Thursday 9 September

Here we are in September and it feels like a new term. I hope you all enjoyed your holidays. I feel re-energised after the busy year so far. The new term is going to be very busy for us and includes six important pieces of work that we have to deliver before Christmas.

Bourne Hill will be opening next month when we start to move staff into the building. Coupled with the move is significant numbers of staff with work from home capability (already 200+) and all new ICT. I chaired the Programme Board yesterday and we are right on track with this.

The government will announce its Comprehensive Spending Review on October 20. This is when we will find out the size of the government financial cut backs to address the national budget deficit. At this point we should know the amount by which our grant will be reduced so that we can finalise our Business Plan. We are predicting that we will lose 25%.

The Business plan is developing well - with a headline figure for efficiencies to be made of £100 million over the next 4 years. We anticipate that we will need £40 million to meet the government grant reduction, and we want a further £60 million to reinvest in priority services for the people of Wiltshire. We feel that this is a sensible and pragmatic approach to the challenges we face as an organisation. This is the next logical step after Local Government Reorganisation and we are well placed to achieved this.

Part of the Business Plan will be a review and reduction of management costs. The Service Directors and I have almost completed this and we will be reviewing this over the coming weeks with staff affected.

ICT will be in-sourced from Steria by January 1st. The project work leading up to this is intense and the teams are flat out to ensure this is achieved with quality and without affecting system performance and reliability. This is a tough ask.

Finally we will be starting the de-cant of County Hall which is the next phase of the Work Place Transformation programme (WPT). The WPT makes annual savings of £4.5 million so it is an important part of our overall plan to reduce operational costs and to move additional money to front line service areas.

All in all, a very busy term ahead for us as a team.

Thanks for reading and we'll chat again next week.

Carlton