A busy summer ahead

Hello,

We are almost in the summer holiday period, and while this means that the number of meetings reduce, there is little sign of the organisation slowing down. The programme of work across service areas combined with the incidents in Amesbury and Salisbury is keeping us all busy.

On Tuesday evening a special community meeting was held in Salisbury to update local people on the investigation following the recent incident and on the recovery programme, and, most importantly, to provide an opportunity for local people to ask questions and raise their concerns with a panel of representatives including Alistair, Wiltshire Police and Public Health England.

About 200 members of the public attended and so far the live broadcast of the meeting (available on our Facebook page) has been seen around 7,500 times and this number is rising.

A special community meeting was also held last night, this time in Amesbury, to update the local community and to enable a question and answer session. This meeting was also broadcast live.

These meetings are a really important way of engaging with local communities, and gaining a better understanding of their concerns; particularly given the recent extraordinary events that have taken place and the ongoing media attention that these have generated.

Throughout the recovery phase we will be doing all we can to support the communities of Amesbury and Salisbury. We recognise that full recovery will take time and we need to support the local economy and wider community, both in the immediate aftermath of the incidents, and in the longer term. The government’s recent announcement of a further funding to provide immediate support enables us to continue to allocate grants and business rate relief to those affected during this difficult period. 

The long-term plans to support the local economy have been discussed with central government and include accelerating local development and regeneration programmes to bring jobs and investment to the wider local community. We will update on this programme in future blogs.

This week the Officer Appointments Committee meets to consider two Tier 2 appointments -Education & Skills and Learning Disabilities & Mental Health. We’ll update you on the outcome of the interviews as soon as possible.

During the summer, the Families and Children’s Transformation team will be attending various family fun days to speak to parents and carers to better understand what’s important to them and how they want to be supported during times of need. You can have your say by going to our Families and children’s transformation survey 2018

Our Black, Minority, Ethnic Staff Network held their regular meeting this week with four guest speakers. Kerry Beety and Saeed Naizai told an inspiring story of a young refugee child's journey to the UK and how he found a loving new family through fostering; Hári Sewell, a management consultant and former NHS executive director, gave a motivational talk on making a positive impact in society; and senior democratic services officer Will Oulton spoke about the importance of blood donation and the need for more BME donors. Well done to everyone involved in organising and taking part in this event.

Just a reminder that the changes to recycling collections comes into effect next Monday with the aim of encouraging everyone to recycle more and reduce the waste collected. The team has done a great job raising awareness of the extra items you can now recycle and you can find out more on our website.

Finally, for those of you taking a break during the school holidays, enjoy some time off and if it’s a staycation fingers crossed the sunshine lasts!

Alistair, Carlton and Terence