained that going forward the focus was on how to ensure the response was in a proportionate way as resources were finite. Barnet is one the largest London boroughs, with a significantly large number of business and one of the largest numbers of schools.

With regards to testing, there had been an increase in the number of days the mobile testing units visited Barnet, with a fixed testing unit due to be set up in Burnt Oak.

With regards to campaigns the Director explained there had been a number of targeted health campaigns to reach Barnet’s diverse population and in particular specific groups and communities. The contact tracing activity had been positive achieving 83%-85%.

With regards to bringing services back into Business As Usual (BAU) the Chief Executive explained the vast majority of services were back to BAU albeit some being delivered in a slightly different way.

With regards to children and young people who had to self-isolate or were in a bubble which meant they had to isolate as a whole, the Executive Director for Children and Young People explained that the council in conjunction with a government scheme had access to over 700 laptops, with further laptops being purchased. These had been distributed to schools and those children who were deemed vulnerable. As the government had extended the scheme, the council would continue to work to secure more laptops. He explained that work had also been undertaken with 2 OFSTED inspectors who were seconded to the 6 London Boroughs in north London and were looking at ‘Loss Learning’ and a guide on how to improve learning during lockdown.

With regards to Care Homes the Executive Director for Adults and Public Health explained that they implemented early on a policy of no admission until people had gone at least 8 days plus of showing symptoms, this was in accordance with the guidance at the time. Throughout the first phase, 5 councils Adult Social Care services worked collectively with all the additional capacity stood up to deal with the pandemic, around the support for care homes and also working with Community Health. She explained they were the first sub-region in London to implement a formal policy through the Integrated Care System (ICS) of governance, agreeing that there would be no discharges of COVID positive patients to care homes across the 5 Boroughs. This had subsequently been picked up by the London wide Care Home Oversight Group as an example of good practice and was well supported by medical and health teams across North Central London. She advised that the Joint Health Overview and Scrutiny Committee would be considering a report on this at their next meeting. She also informed the Committee that the shopping service and call centre were still in operation for vulnerable residents, but that the call service was on much more skeletal service in terms of the call centre and welfare care services. In the event of a second these services could be scaled up quite quickly.

Upon being put to the vote the recommendations as set out in the report were unanimously carried.

RESOLVED – That the Committee

1.     Note the report and identify areas of improvement and feedback that can be incorporated into the next phase of the response.

2.     Agree the proposed approach to next phase of the response and acknowledge that, due to nature of this pandemic, certain elements of next phase maybe subject to change.