Chief Exec's Blog

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.

Regular blog readers will know that the staff survey is something I’ve mentioned frequently over the last few months. I’ve always said it’s important because it’s your chance to tell us what you think of the work we’re doing, particularly on communication and engagement. I encouraged as many of you as possible to participate so we could get a good idea of what you’re thinking and because we pledged we’d act on the survey’s findings.

I’m pleased to say the initial feedback we’ve had has been very positive with a response rate of around 38% – higher than for any staff survey we’ve done for many years. But this still means two-thirds of our staff either didn’t wish to complete the survey or wasn’t aware of it. This remains a concern to me and I need to understand why this is. The next thing to do is share its findings with our wider managers later in September so we can start work on an action plan to address what you’ve told us and be clear on our actions.

In the meantime, one positive statistic is that 88% of teams and 80% of individual respondents felt very or fairly well-informed about the changes and developments in the council that affect you. Of course, that also means we now have to look at potential solutions to the problem of why those who feel uninformed feel that way. The survey also tells us that, among teams, the top ways you are kept informed is via team meetings, your manager and colleagues. Among individuals this blog was the most popular route to being kept informed – just a little bit higher than team meetings.

Although the survey may now be closed, we still want to keep the communication and engagement conversation going. So please do let feedback via your managers or you can always let me know what’s on your mind about these or any other issues. I’ll report back in the autumn about the actions we intend to take as a result of your feedback and in the meantime thank you for taking the time to respond.

Linked to the staff survey is the launch of our new Values and Behaviours initiative. You can read more here. They’ve been developed over a number of months with help from staff, our employee engagement group, trade unions and others. We all agreed that the values we’ve embraced for a number of years don’t need to change.

So, People Focus, Working Together and Innovation remain the basis of our approach as a council community to the work we do every day. But what the revised Values and Behaviours do achieve is a refresh of what our behaviours look like in action and how we conduct ourselves. They demonstrate how we expect people to treat others, how we expect to be treated and the way we should react to others.

Please take time to have a look at them. Let me know if you’ve seen any colleagues setting a strong example to others by displaying our values and behaviours in action so I can share their story with everyone else.

Finally, farewell to Paul Jones, who has worked for the Council for 46 years and has spent the last 19 years in the Call Centre, providing advice to residents on environmental issues. Before this he worked for our Trading Standards team. Goodbye also to Dylan Jenkins, business manager at Pontarddulais Comprehensive School, who retires this week. Dylan joined us in 1979, back in the days when education was managed by West Glamorgan County Council. Thank you both for your service and for your contributions to our communities over the years – and best wishes for your next chapters.

Congratulations to all the young people from Swansea who got their GCSE results yesterday as well as those who picked up their A-Levels last week. Our young people experienced real challenges during the pandemic when they had to work from home for extended periods, helping keep our communities safe. So it’s a great testimony to their resilience, hard work and talent that the results they’ve achieved out-performed the Welsh average. My thanks also go to our education department, the schools, teachers and parents who’ve supported our young people to be the best they can be. Good luck to all the young people in the next chapter of their lives and their future careers.

Of course, our role in supporting young people doesn’t end when they leave school. That point was very much on my mind on Wednesday when I went to Pembroke Dock to see the latest developments in our regional Swansea Bay City Deal initiative. You can find out more about that here. Pembroke Dock may seem a long way away. But the impact of the city deal on our growing reputation and drive to transform our economy and create jobs, potentially for the young people gaining their results this summer, can’t be understated.  It’s also why it was great to see Deputy Prime Minister Angela Raynor, Welsh Secretary Jo Stevens and First Minister Eluned Morgan joining the chair of the region, our council Leader Rob Stewart, at Wednesday’s event. Their presence recognises the importance of what we are doing here and reflects the growing confidence the UK and Welsh Governments have in our vision for our communities. Thanks to what they heard from us they will take back to Cardiff and London some great stories about the region and Swansea, enabling them to endorse our reputation, spirit and aspirations to influential people and businesses in ways that will benefit us in years to come.

Another example of how delivering successful regeneration projects generates wider confidence was on show earlier this week when I visited the Princess Quarter development in the city centre. Alongside the Leader and the Welsh Government’s Cabinet Secretary Jane Bryant, we saw the impact of millions of pounds of private sector investment in our city centre. Princess Quarter is just one instance of how the success of Swansea Arena – along with 71/72 Kingsway and Palace Theatre due to be completed shortly – is now helping build our city centre’s reputation among businesses. They have been crucial in attracting private sector investment, so it’s great to see that investors have witnessed our ambition and want to be part of it, creating jobs and improving viability for the city centre.

Congratulations are also due this week to David Lloyd from our building control team who celebrates his 50^th year of service to the council. Thank you David, yours is quite an achievement. And it’s farewell to Kim Collis, who leaves us after 32 years. Kim retired in June as County Archivist but stayed on a little longer to support us with data protection projects.

Thank you to our team at the Quadrant car park who came to the rescue of visitors whose vehicle experienced a flat tyre. Their actions were so exemplary that the couple, one of whom was heading to hospital for dialysis treatment, contacted us to praise the team’s calm, reassuring presence and their tea!

And, finally, thank you to all those who joined the Welsh Blood Service’s advice day at the Civic Centre on Wednesday about giving blood and registering for stem cell donation. It’s a service that matters to me because it saves lives and one you all know I feel passionate about supporting. If you couldn’t attend the event you can find out about further sessions here.