Weekly round-up with Marcus

17 March 2023

Dear colleagues,

Rob is taking some annual leave today and so has passed the pen, or keyboard, on to me for the weekly round-up and for those of you who don’t know me I am the Director of Place, a directorate that includes planning and building control, regeneration, economy, countryside and tourism to name but a few. I’ll start with some news from my colleagues in Place.

Two new community grant funds have launched this week to help to support the Council’s vision of strong Communities with a bright future. The first is the Strong Communities Grant Fund. The fund aims to improve the resilience of groups and safeguard valued community activities. Its predecessor scheme funded some hugely well received projects and built some fantastic links between the Council and its communities and I have no doubt this one will be equally successful. Running alongside this fund we have also now opened the Shared Prosperity Grant scheme to support larger community projects, particularly those with a focus on employment, travel, local cultural and heritage projects, or volunteering opportunities.

Developing and administering these schemes is a complex process, and often one constrained by external timescales. There is also a huge amount of work to be done once they have launched to help support community groups in producing their business plans. It’s impact on building strong communities, however, cannot be understated. As always, colleagues in Place have done a fantastic job is bringing the various elements together. Thanks to all those involved.

On the topic of grassroots community projects, the Council has this week been celebrating the amazing work of volunteers at the GVS CF61 Community Garden as part of UK Compost Awareness Week. Using the county’s recycled food waste, the CF61 volunteers have developed composting systems using a donated compost bin and compost bays created from wooden pallets. This week, volunteers have been busy creating a wormery that will be used to generate compost and plant feed. Neatly aligned with the Council’s Project Zero agenda, the garden, located at the GVS Llantwit Major CF61 Community Centre, aims to create a space for the community to enjoy and encourage residents to get involved in maintaining and enhancing their community. An excellent example of partnership working.

On behalf of Rob and the rest of SLT I’d like to say thanks to those colleagues who ran a pair of community drop-in sessions in Llantwit Major over the last two weeks. Construction will shortly begin on a hugely innovative and important scheme to provide temporary homes for Ukrainian refugees at the site formerly home to Eagleswell Primary School. The plans have prompted a lot of interest locally and so colleagues from our Housing and Communications teams spent two days speaking to local residents about the plans.

This is just one of the many ways in which the Council is supporting refugees. The development will welcome its first families later this year. In the meantime, our Ukrainian Support Team are hoping to attract new temporary hosts for Ukrainian families who have arrived in Wales, having fled the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Hosts will be asked to commit to 6 months of hosting and will be entitled to a £500 monthly thank you payment from April. The team are on hand to support hosts throughout as part of their hugely valuable work to integrate our guests into life in the Vale. If you’d like to know more then you can get in touch with the team directly.

With the new rate of Council Tax agreed last week, Monday saw the start of one of the busiest periods of the year for our colleagues working in Exchequer Services and at Contact One Vale. More than 60,000 bills are currently landing on doormats or in inboxes across the Vale and naturally this prompts a lot of enquiries through to our Council Tax team. Alongside this around 10,500 benefits notifications have been sent to those residents in receipt of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Reduction, keeping our Benefits team very busy. Business Rates is no less busy having also issued almost 4000 bills to business owners. The teams are being supported in the call handling by Contact One Vale and together this means a great number of our colleagues are currently exceptionally busy speaking to customers. I’d like to say thanks on behalf of the whole organisation for their work as the first point of contact for so many.

I’d like to give a particular mention to Ronnie Alder, one of our Wellbeing Officers in Customer Relations. One of our customers recently wrote in to praise the support she had provided, saying “I was very, very impressed with her kindness, with her professional approach and her determination to make something happen.  Throughout my career I have never met anyone with such a rounded approach to an issue and after every conversation with Ronnie I felt better.  She is a credit to her profession and your service.”

I’m told by the team that she really does go above and beyond on every case she deals with and that this isn’t the first customer to write in to us in gratitude. Hearing about her efforts makes me proud to work alongside someone so determined to make a difference to people’s lives. Thank you Ronnie.

Last summer, our Healthy Living team worked with our Family Information Service and a string of local groups to create a fun-filled schedule of free activities for children and young people as part of our Summer of Fun. A glowing report has now been published into the programme which saw nearly 20,000 individual attendances across the summer. At a time of ever increasing cost of living this will have made a huge difference to many many families. You can learn more about what made the scheme such a success on StaffNet+ now.  

I’d like to end with another shout out to some of the teams in the Place directorate. If you are relaxing in front of the television this weekend you may well see Cosmeston Country Park. The park is featuring in the new Dan Snow series Black Death on Channel 5. The medieval village served as a setting for several scenes, with a number of our staff and volunteers also appearing as victims of the black death. Also, more than two years ago the park welcomed wildlife photographer and presenter Simon King. Simon spent many hours filming the Great Crested Grebes in the park and some of the footage will feature in the new BBC series Wild Isles. I hope you all get chance to see the work of our Countryside team on screen.

Finally, those of you that have been down to Porthkerry Park recently will have seen the new play park taking shape as you can see from the photos of the work. I'm sure you all agree that this will significantly improve the facilities at this wonderful park.

Thank you of course to all the staff who keep not just our country parks but locations across the Vale looking so good. Diolch yn fawr pawb.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend. Thanks on behalf of the Council to everyone for their hard work this week.

Marcus.