Tracie Langley, Cornwall’s s151 officer, looks back at another year dominated by the pandemic, budgets, elections and “you-would-just-never-believe-it” stories.
I can’t say I bounced out of bed on that first morning back at work of 2021 after New Year. Rather, I slunk my way downstairs, grabbed a coffee and slouched into my seat to switch the kit on. My first meeting at 8.00am, a Covid briefing with Cabinet. A regular feature of Monday mornings as we assessed the impact of the pandemic across Cornwall over the previous week.
Cornwall seemed to peak and trough at different times to the rest of the UK, correlating somewhat with the number of tourists, the size of the many beach festivals or children going back to school. Briefings had become business as usual and on this first day back, was followed by a budget update with the same cabinet.
Christmas grinches & a puppy
January always seems to be full of budget scrutiny meetings as we put the last changes through on the new medium-term financial plan (MTFP) and make sure that the current forecast hasn’t moved over the Christmas period.
Often, the Christmas grinches have fiddled around with the finance forecast tables and, hoping I won’t notice the additional growth numbers, added to adult social care. But I am onto those grinches and do a proper post-Christmas check.
As part of our council transformation, I had been working with my finance team to think about what changes we needed to our finance processes in order to ensure we were ready to monitor the financial impacts of the new outcome delivery plans, which are a different construct to the normal service and directorate budget format.
Technically, that means a lot of unpicking of budgets and recharges that may not have had much attention for years.
Mid January saw us getting a Bernese Mountain Dog puppy. Get a puppy they said. Will make you get out from behind your screen they said. Well, this 45 kilo fluff ball has turned our lives upside down although, to be fair, it does mean I move from behind my screen to take him for a walk during the day.
White rabbits
February saw the MTFP being presented through cabinet and council. Budgets before elections are always more tricky as the politicians come to the end of their term and want to be more generous to residents. This requires, of course, the ability of the section 151 officer to pull rabbits out of hats and find pots of money for shiny things, commonly known as the “white rabbit pot”.
Of course, last year was probably one of the hardest years as we dealt with the very significant financial impacts of Covid. White rabbits just could not be found.
Despite the difficulty, we managed to pull together a balanced budget. And, just as the budget was approved, we had the important matter of managing the logistics of three major elections at the same time, for Cornwall Council and the Isle of Scilly: towns, parishes and the police and crime commissioner.
For somewhere like Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, this is an epic piece of event management and fortunately, there were no mishaps, or none that we are telling anyone about anyway.
For Cornwall Council, we saw a wholesale change of cabinet with a new Leader who within 3 weeks was hosting G7. There are many mad stories about getting ready for the G7 in Cornwall, most of which I am unable to put into writing. Suffice to say that there is nothing normal about flying the world’s leaders and their entourage into the little toe of Cornwall with its small roads and ancient hedges.
A successful event though and the world saw Cornwall at its finest.
Relentless
Through July, August and September we were developing priorities with the new cabinet in light of a huge budget gap created by an adult social care Covid bulge.
We have some wicked community issues to resolve: a housing market where people wanting to move to Cornwall have priced out local people because wage levels in in the country are lower than average; a care market without enough home care provision; an NHS in crisis. I could go on.
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On the upside, we will be the first county to be carbon neutral, we have natural lines of lithium, we have a brilliantly vibrant third sector and our housebuilding is on steroids.
I forgot to mention the transformation, digitisation, decarbonisation, decentralisation and reduction in our office buildings in line with modern working.
So, as we move towards the end of the year and all of the work to publish a draft business plan and MTFP for consultation is over, I can look back over the last year and reflect on the successes and those things that didn’t work so well.
In listening to my teams they tell me they are on their knees, tired and in many cases have fallen with Covid. Our year has been relentless, we have been mostly working at home and our teams have missed the physical connections.
But, we have continued to deliver unbelievable things, at pace, with little additional resource and with good humour.
As always, our next year will be challenging. We have big ambitions, and I am personally looking forward to picking up even more of those “you-would-just-never-believe-it” stories for my memoirs.
Tracie Langley is chief operating officer and section 151 officer at Cornwall Council.
Photo by De an Sun on Unsplash
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