I’ve always believed that no one individual has all the good ideas and given the challenges we face as a council we need all our staff coming up with ideas to help us work better and save money.
I’m really pleased to see we’re today launching our new Ideas Hub to replace the former staff suggestion scheme. The hub gives us a new online platform for staff to put forward their ideas. All ideas will go to the relevant Head of Service who can assess the idea with the aim of responding within 10 working days. Although it’s PC-based, it gives the option for those staff without a PC to get their manager to submit an idea on their behalf. Please use the platform as often as you can because the more ideas we have the better. You can even anonymise ideas if you prefer. You can link to the hub here. Thank you to Rhys Curtis for all his work in developing the hub.
Regional working has been a big focus in the past week. Work is now under way on establishing new governance arrangements for the City Deal to ensure this major programme moves forward to the subsequent phases. Steve Thomas, the former chief executive of the Welsh Local Government Association, is helping the region to put in place these arrangements and recruit a managing director, from existing funds, which should remove any conflicts of interest in the current structure. The region’s joint committee has signed-off the business case for stage one of the city centre project and we expect the UK and Welsh governments to fully sign-up in the next few weeks. Towards the end of June Scrutiny and Cabinet will be reviewing and considering the business case to allow the project to proceed.
ERW, our regional education service, this week agreed its working model for the next 12 months. I’d previously said that Neath Port Talbot were pulling out and refusing to pay their contribution, but they’ve now agreed to pay which avoids another financial issue and more importantly allows us to concentrate on delivering better outcomes for children rather than continue the distraction of internal wrangling.
It was important that Corporate Briefing (a meeting of Cabinet Members and CMT) received a report this week to establish a Swansea youth offending team following a very poor inspection report of the existing regional service. We need to get on with this change at pace and have a clear action plan for delivering this. Whilst this change is on-going we also need to support the staff to continue working with clients. The report will now move onto Cabinet.
Leadership team (CMT and Heads of Service) had their monthly meeting and discussed a range of items including staff travel, mandatory training and a new staff benefits scheme. I was particularly interested in the discussion of flexible working. We’ve been running a number of pilots in areas including Corporate Property and HR/OD and we now need to assess the outcomes. Personally, I’m all for flexibility but as we review the pilots we need to develop hard evidence that this approach is in the interests of the employee and the employer. I also want to ensure all areas of our workforce are equitably allowed and encouraged to participate, not just our office-based staff.
Lots of staff have been asking me about Phil’s progress and without going into personal details I’m pleased to say Phil has had the major part of his treatment and is now at home recovering. I’m in quite regular contact with him and I delighted in taking the mickey when Nottingham Forest recently beat his beloved Swans. Phil is really grateful for all your good wishes and, although there’s still some way to go on the road to full recovery, I’m hoping we can see him in the not too distant future.
Many of us will have visited Plantasia over the years and it’s fair to say the council realised it wasn’t reaching its full potential. Officers in Cultural Services have been working in partnership with specialist operator Parkwood to run the attraction. Officers had a tour this week and they were delighted with the new-look attraction. It has a number of new features including tree-top walks, a waterfall and new café. It opens at Easter and can become a major attraction for the city. Thank you to our officers who’ve spend many months working on this.
This week more than 300 free events have been taking place in venues across Swansea as part of our first ever Learning Festival. It’s taken a huge amount of work by our lifelong learning team to organise and coordinate but hundreds of people of all ages have d taken part. Other services delivered free learning opportunities including libraries, archives, museums, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and adult services. Thank you to our staff involved.
Finally, I refuse to comment on Brexit any further because with each passing day I become more confused. If local government ran its business like Westminster we’d all be in special measures!
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