Bourne Hill update and today's cabinet meeting

Hello,

We would like to start this week’s blog by saying a huge thank you to all the teams that have relocated in the Bourne Hill offices. Your positive contribution to the move has ensured that any disruption to service provision and users has been kept to a minimum. Our thanks also go to all those involved in making the move happen so swiftly and efficiently.

As you may be aware the front-facing customer services staff (including housing and benefits) has remained at Bourne Hill and is now located to the old part of the building, the Registry office.

Wiltshire Police contact centre is now located in Salisbury Library. The move was required to enable work to clean up the locations potentially contaminated. This work by the specialist team gets underway this week.

Last week the fourth community recovery meeting was held in Salisbury and focused on updating local people on the decontamination and clean-up work. You can see the presentation on our Supporting Salisbury page or watch the meeting on Youtube or Facebook. More than 3,300 people have watched the footage of this meeting.

Although a considerable amount of time is, quite rightly, being spent on the recovery programme for Salisbury, we are also doing all we can to maintain business as usual and there is a huge amount of work taking place.

At today’s cabinet meeting members discussed a number of diverse issues, including the learning disabilities in-house respite services, the A303 tunnel, the future management of King George V Park in Melksham and a strategy for sexual health and blood borne viruses.

Tomorrow (Weds) the Ofsted Annual Conversation takes place with a visit to children and education. This is part of the new approach by Ofsted which involves an annual conversation between Ofsted and the local authority. This formal discussion, alongside self-evaluation, means we can critically evaluate our own performance and articulate what we think is working well for children in Wiltshire. It will also form part of the intelligence Ofsted use to decide where and when to inspect families and children’s services.

Health and social care continues to integrate more closely but clearly this is something that can’t be done in isolation – on Thursday we’ll be meeting with partners across the health and social care spectrum for a strategic planning session. This will be a key meeting when all partners will work together and adopt a whole system approach to delivering improvement. We’ll update more on this work next week.

Carlton is giving the welcome address at the next BME (Black and Minority Ethnic) staff network event tomorrow. This is a network which staff can choose to join and it offers mutual support, raises awareness and gives advice on specific equality issues as well as acting as a consultative voice to the council. Also speaking will be Cllr Darren Henry, who will give an insight in to his journey to becoming a councillor, and we’ll hear an update on our response to the government's consultation on the integrated communities’ strategy. And there is a performance by local up-and-coming poet Saili Katebe. The meeting takes place on 25 April at 3pm - 5pm in the Cotswold Space at County Hall. Everyone is welcome to attend - to register please email Wali Rahman.

The quarterly staff awards ceremony, the Achieving Excellence Awards, takes place on Thursday afternoon to recognise those staff who have gone above and beyond in the work that they do. Please come along and support your colleagues from 4pm on the first floor balcony at County Hall. Full details of the winners will be announced in this Friday’s Electric Wire.

On the theme of recognition, our community hub programme has been recognised at a number of award ceremonies recently, and on Wednesday night we will find out if we have been successful in the Public Finance Innovation Awards, where the programme has been shortlisted in the community engagement category.

Finally, we’re pleased to announce that Simon Hindey will be joining us as director housing and commercial at the end of July. Simon, who is currently the chief officer for housing at Bracknell Forest Brough Council, has a wealth of experience in housing across a number of local authorities and we look forward to him joining the team.

You can see our latest highlights presentation on the Wire.

Alistair, Carlton and Terence

Salisbury update and some recent success stories

Hello,

Welcome back to those of you who took leave during the Easter holidays and we hope you have come back feeling refreshed.

There continues to be a large amount of focus on the Salisbury community recovery and last week we held our third community update, with well over 300 people attending City Hall to hear the latest developments and ask questions. We also broadcast this meeting online and, to date, this video has been seen more than 5,500 times, which shows the huge amount of interest in the issue - and also highlights how using this kind of digital technology can help us engage with even more people.

To find out the latest updates on the ongoing situation, visit our dedicated web pages at www.wiltshire.gov.uk/salisbury

Now for a few success stories…

• Congratulations to our Youth Offending team who, after a two year process of improvements and continual assessment, have just been awarded the Achievement for All Quality Mark by the Department of Education for the support they give eight to 17-year-olds who encounter the youth justice system.

• Last week we hosted the latest stage of the Local Government Challenge, which seeks the best and brightest local government officers to compete in a series of real-life challenges around the country. Senior corporate support officer Kartar Singh is among those taking part this year – although there are a few more challenges to go before the winner is chosen, being selected to take part is a great achievement in itself.

• Congratulations to our #EPIC staff engagement group, whose work has just been shortlisted in two categories at the HR Excellence Awards. Their work was shortlisted in the ‘Outstanding employee engagement strategy’ category, while the way we’ve used existing technology for #EPIC engagement was shortlisted in the ‘Most innovative deployment of HR technology’ category. We’ll find out in June if the team have been successful.

Earlier this week the #EPIC group provided an update on their work at our regular forum with Heads of Service and managers. We also discussed the recent health and wellbeing staff survey results, and our digital programme.

Finally, our recruitment to Tier 2 continues. We are currently out to advert for three director roles – finance and procurement, learning disabilities and mental health, and education and skills. We have also offered the role of Director Housing and Commercial to a candidate and will update you on this when we are able to.

You can see our latest highlights presentation here. 

Alistair, Carlton and Terence

Salisbury recovery and positive Ofsted review

Hello,

Hope you all had a nice Easter break, and our thanks goes to everyone who was on call, or had to work over the long weekend.

As a council, our top priority continues to be the recovery of Salisbury and ensuring the city begins to thrive again. A big part of this work is to encourage people to visit the city and support those local businesses who have been so badly affected by recent events. We’re doing everything in our power to provide the city with what it needs and through our #LoveSalisbury campaign, promoting all the many activities that are taking place in the city, particularly over the busy half-term period.

Despite the weather not being on our side over the Easter weekend there’s still plenty of the school holidays left and we hope the many measures we have taken so far, including introducing free parking, will continue to pay dividends and get more and more people into the city and enjoying everything it has to offer. Although it has slightly receded, the national media spotlight continues to be on Salisbury and the work we’re doing, and it has been an incredibly busy and intense time. Thanks again to everyone who continues to support all the Salisbury work and all those affected by it, as it is having a knock-on effect on much of the ‘business as usual’ work we carry out. However, this work with partners will be ongoing for quite some time and we can’t over-stress the importance for us to get this right and ensure that long-term, Salisbury doesn’t suffer.

Last week we were pleased to get the official verdict on our recent Ofsted/Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection into the services to support children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities. We’re delighted to say that overall the report is overwhelmingly positive and that’s testament to all of you who have a role to play ensuring children and young people with SEND get the effective support they need. Some of the highlights include that SEND children achieve well in their early users, there is a strong partnership with parent carers, and that young people are well supported as they move into adult life with integrated teams working closely together. We won’t be complacent though and understand there are areas to develop further and we are working hard to continually make improvements.

We had a glimpse over the weekend just how suddenly we can get the kind of rainfall in Wiltshire that can cause some problems. We had some flood warnings in place and experienced some minor flood-related issues over the course of the weekend and as a precaution the barriers were raised in Bradford on Avon. We know too well the devastation that can be caused by flooding and since 2013/14, when the county was badly affected, we have continued to work with the Environment Agency and local communities to ensure we are as prepared as possible should it happen to that scale again. The weather is extremely unpredictable but with robust detailed flood plans in place, the reaction of ourselves and our communities will be anything but.

Alistair, Carlton and Terence