Collaboration, learning and equality

Hello everybody,

A wet bank holiday Monday was an opportunity to recover from the long day that had been election count Sunday. I am pleased to say that we delivered a free, fair and safe election and results in good time to the South East Returning Officer at Southampton. I am grateful to all of the staff who worked so hard on Thursday, Friday and Sunday.

On the seafront with Toni Manuel - Seafront Development Manager

Beach Clean-Up/Don’t be a tosser!

When it came to the beach clear up on Tuesday, organised by the Argus with the council and a good number of other companies and bodies, the bad weather did mean that there was not much serious littering on the beach to clear up. That said, 60 or 70 of us got going with our litter pickers and did good work, particularly picking up cigarette butts and other horrible detritus. The spirit was great and it was good to see councillors from all of the parties donning their gloves and working well together. I do think that we need a litter campaign that is more hard hitting than perhaps in the past and I am rather taken with the campaign I saw in Sydney in Australia which went something along the lines of “Don’t be a tosser”. I think Max and Nick who gave us our equipment and our safety briefing would agree that we’ve got to do more to encourage citizens and visitors to dispose of their litter in bins and not leave it on the beach and the promenade and our streets and parks.

Nick James - central driver with Max Murray beach - charge hand 

Learning Organisations

This week I have been involved in three learning exercises. Firstly, we received some really affirming and useful feedback from an informal equality review that was held last week. This is to help us prepare and mark our progress towards reaccreditation against the Equality Framework for local government. Secondly, we have been preparing our self-assessment and presentation for a Local Government Association corporate peer challenge which takes place next week. Here we are asking a panel of councillors and officers led by another local authority’s chief executive to provide critical friendship gauging the progress we are making as a local authority, both in terms of leading our city, achieving our priorities and rising to the challenge of reducing financial support from government. We very much hope that this peer challenge will add value to the modernisation journey that we’re on and will encourage us in our quest to become a high performing organisation which is living its values every day. The third learning event took place today, Friday, and saw me being part of a panel of senior colleagues providing challenge to the organisations that make up the local safeguarding children’s board and their self assessment of the progress they’re making in terms of their organisational safeguarding arrangements. This was a really open and reflective discussion with lots of good ideas and a consensus developing that we have to aim for a culture of safeguarding across all our organisations, and indeed the city as a whole. The right actions are being taken to assure ourselves that safeguarding is being taken seriously and is prioritised; yet there is no room for complacency and we concluded that multi-agency working and learning together as well as even better information sharing are all necessary. 

Graham Barlett, -Chair LSCB, Leighe Rogers - Director of Probation, and
Paul Furnell - Head of Public Prosecution at Sussex Police 

Maggie Baker, Cllr Sue Shanks and  Ellen Thulvihill

Working together

One of our key partners is the police and this week I have had a catch up with Nev Kemp, our Chief Superintendent in the city, as well as a regular meeting with the Police and Crime Commissioner, Katy Bourne, involving as well, Jason Kitcat, Leader of the Council. In both those conversations community safety, the importance of domestic abuse and the vital process that is underway for recruitment of a new Chief Constable were all discussed. I am pleased to say that we and other organisations in the city have played our part in that recruitment process, albeit in an informal consultative capacity. I look forward to a really sound appointment being made and working well with the new Chief Constable of Sussex Police.

 Walking on Sunshine

In the only sunshine this week Jason Kitcat council leader and I chose to conduct part of our “one to one” walking along the seafront, reviewing progress. In particular we noticed the new inviting recycling bins and reflected on the quality of craftsmanship of the work on the arches. We also noted that the seafront lifeguard service is now back in position on the beach, which was still gleaming from the beach clean and our conscientious, regular CityClean regime.

If women ruled the world

Last night I participated in a Brighton Fringe event as part of a panel discussing with a very large and lively audience this rather odd proposition. We started by watching a film, ‘30% - Women and Politics in SierraLeone’ and heard from its director, Anna Cady. The subject of the film was the challenging quest by three feisty women politicians to achieve 30% women members in the parliament. We went on to discuss the issue of women in power, noting along the way that in the UK that just over 20% of MP's in parliament are women and just 369 women have been elected to UK parliament since 1918. Joined by Andrea Cornwall, Head of School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, Melissa Leach, Director of the Institute of Development Studies, Ifrah Hassan, Outreach Worker, Integrate Bristol and Muna Hassan at Intergrate Bristol and Caroline Lucas MP we discussed a wide ranging number of topics related to women in power and politics. Interestingly an early consensus was achieved that it would be better to aspire to equality rather than world dominance by women. The session was live streamed and you can watch it if you are interested. I think the themes of education, empowerment, role modelling, support from families and organisational cultures which support equality and the value of women were all themes that emerged.  It was encouraging that there were a number of transgender women in the audience who gave an interesting challenge to gender as a fixed notion and indeed the relationship of sexuality to gender. 

The panel at 'If women ruled the world' 

So on the themes of collaboration, learning and equality, I’ll sign off this week’s blog and hope that we perhaps see a little more sun this weekend.

All the best,

Penny