Friday 24 February

TGI Friday! I’m taking today off so this might be a short blog as I’m off to Wales in half an hour. I’m also still smarting from us losing last night's cricket T20 match against Pakistan too, but their bowlers were excellent, especially in the last overs.

Talking about cricket I spent most of yesterday at Somerset County Cricket ground with Chief Execs from across the South West (they offer South West Councils cheap meeting rooms). It was good to catch up with friends and colleagues, and needless to say there was lots of interest in our leadership model. We discussed some of the big issues facing local government in the south west, to agree how we would respond and lobby central government. Welfare reform to the benefits system is worrying everybody as we believe that in Wilshire it will remove around £10 million per year from the economy at a time when we need every penny to stimulate economic growth and jobs. Others are hit much worse and the impact on rural communities will be high. We also discussed the approach to inspection, particularly the peer review process being led by the Local Government Association (LGA). Our fear is that the service based approach will emphasise silos and non-corporate working within our organisations at a time when this is the last thing we should be doing. Having said that we are definitely in favour of the light-touch peer approach.

I spent all day Wednesday in Salisbury. It was good to catch up with the Customer Service teams in the morning and talk about ways that we can improve the service. These ideas all came from staff working in the front line and we have started working on these items immediately. It’s all about continuous improvement. After lunch I went to Bourne Hill to meet staff from the Planning, Technical Support, Conservation, Enforcement and the Building Control teams. Again it was great to hear their feedback on our recent planning transformation event and importantly put some faces to some names.

For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand. 199 followers as of this morning... will you be number 200?

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again in a week or so.

Carlton