Archives for June 2021

How many of us were using Zoom or Teams to keep in touch with family, friends or colleagues before the pandemic? I know I wasn’t and I can’t imagine many of us were, but the pandemic has forced us to go digital to keep in touch. So much so, Teams has become second nature for holding meetings and keeping in contact.

The pandemic has accelerated our use of digital as individuals but also as an organisation. It’s now a vital part of our day-to-day operation, ensuring continuity of communication and support for rapid decision-making.  Future economic prosperity will depend on it and it carries the potential to improve our relationship and communication with citizens and partners.  But it’s not without its problems and challenges.  Organisations must plan their way carefully in this Brave New World and be clear about how they’ll adapt and employ the technology for the common good.

This week CMT considered an early draft of our developing Digital Strategy which will follow the one we agreed in 2015 following the end of the Cap Gemini contract.  The strategy must factor-in issues like digital inclusion, cyber security as well as data and information management.

The strategy has six mission areas to deliver the vision:

1.       Joined-up digital first services for people, communities and businesses 24/7

2.       Enabling joined-up service transformation

3.       Designing services around people’s needs

4.       Joined-up data and business intelligence to inform decision-making

5.       New models of delivery – regional and national working

6.       Digital skills and confidence.

Central to delivering this vision will be a focus on the skills needed by our organisation in a rapidly changing environment and this will be a constant challenge.  Where and how we invest our scarce resources through the ICT Development Fund will also need careful consideration, given the competing priorities. But I’m confident that in the coming weeks this strategy will be shaped with elected members to meet the city and the organisation’s needs.  Thanks to Sarah Lackenby and Jo Harley for bringing forward this core element of our transformation programme. 

Talking of digital, I mentioned previously we’d submitted a bid to the Local Government Digital Transformation Fund and I’m delighted our proposal for smart bins has been successful and now awaits Ministerial approval.

Anti-Fraud Plan

We’ve invested in detecting fraud and I’m delighted that our efforts are paying-off. This is a very important part of our governance process and one which we have invested in more than most of our neighbours.  It’s also highly complex and covers a multitude of areas given the breadth and scale of our organisation.  CMT considered the caseloads and activities undertaken during the year which were impacted like most things by the pandemic as councils needed to ensure that rapid support packages were delivered to businesses and communities, but with the necessary safeguards in place.  This has been no mean feat and my thanks go to Jonathon Rogers and Jeff Fish who have worked so hard to maintain probity.  Thanks also to Simon Cockings for taking CMT through the report which goes to Audit Committee next month. But we must remember that dealing with fraud is everybody’s business in the organisation.  

Changing boundaries

This week the Leader and I met with the Local Democracy and Boundary Commission for Wales to hear their final recommendations for the shape of the ward map for Swansea following a lengthy review. The process is complex and more than three years have passed since the review started. The recommendations are aimed at improving electoral parity, so that the vote of an individual elector has as equal a value to those of other electors throughout the city and county.  They also recommend the renaming of some wards. 

A number of objections were raised and these were considered by the Commission before finalising their recommendations but they won’t be universally popular.  Full details can be found here but the headlines are that the number of wards will reduce from 36 to 32 and the number of councillors will increase from 72 to 75.

This means that many of our systems and databases will need to change and we must make the proper arrangements for the local government elections next year.  Thanks to Huw Evans and Alison O’Hara for supporting us through this process.

Clean-up

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It was busy last weekend in Townhill for our highways and cleansing teams. They were out in force both days patching roads, cleaning gulleys, fixing pavements, painting street furniture and clearing roadside overgrowth. A big thank-you to all those involved.

C’mon Wales

I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea but once again I have to wish our national football team good luck against Denmark tomorrow.

Our staff in social care have been on the front line of the Covid response for 15 months.  Their resilience has been amazing and I am full of admiration for them.  So when we had the feedback from the Care Inspectorate Wales (CIW) yesterday following their recent assurance visit I was optimistic that this would be recognised.  The visit examined the whole of our social services functions.

Social work is a tough job even without the pandemic and to be frank I was not going to take any unmerited criticism lying down.  We will not get a formal letter from CIW until next month but I was reassured by the informal feedback which very much reflected what we already knew about strengths and areas for improvement. Thanks to Gemma, Kath, Lucy and Di who helped to manage the inspection.  We will share the formal feedback as soon as we can.

Public protection

Another part of the incredible effort to keep people in Swansea safe has been the contribution of our public protection team. Their work with businesses, organisations and supporting the health service response to the pandemic has been rigorous, challenging and life-saving. That’s why it’s great to hear of UK recognition in the Regulatory Excellence Awards for their work alongside colleagues elsewhere in Wales.

City of Sport and Health

This week Councillor Andrea Lewis and I met the Secretary of State for Wales along with colleagues from Swansea University and the Swansea Bay University Health Board.  We discussed the latest City Deal project being sponsored by the Council – the Life Science, Well-being and Sport Campuses.  This project will create the environment to leverage about £115 million of additional investment to create a 55-acre Innovation Park and a national centre of excellence with performance sport infrastructure. It aims to attract sports tech and related companies to help establish Swansea as a sport and well-being innovation test bed.

The scheme builds on the work we have done with the university over the past decade to develop the Institute of Life Science and NHS health research systems in the Swansea Bay City Region.  The aim is to create 1,000-1,120 jobs and generate a £150m additional contribution to regional GVA. 

The project comes in two phases. Phase 1 will see development of Institute of Life Science innovation, incubation and office space at the Morriston Regional Hospital site and a dedicated research and innovation area at the Sketty Lane Sports Park. Phase 2 will include the development of a 55-acre Innovation Park at Morriston and a national centre of Sports and Sports Tech excellence at Sketty Lane.

It was a challenging session which focussed on the economic and strategic case for the investment by governments.  The next stage will be to take the project through the formal City Deal governance processes.

Additional Learning Needs

From time to time I have mentioned the issue of the Additional Learning Needs (ALN) Act in the blog.  This is because the Welsh Government’s new legislative framework presents many challenges for the council, not simply in education and schools, but across the whole organisation and beyond.  Health, social care, legal services, employment support and many other areas need to respond to the requirements of the Act.  CMT this week received an update from Sarah Hughes, Improvement and Monitoring Manager, who gave an excellent presentation on a programme which is incredibly complex.  It was very well received by CMT who now will need to monitor and support the work being done by all those involved in delivering it.  Thanks to Sarah for working it through with us.

C’mon Wales

Following the enthralling game against Turkey I will be spending Sunday evening glued to the TV for a tougher challenge against Italy.  Let’s hope for a similar performance from our national team.

I’m sure you’ll have noticed media attention on the latest version of Covid-19, the so-called Indian or Delta variant. While the First Minister is damping down expectations of a return to a mask-free normal anytime soon, we have been actively dealing with an incident at Jack Murphy’s bar in Wind Street. The latest information is that 41 positive cases have been identified, though we do believe the incident is now under control. But what it shows is just how fragile the Covid-19 situation is. We cannot let our guard down either as individuals or as a council. Mark Wade, his team and the test, trace, protect team have done an outstanding job throughout the pandemic with the public health response, supporting businesses, the community and helping keep us safe. My thanks to them all.

Vaccination certification service

Staying with the virus theme our contact tracing and digital services teams are making it possible for thousands of Welsh people going abroad to get vaccination certificates in time for their trip. It’s a vital service for anyone in Wales as without a certificate many countries simply will not let you in. At Welsh Government’s request our teams set up the service from scratch in just over a week and already around 5,000 travellers have benefited. Forty staff are providing the service and it’s another example of how we can do things efficiently and at astonishing pace. It also demonstrates confidence that Welsh Government have in the council as they specifically asked us to do this for the whole of Wales. Thanks to Adam Hill, Hywel Lewis and the teams who’ve been working on this.

Regional collaboration

Negotiations on regional working are continuing at pace. Welsh Government has accepted our £250,000 bid and will help us develop the Corporate Joint Committee approach. The coming weeks will be vital and huge thanks are due to Martin Nicholls and Tracey Meredith who have been leading on this issue for the region.

Skyline

This week the Leader and I were delighted to host a visit to Swansea by Nick Swallow, New Zealand’s government Trade and Enterprise commissioner. He was here to discuss progress on the Skyline visitor attraction proposed for Kilvey Hill and to look at the financial package with Welsh Government. We’re in constant contact with New Zealand about the proposal which would be a massive boost for Swansea as we emerge from the pandemic. The Swansea Arena alongside Skyline would give us a great opportunity to be a brilliant destination of choice.  Let’s hope we can get this project over the line soon.

Thank you

Well done to our city centre rangers who’ve rightly been praised by local police for helping to save a man’s life. A swift and effective response by rangers saw the critically ill man given CPR with the help of a defibrillator.

It’s goodbye to two members of staff Phil Owen and John Gibbs who are retiring after clocking up almost 90 years’ service to the people of Swansea. Phil is retiring after 46 years, first with highways and then with the cleansing team. John has worked for the council for 43 years and most recently looked after external facilities and survey work for housing. Thank you both for your service. Enjoy your retirement.

The Euros

Good luck to our national football team who kick-off their European Football Championship campaign tomorrow against Switzerland in Baku. Let’s hope we can do even better than last time. C’mon Wales!

For the past few decades we’ve had to provide our core services by doing more with less.  It’s almost become the unwritten law and like other organisations we regularly have to cut our cloth.  You’ll be fed up being told the past year has been unlike any other, but the same is true of our financial position.  Our report to Cabinet on the financial outturn is published next week and contrary to many people’s expectations the situation has improved, mainly due to three factors.

The first is that Covid-19 simply prevented us from providing many services and this resulted in larger than expected service underspending. To a degree this has temporarily bottled a demand that we may well need to meet in future but for the time being it gives us breathing space.

Secondly the Welsh Government recognised that the extra things we needed to do to support our communities during Covid-19 came at a cost and was reimbursed by them. Our clever use of managing and maximising grants and making justified business cases to Welsh Government paid off.

Finally we have some very clever people working for us who manage our capital borrowing and spending programmes and their strategy on capital refinancing and delaying borrowing saved on loan and interest costs.

For the housing revenue account (HRA) we had a lower level of bad debt than we assumed, as rent arrears were controlled through our proactive rent arrears team.  We also had some limited reductions in non-essential repairs and maintenance, saving on materials and staffing costs due to the constraints on working in people’s homes.  And once again clever capital financing saved on charges to the HRA.

The report on capital outturn also makes for unexpected and pleasing reading.  Understandably there was a large amount of slippage in spend as many regeneration schemes worked to cope with the challenges of social distancing.  This delayed borrowing saved the council fund and HRA capital financing costs.

But despite this we still managed a record capital spend as our regeneration programme continued at a reduced but astonishing pace.

Major thanks must go to our accountancy teams not only for clever capital financing but also for identifying and escalating the additional costs we were incurring during Covid-19.  This underlines the importance of the accountancy service in major organisations.  Elvis Presley once said “I have no use for bodyguards, but I have very specific use for two highly-trained certified public accountants.”  I feel in a similar position, albeit armed with more than two.  They’ve created the capacity we needed for recovery to take place against what will be a tricky medium term financial environment.  The rest of us now owe them a debt to make sure that it does.

On a different note I met the new Digital Team for Welsh Local Government this week.  They will support and guide councils through the complex maze of digital service provision.  I was interested in their views on how digital services can help make the discretionary services offered by councils more sustainable and efficient. I hope we can work closely with the team and make the most of their offer to provide training and support as well as advocating for a more consistent and joined-up approach to public sector service provision. 

Copr Bay

Robert Jenrick, the UK Government’s Secretary of State for Communities, Housing and Local Government – is the latest high profile minister to visit our Copr Bay development which includes the Swansea Arena. Mr Jenrick and Simon Hart, Secretary of State for Wales, were given a tour of the site by the Leader and the Cabinet member for investment, regeneration and tourism and some council officers. They were both hugely-impressed with the progress that’s been achieved throughout the pandemic, which is a credit to all involved. This development and others mean Swansea is well-placed to help lead Wales’ economic recovery from Covid-19.

LACs

Six new Local Area Coordinators have started work and are now out and about getting to know residents and organisations on their patches. The new recruits bring the number on the team to 22 and means even more communities are being served. LACs were at the forefront of our response to the pandemic by supporting people and helping informal neighbour to neighbour support when people came forward offering to help.

Retirement

Best wishes to Julie Nicholas-Humphreys who retired this week. Julie has been key to transforming the council’s contact centre operations – particularly through the pandemic, managing our Welsh Language translation team as well as the successful launch and running of our TTP service – currently the second largest in Wales.