Election thanks, new government and new agenda

It’s a week since the general election and I’ve been surprised how quickly the new government has got stuck into their new agenda. The announcement yesterday from the Chancellor George Osborne to devolve to cities increased power, responsibility and money for key services such as health, skills/learning, welfare payments in return for elected mayors and retention of business rate growth is welcome. It needs to go much further though to include counties, in which over half the UK’s gross value add is generated. We will be lobbying hard so that the counties and south are not forgotten in the rush to devolve power from Whitehall. 

I would like to thank all of the 1,500 staff who worked on that election last week. Our performance in all 5 constituencies was excellent with the candidates, agents, media and others all feeding back that it went smoothly. We implemented Individual Elector Registration (IER) at the same time – one of the biggest changes in the electoral registration system ever – and this went well too, although across the country a significant number of previously registered individuals were not on the new register for a number of reasons. I would particularly like to thank the whole election team and John Watling in particular who led this for us. As always, a job very well done.

I did my first 10 mile time trial on Wednesday evening in Frome and was pleasantly surprised with a time of 27 minutes 57 seconds. I had set a goal of sub-30 minutes later in the summer so this was pleasing, although it reminded me how rubbish arbitrary targets are! We should remember that in our service performance reporting. Looking forward to my second outing next week.  

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.

Carlton