New term challenges and opportunities

Hello everybody

New term, new campus

The start of the new term was an especially exciting one for some of the pupils at Hove Junior School who started this week in their new satellite campus site in Holland Road. Formerly this was Hove Police Station and thanks to collaboration between the police, the council and the tremendous work of our property and design team, the building has been transformed into a superb school site. Here is a link to a feature on Meridian news from Monday where you can hear the enthusiasm of pupils and the headteacher.

Hove Junior School with its new solar panelled extension

The new school hall

A new classroom

Disruption to refuse and recycling 

As readers of my blog know, collaboration and change are two themes of life at the moment and for the foreseeable future. So I am disappointed to say that my week was somewhat clouded at the prospect of a return of the disruption to the city’s refuse and recycling service.

I had hoped that constructive conversations between the council, trade unions and the staff would allow us to avoid this action. Its focus is that the refuse and recycling driver charge hands are unhappy about the grade of their jobs. As with the case for all jobs, the grade was determined using the council’s job evaluation scheme to ensure fairness and consistency across our workforce and so we cannot change that for one group of staff.

What citizens need is a safe, regular and reliable service and what they don’t need is the threat of action that will see the return of rubbish piling up on the streets. I very much hope that respectful discussions will lead to the action ceasing and enable a resumption of conversations focusing on modern practices and flexible working with the interest of residents as the first priority.

I can’t say enough about the legal and financial constraints in which we are operating. We cannot resist change, and I would rather we embrace all the opportunities for improving services and recognise that nothing stays exactly the same. We can’t put the interests of residents, and our colleagues, in jeopardy. I urge everybody involved to find an alternative way forward.

Positive collaboration in Pavilion Gardens 

Turning back to the theme of positive collaboration, I was pleased to know that the recent summit I chaired on improving cleanliness in the heart of the city is leading to action. On Wednesday, the litter pick in the Pavilion Gardens orchestrated by the Argus, was a real success.

Volunteers at the litter pick in Pavilion Gardens

Thank you to everybody who took part. I hope that there is going to be a regular repeat of this activity so that we can begin to change the behaviour of the few who make this place dirty and intimidating. It should be the blooming beautiful public space in the heart of the city that the Royal Pavilion and Dome deserve.

Working together for our health and wellbeing

Collaboration is also a theme of the work of our Health and Wellbeing system with the Health and Wellbeing board at its heart. On Tuesday the board met and took some important decisions on the future of working together between health and social care including the provision of equipment for residents who need aids and adaptations to help them in their home. These decisions, after serious preparation and considerations, will lead to changes in the way equipment is managed, cleaned and distributed in Brighton & Hove. It will mean appointing a specialist provider who is also working in a neighbouring authority who can bring investment as well as expertise to this service. It will mean changes for staff, a minority of whom are council staff. We will ensure that proper protections and employment practice will characterise the change when it happens at the end of the current contract with the Community Trust in the spring of next year.

On the same agenda, the board approved arrangements for the Better Care Fund locally. In practice this means the development of closer working between Adult Social Care, Primary Care and the hospital and an improvement in services which we hope will mean fewer admissions to hospital. The working together of organisations is fantastic and the openness with which the board discussed these and other items demonstrates the way we want to work and engage in the city.

Looking at the i360 

Finally then, I wanted to share with you the progress that is being made to the i360 site. You can now look through the hoardings as work gets underway to complete the i360 tower next year. Just in case this isn’t clear the money from the Public Works Loan Board and the Local Economic Partnership could not be spent on other council services. So to those who ask whether cuts could be avoided by diverting this investment, a simple answer is no.

The new hoardings at the i360 site on Kings Road

Having a peek at the i360 site

I hope you have a good weekend.

Penny