We welcomed the peer review team at County Hall yesterday. Following a brief overview of the organisation from Jane and ourselves, the team spent its first day with us meeting the leadership teams; cabinet and all of us. They also met several directors focusing on HR and OD, communities, children’s transformation and our work to become more digital.
Their initial feedback so far is measured. The team will be on site until Thursday and will be attending various meetings and focus groups with both internal staff, elected members and external partners. We would like to thank all of you that are attending meetings for taking the time to share the work that you do to make Wiltshire a better place.
As we said in last week’s blog, we look forward to hearing the peer reviewer’s findings and thoughts on where we can do things differently to improve what we do; particularly on the areas that we have asked them to focus on.
At our weekly meeting with cabinet members yesterday we discussed a range of issues; one was the consultation that’s currently underway on proposals for car parking charges; in particular the residential parking in Salisbury which cabinet has requested some further work is undertaken to assess the proposal and costs, based on initial feedback.
We also talked about today’s cabinet meeting, which was attended by members of the public to speak on the special schools provision and adult social care services. It’s always good to have public participation and to hear their views as users on proposed policy and service changes.
On a separate note yesterday, we also discussed fostering and how we could encourage staff to consider being foster carers. We will be looking at an internally focused campaign as our marketing to recruit foster carers externally has been extremely successful and, we know we need even more carers to come forward – something to think about...
As we mentioned last week, the budget remains at the forefront of our discussions and current work plans. We have now arranged dates for the budget summit meetings - as mentioned in last week’s blog - with directors and cabinet members to talk through their plans for making savings and doing things differently. The budget and plans for delivering savings next year will be discussed at the staff forums which start next week in Trowbridge.
This week we are hosting an Employability Fair (taking place today) and the Wiltshire Assembly (Thursday) in the atrium at County Hall. The theme of the assembly is military integration and will include an update on the progress being made for the relocation of 4,000 Army personnel to the county from Germany making our county home to a quarter of the British Army by 2020. We continue to work closely with our MOD partners to integrate civilian and military communities to create vibrant, welcoming and supportive places where people want to live and work. The assembly has more than 100 attendees and they will be asked to pledge what they can do to assist with this integration and support for the troops and their families across the county.
Next week we will include an update on the peer review feedback and next steps.
Hope you all have a good week.
Alison, Alistair, Carlton and Terence
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