Archives for September 2025

The staff survey for 2025 will be launching shortly. I’ve always said in my blogs that it’s a really important opportunity for everyone to share their views on working for the council, our communication with you, and ways we can improve. As we did last year, the survey will gather both individual and team responses. I’d ask managers to make sure all staff are encouraged to take part, whether that’s by completing individual surveys or joining in team surveys at their next team meetings. For colleagues without IT access, please make sure hard copy surveys are available so that everyone can have their say. This is very important as it helps us understand detail within the survey but also gives us insight on how good our wider communication is with staff across the council so please make every effort to participate. If you’ve not yet had your say in the separate residents’ survey please act now as it closes tonight.

This week our Leader, Cllr Rob Stewart, announced some changes to the make-up of the Cabinet. Councillors Rebecca Fogarty and Andrew Williams will share the new post of Corporate Services in a mini re-shuffle that will continue during a temporary leave of absence by Cllr Robert Francis-Davies. I’m sure you will join me in welcoming them both to their new roles and wishing Cllr Francis-Davies well in his recovery.

Earlier this week I was involved in Exercise Pegasus, an ongoing UK-wide Government-led exercise testing public sector resilience in the face of a pandemic-level event. Although it’s a relief to say such things are tremendously rare, the lessons learnt from the Covid pandemic taught us that we need to be ready and prepared to deal with major incidents hence such exercises are crucial. This week’s test engaged teams from around the council and my thanks to them for their involvement and to Tim Kingham and Ben Cromie for facilitating our participation in this important work.

In the same vein of responding to incidents, it’s great to see progress being made after last week’s issues at Cwmbwrla roundabout. I’m pleased to say that thanks to the work of our highways team, the situation is now largely stable, the road into the city is partially open and plans are in place to deal with further flooding risk although this will take a while to resolve given the issue is on private land and there are several complicating factors involved. Elsewhere our parks and cleansing team have been very busy clearing blocked gullies, watercourses, and culverts to help prevent flooding as we move into the winter period. My thanks to all involved.

The Y Storfa transformation is gathering pace as the countdown to its initial opening towards the end of the year continues. This week we announced the current Central Library at the Civic Centre will be closed from Monday 20 October to allow staff to prepare for the move. This will include the relocation of more than 60,000 books and thousands of other items like maps and microfilm reels, as well as setting up library services and spaces at Y Storfa. When fully open Y Storfa will bring together a wide range of other services including the West Glamorgan Archive Service, Lifelong Learning, Housing Options, the Contact Centre and Revenue and Benefits. My thanks to everyone overseeing the Y Storfa development, and to our Facilities and library teams for all their hard work in getting this vital project into the home stretch.

A key aspect of our workforce development strategy is around maximising the opportunities for personal development of our staff. I was really pleased to see a great example of this in our Housing and Public Health team who have made excellent progress in career coaching and staff development, with support from Elaina Brutto. Coaching sessions are helping staff secure job offers, and training and development opportunities are being picked up through appraisals. There’s been a noticeable increase in staff confidence and skills, and managers are benefiting from support sessions and toolkits. The service has also welcomed two apprentices, with two more starting soon. Congratulations to the team for their success so far. Such initiatives are available across the council, albeit locally tailored to suit service needs, so please take the opportunity to find out what’s going on in your area.

Well done to the housing team on the success of their biggest-ever tenants’ drop-in event at the Brangwyn Hall on Wednesday. The feedback from tenants, councillors and participants has been very positive. Also, congratulations to the occupational health team for their efforts at Wednesday’s staff Macmillan Coffee Morning at Guildhall. More than £200 was raised for a great cause and my thanks to all those who contributed to the event.

As many of you will know our highways and traffic teams have been dealing with a major flooding incident at Cwmbwrla roundabout. Since last weekend’s heavy rainfall, they’ve been working round the clock to manage what is a highly complex situation. I want to thank them, other council staff who have been drawn in to support their work and partner organisations like Dwr Cymru Welsh Water, South Wales Police and Mid and West Wales Fire Service. As always, the resilience and commitment of our staff is at its best when our residents need us most. I also want to tackle one or two myths you might have seen on social media about the situation. We believe the problem is with a culvert which is blocked on private land and  can’t currently be accessed. This means the only way to deal with the water in the short term is to pump away as much of it as we can. Alongside our partners, our priority is to protect the public, their property and keep our roads as open as much as possible until the culvert can be accessed and repaired. I’ll keep you posted and if you live, work or use roads in the area please keep an eye on our social media for updates. In the meantime, thank you for your patience and support.

This week I was pleased to attend two events that celebrate the role of unsung heroes who rarely get the recognition from the wider community that they deserve. Yesterday, alongside colleagues in the West Glamorgan Carers Partnership, we hosted the annual Unpaid Carers Event at Swansea.com Stadium to thank them for their work, share information, and offer networking opportunities. The day before our community development team hosted a city-wide Volunteers Recognition Day at Brangwyn Hall to thank them for their dedication and commitment over the last year. It’s no exaggeration to say that without unpaid carers and volunteers our public services would struggle to deliver and our communities would be much poorer. My thanks to them and to the teams who organised these two important events.

Yesterday Cabinet saw two reports about our performance in the first quarter of the financial year. On our financial position Cabinet was told we are well-placed to manage the challenges we face in the year ahead of rising demand for services and cost pressures. We will, of course, need to deliver on our savings targets to achieve break-even by the end of the year. Our performance monitoring report also offered room for optimism. While there remain significant challenges in some areas, most of our services are delivering or exceeding our expectations and that’s down to you, so a huge thanks from me.

Congratulations to our car parks team for being named Britain’s best at what they do in this year’s British Parking Awards. They were the only Welsh council shortlisted, and they picked up the award for best back office services as well as the Team of the Year prize, the event’s main award.

Also well done to our tackling poverty and enabling communities team for earning the praise of their peers at this year’s APSE awards.  Although they didn’t win, it is a significant achievement to be finalists for two awards at such a prestigious occasion.

This week CMT and I joined the latest Induction meeting for our new starters You might recall the revamped induction programme was informed by your feedback to last year’s staff survey. There were 70 people there and it was a really useful session with each director introducing their area of the council and attendees having the chance to ask questions at the end. The kinds of questions we were asked were around workforce development, career development and the challenges we face. We’ve done three or four of these sessions so far – all of them on Teams –and we are looking now at staging similar events for wider staff networks. The idea is still in its initial stages, so if you have views or suggestions, please let me know. My thanks to Rachael Davies, Rachel Healion and Angela Griffiths in the HR team for developing and delivering the Induction programme and these quarterly sessions.

Yesterday I caught up with our Community Safety Forum, a cross-council network dedicated to supporting our work with partners in areas such as anti-social behaviour, crime, crime prevention and community cohesion. At its heart is our ambition to ensure there is a cross-council approach to doing all we can to help our residents feel safe in their homes and communities. Yesterday’s meeting included a briefing from Rhys Harries, our Trading Standards lead, who highlighted action they’ve taken recently on seizing illegal products including tens of thousands of vapes and dangerous toys. My thanks to Rhys and the team and to all our teams around the council who are playing a role in this important area of work. Your successes are being noticed and they’re helping improve our reputation with residents and further afield.

Blog readers will remember last week I briefly mentioned my meeting with Kelly Fountain, the new Chief Executive of Gower College Swansea. Part of our discussion was about the Swansea Pledge. The pledge is our joint commitment to support local businesses to go into schools to collaborate with pupils on real-life career, jobs and skills development opportunities that will help students prepare for the world of work. We are leading the way in transforming our economy to create thousands of jobs in Swansea in the years ahead thanks to the work we’re doing through initiatives like the City Deal. The Swansea Pledge helps us to do all we can to make sure it’s local young people who get those jobs when the time comes.

Luke Riley is a brilliant example of how we’re recruiting local young people into jobs that make the most of their talents. Luke joined the Swansea Market team straight from school and he’s become a TikTok sensation thanks to his work promoting the venue to new audiences and new customers on social media. Well done Luke – and my thanks too to the market team who’ve helped him flourish at this much-loved institution.

Well done also to our Nature Conservation team who have been developing a new generation of 16 local nature reserves (LNRs) for our communities to enjoy in the years ahead. They’re the first LNRs we’ve created in more than 30 years and, if adopted, they’ll aim to bring communities together to enjoy local wildlife as we protect and promote biodiversity for future generations. Have your say on their consultation here.

My thanks to our special events, highways and other teams who will be making sure this Sunday’s Admiral Swansea Bay 10k goes well. Some of you are running for charity, including our deputy leader, Cllr Andrea Williams which is great to hear. I want to wish you all well and do hope the weather is better than it’s forecasted to be. Good Luck to you all.

It was good to see more than 100 of our Senior Management Group at Brangwyn Hall yesterday. SMG is a quarterly catch-up that aims to keep managers informed about key corporate plans and issue so they can update you. The meetings are part of our response to last year’s annual staff survey to continue to do as much as we can to keep you informed. We’re just finalising this year’s staff survey which should be with you next month, so keep an eye out for it.

Yesterday’s SMG included a briefing from finance director Ben Smith. In general, we are in a reasonably good position to weather the uncertainties around inflation, government funding and rising demand for services. Next month we’ll start the process of budget planning for 2026/27 and in the meantime we need to keep working hard to stay within our existing budgets and deliver on our agreed savings and transformation. At SMG I said we’ll be publishing a report soon on the Performance Panel Assessment we had earlier this year. The feedback was overall very positive, especially about staff commitment and compassion in their roles. So, my thanks to all of you who participated in the process. I’ll go into more depth about what else the panel said in a future blog. I also discussed with SMG the importance  of appraisals. With the exception of some staff in education, who are working to an academic rota,  everyone should have had their appraisal by now. If you’re among those who still haven’t had theirs, please speak to your manager now or raise it with your head of service.

SMG also had a try-out of our new Copilot 365 AI system. We’ve now bought more than 1,000 professional Copilot licences for our teams to use and what’s clear is that it can make a real difference. So if you’ve got a licence or access to the free Copilot, please make the most of it. I’ve tried it myself and it’s a pretty impressive time-saver. We also had a presentation about how we can further improve our use of data to develop and direct services and budgets more effectively and efficiently. 

Another outcome from last year’s staff survey was a re-vamp of our new-starter induction programme and visibility of our senior management across the organisation. The latest induction session  for new staff with me and our corporate management team is next week. We encourage those invited to attend the virtual event and ask that managers assist in making appropriate arrangements wherever possible.

Meeting senior UK and Welsh Government figures is an essential part of the promotion work we do to help keep Swansea’s growing reputation as a place to live, work and do business uppermost in their minds when key decisions are being made. Yesterday I met with officials from the Welsh Office to catch-up on issues of common interest. It included a discussion about Westminster Government grants like the Shared Prosperity Fund, which is having real impact in Swansea thanks to the work our regeneration and wider teams are doing to target resources to where they’re most needed. Today the leader and myself will  be meeting Ken Skates, Welsh Government Cabinet Secretary for Transport and North Wales. We’ll be raising the importance of the regional transport plan in helping ensure everyone benefits from our investment in jobs and economic regeneration. My thanks to Stuart Davies and his team in transport for leading work on the plan for us and partner councils.

This week I also met up with Kelly Fountain, the new chief executive of Gower College Swansea. Many of you will have benefited from our partnership with the college in areas including apprenticeships, manager development and training. So it’s a vital relationship for us and it was great to catch-up with Kelly to learn more about the college’s plans for the future and continue to build on our effective partnership.

Well done to our Project Zero team for their latest initiative that promotes our city’s independent coffee shops, the city centre and net zero all in one go. The enterprise encourages people to reusable takeaway coffee cups by offering discounts every time they use one. Check it out here.

And finally, it’s farewell to David Hughes, one of our transport team’s vehicle fitters, who is retiring after 45 years. David is looking forward to spending his retirement on his smallholding. Good luck with that David and thank you for your service.