Archives for February 2022

Our response to the recent storms has been outstanding and I want to thank all our staff for their amazing efforts during the past week.

Despite the heavy rain and high winds, our teams have been dealing with their biggest clean-up operation in recent memory.

Here’s just some of the fall-out and staff efforts so far:

• Damage to Home Farm, Bay Field Hospital and the depots, has been made safe by Building Services and temporary repairs carried out so all are in operation whilst further works is completed.
• More than 250 council properties experienced damage to their roof. Building Services are working through these, prioritising those with water ingress
• Damage to Trafalgar Bridge in the marina which should be operational this week. Damage to a pontoon in the marina. Repairs will take 2-3 weeks, though no boats have been damaged by the pontoon.
• Clean-up of debris and wash-down continues by our Highways team, with temporary road closures continuing to help our parks team remove fallen trees safely, notably Mayals Road, Cillonen Road and Brynfield Road. A section of the cycleway by the stadium had been closed due to roofing materials being blown on the track.
• All waste collection rounds have caught up thanks to the excellent work of our crews.
• Hundreds of trees have fallen and our teams are prioritising those areas that pose a risk to the public, with work ongoing for several weeks.

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I’ve seen for myself the damage left by the storms, but also the great work our teams have been doing in the clean-up operation. Walking around the city earlier this week I saw the tree team in Singleton Park and on the seafront doing an incredible job. I asked them if it had been a busy weekend, which provoked a laugh.  I met them at Home Farm a while ago and I was struck by their love of trees so it can’t have been easy for them to see so many mature trees wrecked.

The past two years starting with Storm Dennis in February, 2020, and throughout the pandemic has brought one challenge after another for our staff in all departments. Our response has always been more than I could have expected. The people of Swansea should be proud of their council and its staff. You all deserve our heartfelt thanks.

Our fantastic new arena

The first test event is being held at our new arena tonight in anticipation of the official opening on March 3. Ticket-holders will be the first to sample the magnificent facilities at the centrepiece of our Copr Bay development which also includes the stunning bridge across Oystermouth Road, linking the city centre to the venue and the seafront, and the new coastal park. Copr Bay will help transform our city centre and local economy by attracting major stars and events and leading to further economic growth and helping to encourage new retail, leisure and housing.

It’s been a mammoth effort to get this built during the pandemic.

Sometimes we overlook the huge contribution we make to the city, but as council employees we can all be proud of the new Copr Bay and the huge role the council has played in it.

Our contractors have done a great job, but the real heroes are our officers in many departments who planned and have overseen this game-changing project. My thanks especially to Lee Richards and his team who really have been exceptional from day one.

Thank you

Our city centre rangers showed another side of the council’s role during a heart-breaking incident close to the Grand Theatre. They found a man in urgent need of medical attention so, whilst keeping passers-by at a distance, they used CPR and a defibrillator. Rapid response paramedics and an ambulance then arrived to take over. Although they couldn’t save the life of the 94-year-old who’d collapsed at the junction of Oxford Street and Dillwyn Street, his family and friends expressed great thanks to the rangers. The rangers play a vital role and last year the team dealt with more than 11,300 incidents a year ranging from customer queries to events and from dealing with vulnerable people to using first aid. 

A huge thanks to all our staff who’ve been battling against the winds of Storm Eunice today. It’s at times like these that our staff work in really testing conditions to be there for the people of Swansea. Our highways teams are out in difficult conditions clearing debris etc along with many other staff providing front line services such as burials and cremations, housing repairs and vital care to vulnerable people, as well as remote learning for our school pupils. These are just some of our services that have been operating today and I know there’s been a huge effort across the board. We had to make decisions to change some services late yesterday based on the latest weather forecast and advice. Our recent experiences of working from home during the pandemic certainly helped with this. My thanks to you all for responding at short notice and I hope you and your loved ones stay safe.

Pay for staff

I’m delighted that yesterday Cabinet approved new pay proposals which means a minimum £10 an hour for our staff. The proposals are above the UK’s voluntary real living wage rate of £9.90 and has been welcomed by our unions. If approved by Council in March this will be a major step forward and it will put us at the forefront of councils in Wales.  The Leader and I have also been discussing giving every member of staff an additional day’s leave in recognition for their efforts put in during the pandemic.

Returning to work after Covid

Covid infection rates and hospitalisations continue to show encouraging signs so we’re now considering how and when we return to work. As I mentioned recently, we won’t return to pre-pandemic ways of working, but we do need to agree what the new agile arrangements will look like on the ground. Heads of Service are currently looking at their areas and we’ll be holding discussions with trade unions and staff in the coming weeks to finalise our plans.

Our workforce plan

CMT has agreed the new Workforce Strategy which will bring benefits to us all. The four priorities areas are leadership and management, a workforce fit for the future, well-being and inclusion, and being an employer of choice. This is designed to support our staff and there’ll be actions to support each priority in the coming months and years. We’ll be discussing the strategy with unions and staff in the near future.

Good financial news

Cabinet also approved the Budget which will now go on to Council for March 3. I’ve mentioned previously this is vital because it’ll determine the resources each of us will have to do our jobs next year. Thankfully, we’ve avoided job losses and next year is looking pretty stable. This has been helped by all of you contributing to a significant under-spend this year and also the great work of our finance team in clawing back from the Welsh Government the extra costs due to Covid. It means we’re better placed to deal with the immediate fall-out of Covid, although future years remain a huge challenge financially.

Congratulations

Well done to Plasmarl primary school which has become only the second school in South Wales to become a Trauma Informed School. The school supports children who suffer with trauma or mental health problems and whose issues act as a barrier to learning. Their well-being officer, Helen Davies, a trained trauma practitioner, has been training staff and they have been given this official accolade. Great news and thank you Helen, headteacher Lucy Saunders and to everyone involved.

Thanks to Riaz Hassan’s great work there’s a change to Covid vaccine arrangements in Wales. It now means those who’ve had the vaccine outside of the UK will be recognised in Wales for contact purposes. Riaz, our community cohesion co-ordinator, worked with our communities in Swansea to help make this change. Great stuff Riaz.

This week I’m going to start on a positive and heart-warming story about one of our staff, Rhys Thomas, from social services. Rhys, a partnership and involvement officer, set off from the LC one day last week on a regular wellbeing walk with a group of service users when one of them collapsed.

Rhys performed CPR and used a defibrillator from the LC to save the man’s life. Thankfully, the man was taken to hospital and recovered. I’m sure we’d all like to think that we would do the same in those circumstances, but there’s a huge difference between having the training and being confronted with such an emergency out of the blue. Rhys’s actions were amazing and I can only congratulate him and thank him on behalf of all of us. The staff at the LC summed it up perfectly by messaging Rhys: “Massive congratulations to you for saving this man’s life! #notallheroeswearcapes – yesterday the hero wore a council badge!!”

Budget update

Our budget has started going through the political cycle with the Cabinet report now published. If it passes through Cabinet next Thursday it then moves on to Council on March 3 for a final decision. I’d encourage you all to read it, especially the section on the Medium Term Financial Plan. Whilst the coming 12 months looks financially sound, there are huge challenges ahead of us in the coming years. It’s something we are already planning for, but you can all play your part by discussing with managers how we can be more efficient and do things differently in the future. My thanks to the finance team for their work in pulling together all of the various strands into this report.

YGG Tan-y-Lan is open

I’ve said in my blog before how much I enjoy visiting our schools to catch up with staff and pupils. Due to a diary clash I was, therefore, disappointed to miss out on attending Wednesday’s official opening of the new Welsh medium primary school for Tan-y-Lan. Building a new school is a big challenge at any time. But getting it done in the middle of a pandemic is an amazing achievement. My thanks to Louise Herbert-Evans, her team in education, the construction company Kier and the school community for all their effort.

Covid update

The Welsh Government’s regular update today is expected to confirm we’ll be staying at Alert Level 0 for the next few weeks with a small number of restrictions easing in the meantime. Welsh Government guidance on working from home hasn’t changed. So please continue to work from home where you can and organise Teams meetings where face-to-face isn’t necessary.

Congratulations

Well done this week to a number of our staff who’ve won apprenticeship awards through our ongoing training links with Gower College Swansea. Tracey Ellicott won the Leadership and Management?Apprentice of the Year?award, while Scott Tovey was named Foundation Apprentice of the Year, Angela Averis gained the Support Teaching and Learning Award and Ryan Gibbons became Bricklaying Apprentice of the Year. Congratulations to them all.

You may have seen the news coverage this week of children being sexually exploited. We were one of six areas randomly selected as part of a UK inquiry, but not because we have more or worse problems than anywhere else. In fact, these issues are common across all parts of the UK.

The report captured a number of concerns and some of the case studies are heart-breaking. Some cases were non-recent and through our work with the inquiry we have been addressing these issues for some time. Our staff have been tremendous and the work they do really does make a huge difference to children’s lives. My respect and gratitude for the work they do increases even more when you read reports like this. Their job is tough at the best of times and reports like this, whilst necessary for highlighting and addressing serious issues, can put staff in the spotlight. So much of their work is unreported and unseen by the vast majority of people, but I’m in no doubt about the immense efforts they go to in some of the most difficult and emotional situations.

We want to support our staff by giving them the right tools and the time to do the best job they can. We’re investing in staff and services, including new residential support for young people. We know there’s more work to do and we’re all determined to keep improving.

I want to thank all the staff who supported this inquiry and to everyone involved in responding to its recommendations. Above all I want to thank our staff who do all they can every day to support vulnerable young people and their families.

Post-Covid working

Not many things are certain, but I’m pretty confident Covid has changed the way we work forever. The pandemic showed we can work in more agile ways – using things like Teams, home-working and agile working hours – something we’d talked about for some time but hadn’t fully embraced. Out of necessity Covid has given us different options to travelling between offices or trekking across the city or parts of Wales for face-to-face meetings. Many of us will never return to the way it was pre-Covid when we took the daily commute to work five days a week.

But the other thing Covid showed us is that working from home doesn’t suit every team or every individual. We all have different needs.

So with Covid restrictions hopefully easing, we’re now discussing what the future will look like. The major change is that instead of being determined by Covid, the way we work will be based on our agile working strategy.

Heads of Service and Directors will be looking at what agile working means for their staff. Without pre-judging it, I think it’s going to mean different things for different areas because there isn’t one answer that suits our differing needs. Some will be working from home, some coming into the office a few days and others may be in the office more than at home. Even then, we may still need to distance and have increased hygiene and cleaning in place.

These changes will take some working through, so in the meantime please continue to work from home where you can and try to arrange Teams meetings where face-to-face isn’t necessary. I’ll update you in the coming weeks.