The Government were hoping for council tax freezes across the country this year following their somewhat definitive announcement last year.

Problem with that announcement is that it was aspirational, not definitive, because it is up to local areas what they do. And quite right too in my view because I’m a strong believer in local democracy, local decisions and people making their views known via the local ballot box.

There was an incentive announced by Government pre Christmas in the form of a grant which would allow a maximum 2.5% increase by a council to be covered from the grant meaning a zero rise on council tax bills.

But the complication is that the one off grant has been done in a way which means it becomes more expensive year on year for councils that do that. In short, if an Authority isn’t efficient by default and can’t afford it practically, even the incentive doesn’t make it viable… hence a mixed picture in take up.

In Staffordshire we started working on the big changes needed to reduce the core costs of the County Council immediately we came to office in 2009. It means we aren’t reliant on Government help to keep a lid on council tax here and it also means we haven’t arbitrarily cut front line services.

During our 4 year term in office, all but the first year are a freeze on the County Council’s part of the council tax bill (which is the vast majority). That first year we set a 1.9% rise as the reforms we had started hadn’t yet resulted in the lower core costs that are now in place. Even that 1.9% was one of the lowest in the country.

But the stark difference in the approach politically to council tax levels can be seen in the table above. It shows the last decade of Labour’s unbroken 28 years running Staffordshire County Council saw council tax levels an average of 14 times higher year on year than Conservative’s current four year term.

And the previous 18 years of County Labour were a similar picture. Our philosophy is to take in council tax as little as is needed and not as much as is possible which has been Labour’s approach.

Labour controlled Stoke on Trent City Council are the latest Authority to announce a 3.5% rise in the council tax people will pay this year. Districts and Boroughs in Staffordshire will make known their council tax levels shortly.

Click here to comment on this post   

The original St Giles Hospice is at Whittington near to Lichfield and there are also facilities in Walsall and Sutton Coldfield as well as community based services across the area.

I hadn’t realised exactly how St Giles Hospice had come about. I knew it began at the former St Giles Vicarage in Whittington but that was about it. 

In fact, in 1983, the then vicar, Reverend Canon Paul Brothwell, became concerned at the care available to terminally-ill patients in local hospitals and set about providing some beds in the vicarage for a few local people to be cared for in the most compassionate way possible.

Those early beginnings have grown into the modern St Giles Hospice we see today. The original principles remain unchanged and they now strive to offer specialist care in a variety of settings for patients with cancer or other serious illnesses, as well as providing support for their families and helpers.

It is the current scale and scope of their work which I was surprised about. I knew they are a major hospice service but hadn’t realised quite how big… one of the biggest in the country.

The ninety minutes I talked with Peter and Emma was immensely useful and a key element was around the need, and opportunity, for greater collaboration than ever before with NHS and Social Care services in Staffordshire.

Much of what we talked about sits very well with the ongoing work in Staffordshire to make the many different parts of the healthcare system here work and collaborate better together. We’ll be meeting again shortly to see how we can progress things.

Click here to comment on this post 

Ok, nowhere is ‘flying’ in economic terms but it is a statistical fact that our county is doing far better than just about anywhere else in the UK.

It hasn’t ‘just happened’… as I’ve said many times before. We’ve worked hard to up the anti on the attractiveness of Staffordshire as a place to do business nationally and internationally. And it’s working!

We’ve supported viable businesses, where banks have failed to do that, right across Staffordshire meaning hundreds of new jobs created and saved. And we’ve invested heavily in apprenticeships, new start up business parks (in the right places!) and generally providing infrastructure and practical reasons for external investment.

So it certainly is working. And it’s because of the approach we’ve taken in Staffordshire which is very different to other parts of the UK. A different political approach and an inbuilt understanding of what business wants and how it works… but also how this fits with Staffordshire’s communities.

The visit by Michael Heseltine, who is tasked by the Government to oversee economic recovery initiatives, is in recognition that we’ve made progress in Staffordshire against the national trend.

So, as I say, we’re not exactly flying but Jaguar Land Rover, Amazon, Associated Parcels and countless others relocating to the county appears to be a trend which is set to gain pace.

Good for jobs and people’s pockets, and good for Staffordshire.

Click here to comment on this post 

Today’s announcement by the Sec of State for Transport isn’t, to be fair, unexpected but is unwelcome.

And not just because it would rip a swathe through some of the most fabulous countryside in Staffordshire but also because from a cold assessment of the business case it’s massively risky.

Not just the risk, many say liklihood, of it not creating the growth that’s claimed but also because it could even damage the economy of the Midlands by sucking more investment from here down to London.

I don’t agree with HS2 and see it as a black mark against what is, in the main, an effective  time in office nationally for the Governemnt trying to set the foundations that will be better for the UK in the future.

We’ll see where things go from here!!

Click here to comment on this post

I have written before about the work we’ve been doing over the last couple of years to improve the healthcare system across Staffordshire as well as the fact it hasn’t got the recognition that it should have done nationally.

That’s probably because it’s been overshadowed by the historical, and tragic, issues at Stafford Hospital. And whilst there’s still a long way to go, a significant milestone has been reached with the formation of the new joint health and social care organisation.

As I say there are many even more complex things we need to do to improve the way the whole healthcare system serves the public and that will take several years to do properly even though we are more advanced than most in Staffordshire.

But the formation of the new organisation and the fundamental changes to the way health and social care professionals will now work as single, rather than different, teams is exactly what the Prime Minister is calling for.

So we are well placed for step change health and care services improvement in Staffordshire during the coming months and years and also prepared to help other areas across the UK to start that journey through the work we’ve already done and our experience.

Click here to comment on this post

They will take place in mid January and I am pleased that every company, organisation and provider I’ve asked to meet with me has agreed.

One meeting will be with domiciliary care providers and a further one with organisations that invest in, and build, supported living developments for older people or those who need some support on a daily basis.

Fundamental to the meetings is the quality of services provided in the future and the sustainability of our ambitious building programme for supported or sheltered living schemes in the current economic climate.

The latter is because of signs of a slow down in the ability of developers to raise money and make schemes viable with a minimal subsidy from the County Council. I want to look at new ways of doing it which could include a new approach to contracting the care element in future.

It’s also about examining whether the County Council could assist with pump priming new developments through the use of capital where banks aren’t able to. The last couple of years we’ve driven a big increase in Staffordshire of developments to help people remain independent in safe surroundings even with some vulnerabilities and health challenges.

In fact, Staffordshire was named as leading nationally in meeting the needs of the future in a recent Parliamentary Report and I don’t intend to see progress stall which means early intervention may be needed.

Care wise, it’s about sustainability of the provider sector with rising cost of fuel and other factors, quality of  care given to individuals in their homes and enhancing the profession of Home Care as a career rather than just as a job. It’s also understanding in more detail whether providers are passing on some specific incentives to their staff as expected or adding them to profits… as some clearly are.

But for Care, the bottom line for me is quality of services and that’s where the focus will continue to be. Over the last two years we’ve contrated much, much harder to ensure people receiving care are put before company profits and some that have failed to understand that have faced ultimate consequences.

Tough but fair. And that’s why before we formalise a completely new way of paying providers, residential and non residential, across the care sector in Staffordshire by the quality of care and results, rather than simply the task, we need to understand the impact that could have on those who can’t raise their standards sufficiently.

So, it should be useful and interesting but one thing that will continue is the drive to raise standards and professionalism in care ever further.

Click here to comment on this post

That was back in June 2009 and as a brand new Administration it was a real shock to be saddled with such a large and unexpected commitment.

Despite the surprise the principle was ok’ish but like so many things we found the deal wasn’t put together as well as it could have been and certainly didn’t appear to be what could be called a hard bargain.

We perhaps could have gone to court to try to escape the deal but we judged there was a chance to improve it, provide some badly needed economic development and also local employment. And with a large scale infrastructure development programme planned we thought it would be bad reputationally with the very sector we were looking to stimulate.

So we pressed on, renegotiated the contracts, improved the efficiency of the two new buildings and reduced the cost over the 40 year term considerably. The new offices are now in use and 17 other buildings in the centre of Stafford have been vacated for disposal or surrender of leases.

The new buildings are also amongst the most efficient energy wise in the UK having their own biomass energy generation using fuel from land owned by County at Cannock Chase.

The total cost to the Staffordshire tax payer of accommodation in central Stafford is more than £250k less each year meaning a total term saving of about £12million.

Not too bad, bearing in mind the deal Labour left us would have cost the public purse half a million a year more for the two new office blocks than the original seventeen… so their property deal would have been £32million more expensive over the term than we’ve managed to settle on.

Click here to comment on this post

A big statement but unusually it’s a decision which is virtually impossible to over egg… even for a politician!

This is one of the biggest decisions ever taken by the County Council not only because of the transformation in healthcare service quality but also because it will involve £1.5billion from the County Council of public money. My Report to Cabinet colleagues yesterday was over 240 pages and the culmination of nearly two years work including numerous appearances by me before County Committees to be questioned on the plans.

We started planning for this shortly after coming to power in late 2009 and it involves bringing Staffordshire’s main three NHS organisations and County Council Social Services into one new public body.

Social Care services, currently run by the County Council, support all sorts of
people such as the elderly and those with mental health challenges, learning disabilities or physical disabilities. It is all about providing help for people to maintain, or regain, their independence and enjoy as normal a life as their circumstances can allow.

Very often that help is delivered in community settings such as an individual’s home or supported living places. It can also mean the difference between recovering from injury or trauma safely at home or ending up in hospital when there’s no real need to… it’s also discharge from hospital, when clinically well enough, and getting back home with support more quickly.

Clinical community health services, such as district nursing, physiotherapy and anything which is ‘medical’ in nature also support independent living and are provided to individuals by the NHS separately to the County Council. 

But as individuals often need joint support from both Social Care and the NHS, and because they are currently delivered by different bodies across Staffordshire, things don’t join up too well. It’s a problem right across the UK.

No matter how hard the professionals try  to coordinate visits and treatment the experience of patients is fragmented and the technical support systems don’t work properly together. And it was those problems that quickly became apparent in 2009 and led us to launch ambitious, and huge, plans to join things up.  

As I wrote earlier, those plans were formally agreed by the County Cabinet yesterday. It ratified agreement last week by Staffordshire’s NHS meaning, that after due diligence with Government nationally, the operational strategy to make it happen in reality can start in earnest. 

The establishment of the UK’s largest ever combined health and social care provider will also provide a crucial lever for improvements to the way the wider healthcare system in Staffordshire works collaboratively for the benefit of patients. 

What we agreed yesterday is huge but the transformation of the wider system is even bigger and more complex still. You can view the follow on questions and discussion after my report here. The extra starts at 1hr 45mins 26 secs on the webcast.

Click here to comment on this post        

Government has brought in new arrangements nationally that make the Blue Badge parking scheme for disabled people more fraud and misuse proof.

The badges allow people with disabilities to use designated parking spaces closer to shops and other attractions. But with the new anti-fraud arrangements comes more processing costs for local authorities.

Because of that the Government has issued guideance that a new £10 charge can be made for each badge and, as far as I can see so far, that charge is being passed on to disabled people right across the country by local authorities.

But I’ve said no to that in Staffordshire… they will remain free to disabled people. And we’ve done it by redesigning and making cheaper the administrative processes… just as we have done with the ‘bureaucracy’ right across the County Council over the last two years.

In short that redesign has reduced processing costs a lot meaning the tax payer saves some money and we can still provide the new secure Blue Badges for free… unlike other areas.

A win all round I think and a small but significant decision which reinforces our determination to help people maintain their independence through mobility.

Staffordshire County Council is doing things differently. Fact!

Click here to comment on this post 

It’s a radical approach for Staffordshire that has caught the imagination with over 1500 responses received so far from Staffordshire people. The changes I want to see are simple…

Complaints about health and social care services being handled by an independent people led body rather than the Trust or organisation being complained about.

A single ’gateway’ for the whole of Staffordshire with easy and clear access where people can complain or offer feedback on services for any part of the NHS, health and care sector rather than having to find their way through the dozens of different systems of the many different healthcare bodies.

Collating all feedback, complaints, soft and hard data and information in one place instead of the fragmented way it is held in so many different places currently. That would provide a fuller, holistic picture of the ‘whole system’ rather than snapshots of bits.

It would also help as an early warning of quality or service failure because half a dozen issues which are currently viewed in isolation could be connected, potentially signalling sytemic failure and bigger concerns.

Simple but effective, I believe, and I also think it would bring a greater transparency to public services and hopefully improve public understanding, interaction and confidence in them.

It seems that the vast majority of people giving their views agree with those principles with solid support for the development of Engaging Communities Staffordshire (ECS). There is more information on ECS here and you can respond online to the public consultation until mid January here or hard copy here.

In addition, I will be hosting three public events early in the new year to hear views and answer questions:

• 9^th January, 6pm start Cannock, Venue: The Ballroom, Cannock District Council, Beecroft Road, Cannock. WS12 9SA
• 10^th January, 2pm start, Lichfield, Venue: King Edward V1 School, Upper St John Street, Lichfield WS14 9EE
• 11^th January, 6pm start, Stafford, Venue: The David Jones Centre, 96a Stone Road, Stafford ST16 2RS

It is important to book places in advance and advise if you have any special requirements. You can call 01785 277502 to book your place or e-mail: healthandsocialcareconsultation@staffordshire.gov.uk

Click here to comment on this post