2018 - a year of opportunity and delivery

Welcome back and happy New Year for 2018!

We hope you all managed to enjoy a well-earned break over the festive period and are ready for the New Year. Our thanks go to those staff who did a great job managing the impact of the extreme weather over the last couple of weeks.

As we said in our pre-Christmas blog, 2018 promises to be a year of opportunity and delivery and we’re pleased that interviews for the vacant director posts for economic development and planning, and commercial and housing are underway this week.

Over the next few weeks the interviews for the two adult social care directors; continued support, and access and reablement, as well as directors for commissioning, and education and skills will also take place.

We hope to appoint to these roles by early next month, but in the meantime, the following temporary arrangements have been put in place; 

• Graham Wilkin – interim statutory director, Adult Social Services (DASS)

• Emma Legg – acting director, adult social care 

• Evelyn Wheeler – interim director, commissioning 

• Alan Stubbersfield – interim director, skills and education

Our first meeting of the year with cabinet members took place on Monday. We discussed the cabinet meetings scheduled for 30 January and 6 February and the agenda items which include feedback on the consultation on the local transport plan and next year’s budget. 

As we previously updated, next year we need to find around £25m in savings to meet increasing demand in some services. On Monday we ran through proposals to deliver these savings. Whilst most of these have been accepted, more detail is required for some of the proposals put forward.

As you may have heard, the government has agreed that councils can now increase council tax by up to 3% without a referendum. The maximum used to be 2%, and the extra 1% could generate around £2.4m for the council, should members agree to this increase.

In terms of what happens next on the budget - all directors and heads of service will be sent base budgets to review shortly. The papers setting out the budget proposals will be published on 29 January, ahead of the cabinet discussion on 6 February, and a decision by full council on 20 February.

That might sound like a long process – but the reality is that when setting the budget there needs to be an appropriate level of scrutiny given the size of our budget and scale of services we deliver.

Whilst there is a lot of focus on next year’s budget, we still need to manage this year’s budget to ensure that it is balanced and that we continue to minimise any potential overspend. We are encouraging all managers to be vigilant in their approach to any recruitment and spend from now until April and to recognise that by being diligent we can achieve a balanced outcome.

This Friday we are hosting a visit from Gloucester City Council, that is keen to look at how we work, with a particular focus on our hubs and our programme of transformation following the move to unitary. With the budget challenges and service demands facing local authorities several have visited to look at rationalisation of property, flexible working and community working.

Finally, the EPIC staff engagement team launched the opportunity to deliver an EPIC Xmas impression. More than 1,000 impressions were sent over the Christmas period – an incredible response! We encourage you to make use of impressions to recognise and thank your colleagues for their work. If you haven’t sent one yet, EPIC has now launched new impressions focused on empowerment, innovation and collaboration. You can find out more about impressions here.

And the EPIC team is still looking for more volunteers, the deadline for applications is today. You can apply here.

Finally, the recent highlights are on the intranet.

Alistair, Carlton and Terence