Rob's Weekly Round-Up

03 October 2025

Hi everyone,

This week I want to bring you a special Friday update that focuses on our Brilliant Basics Charter which launched earlier today.

The charter sets out fundamental principles that we should all have in mind when doing our work. They are the standards that we strive for, both individually and as an organisation.

These tenets are set out in detail within the charter itself, but broadly cover what we want to achieve, how we intend to realise those aims and why they’re important.

Many aspects of the Brilliant Basics approach are behaviours that we already adopt every day as we strive to best serve our residents.

But it is useful to have them written down and collected in one place, so we are all clear and unified in our ambitions.

Brilliant Basics is about getting those really straightforward actions (for instance how we communicate with residents), right every single time.

This Charter is born out of Vale 2030, our new Corporate Plan, and one of the objectives in that plan - to be the best council that we can be. 

That means delivering the optimum service to our residents, but also having processes that are streamlined, efficient and effective.

It's important to adopt the Brilliant Basics Charter because we're all involved in public service. A significant number of residents use our services because they have to. They can’t go to any other organisation, so why wouldn’t we want to be in a position of giving the best possible service every time to our residents?

I see this in action every day through emails sent in from residents thanking staff for the services we’ve delivered, many of which I share in this round-up on a regular basis.

Those messages of gratitude might relate to frontline social care services, the work of our schools, services delivered through housing, neighbourhood and planning services or people answering phones and dealing with email correspondence.

The other day somebody got in touch to say a member of staff had gone the extra mile by phoning back to help a person fill out a form.
An act like that might seem small, but it can really make a difference to people.

The Brilliant Basics Charter sets out a clear target – to do the fundamentals right as many times as we can, ideally every time. 

There will always be room for improvement, but it's about putting every effort into doing things correctly so that our residents feel they are receiving a good service.

Director of Corporate Resources Tom Bowring has played a key part in developing the charter and taken a leading role on the work that led to its creation.

“The Brilliant Basics charter was put together and developed over a few months. We did some work as a leadership team, initially thinking about the massive changes we would need to deliver. But we quickly recognised that there was no point doing big transformational change without getting the basics right and creating the foundations to build upon.

“But it’s not just about the Strategic Leadership Team, we all have to make sure the basics are being done right across the organisation.

“After talking to colleagues and running workshops, it was great to also spend some time asking managers what it meant to them, how they would want to see it developed, and what they’d expect to see.

“This has been a really collaborative, whole-team effort, putting together something that will hopefully be useful for all of us when it comes to dealings with the council.”

Earlier this week, I visited the Vale Community Resource Service (VCRS), following its excellent report from Care Inspectorate Wales which provided a perfect example of Brilliant Basics in action.

The VCRS is a multi-agency operation that works with people in their homes to reduce the need for longer-term hospital stays and social services support.

This has a clear benefit, not only to the people that need the service as they can often avoid or reduce time spent in hospital, but it also frees up these vital resources for the people that really need them.

A key point noted in the report was that service users were highly complimentary of the care they received and the staff that provide it.

The team are getting the fundamentals of their work consistently right. This is reflected both in citizen experience and the positive outcomes the team are achieving. Da iawn pawb a llongyfarchiadau. 

Head of Digital Nickki Johns has also pointed to other instances of Brilliant Basics being implemented effectively.

“Really good examples of Brilliant Basics include work taking place with the council tax team at the moment to look at their processes,” she said. 

“Some things are done simply because historically that's the way it's always been. So it's really important to reflect not only on what we do, but why we do it.  And if something no longer makes sense - either in a digital age, or because our environment has changed, or residents' expectations have changed - we have to challenge that.

“Brilliant Basics is so important for customer experience because it's very much about us as an organisation doing this together. The contact centre takes the majority of the calls and acts as reception at the Civic Offices. However, the customer experience that anybody has with us is based on every part of their interaction. That might mean us getting information, sending a letter, or other further interactions. So it's about consistency.

“When people contact us, they're not looking for anything fancy. What they want is to make sure that it works first time, and that all their responses are right. We’re not always able to give our customers and residents exactly what they want, but we can always respond on time. We can do what we say we’re going to do, and we can talk to them in a way they understand.”

Well said Nickki – that is absolutely the target and what we all must continue to aim for.

I’m sure you will all join me in doing our utmost to realise those ambitions and I look forward to sharing more examples of the great work we do in my usual message next week. 

As always, thank you very much for your efforts this week, they are very much appreciated.

For those not in work, enjoy a restful and relaxing couple of days off.

Diolch yn fawr iawn,

Rob