Archives for September 2024

As someone who’s built a career in the council, I’m committed to ensuring our staff have every opportunity to learn new skills and develop. Staff training was one of the main talking points at this week’s CMT meeting. We reviewed our training programme which includes staff development opportunities, mandatory training and health and safety courses. It’s fair to say our training offer is comprehensive, but we always need to make sure we aren’t missing any obvious requirements within specific services. It’s also important to make it easier for staff to access and complete training online where possible, but recognise that some must be provided face-to-face where necessary. We’re discussing development needs with heads of service and senior managers. At the same time, colleagues in human resources are working with each service to understand their staff development needs and how we can support staff in their role to develop their skills as part of growing our own so that we can develop and promote officers from within. All staff can influence this during their appraisals and 121s and supervision, so please raise if you need to.

We had our regular Cabinet/CMT away day this week which gave us the chance to look at some major issues in detail. This month included looking at the budget challenges facing our schools and how best we can meet the needs of some of our young people in accessing our core support services in and around the city. Further work will continue in both these areas over the coming months. In addition, we also discussed the regeneration of the High Street and surrounding areas which historically have suffered from some issues. We are heading in the right direction with improvements but there is still more to do. In addition to the work the council is doing, we are working with the likes of Coastal to bring new life to old buildings and create a vibrant area where people can live and work. The proposals are exciting and we’ll be developing them further in the coming months with a view to a public launch early in 2025.

We also reviewed the success of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund where we’ve been able to invest £1.3m in 132 small businesses and gain £1m in match-funding from the private sector which has helped create around 90 jobs. It’s also seen £1m invested in securing the future of some of our heritage sites, £3.6m in developing skills locally, and more than £3m invested in third sector and community organisations and activities. It’s a great tribute to our officers, especially Paul Relf and his team, who have successfully applied for and distributed the funding to boost the local economy and have also led on the work for the region.

Linked to this, it’s great to see how two historic city centre locations have been transformed into modern venues. The refurbished Albert Hall is officially opening today, and the Palace Theatre will be re-opening on November 7. Across the Palace’s six floors, Tramshed Tech will offer versatile workspaces, including co-working, meeting rooms, office space, a podcast studio and a coffee shop. Both venues look fantastic, promise to add to our city centre offer and boost our reputation as a council and city. My thanks to all the officers who’ve been involved.

Perhaps a less exciting but equally important subject, I met with Audit Wales this week to discuss our arrangements for managing our finance, governance, risks and so on. Across Wales councils are facing similar challenges, but it’s an opportunity to share our plans with our regulators and to get an external view. It was a positive meeting and in January we’ll be catching up with Audit Wales along with Estyn and Care Inspectorate Wales for our annual review meeting to discuss how we’re delivering our priorities and meeting our key challenges.

Finally today we will see Chris Howell, our Head of Waste, Parks and Cleansing retire after 11 years with the council. I have worked alongside Chris for many years and he has been a great asset to the council, bringing his thoughts and innovation to these services. I have personally welcomed his input both to the service and corporately over this time and pass on my best wishes for the future. Going forward Nigel Williams will now oversee the waste service and Tracey McNulty will take on the parks and cleansing service while the council considers its longer-term options.

CMT, heads of service and our Senior Manager Group (SMG) caught up for a busy discussion about the key issues we’re facing now and over the coming months. Wednesday’s event at Brangwyn Hall was the first face-to-face SMG meeting we’ve done since before COVID-19 and the feedback so far has been very positive. Managers did a Q&A session with CMT and had a discussion about how such meetings should be arranged in the future. Importantly, we also had an update from Finance Director Ben Smith about the budget. Next month we’re starting discussions with Cabinet members about our budget for 2025/26, something that will affect us all by the time it’s agreed next March. I will keep you posted on progress. We also did an in-depth review of the feedback from the staff survey and what it means for managers as well as you. We also discussed the actions we’ll need to take in light of what you’ve told us. I’ll update you further on these shortly as we know it’s important to feedback on what you have told us and show how we are taking action.

Climate change is a fact of life and, as a seaside community, it will affect the way we provide services as well as the way we live in the years ahead. That’s why I was pleased to attend a Resilient Swansea workshop at Llanrhidian Primary School designed to get residents’ views on developing plans to mitigate and adapt to the changes we face. It matters also because it links to our commitments under the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and you can find out more about it here. My thanks also to the school for hosting the workshop. The visit also gave me the chance to catch up with Llandrhidian Primary School, its head teacher, Donna Caswell, and enjoy the hospitality on offer from its pupil-led community café. The cafe is open to the public and well worth a visit if you’re in the area.

It was great to be at the West Glamorgan Regional Partnership’s annual event for unpaid carers on Tuesday. We invest millions of pounds a year in social care services that make a difference every day. But it’s also important to acknowledge and support the vital contribution of an estimated 41,000 unpaid carers in the West Glamorgan area who play their part as well, which is what the event was all about. You can find out more here. But in the meantime, my thanks to all those who organised the event and all the unpaid carers who give so much.

Congratulations to the hard-working youngsters at Cila Primary School whose expertise has won them the highly prestigious Wales in Bloom Awards for the best school garden in Wales for the third year in a row. This year they secured the award jointly with a school in Abergavenny.

And, finally, everyone is welcome at next Wednesday’s Macmillan Coffee Morning in Room 153 at Guildhall being run by our occupational health team. It starts at 10am and if you can join the band of volunteer bakers or donate something else for a great cause, find out more here.

Your responses to the recent staff survey will be published next week and I’m really pleased with the results. Overall, 1,441 staff took part in the individual survey, and 1,011 staff took part in 117 team discussions. It was the first time we used team feedback as well as their usual individual responses, and it’s given us a lot of information which we’re now reflecting on before developing a plan responding to the issues you raised. Some of the headline results show the vast majority of staff have regular team meetings and they feel informed about what’s going on at the council. High levels of staff also say they have opportunities to get involved in discussions and to put forward suggestions. There’s lots more information which we’ll publish shortly so that you can see the results in full and we will also be discussing the results at next week’s senior managers group and then we’ll consider how to act upon your views. I’m really pleased with the number of staff who took part and I think the idea of using team meetings to gather feedback has worked well. As always, the results vary across some areas which we’ll also be exploring how we can further improve engagement for staff and sharing service specific results shortly. Thank you to everyone who took part, and I want to confirm that we will act on the findings so hopefully you’ll see the benefits when we come to address the key issues raised.

One of the other ways we’re supporting staff is through our digital services and development. This week CMT had an update on our digital programme and it’s good to see how we’re using technology to help staff work more efficiently. What came through is the huge demand for digital services in our day-to-day work and in developing new ways of providing services. Although digital development isn’t cheap, it can also help us save money and ensure our services are more efficient at a time of tightening budgets. We will be discussing the work with our cabinet and leadership teams shortly. Thank you to our digital team for the work they’re doing to support us.

I’m really pleased with our performance across our services which is down to the huge efforts of staff. This week we discussed the draft report on our annual review of performance which reflects on how well we’re doing in delivering our six wellbeing objectives. It shows we’re making really good progress and despite some huge challenges, there’s some excellent work going on in our priority areas. The report will go through the usual democratic meetings before being published later this year. Thank you to everyone for all your efforts.

Today I’m at one of our climate change events bringing together a wide variety of organisations, communities, residents and businesses from across Swansea. The aim is to get people’s views on how to tackle climate change in their local area. Resilient Swansea, launched by the Swansea Climate Signatories Group, is being run in collaboration with the Swansea PSB. Climate change is among the council’s six wellbeing priorities so it’ll be good to hear views and ideas.

For staff using public transport you probably have views on the quality of local bus and train services. Yesterday we were at a regional meeting where Transport for Wales updated us on the latest proposals for bus franchising. The current services are commercially-driven which often means some less-used routes often face cuts. Franchising allows us to run a more equal service, plugging gaps whilst also leading to improved control in providing more reliable and cost-effective services. It also helps with our ambitions to make the city centre a more thriving and vibrant place during the day and night-time, and supporting our events and tourism by ensuring buses run later into the night.

I’m delighted to see the Government support for Tata at Port Talbot. It’s one of the region’s landmark employers and affects so many people and businesses here in Swansea. Losing Tata would have been a major blow so hopefully, this investment will help secure its future for the region and continue to boost the local economy.

Congratulations to Isaac Fabb one of our apprentices who picked up the Skills for Work Awards at Gower College.

We’re looking to improve the ways we engage and provide contact with our customers. It’s right we want to provide the most appropriate methods of contact for our customers but also in ways that support our staff. As such our new customer contact operating model is being developed in ways that’ll promote efficient and effective digital services while ensuring customers can still contact us by phone or face-to-face where necessary – which for some other organisations appears to have gone out of fashion! CMT went through the draft model this week and we’ll be discussing with our cabinet and Leadership Team and then engaging with staff and then the public to ensure we get the right fit across the council.

We met with senior executives from Amazon this week to discuss their operations in Swansea and to encourage them to invest further in the city. They already have a big presence in the Swansea area including SA1 with Veeqo, a technology firm that’s part of the Amazon family. We shared the wider Swansea vision and ongoing regeneration programme and also discussed any potential opportunities for them to further increase their presence in Swansea. It was a very positive meeting with a global company and I’m hopeful we can continue to develop these working relationships in the future. The feedback we had was very encouraging and they stated they hadn’t seen a council with such a clear and comprehensive regeneration vision. I’ve spoken many times about our reputation as a council and a city, so I’m delighted with this feedback, and it can only help to further promote our reputation and encourage more investment in Swansea. My continued thanks to everyone involved.

Sticking with regeneration we’re making good progress on one of our strategic development sites at St Thomas. Our partner Urban Splash has been working with house builder Lovell Homes to bring forward plans for more than 200 new homes, including a significant number of affordable homes. Their vision is very much aligned with the Council’s priorities in terms of the local economic benefits through our Beyond Bricks and Mortar initiative, sustainable home-building, supporting veterans and bringing wider social benefits. My thanks to officers who’ve been working to make this happen.

I’m grateful to officers who’ve been working on Swansea Airport for many months, and probably years, to improve the way the facility operates and meets the needs of users. It’s been a long-running and complex issue, but we’ve now reached the point where an interim lease has been provided to a group of users who have set up an alliance. Hopefully this will give everyone an opportunity to agree new arrangements to run the airport. Thanks to Geoff Bacon and his team, especially Alex O’Brien, for all their efforts on this.

Well done to staff at Pen-y-bryn school who came to the aid of a taxi driver who suffered a cardiac arrest. The driver was due to pick-up pupils at the end of the school day. Two members of staff rushed to provide CPR and were supported by an off-duty fireman. The CPR continued for a long period of time and for a period the taxi driver was not responding. Ambulances and the police arrived, and I’m pleased to say the taxi driver was conscious when he was taken by ambulance to hospital.

Good luck to Huw Evans in Democratic Services who’ll be cycling 700 miles in eight days. Huw and his friends will make the journey from Gothenburg to Amsterdam, through Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Netherlands. The aim is to raise money for Blood Cancer UK, a charity dedicated to fund research and provide support to improve blood cancer patients’ lives. You can support Huw either by donating directly with him or via the Cader Man Just Giving page https://www.justgiving.com/page/caderman2024. This charity is very close to my heart and you can get further information here www.bloodcancer.org.uk Congratulations to Alan Webster, our tree officer, who’s been selected to play cricket for Wales in the Over-50s World Cup in Sri Lanka. Alan plays for Neyland Cricket Club and so far he’s made six international appearances. He’ll play in group stage matches against Australia, Canada, India, Pakistan, South Africa and West Indies.