Friday 6 November 2009

Councillors this week have selected the next chief executive - Andrew Kerr who is currently the CEO at North Tyneside Council. This is subject to approval at full council next week. With the other corporate directors, I had the pleasure of talking with Andrew as part of the selection process. He is very inspirational and showed a real depth of knowledge about the issues we face in Wiltshire and the challenges that a new unitary organisation faces. North Tyneside is a unitary and has gone from strength to strength over the last few years. Andrew will be joining us in around three months time.

We held an afternoon at Monkton Park on Monday to brief around 100 staff about the Work Place Transformation Programme. It was a lively session with some great questions about how the change will affect staff generally and lots of questions specifically about ICT, car parking, hot desking, etc. Do please visit the web site for a full summary of the FAQs and other events that are coming up with respect to this important programme.

I was in London yesterday to attend the first Public Service Leadership conference. Attendees were from all elements of the public sector; the armed forces, civil service, local government, the NHS, higher education, police, probation and many others. We were addressed by Peter Housden, Permanent Secretary to the department of Communities & Local Government (CLG). He outlined some of the challenges ahead (including not surprisingly reducing expenditure) but also went on to talk about Total Place and the drive to join up currently separate public services into what he called a whole system approach for consumers. We are well placed in Wiltshire for this agenda. Our systems thinking approach to service redesign, which has delivered so well in adult care, highways as well as revenues and benefits and many others is all about a whole systems approach. We can expand this with our partners to tackle some of the difficult cross-cutting service issues that we jointly face.

Today I shall be with the service directors for a day to plan out the next five years for the department. We won't finish this in a day but we want to start to identify the direction that many of our services need to take to meet our customers' requirements, the councils corporate plan, our medium term financial plan and the forthcoming changes in central government policy and funding. It will be very interesting and I'll share this with you when we have it developed sufficiently.

Thanks for reading and catch up again next week. Have a great weekend - I'm off to the Swindon Steam Museum, somewhere I've been meaning to go for nearly three years since arriving in Wiltshire!

Carlton