Friday 18 September 2009

Friday at last - the weeks seem to be flying by at the moment, and still England can't beat the Australians in the one day game. Last try on Sunday...

I am spending the bulk of today at the Chippenham depot with Graeme Hay and the team meeting staff and learning about the lean systems work that Highways have been undertaking during the last few months. They have completely redesigned the "pot hole" filling element of their work to make it faster in terms of filling holes that have appeared in our road system as well as filling more of them, increasing our capacity. This is very important for people in Wiltshire, indeed if you ask residents and members what their top issue is at present they often say the quality of our road surfaces. I'll let you know what I find next week.

My service directors and I spent half a day on Wednesday with the Scrutiny Management Committee - the group of members responsible for scrutinising the work we do in Resources and who will help us shape and develop policy moving forward. It was great to get to know some of the new members better and take them through our huge list of responsibilities, achievements and areas where we need to improve performance. They were very supportive of the efforts and results achieved to date by all staff within our team. I take scrutiny very seriously as I believe is adds tremendously to the robustness of our policies and actions plans and I encourage everybody in Resources to engage fully with this process. Councillors will be identifying their programme of scrutiny work next week and we'll share this with you in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading and have a good weekend. Speak again next week.

Carlton