Paying respects to a great cabinet member to serve under

A sad goodbye to a great man

Jerry Wickham, who sadly passed away on 23 July

We were extremely saddened to hear that former cabinet member Jerry Wickham passed away this week.

Jerry was very open about his diagnosis of prostate cancer, but he did not let this illness define him.  He was defined by his integrity, values and his skill as a cabinet member. He was a brilliant councillor to serve under and will be terribly missed by all who knew him.

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men and robs so many people of their loved ones. Jerry was always so keen to raise awareness and prevent other people having to go through what he had, so if you need any advice and support please visit the Prostate Cancer UK website.

Our thoughts are with Jerry’s wife Suzanne, their sons, and his family and friends at this very sad time.


‘Good’ rating is GREAT news for our children’s services

The children's services team celebrate their success

Following years of commitment and hard work from our staff, we were delighted to get confirmation that our children’s social care services are rated ‘Good’ in all areas by Ofsted – the first authority in the South West to achieve this. It can’t be understated how hard the team has worked to make improvements to the service and get this fantastic recognition. We are outstanding in places, and where we need to improve we have already made steps to achieving that goal. 

Among the many highlights, the report notes:

• Senior leaders and frontline practitioners are driven by a determination to improve the life chances of children in Wiltshire
• Children in care and care leavers receive a good service in Wiltshire
• Responses to children from domestic abuse are effective and decisive action taken by social workers to protect children when required
• Social workers have manageable workloads following significant investment to increase numbers 
• Social workers are given the time they need to work purposefully with families and children
• The arrangements for finding children adoptive parents is a strength and children in Wiltshire are waiting less time than ever to move in with their adoptive family

Getting the basics right is fundamental and provides a solid platform for our work, the investment we have made in good practice and social work values has led to better lives for children and families across Wiltshire. We couldn’t be prouder of this achievement.

We gathered as many members of the children’s services team together on Monday as we could to tell them the good news and the atmosphere was fantastic. You can read the full report on the Ofsted website and it makes for great reading.

The staff we have are the key to this success and our aim now is to continue to be a progressive, supportive and learning organisation. Thanks so much to everyone involved.


Big step forward for our digital programme 

Cutting the ribbon on Val

It’s been a busy week for our digital programme team with the launch of our first virtual assistant, Val, within the payroll team.

Val went live on Wednesday 17 July and has automated the distribution of payroll output reports – effectively running a series of six reports for each of our 43 payrolls.

This used to require a significant amount of repetitive keying for staff, taking up one-two days per month and creating bottlenecks in a time-critical process. Now, with Val on board, this takes just over an hour, not only freeing up staff time, but also reducing pressure and giving us capacity and confidence to take on more payrolls, which supports our commercial agenda.

Virtual assistants represent a significant step forward in our digital transformation. They are changing the way we work, both at an individual and organisational level, making it simpler, quicker and easier for our customers and staff to access our services.

As this is a new technology we have been learning as we go, and it has not been as smooth or easy as we initially thought. However, the teams involved have worked tirelessly to get to this point.

We would like to thank all the teams involved, both from the digital programme itself, the Payroll team and all the other teams that are working with the digital programme to identify opportunities and help us achieve our vision.

To find out more about our first virtual assistant, please watch this video. 

We have seven other processes currently in build phase (six in HR&OD and one in planning) and these will be released over the coming months. Discussions are ongoing with other services; if you think your service has a suitable process that could be automated, which is high volume, rule-based and repetitive, please contact digitalprogramme@wiltshire.gov.uk.


Council and Police IT to go separate ways

Cabinet took place this week, the first chaired by new leader Philip Whitehead. It was a busy agenda and one of the items was the decision for ourselves and Wiltshire Police to separate our IT infrastructure. This joint decision by both organisations, will allow the police to align with the Police Vision 2025 digital programme, which requires nationally consistent IT systems for the police service, and will enable them to have better access to national police IT infrastructure programmes.

We will work together over the next year to manage this transition carefully and ensure there is minimal disruption to both organisations. Wiltshire Police is one our major partners and although our IT services are separating, we will continue to have a strong partnership with them going forward.

You can catch up with the cabinet webcast online.

School’s out for summer

This academic year seems to have flown by and the school holidays are now here. As a council we put on a host of activities throughout the break to keep the kids entertained. Among others, our leisure services and libraries team have lots planned including the Get Active programme and this year’s space-themed Summer Reading Challenge. We know it can be a tricky time of year to think of things to do so please keep an eye on the Wiltshire Council website for some great ideas.

It's been a particularly busy first half of the year, so for those of you having some time off over the coming month or so, we hope you get a chance to recharge the batteries and this week’s warm weather sticks around a little longer.

Alistair, Carlton and Terence

Armed Forces celebrations a huge success

Sorry for the lack of blogs recently. It’s been a particularly busy month, but now we’re out the other side and have come up for a bit of air, it’s nice to able to reflect on, and share with you, what we’ve been up to.

Months of planning comes to a hugely successful conclusion

After all the preparation and build up, the Armed Forces Day National Event happened last weekend. The event was a great success and the feedback received so far has been overwhelmingly positive; it was great to see so many people enjoying the weekend with their family and friends. We were keeping our fingers crossed for nice weather but perhaps we did it a little too tightly as there was heatwave temperatures on-site. It didn’t spoil anyone’s fun but certainly wasn’t easy for everyone working there.  

The reason for the weekend was of course the Armed Forces, and it was a sight to behold to see all the different military services come together and show people what they’re all about. It was an absolute privilege to host the parade in Salisbury and, all that took part got a brilliant reception, both from the thousands in the crowd, and HRH The Princess Royal.

At Hudson’s Field, the performances of bands like the Kaiser Chiefs and The Feeling, together with local homegrown talent, really went down well and the atmosphere was electrifying.

We can’t understate what a monumental team effort it was from everyone involved before and during the event. Lots of our staff have worked round the clock in its planning, working with our partners day in and day out making sure every detail was covered and more importantly than anything, ensuring everyone attending was safe. We’ve taken away so much learning and forged many new working relationships and friendships among partners and colleagues throughout this time.

We would like to thank everyone involved for their help ensuring the success of this event. It’s Scarborough’s turn next year, and we wish them all the very best, but, and we say this in the nicest possible way, we think they’ve got their work cut out to match what we achieved.

Ofsted inspection comes to an end

Our children’s services teams have been through an extremely intense time with the Ofsted inspection recently taking place. A couple of weeks ago you may have heard a collective sigh of relief from where you were working when the inspectors left the site and the main part of inspection came to an end.  

Our teams worked tremendously hard to ensure the inspectors got a complete picture of how our services work in Wiltshire. The inspectors reviewed the entirety of children’s services, from the initial referrals coming into the MASH team, through to Children in Care, Care Leavers and Adoption.  All of the teams pulled together to work exceptionally hard to showcase the excellent work that is undertaken on a daily basis and we are positive that the inspectors were shown just how hard we all work to ensure the most vulnerable children in our society are at the centre of all we do. 

We are now in the period of waiting to receive the final report that will tell us our result.  There will be opportunity for us to ensure the report is factually accurate before it is published.  We will be sure to share the results with you as soon as we are able.   

Thank you to everyone for their hard work and commitment during this time, it’s been a real team effort – which is something of a theme of this week’s blog.

MASH makes its mark

On Monday 17 June, we officially launched our Adult Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub (MASH) alongside key partners. Modelled on our highly successful children’s MASH, the team is made up of a number of professionals led by ourselves, Wiltshire Police and NHS Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group. The aim of the Adult MASH is to safeguard adults in a joined-up way and ensure those in need get the right support as quickly and effectively as possible.

The service got underway last year and in that time the team has received more than 4,000 concerns and more than 1,200 investigations have been carried out. It’s well documented that the demand on adult services is increasing and the Adult MASH has already played a key part in strengthening information sharing and decision making.

Protecting all vulnerable people in Wiltshire is our top priority and we’re pleased to see the positive results that our MASH model has achieved so far.

A busy week…

Finally, what a busy week this has been!  This week has seen each of us attending meetings across the country, including the likes of the Local Government Association Annual Conference in Bournemouth, Cabinet at County Hall, a Defence Committee, the HR Excellence Awards in London, and the ADCS Conference in Manchester.

Our HR team were shortlisted for awards in two categories, unfortunately they were not successful this year however – being nominated alongside some huge private sector companies was, in itself, a fantastic achievement and our congratulations go to all our HR staff involved in this. 

Following Baroness Jane Scott’s decision to stand down, you will have seen the news that Philip Whitehead has been voted in by the Conservative group as their new party leader.

Next week, Full Council will meet and during this meeting a new leader of the council will be voted in. Once the decision has been made we will ensure you’re all updated on the change. The Lib Dem leader Ian Thorn, Labour Leader Ricky Rogers and Independent Ernie Clark remain leaders of their respective groups.

Jane standing down leaves some big boots to fill in the council, her hard work, dedication and strong leadership has really shaped the unitary council here in Wiltshire and she will be sorely missed.  We do of course wish Jane all the very best in everything she does going forward. Jane will remain a local councillor and I am sure we will continue to see her at to council meetings going forward. 

Alistair, Carlton and Terence