Tuesday 3 January 2012

Happy New Year to everybody. I hope you all had a good Christmas break and return to work refreshed. Many staff worked over the Christmas period to provide much needed services to our communities so thank you all for your hard work.

The holidays coupled with the start of a new year always gives me time to reflect on the last year and plan the coming one. This year was no exception, although it did take me rather longer to start thinking about 2012 than it usually does!

We have much to do this year. It would be too long a list to highlight everything but that stand out items for me include the following;

• Working together on our corporate culture, values and behaviours to embed these. Ensuring us as leaders and managers exemplify these too.
• Continue to devolve services, work, decisions and assets to our communities
• Encourage and facilitate economic increased investment into the county, especially our market towns
• Developing our new organisational leadership model and sharing this widely with the local government community
• planning for next year’s election (we have over 400 elections on the same day – not sure if any organisation has ever undertaken such a task)
• start to build our first three campuses and deliver the business cases for the next wave
• tender and let our new highways contract
• work together to develop our planning service and deliver the peer review recommendations
• continue our systems review of all of our services to ensure maximum performance at minimum cost
• completing the first phase of the county hall refurbishment and re-occupy the MECH building
• continue the roll out of our new waste service and then start to optimise it’s organisation, delivery and performance
• start to plan for and develop proposals to deliver the 13-14 budget with the additional reductions in central government grant announced

A busy but exciting year for us all and, I think another year where Wiltshire leads the agenda in local government. We need to celebrate this more I think.

Welcome back and once again, Happy New Year to all our staff, members communities, and customers.

Carlton