by Paul O'Brien
Wednesday 02 August 2006
Did a number of visits today. Started at St. Helens where I met Assistant Chief Executive, Mike Foy. We had lengthy discussion on future of local government and Mike had some good ideas around better Asset Management and Shared Services. We even discussed things turning full circle and local authorities sitting as a centre point to a great big doughnut, managing a whole host of services, partnerships, contractors, utilities, public sector agencies on the publics behalf. Is this the future role of local government, well after years of reductions in powers its nice to consider something of an expansionist policy.
Met incoming National Chair and Secretary Cllr John Kerr-Brown and Peter Moffat at Warrington to discuss themes for their year in office and more importantly for me the performance targets they want me to achieve.
In the afternoon I visited Peter MacLeod, Executive Director for the Environment at Knowsley. Peter showed me some great work that the in-house team has done in bidding to deliver an integrated FM approach within the Building Schools for the Future Programme.
My final meeting of the day is with our new PR agency, Reputation. Mark Fletcher runs through some ideas with me about how we can improve the Associations media profile in the future. I like what he has to say and we part company agreeing to a series of development targets.
