Archives for January 2021

The First Minister is due to announce the latest three-weekly review of the Covid restrictions today and the over-riding issue seems to be balancing public health with trying to slowly emerge from lockdown.

Unlike before, we now have evidence from previous lockdowns which show the rate of infections leapt significantly before restrictions were introduced, they then began to flatten during lockdown only to increase sharply again almost as soon as we came out of lockdown. Add to this we now need to consider the impact of new variants and the effectiveness of the vaccines, and it’s not an easy job!

If it was up to me I’d take a very cautious approach because past experience shows coming out of lockdown is very risky. We need to get the infection rates lower, vaccinate more people and assess the new variants before taking major steps to come out of lockdown. I know this isn’t what the hospitality sector and other businesses would want to hear, but we need to get this right to avoid further spikes in infection and more lockdowns which will be even more damaging to the economy and lives.

Once again I want to thank our staff who are supporting the vaccine roll-out across the Swansea Bay region.

Linked to this there’s been a focus on the DVLA this week and the number of its staff who’ve been infected by Covid. The media and politicians are continuing to ask questions, but I’ve been delighted by the way our staff have worked alongside Public Health Wales and the Health and Safety Executive to help the DVLA overcome these issues. The one surprise for me is the DVLA’s reliance on paperwork which means many staff not being able to work remotely. This just reinforces the tremendous work our ICT team have done to get us into a position where we can work electronically so our office-based staff can work from home. Thank you to all the team for their outstanding efforts.

Another key issue this week has been the fall-out from the Debenhams situation. We now know all its shops will close which is a major blow for its staff and our local economy. Debenhams has long been our anchor store in the Quadrant, bringing in shoppers but also attracting other major retailers. I’ve been in discussions with my chief executive colleagues in Cardiff and Newport because the three of us now have to face up to life without Debenhams in our city centres. Huw Mowbray and his team have already commissioned a review on how we re-model the Quadrant which will help guide our strategy. But I’m also keen to hear from you as our staff who use the city centre on what you think can be done to increase footfall to the Quadrant and city centre. I’m also working with our Leader and Cardiff and Newport to push the Welsh Government for a support package to ensure we hold onto the remaining stores who’ll be feeling the effects of Debenhams going.

Education Director

Our Appointments Committee is due to meet on Monday to appoint our new Education Director following the departure of Nick Williams. I’ll update as and when we appoint to this vital post.

Change on the way

The Local Government and Elections Act may not be top of your reading list, but it’s going to affect the way we work in the future. It’s not just about getting 16 and 17-year-olds to vote, as CMT discovered when we discussed it this week. Among other things it focuses on public participation in decisions, how we deal with petitions, broadcasting meetings and creating new corporate joint committees. There’s much more to it and we’ll update you as it progresses.

Great effort

Once again thanks go to our highways team for keeping people safe. A couple of weeks ago they were busy keeping the floods of Storm Christophe at bay and then last weekend they were out again in more atrocious weather keeping the main roads open through snow storms and ice we don’t often see in Swansea. Let’s hope for quieter times this weekend.

Billy James, Technical Inspector in the Homes Preparation Unit, Housing, retired this week after 47 years’ service. Billy started at the Council on 18^th April 1974, when his first job was working as a 15-year-old tea boy/labourer before completing his apprenticeship. When the HPU was set up he became a Technical Inspector and he has inspected void properties all over the city ever since. Enjoy your retirement Billy.

Sad news

On a sad note though, we have lost one of our highways engineers, Emyr Picton, who recently passed away. Emyr joined us in 1986 and worked as a highway engineer in Clydach. He was a valued and trusted member of the team and his great sense of humour will be sadly missed by his colleagues. My deepest sympathies go out to Emyr’s wife Lynne and family at this very difficult time.

Consultation on our budget for the coming year has started today and you can have your say on our spending priorities. Cabinet yesterday agreed the budget proposals and gave the green light for consultation. The feedback and results will be considered before the final proposals are discussed by Cabinet, so please take the opportunity to give your views here. The budget settlement from the Welsh Government gives us a cash increase and real terms increases for all our directorates, including schools. I’m delighted that we appear to have avoided any major cuts and we’re protecting services and jobs as best we can.

Pay rises are likely to be very limited given the UK Government’s stance on this issue, although it’s ultimately a matter for Welsh Government to decide teachers’ pay and for the employers to have a nationally-agreed council pay offer. This will feel like a kick in the teeth for many of our staff, particularly those who’ve been on the front line in providing care to the vulnerable during the pandemic, and I hope this will be recognised in negotiations.

Council tax has yet to be decided, but we need to balance supporting families with the need to keep services running, protect jobs, continue to support those facilities and services suspended during lockdown and to pay benefits for those hardest hit during the pandemic. Unfortunately, the outlook for future years isn’t as good as we know both UK and Welsh Governments have had to dig deep in response to the pandemic and to give the public sector a reasonable settlement. They won’t have the money in the medium term to do this so we expect tough years ahead, although our Recovery Programme is designed to help us meet new challenges as we slowly emerge from the pandemic. Thank you to Ben Smith, Sarah Willis and the finance team and everyone across the council who’ve played their part in putting together this year’s budget proposals.

It’s great to see our vaccination programme is rolling-out and reaching more vulnerable people. We’ve now vaccinated more than 25,000 of the most vulnerable people in the Swansea bay area. This week we opened the third mass vaccination centre (MVC) at the Canolfan Centre. The programme is being run by the health board and is supported by us. So far those aged over 80 have been prioritised and over 70s are now being invited to the MVCs. We hope to have these two groups vaccinated by the end of February. We’ve also been prioritising our care homes and these should be completed by the end of the month. A big thank you to our staff in these homes for all their dedication during these hugely challenging times. And our frontline social care staff, along with NHS staff, have also been prioritised for vaccination. The roll-out will continue in the coming months and each of us will be contacted to let us know when we’re due to receive the vaccination. For further details on the nationally-agreed programme go here. Well done to Craig Gimblett, Ben Cromie and Sue Reed and her team for helping to identify and prepare the MVCs.

Once again thank you to our highways team for their efforts in keeping people safe and the floods at bay during Storm Christoph. They were out in atrocious weather overnight on Wednesday dealing with callouts, closing roads and issuing sandbags where necessary. A lot of prevention work checking and clearing watercourses had taken place prior to the storm’s arrival and that helped keep the problems to a minimum. And thank you to Adam Ratajczak from our security team who stepped in to support our registrations team by translating for a Polish man whose wife had passed away. These are just a few examples of how our staff go above and beyond every day.

Thank you all for your continued efforts in these challenging times. Please stay safe!

I met a committee of Senedd Members this week to discuss the seismic change brought by the pandemic and how it could shape our future.

As a council the biggest change for us has probably been the move to remote working with the vast majority of our office-based staff now working from home. Before the pandemic about 80 staff a day were connecting remotely, now it’s over 3,000. That change was almost overnight and the response of staff has been amazing. Before the pandemic many of our staff weren’t keen on home-working, but our staff survey in September showed about 90% want to continue working from home for at least part of the week.

All our call centres now work remotely and we’ve seen a shift in the way the public access our services with greater telephone and online contact. And other organisations and businesses, including retail and hospitality, have undergone their own transformation and things won’t go back to the way they were pre-pandemic.

But some of that change was already under way. In Swansea we’d started responding to the reduction in city centre footfall caused mainly by online shopping. The pandemic has accelerated that shift to such as degree that the very future of towns and city centre are now in the balance. They need to become areas to live, work and enjoy leisure and cultural offers, bringing in new patterns of footfall and visitors.

We started that journey a few years ago with better transport and pedestrian access – just look at the Kingsway. We’ve also made and will continue to make the city centre greener and more welcoming. There’s new city centre residential developments, better digital infrastructure, and we’ve transformed the cultural offer with museums, galleries, digital arena and the cultural quarter on High Street.

Another key ingredient is creating opportunities for city centre working. Despite the recent shift to home-working, not all employees will be working at home all of the time. This gives us the opportunity to create hubs where different public sector organisations can work from one place. We’ve already been doing this at the Civic Centre with university and NHS staff taking office space previously occupied by our staff who moved to agile working.

To boost this further we need both the Welsh and UK Governments to relocate jobs to public sector hubs in regional cities to help create extra footfall and spend. We’re unlikely to see huge numbers of shoppers fill our city centre every day because they’re increasingly buying online, but bringing office workers into a hub will see them using cafes, restaurants, bars and shops during lunchtime and after work, as well as creating local jobs. We hope for some positive news on this for Swansea very soon. But to do this we also need the infrastructure to support these hubs and home working through 5G technology. We’ve provided extra support to our staff who’ve been struggling at home, but internet coverage in some parts of Swansea remains patchy.

In preparing for the Senedd committee meeting I reflected on my own personal thoughts about the current ways of working and how these may change our future actions.  Personally, I think it’s hard to predict how people will react post-pandemic.  On the one hand the technology has simplified things and become a part of many of our lives.  On the other hand there’s no real substitute for human interaction and our naturally social behaviours.  Many of us are surely looking forward to working alongside our colleagues again, exhausted by back-to-back virtual meetings.  The distinction between work life and home life is an important one and I suspect that the future holds a more hybrid model of working for most people rather than a purely home or office based environment.

Either way we need to factor the possibilities into our plans for the city and the Council.

Stay safe and well.

This week I‘ve been working with finance colleagues on the draft budget report for next year.  As you might imagine this has been a more challenging task than in previous years, given the significant changes that have taken place during the year and the lateness of indications of financial support from the Governments.  Thanks to Ben Smith and Sarah Willis we’ve made rapid progress and the programme for the future will be presented for councillor approval over the coming weeks.

The Sustainable Swansea – fit for the future programme approved in 2013 helped steer budget prioritisation and medium term financial planning, using commissioning reviews of services to help our transformation and improvement efforts. It’s been successful in steering us through tough financial challenges whilst protecting and maintaining services, but it had run its course.  And bearing in mind the deep impact of the pandemic a new approach was required.   

So in October 2020 Cabinet approved the new “From Recovery to Transformation” report detailing the “Swansea – Achieving Better Together, Transformation Strategy & Programme Framework 2022 – 2026”.  This will now inform and shape the budget process and accelerate transformation.

The small matters of Brexit, Covid-19 and the cancellation of detailed spending reviews by the UK Government are out of our control but have a huge impact on us.  Plus the Welsh Government didn’t announce the settlement until December 22 with the final figures expected on 2 March which makes the budget process extremely challenging, compressed and uncertain. Equally, however, the now known broad funding increase for local government for 2021/22 is clearly helpful, although the information contained within the settlement makes it clear that the funding available for COVID-19 pressures is much reduced in 2021/22 and this will be a significant risk.         

So for the short term we’re clear and can plan our services with a degree of confidence.  But the longer-term outlook is grim with inevitable impacts on public spending in the light of a severely damaged UK economy.  We’ll need to see what results from the UK-wide budget and Comprehensive Spending Review in 2021 before we know the true extent of the challenge but in my view it is unlikely to be good news for local councils.

Despite this gloom the governments need to be reminded of the vital role councils play in supporting communities.  This has been brought onto centre stage during the pandemic, and my blog of May 8 2020 detailed how rapidly and effectively we responded to the crisis.  I’ll be reminding Welsh Government of this reality at every opportunity I get. The coming weeks are going to be very tough.  The predictions of scientists are deeply worrying given our already stretched health and social care services and the challenges of the variant to the virus are not yet fully known.  Both the Pfizer-BioNtech and AstraZeneca vaccines are being rolled-out in the city and across the UK and this remains the focus of our effort and our hope for the future.

In the meantime, we must continue to observe the hygiene and social distancing measures required of us to help to stem the tide.  Thanks for all your work and support for the people of Swansea.  Stay safe and stay well.

Sad news

Our Outdoor Leisure team has lost a respected colleague. Recreation Ground parking attendant Chris Evans passed away on December 25 at the age of 66. Chris had been with us in a number of roles since around 2003 and, whilst undergoing treatment, worked bravely up to the first lockdown. My thoughts are with his sister Judith and family, and workmates who supported him through the pandemic.