Wednesday 31 August

Hi all, so here we are on the last day of August. I hope you all enjoyed your holidays and have returned safely. For those of you still to go, have fun.

For some reason I always have a slightly apprehensive feeling at the beginning of a new term. The holidays are over and I know we have to get our heads down to some serious work between now and Christmas. I thought that I would update you on where we are as a team and also some of the key events and tasks that we face over the autumn “term”.

Performance in the team is good. All of our Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are where we would expect them to be with no surprises or areas falling short against the plan we had at the beginning of the year. Our budget status is also on target including the savings that we committed to as part of the 11-12 budget – some £4.2 m of savings. I’d like to thank you all for your hard work in achieving both of these elements of performance.

The transformation of ICT is also on track. As those of you in the service will know, we’re coming to the end of the post in-source redesign and restructure over the coming few weeks. This has been an unsettling time for some so it will be good to get back to some degree of certainty as we move forward together. The team are still delivering superior performance and have reduced expenditure by £2m this year. No mean achievement!

Our ambitious transformation programme is running at pace. The business cases for the first three campus (Salisbury, Corsham and Melksham) are being finalised for Cabinet approval later in the autumn; our systems thinking work now extends to at least eight major service areas and is identifying some big opportunities to do things better and with less cost; our ten year asset management plan outlining all our capital expenditure is under development to input into the budget process later this year; we have big staff engagement events planned for the November-January time frame where we want to get out to all 4,500 staff affected by the transformation programme to explain what’s happening, why and what impact the changes will have on our teams and staff; our “shaping the future” work is coming to the point where staff themselves have developed the values and behaviours they expect for all of us moving forward. This will underpin our work on culture development moving forward. Finally you will have seen the building work on County Hall progressing with speed. The first staff will move back into the new part of the building this time next year. These building works save is a significant amount of cost year on year by enabling more people to be located in the building which allows others buildings to be sold. Thanks to all those involved in what is one of the biggest local government transformation programmes in the UK.

Coming up over the next period we have a couple of significant events. Our next Team Day is on 26 September so please put this in the diary. It will be good to get the whole team together to talk about what we’re doing, how it’s going and the challenges we face over the next six months. The other big task of course is setting the 11-12 budget. My best estimate at the moment is that we as a team will need to find further savings of approximately £4.5m next year. This will be a challenge but I know we have the right people to achieve this.

Finally, please feel free to call me or email me or invite me to your team meetings if you wish to talk about any of this, or indeed anything else. I always welcome and appreciate the direct approach...

Talk again in a week or so.

Carlton