An update on Salisbury and business as usual

Hello,

While the eyes of the world’s media remain very much focused on Salisbury, we are continuing to work with local and national partners to do everything possible to help the city recover.

Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Michael Gove visited Salisbury on Friday and met with Jane Scott, Alistair, John Glen MP and several local business representatives.

To support the businesses and to encourage visitors, along with free park and ride we agreed to introduce free parking in all our city car parks. This has had an immediate and positive impact with a notable increase in shoppers and visitors over the weekend – let’s hope that continues.

This morning at the cabinet meeting, which was held in City Hall, Salisbury, an update on the recovery programme was provided to the local community and attendees; including media representatives.

There is understandably a huge amount of interest in what is being done to support the city, particularly from businesses, and we have launched a new web portal to provide information and advice on the support that’s available and what’s happening to help the city return to normal at www.wiltshire.gov.uk/salisbury

While the developments in Salisbury are an extraordinary situation, our council business as usual continues.

Among the items discussed at Cabinet today was the report produced and feedback following the peer challenge last year by senior local authority representatives from across the UK.

The team told us they observed:

• a solid track record of financial management
• strong and accessible political leadership which sets a clear direction
• good working relationships with stakeholders
• an ambitious agenda for the next 10 years and a resolute focus on ‘strong communities’ 
• a committed workforce - all staff that the team met told them that Wiltshire Council is a great place to work; that they feel valued, are developed to undertake their roles and feel supported to progress their careers
• evidence of a very impressive approach to staff engagement throughout the organisation from frontline staff to senior leaders
• a very good recovery in children’s services.

While this is great feedback, our focus as always is on how we can use what we’ve been told to continue to improve.

We’ll be taking the same approach with the feedback we’ve received following a joint Ofsted/Care Quality Commission review of the local area’s provision for young people with Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities (SEND) in January.

The inspection team praised the effective partnerships and the ambition to deliver the very best outcomes for Wiltshire’s children and young people and recognising our effective partnerships across education, health and social care. The inspection has confirmed that the strategic plans we have in place will deliver our ambitions.

Over the weekend, our community engagement managers helped to facilitate more than 70 litter picks across Wiltshire as part of the postponed Great British Spring Clean. Thanks to everyone involved in helping to tidy up our county and remove around 7.5 tonnes of rubbish!

Finally, last night saw the first of a series of #EPIC Talks – and the bar was set very high with the first speaker, Dr Charles Kriel. Dr Kriel was recently appointed as the Specialist Advisor to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee on Fake News at the House of Commons, advising on issues surrounding influence campaigning, personality profiling, and micro-targeting social media audiences.

This was a really topical issue for the first talk, a new initiative which has come from our EPIC staff engagement group. More talks are already being planned and we’d encourage you to try to get along to one if you can.

Alistair, Carlton and Terence