Friday, 14 June 2013

14 June 2013

A busy week; I’m within a couple of pounds of 4 stone lost and now have 8 chords to my name on the guitar. Progress on all fronts...

Yesterday Carolyn, Maggie and I spent a full day together developing our strategic plans and thinking around the big challenges which we face over the next four years. The new council draft Business Plan will be published early next week to go to scrutiny later in the month and then on to Cabinet next month. This plan reflects the political priorities of our elected members and the findings from our strategic needs assessment – the underlying data and evidence about Wiltshire, it’s communities, residents and businesses and where we need to focus to deliver our vision of more resilient communities.

The other major element of the plan is that it highlights the size of the financial challenge ahead. We think that we will have to identify and deliver cost savings of £120m over the next four years – around £30m per year. This should be set within the context of our projected spend over the same period of £3.6 billion. Challenging but achievable in my opinion.

A prime area of focus over the next few months will be to realign our transformation programme to deliver the above. Key issues for me are how we ensure that every member of staff and every service is involved and also how we align our cultural and behaviour change to this. This is the biggest challenge I think we face – not financial, but thinking and behaving differently. More on this anon.

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 talk again in a few days.

Carlton

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