Election nearly upon us ...

I’m in Monkton Park today with the election team for a run thorough of the Chippenham General Election count later today. We always rehearse these ahead of time to ensure everybody knows what will happen, when and where so there are no surprises on the night. I do hate surprises. We have so far had 40,000 postal votes returned to us – about 65% of the total issued – which have been opened, scanned and secured to go to the five separate counts next week. Thank you to Sue Reeves for leading this work with the team at Monkton Park. Roll on next Thursday…

Earlier this week we got together with all of the economic development and planning team – over 200 people – in Warminster for half a day to work together on the direction of the organisation, the service plan which is being developed and to review the staff survey and culture development / service change results. There was a lot of energy in the room with great questions from the team. We spoke about the need to not obsess about the financial pressures we face (a negative, energy draining experience in my opinion), but use our time wisely to rethink and action how services could be redesigned and delivered against the changing purpose and demand from our customers.

One of the largest challenges we face with respect to this is the changing expectations around our online or digital offer. When people can sit at home and conduct quite complex activities on line, sometimes with a single click, their whole expectation from all of our services starts to change rapidly. We must embrace this if we are to remain relevant to the people we serve across the county. The irrelevance of local government, and government in general to many of our citizens, is by far the biggest challenge we face over the next 5-10 years. So we better start thinking and doing something about it today.  

Speak again soon on the other side of the election. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter.

Carlton