Friday 19 April 2013

Welcome back everybody after the Easter Break.


It’s straight back into action on the run in to the local government elections on May 2nd. Elections will be held in 27 counties, 6 unitaries and one or two other places and for election junkies like me it will be a fascinating process and exciting to see the results. In Wiltshire, we have just over 300 candidates fighting elections in 92 divisions across the county. Six divisions are uncontested and the single candidates standing have been appointed already. This is not particularly democratic, and as Returning Officer I will be exploring with the new members ways in which we can encourage better democratic participation in some areas.

On Wednesday I joined the Development Services team for their event in Devizes. The whole team gets together three or four times per year to review their service transformation progress, look at their staff survey results and share information about the changes going on in the service. It is always a lively event with about 120 people attending. The presentations were excellent and the question and answer sessions were lively and enlightening. I encourage other services to take part in these types of event – you can never over communicate, and everybody needs to know what is happening and have the chance to ask their questions.

Next week I am attending the Associate of County Chief Executives spring conference. We will be exploring economic growth, and how county councils can drive forward the growth agenda across the country, completing some work on troubled families and looking at transport infrastructure and how we ensure we and the Local Enterprise Partnerships can deliver what our communities need. It is always good to catch up with colleagues and share experiences and learning from the common challenges we face.

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.

Thanks for reading and we’ll talk again in a couple of weeks.

Carlton