18 November 2011

It’s Children in Need day today – always fun and exciting and a somewhat unpredictable prospect. I hope you all have a good day and that we raise a lot of money for children and young people, both in the UK and across the world. A couple of events to note if I may. Mark Stone will be having his head shaved in the chamber at 10am so long as we have more than £250 raised. At the last count it was way past this, so bring him on...

I shall be drawing the raffle in the East Wing at 12 noon. We have more than 70 prizes up for grabs so if you haven’t bought a ticket yet, please do so – It’s such a good cause.

You will have seen the council operating model or structure chart published yesterday. It was important to get this agreed with Cabinet and published quickly – I noticed last night that it’s even on our web site.

The important thing to say is that the three corporate directors will be focussing much less on structure in the future. We won’t be using it to manage the business per se, but of course it is important for line management reasons such as objectives and appraisals, etc. The important point to consider are the cross cutting themes. The full list is still under development but will include:

• Culture, behaviour, leadership
• Business plan
• Communities
• Transformation
• Planning peer review action plan delivery
• Highways and amenities commissioning
• Economic development
• Health
• Promoting democracy
• Vulnerable families and safeguarding
• Organisational performance

We will lead the organisation through these themes – because these are the issues that matter to our communities, customers and our elected members. This will also ensure we start to break down the boundaries that pop up between professional groups and departments. I’d like to encourage you to feedback on this concept, because we need your views and opinions. Please email any of the corporate directors.

For daily updates, opinion and all sorts of things, you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand

Thanks for reading, and talk again next week.

Carlton