Looking back to August, Derbyshire’s looked after children have had some incredible GCSE and A-Level results this year – huge congratulations to them all and to our dedicated teams who enable our young people to focus on their studies and achieve such great outcomes. I hope that those of you with children who are at the same stages have been able to celebrate their successes, as well as get good plans in place where results have proved more challenging.
There will be more success for colleagues to celebrate when on Wednesday, the Our Derbyshire Awards evening takes place. From a total of 289 nominations, a cross-council group of colleagues made the difficult decisions to select 22 finalists across seven categories to attend the awards evening. Our Derbyshire Award Finalists. It has been a very strong field of entries this year and my thanks go to all of you who submitted a nomination. Whilst not everyone can be the winners, the strength of the Our Derbyshire Awards is that colleagues are recognising their peers, their teams and their managers and it is this which makes the awards such a positive initiative. Congratulations to all of you who were nominated, thank you to all those of you who have taken the time to nominate and recognise your colleagues and good luck to all the finalists for the awards evening when the winners will be announced.
The work to develop our LGR submission is progressing well and to ensure we understand what is important to you with respect to this significant initiative we recently commenced a staff survey on local government reorganisation. Thank you to everyone who has responded. So far we’ve received more than 571 responses but we’re keen to hear from more colleagues about proposals for having fewer councils in Derby and Derbyshire, to provide better value and create stronger communities.
As you’ll recall, Government has instructed councils in areas where there are 2 ‘tiers’ of councils to come up with proposals for moving to a single tier known as unitary councils, and we want to know your opinions on local government reorganisation specifically as a council employee.
The survey is anonymous and should take about 10 minutes to complete so please do take a few moments to share your views at employee views on local government reorganisation in Derby and Derbyshire before the survey closes on 10 October.
We promised to keep you up-to-date with the latest developments and next steps for local government reorganisation in our area.
The public engagement we carried out with local residents and businesses on options for reducing the number of councils in Derby and Derbyshire from 10 to 2 resulted in more than 4,500 questionnaire responses.
We’ve also asked key stakeholders such as emergency services and other local organisations for their views and we’re in the process of analysing all of the feedback we’ve received to help decide the best way forward.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be putting together our final proposal for simplifying local Government in Derby and Derbyshire. Cabinet Members will consider the proposal at a meeting in November in time for the final proposal being sent to Government no later than 28 November.
Local district and borough councils have been working with Derby City Council on a separate proposal. Government is expected to give feedback on both proposals early in 2026 and decide which one it intends to take forward for further public consultation.
Meanwhile, from a financial perspective we have had a good start to the year. Our first quarter forecast for the year end is that we will have an overspend of just over £1 million. This is a significant improvement compared to a forecast overspend at the same point 2 years ago of £46 million and the position at the same point last year of a forecast overspend of £20 million. The much-reduced forecast overspend figure of just over £1 million for this financial year (2025 to 2026) reveals the results of delivering wide-scale efficiencies together with a programme of savings put in place across all areas of spending to reduce costs. My thanks to colleagues for their exceptional work to deliver these significant savings which have led to this much improved position.
However, despite this good news, we continue to face significant financial pressures, driven by high costs and increasing demand for services as we start to prepare our budget for next financial year (2026 to 2027).
You may recall at the start of this year, I wrote to you about the ways in which we are progressing the reshaping of our services to improve, modernise and deliver efficiencies. On 1 April, we commenced the implementation of our new One Council operating model by transferring business support colleagues from across the council into one team to create a single business support service. However, we have much more to do, not only to stay on track this financial year but also to ensure we can set a balanced budget for 2026 to 2027 and into the medium term.
A significant portion of our spend is attributed to social care, especially in adult social care and health, which has a higher than average spend. In addition, our own internal benchmarking suggests that our overall operating costs remain higher and that we employ more people than other comparable councils.
To help identify where there is potential to make further changes to the way we operate and generate savings, we secured some additional external support from PwC. A paper was taken to 3 July’s Cabinet meetingsetting out where the council could become more efficient and effective, which included reviewing and, where necessary, restructuring staffing to make sure it is fit for purpose.
Priority service areas, such as SEND and addressing potholes would be improved through efficiency, rather than staffing reductions. In other services, savings and efficiencies would be made by deleting vacant posts first and reducing agency staff second. We would only consider whether it was necessary to reduce the numbers of staff on permanent contracts once these options had been exhausted.
A further report considering the One Council transformation programme will be considered by Cabinet within the next few months, and we will keep you updated with progress.
There was one day in August where I got particularly wet, but this was not due to the weather! Charlie Greaves, Digital Learning Lead in the Learning and Development Team organised a fund-raising event at lunchtime at County Hall and asked me if I would participate. Charlie was selected to carry the Baton of Hope for part of the Derbyshire leg on 13 September, with her own experiences of suicide being a driving force for her wanting to participate. The Baton of Hope is the UK largest suicide prevention initiative, and those affected or bereaved by suicide in some way carry the baton across a dedicated leg with stops along the way with events, activities, and entertainment.
To raise funds for this important cause Charlie organised a wet sponge throwing event on the terrace at County Hall. Having agreed to be involved, I decided it wouldn’t be fair to be the only target for the sponges (!), and so with only a little bit of persuasion half a dozen other senior colleagues joined me. The event was brilliantly organised by Charlie, and everyone had a lot of fun taking the opportunity to throw wet sponges – we all got quite wet and some people (especially Charlie!) were very accurate! Thank you to Charlie for organising this event and for everyone’s generous donations.