Thursday 2 July 2009

Another early blog this week as I will be in Taunton tomorrow meeting with colleagues from across the South West at the Regional Improvement & Efficiency Programme meeting (RIEP). There are RIEP's in each region of the country and they are responsible for delivery of the efficiency and improvement agenda across the country. They have substantial funds available for local authorities to use to develop new innovative solutions to the challenges that we face. I represent Wiltshire on the Executive Board.

It is the first formal meeting of the Warminster Area Board tonight which I shall be attending. This is the new local forum whereby communities and individuals can discuss issues that they face and take decisions around how service delivery can be improved in their area to better address the issues they have. They also have funding to allocate to priority projects that their communities wish to see delivered. I'm looking forward to this as it represents the way in which we can get closer to the people we serve and also presents an opportunity for us to innovate in the way we deliver local services.

The Planning or Development Control (DC) team finished the first part of their lean review this week. We had an excellent presentation by the team outlining the current DC system, what works well and what currently isn't working well for customers. The redesign experiment starts immediately with huge opportunities to not only stream line the way we do business but to also drive up performance for our customers - a real win-win. This should reduce costs too as doing the right thing for customers first time always saves money.

We started the first round of Member meetings this week; a Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) presentation on the Challenges Ahead - part of the new member induction programme, the first Audit Committee and first Overview & Scrutiny meeting. It was good to start engaging with members on the agenda to which they have just been elected and interesting to see many new ideas and opinions about how we should be improving what we do. More of that anon.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week.

Carlton