Friday 14 January 2011

Hi everybody and a Happy New Year to you all. I hope you had a good break over the Christmas period and I also hope that you can still remember it! 2011 seems to have started with all the pace that 2010 finished.

It’s been a momentous week this week for the team. At 12.01 this morning, we took our ICT contract back in house and so from today the whole of the ICT service is delivered by the Wiltshire team. I’d like to thank the forty or so people who pulled an “all-nighter” last night to ensure this happened on time, and as smoothly as possible. Performance reports that I have so far received are all positive, but I would ask you for your patience as and when some of the bugs do occur while we sort these out. This programme has been technically very difficult, including an enormous amount of knowledge transfer required as our team have had to learn so much about parts of the system that we haven’t delivered for well over ten years. Well done to the whole ICT team – great job.

The second momentous event of the week has been the take-over of the Monkton Park PFI building. This is an innovative first in local government where I believe that we are the first local authority to take over a PFI deal. This has been delivered by property, legal and workplace transformation colleagues including much negotiation with the banks over the Christmas period to pull it off. This deal gives us complete control of the building and importantly saves us around £300,000 per year – money that our elected members can now re-focus to their front line service priorities.

Finally for this week, work on the 11-12 budget continues apace. The final budget will be published in the next couple of weeks so we’re now into the minutiae of detail around specific proposals and how these are presented. I’m pleased to say that we’re just about balanced. Well done to the finance team. This week and next week we are consulting the public and businesses on their budget priorities so that these can be reflected in the final submission. More on this next week.

Thanks for reading and talk again next week