Friday 26 November 2010

Another busy week and it's really starting to feel like winter now.

This week the Corporate Leadership Team met with Cabinet members to continue work on the Business Plan. We now understand that we will receive our grant settlement detail on December 9, which is when we can start to firm up plans for the 2011-12 budget and just how much we will need to save to set a balanced budget - which is a legal responsibility that we have. At present we are still assuming that the nearly 30% reduction in government grant will be heavily front-loaded into year one, that is next year.

Our work on procurement savings continues quickly. We are coming to the end of the opportunity assessment (OA) phase of the work - essentially the time when we have the detailed negotiation plans for each contract in terms of how we will deliver the £9 million that we need for the 11-12 budget. The teams have been working very hard on this and I thank them all for their efforts.

I met with the Resources reference group this week - 30 front line DOR staff members for a general question and answer session on all things connected to budget, Comprehensive Spending Review, cuts, redundancies and the like. It was good to see so many positive people, despite the tough things we're having to do at the moment. We must do more of these over the coming months to enhance our communication. If you would like to join this group then please contact Jane Gray.

Finally I have had a lot of positive feedback from the DOR Team Day last week in Devizes. Nearly 600 people attended. I particularly enjoyed the green/red card voting on specific questions led by Laurie Bell and her team. I thought the fact that 90%+ of DOR would like to see a cut in their terms and conditions if it meant less job losses was a powerful message to us as leaders. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve this event then please let me know.

Thanks for reading and speak again next week.

Carlton