Weekly Round Up with Tom

13 March 2026

Hi Everyone, 

As you will have heard following Rob’s update on Wednesday, the budget for this coming financial year was approved at a meeting of Full Council on Monday evening.  

Setting the budget is always a significant milestone as it commits hundreds of millions of pounds to the services our residents rely on every day and helps shape what we can achieve together as an organisation over the year ahead. 

But while the numbers themselves are important, the real story behind it is the work of the people who made it possible and the impact it will have for our residents. 

Colleagues have spent months working through plans, pressures and priorities to ensure we can continue delivering for residents while planning for the future set out in Vale 2030.

A special thank you must go to Matt Bowmer, Gemma Jones and the wider Finance Team for your work on this over the past weeks and months. Your dedication and expertise throughout the process has been fantastic and you should be rightly proud of how collaboratively you have led this work. Developing a local authority budget is no easy task given the scale and complexity of the services we provide year-round. 

Thank you also to colleagues in Democratic Services for helping to facilitate Monday night’s Full Council meeting where the budget was approved, and for the continued work you do in supporting the democratic process.  

The work of colleagues in that team goes beyond facilitating Council meetings as they also support the wider work of our elected members. As part of our Reshaping work, the team have most recently demonstrated this through the newly-created task and finish groups, which as a result, will now feed into future scrutiny meetings, helping to further strengthen how issues are discussed and policies made. 

While council tax often features in the headlines around budget time, it’s also worth recognising the teams who deal with the practical side of it every day. Our Council Tax and Benefits colleagues do a huge amount of work supporting residents with queries, helping people understand what they owe and what support may be available to them, as well as preparing the thousands of bills that will be issued in the coming weeks. 

All of this reflects something important about how we work as an organisation – which is the collective effort that is always undertaken to deliver for our residents – and it is that collective effort that sits at the heart of our new People Strategy, which will be considered by Cabinet later this month. 

The People Strategy 2026–2030 will provide a refreshed guide for how we support, develop and empower ourselves and our colleagues across our Council. Aligning with the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act and our own Vale 2030 ambitions, it sets out the vision for how we value and support each other, while creating the culture we need to continue to deliver services to our communities. There will be lots more about the People Strategy in the coming weeks, but I wanted to take the opportunity to thank Tracy Dickinson and the wider HR team for all their work in this important area. 

This new strategy has been shaped in consultation with colleagues across the organisation and beyond, including what you told us in the staff survey last year, staff networks such as GLAM, Abl and Diverse, trade unions, headteachers, Heads of Service and a number of key partners. Feedback from that process has been reviewed by our newly formed People Board, a cross-section of staff who will help track the success of the strategy moving forward as part of our Reshaping work.

At its core, it recognises that our organisational culture – and the way we support our staff – plays a vital role in the quality of services we provide to residents. 

That focus on improvement and organisational culture is something we continue to explore in different ways. 

On that theme, last week I had the opportunity to take part in a Panel Performance Assessment in Newport alongside other colleagues with extensive public sector experience. Our role was to look at how Newport is delivering its objectives using its resources and approaching areas such as regeneration and digital transformation. 

As well as sharing some of our experiences from the Vale, it was a valuable opportunity to learn from how others are tackling similar challenges and opportunities. 

One area where we continue to make real progress ourselves is digital transformation as part of the Reshaping Programme. 

Led by Nickki Johns, our Digital team has been working closely with colleagues across services to modernise how residents interact with the Council. A great example of this is the e-billing service for council tax. 

Residents in the Vale are able to view their bills and account information online - making information easier to access at any time, reducing printing and postage costs, and helping to free up resources that can instead support frontline services. Using less paper also reduces carbon emissions, supporting the Council’s Project Zero ambition to become carbon neutral by 2030. 

It is fantastic to see this area continue to grow - especially as we are constantly looking for new and innovative ways to shape the way we work – and these ambitions will only continue through 2026 and 2027. The team is working tirelessly to develop innovative solutions, adopt new practices, and put us on the front foot for the future.  

As directors we recently came together to discuss our priorities to deliver Vale 2030 for the year ahead. Our Annual Directorate Plans will be making their way through scrutiny committees over the next couple of weeks. Those will guide the work all teams do and we’re looking forward to presenting and discussing them as part of the upcoming series of management development sessions. 

Continuing to listen to colleagues and our residents will remain central to this work, because ultimately, the plans and strategies we set only matter when they translate into better outcomes for our communities. 

That’s all from me this week. As always thank you for the care and dedication you bring to your work week in and week out as we strive be the best versions of ourselves and the best Council we can be, for our residents. 

For those of you not in work, I hope you have a relaxing and enjoyable weekend. 

Diolch yn fawr, 

Tom