Nick’s Notes Worth Cllr Nick
W
elcome back to Simply Spalding after a very long Covid enforced break. My County Council portfolio covers Emergency Services and we already had some excellent contingency plans in place for a pandemic, but the scale of the COVID-19 pandemic certainly tested those plans to the full. Lincolnshire Fire & Rescue played a major part supporting the Lincolnshire Resilience Forum, chaired by the Police, in their strategic and tactical planning. This included supporting EMAS with ambulance driving, mortuary planning, PPE storage and delivery of PPE to key partners including care homes. We were also fortunate in that many of our retained firefighters were furloughed from their everyday work, which meant that their availability to respond to incidents
Nick Worth, gives you an insight as to what is happening in and around Spalding and the surrounding villages.... was better than at any time in our history. At both County and District level the way we worked changed dramatically, with all office based staff being requested to work from home and most continue to do so. This has meant massive changes to our IT making full use of previously little known video conferencing software such as Zoom, Teams, Lifesize, Skype for Business to name a few! To their great credit the workforce adapted really quickly to the new technology and has now become part of the new normal. Looking ahead it is likely that in the future working practices will involve something like two days in the office and three working from home. There is much debate over this as working from home has its good and bad points and not everyone wants to work from home as many need that interaction and
stimulus that you can only get with your colleagues in the office. I would also like to pay particular tribute to our refuse collectors and grounds maintenance teams working in their ‘Bubbles’ (a new definition now needed in the dictionary!), week in week out delivering our most basic services that maybe we always take for granted and could so easily have fallen over. Well done to them, they are indeed key workers. There are of course many savings to be had and a better quality of life for our workforce. I know that I used to travel around 20,000 miles a year going back and forth from Lincoln and Spalding. Since March I have probably done 1,000 miles but attended meetings in different parts of the County and in London all in the same day using video conferencing, so much more efficient. Meetings are more focussed , but you do miss the social side of it. There comes a point
when you are desperate just to see someone in person! Covid hasn’t stopped us moving forward and over this time we have distributed over £18million in grants for our local businesses and community groups. Unfortunately there will always be a few that don’t meet the criteria and as the Chancellor has said, we can’t help everyone, but we will always try to help where we can. Further investment has come into the Food Enterprise Zone at Holbeach where building work is well underway and The South Western Relief Road in Spalding has started preliminary works near to Enterprise Way ready for the main work to commence in the spring. A £4.5million bid has been put into the government for the Holbeach High Street Fund for which we anticipate hearing the outcome around November. Spalding has formed its own town centre group made up of a mixture of businesses, The Federation of Small Business and the District Council to look at a strategy for the future of the town centre with some anticipated quick wins, alongside some medium and longer term ambitions. Their first meeting was by all accounts a positive one, but it hardly needs saying that the next six months are going to be very difficult for High Streets and retailers across the country. So finally, it’s nice to be back, but Stay Safe, Put your masks on, keep your distance, download the COVID-19 app on your phone, use it and be positive - together we will get through this.
Nick
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