Weekly Round Up with Miles

12 July 2024

Dear colleagues,

While Rob is enjoying a well earned break he’s asked me to take on the weekly round-up duties for this week. As always there has been plenty of good work to shout about across the Council. I’m also going to take the chance to talk-up some of what’s going on in Environment and Housing as well.

Before he headed off on his holidays Rob joined the Leader in hosting our latest Long Service Awards on Monday. As always it was a great celebration of what our colleagues had achieved during their time with us. When I collected my own last year it was also a real reminder of how much of our lives we give to our jobs and I’m really proud to work for an organisation that recognises this.   

The awards recognise those who have worked in local government for periods of 25 and 40 years. All colleagues are entitled to one, whatever their role, as long as at least ten of those years were with the Vale. Colleagues should be contacted directly by our HR team when they are eligible but if you have worked in local government for as long as I have you’ll know that our processes don’t always align perfectly so if you think you are entitled to an award but haven’t received it you can contact the Lifecycle team in HR to check.

Something that always comes up in these sessions is just how much the Council and the services we deliver have changed over the course of people’s careers. In my 42 years on this Council, I’ve worked in a fair few teams – both frontline and behind the scenes – and can say that we never stand still.

There are always new issues to respond to. The wider context in which we work also means that we are always having to reprioritise what we do as well. Explaining this to our residents is not always easy and so over the past few weeks the Highway Maintenance team in Neighbourhood Services and been working with the Communications team to develop a new campaign to help explain how we are responding to many people’s top priority – potholes.

In some ways the issues we are balancing in maintaining our roads sum up the challenge we face as an organisation as a whole. The cost of maintaining our roads and delivering other important front-line services is increasing. In recent years the UK has experienced more cold weather and rainfall which are both major contributors to potholes forming. Increased traffic on our roads also means that they deteriorate more quickly. This means that despite spending more than ever on maintaining our highways, it is very difficult to keep up with the ever-increasing number of potholes. At the same time, like other councils, we are prioritising services that support our most vulnerable residents. 

We are spending more money than ever before on repairing potholes on the 1000 kms of highway in the Vale of Glamorgan. In 2023, the Council allocated £1.17 million to potholes (0.4% of our overall budget) and repaired 9,717 potholes. In 2018, we allocated just £371,000 (0.17% of the overall budget). Unfortunately, take a look at our Facebook page most weeks and you’ll see this huge increase is not reflected in how residents view our work. Over the summer we are going to try and set the record straight on this area of our work. There will be a coordinated online campaign to try and show what great work our Neighbourhood Servies teams do. Hopefully colleagues will find this an interesting insight into our work as well. If you do, please feel free to share with your friends.

Funding increasing spending in some areas of our work means we need to find new ways to support others. This is something else we are familiar with in my area.

The success of our new green waste service probably being the highest profile example of this. Our new service means that those residents who want green waste collections are able to get them at a very affordable prices, and those that don’t are no longer subsidising a service they don’t use.

We now have 12,935 subscribers to the garden waste service and this year the combined income and efficiency savings will surpass £550,000. I’d like to give a big shout out to all of the teams working to deliver this service. They are dealing with ever increasing green waste collection demands and work incredibly flexibly to deal with the surges of green waste we see this time of year after sunny days and long weekends.

This is a real Team Vale effort as well and all of this work has been made possible by us making better use of the technology available to us. Digital is an area of the Council’s work where the pace of change is only going to increase and if you haven’t yet had chance to read the piece published this week with Nickki Johns, our Head of Digital, talking about what’s soon coming down the line then I would highly recommend that you do.

My final Environment and Housing thank you is to the teams in Shared Regulatory Services. Anyone who attended the recent Welcome to the Council of the Future session with Rob and Tom Bowring will have heard them talk about SRS and how innovative the regional service model was when the team was established. They have gone from strength to strength in the years since and do incredible work to keep the Vale, Cardiff and Bridgend safe through their work.

Last month saw the conclusion of one of the team’s biggest investigations in recent years. A total of 25 years of immediate custodial sentences and a further 9 years of suspended sentences were given to an organised criminal group that established and ran 8 shops selling illegal tobacco and nitrous oxide canisters in South Wales. As a result of the group’s crimes the public were sold sub-standard products and vulnerable victims were put at great risk where individual cigarettes were sold to underage children. The selling of nitrous oxide was potentially dangerous too as it is often misused.

At the sentencing the judge praised our two main investigators in the case which involved numerous members of SRS and also colleagues from Cardiff Council’s Legal Services team. It was an amazing result and a just reward for everyone’s hard work and commitment over a prolonged period. Diolch yn fawr to everyone involved. 

Some of you will hopefully have already seen the Staff Travel Survey that launched earlier this week. The surveys helps us understand how the Council as an employer supports active travel and the use of public transport in getting to work. It’s important in planning how we will continue to decarbonise the organisation in the future so if you haven’t yet had chance please to take two minutes to complete it.

I’d like to wish good luck to some colleagues taking a very different form of transport this weekend. Julie Thomas, Rehabilitation and Mobility Officer for the Visually Impaired, and at Ty Jenner, and Liam, Geraint, Felicity, and Grace from the admin team are taking part in a sponsored zip wire in aid of Sight Cymru on Saturday. You can find out more and donate to the cause on their Just Giving page. Good luck guys!

Finally, and to show that there is life outside of work and that your senior officers are capable of other things; the mighty Cadstock music festival returns to Victoria Park this weekend, where you will be able to see Adam Sargent strutting his stuff as the lead singer of Stonehouse and me attempting to relive my youth as the same in my band Second Chance.     

Thanks to everyone for your hard work this week. Have a great weekend....and see you down the front.

Miles.