Peer Review recap and this week's Staff Engagement Forum

Hello,

Last week we welcomed the LGA Peer Review Team to County Hall to carry out a review on the organisation. The peer review is a voluntary process that provides the opportunity for independent people, usually from other local authorities, to review how we work. Their role is to act as a critical friend and provide honest feedback on what they think works, and where we could do things differently and better. We’re big advocates of this process and although a lot of preparation is required, and it can be intensive, the benefits and the learning we get is extremely worthwhile.

The peers spent four days with us and during that time they spoke to more than 130 people, attended 40 meetings, carried out a number of site visits and spent an incredible 260 hours determining their findings – this is the equivalent of one person spending more than seven weeks in Wiltshire. 

The initial feedback we’ve had has been encouraging and we’d like to thank everyone who played a part in ensuring the review ran as smoothly and professionally as it did – the reviewers were very impressed with the organisation (in both senses of the word). Here’s some of the initial feedback we received:

• Strong, visible and accessible political leadership that gives clear direction
• Staff feel valued and say this a great place to work
• Children's services recovery has successfully leveraged wider resources and commitment 
• Solid financial performance over the last four years
• Good digital strategy and now we need to move to delivery involving digital customer access to all services and automation of manual work processing 
• We should adopt a planning and performance management regime that links business and financial planning and supports openness and accountability 
• We could provide more clarity on asset transfers and be more assertive about the agenda
• There is more work to do to build a shared understanding of the opportunities, investment required and the skill needed to pursue our commercial and digital agenda

There is lots for us to reflect on and to take forward and we will be considering the next steps and a plan of action.

We’re looking forward to seeing you all at the staff forums which start later this week (please book a place, if you haven’t already done so). It will obviously be the first staff forum for us as a leadership team and we’re looking forward to reflecting on some of the highlights of the past year, as well as sharing our vision going forward. However, the main focus of these sessions is to hear from you and your views on the council and its future plans. 

We’re also looking forward to engaging with other key stakeholders later this week; the town and parish councils. We’re hosting a training and network day for representatives of these organisations and the agenda will include a variety of topics to assist them as effective local councils. We will be updating on our priorities over the next decade, information governance, highways, planning, budget setting and communications. We want our link with the parish and town council to be strong; particularly as they are close to the local communities and deliver many services and we are looking at devolving more services and assets in the future.

Finally, interviews for some of the Director posts take place this week. We are pleased to announce that yesterday Lucy Townsend was appointed as Director – Families and Children’s Services. We will provide further announcements, as appropriate, following interviews.

Have a good week and look forward to seeing some of you on Thursday.

Alison, Alistair, Carlton and Terence