A fantastic place

As I walked out last night to see the sunset over Hove Lagoon after what had been another long day, I really did reflect on what a fantastic place Brighton & Hove is to live work and visit.

Sunset at Hove Lagoon

This is the final line of our ambition for the city which was agreed with all our partners in Brighton & Hove Connected. And it formed the first line to our Peer Challenge team who have spent this week with us led by Adam Wilkinson, chief executive of Derby City Council. The team was a mix of political and managerial leaders supported by the Local Government Association who came to look and listen, particularly to listen, and to then give us feedback on how we are doing in working towards achieving our ambitions and rising to our challenges. We won’t receive their report for another few weeks but we got some headline feedback and received some encouraging messages about the journey of change and improvement that we have embarked upon. The team were universally positive about the passion and openness from staff and our partners and I am grateful to everyone who took the trouble to be involved – thank you.

We are unique

So while we wait for more detailed feedback we can crack on with delivering our plans for this year.  We are wrestling with the very real and difficult task of planning for the next and subsequent years, which will see us needing to make even bigger changes to adapt to reducing finances that we will have at our disposal. Our success in making reductions over the past years must not lull us into a false sense of security, as the review team confirmed, just doing more of the same is not going to achieve what we need to. So we are having to look radically at doing things, stopping some things and of course continuing to work hard to ensure the economy of the city thrives and we can maximise income from business rates.

i360 - just one of our solutions

Counting our lucky stars while addressing our city’s challenges was a theme of a conversation that I had with Nick Morrison, one of our road sweepers, when he was coming down Grand Avenue, very early on Tuesday morning. Nick enjoys his job working for us and also regularly volunteers at a nature reserve and was enthusiastic about that part of his life as well. He too reflected on how much we have to be appreciative of living in this city. Our street sweeping, refuse, recycling and seafront teams are a key part of the eyes and ears of the city helping to keep it both clean and also safe. 

Nick Morrison on Grand Avenue

At the moment we are at the start of a big programme of management development. Its purpose is to support us embedding our culture of high performance and improving our services to all the city’s residents and improve the experience of our staff within the council. The programme is titled living our values, every day and on Wednesday morning I went to open one of the groups in the programme which was starting this week.

Richard Dunston, programme facilitator

Each group is being introduced by a member of ELT so that we reinforce how important we see this programme as a development opportunity for every participant. This is also a key development opportunity for the whole of the council focussing on the performance of ourselves, others and service. Our behaviour must be guided by our values ensuring that we behave in a way that promotes and ensures respect, openness, creativity, customer focus, efficiency and collaboration. Already I am receiving positive feedback from participants in the programme and offers to get even more involved in the changes we are making within the council. This is really encouraging.

A group of our managers at the course

Another group at the course

Late on Wednesday, I was the lunch time speaker at Moulsecoomb Rectory, where Father John hosted local public servants and community workers to join him for lunch. I was asked to say a few words about myself and about the role of chief executive and my focus and purpose in that role. I talked about a long held ambition to make a difference through public service to motivate and inspire staff and to help make this a better place. Father John’s catering was superb, but I didn’t manage to take a photo!

I will end where I began which is with the Peer Challenge. What I gained from this week’s learning exercise is that we are set on a course  of improving our performance, deepening our partnership working and improving outcomes for all our citizens. In doing all of this we have got to become even bolder in our proposals to meet the financial challenges over the next few years and to have the courage  to contemplate doing some things very differently. We have got to be open with our citizens and communities about the scale of the financial challenge we face and fashion a response together.

This afternoon I will be laying a wreath as part of the memorial services for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings. I am sure it will be a poignant moment and it is always important to remember what those in previous generations did to ensure our safety and wellbeing. I salute their sacrifice. Lest we forget.

Enjoy your weekend and thanks for all that you do to keep our city a fantastic place to work, live and visit.

Penny