An week of inventive and involving work

Our unique festival

Last weekend saw the inventive Paddle Round the Pier seaside festival and it was a delight to visit on both days. 

One of the races at Paddle Round the Pier

Our wildflowers on Hove Lawns

As well as tasting the delights of an impromptu lunch with Karl from Moshimo, I also took advantage of our newest seafront loos as I walked towards town. It has been pointed out since that I took a loo selfie! 

My loo selfie

All I wanted to do was to capture and share with people the brightness and quality of the newest addition to our public conveniences. It was good to meet the proud temporary attendant Rob Short who works for Wettons. 

Rob Short at the new loos

And on Sunday our Cityclean paddling crew did a good job and raised over £500 for charity. Well done to them.

The cityclean team 

Paddling round the Pier

Reimaging the Royal Pavilion estate

On Monday I met with the Pavilion café’s David Sewell and the Friends of the café as we grouped to re-apply for funding to invest in the whole of the estate that is the Pavilion, Dome, Corn Exchange, Museum and gardens. We intend to be inventive and involving as we reimagine this uniquely beautiful and extraordinary heart and lungs of our city.

Friends of the Pavilion cafe with Janita Bagshaw and me

Local Government annual conference

Then on Tuesday it was off to sunny, sandy Bournemouth with Jason, leader of the council to join the local government family for its annual conference. At this time of recession it is important to take opportunities to learn and share and the conference gave us plenty of that. 

Simon Stevens, chief executive NHS

Members and chief executives from North and South and East and West of the country came together to be inventive and to involve one another in sharing how we can respond to the challenges of reducing resources, increasing demand and rising expectations. The conference was characterised by generosity, optimism, collaboration and creativity. The Innovation Zone was a safe space for sharing, the conference provided platforms for discussing problems and new initiatives especially focussing on the opportunities of digital and the importance of outcomes over traditional service arrangements. We picked up ideas such as solar rubbish bins.

Jason Kitcat and one of the solar rubbish bins

There was intelligence in the form of a Ipsos MORI survey (PDF 1.42MB) of latest perception. There was no end of information. And we had the opportunity to meet new and key players especially Simon Stevens the NHS Chief Executive from April. He led a full session and a private session on the leadership challenge and opportunities for collaboration with local government and the NHS.

Ben Page from IPSOS Mori

Along the way I met up with long standing friends in local government and made new ones. Listening to stories of inventiveness and involvement and taking heart for our challenges. What is absolutely clear is that we need to work differently, embrace more change and be ever clearer about our purpose, priorities and partnerships, to ensure the best outcomes for our place; the fabulous city of Brighton & Hove.

Our Big Difference winners

I am now back at base and delighted that today we have awarded the winners for the Big Difference Awards for exceptional work and they are Martin Reiley from Cityclean, who went out of his way to help a resident track down stolen items and the team who worked on our first same sex marriages in March. It was very interesting to hear from all the staff who were shortlisted and is never an easy decision to make. Everyone who gets on the shortlist is a winner in their own right. There will be more about the winners on the Wave next week.

The shortlisted staff for the Big Difference awards

As always enjoy the weekend. 
Penny

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