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
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