Council staff fend off the competition, and Cabinet drive forward key projects

Celebrating our successful six 

 Jenine, Lynn, Doug, Claire, Vicky and Sean with the Executive Directors

Many congratulations to six members of staff for winning the highly competitive SW Challenge 2019. This event saw 19 teams from different authorities become the senior leadership team of a fictitious council with the overall aim of turning its fortunes around while navigating their way through a whole heap of issues, such as changing priorities, potential political scandals, and left-field crisis’.

This year’s Wiltshire Council team members were Vicky Bodman, Jenine Brister, Sean Chacksfield, Doug Coombs, Claire Lovelock and their Chief Executive Lynn Trigwell. The team are the first from the council to be victorious and they managed to identify more than £60m of savings – not bad for a day’s work!

Not only is it great for their own individual development, but it’s a feather in the cap for us at the council and we’re all delighted for their success. We will undoubtedly be sending a team next year to defend the trophy and if the opportunity presents itself for you to be involved, then we’d certainly recommend you put yourself forward.

Cabinet moves key projects forward

Cabinet took place this week and there was a host of big items on the agenda. Among the items saw agreement for the council to act as developer for new offices for Good Energy in Chippenham, and a new public car park. If all goes ahead, this will be great for the economy and the Chippenham area.

Another significant regeneration item saw Cabinet formally recommend to Council to invest capital funding to acquire third party interests in land and property and fund further development in the Maltings area in Salisbury.

Local housing received a big boost as Cabinet agreed to build 1,000 more council homes in the third phase of our building programme. The programme will ensure that as many of these new homes as possible will be rented out at social rents, to ensure affordable housing for the most vulnerable in the county.

They also agreed to invest more than £5m in our buildings to install technology that will make them as energy efficient as possible. This should save around £500k a year in savings and is a real statement of intent of our ongoing response to the global climate crisis. On that note, we were delighted Wiltshire was recently named the most climate-friendly area in Britain and Wales by Friends of the Earth. We will be doing everything we can to build on that recognition and have many more plans in the pipeline to ensure we are leading from the front locally.

On a related note, Cabinet also approved the Council’s draft Air Quality Strategy, which will now go forward to Full Council.

As you can see, lots of big council projects took significant steps forward and it was extremely productive.

Great to hydrate

County Hall was extremely hydrated on Wednesday with the launch of the first water refill station being installed at one of our hubs, provided and paid for by Wessex Water. We are one of the early adopters of this scheme which provides free water to visitors of the building which will not only have health benefits, but hopefully reduce the amount of single-use plastic bottles. The late Cabinet Member Jerry Wickham first suggested this and we’re pleased it’s now a reality for all to use. It’s a simple idea, and one which we hope to roll out at many more buildings.

100 reasons to visit our libraries 

Wilton Mobile Library in 1954

This week is Libraries Week and those of you who follow the @WiltsCouncil Twitter feed will have seen lots of great stuff to celebrate, including classic pictures of Wiltshire libraries of days gone by. It’s also 100 years since the first library opened in Wiltshire and during that time the service continues to evolve and truly be at the heart of our communities. Gone are the days when you go there to just pick up a book; they are now places for people to sing with their children, meet like-minded people, to hear from revered authors and generally just a place to be around friendly faces. More than 140,000 items are issued by our libraries each month and we thank all the staff and volunteers for continuing to make them special places for people to visit. Here’s to the next 100 years.

On 1 August 1919 Wiltshire became one of the first counties to have a public library service