Tuesday, 6 March 2007

As it was my first day at the office for a while, I arrived for work this morning at about 7:30 am. And of course I had to spend time catching up on e-mails - what did people do with themselves before e-mail?

It turns out that my early start was well planned: the south-bound route into Watford was closed around 8:00 due to some accidents or other. WCVS’s counselling course was due to begin at 9:30 am but participants were still arriving after 10:30.

Meanwhile, I was meeting with Sha-Lee about the next stages of our Value and Volumes work, and then I spent time with Sue chewing over how WCVS will cope with her departure. I gather from Sue that the Watford Credit Union successfully moved in over the weekend to become our new neighbours.

A busy day for meetings

In the afternoon, I had a choice of three meeting. Watford Learning Partnership were meeting, and Vanessa agreed to attend in my place. Herts CVS were also meeting, but I passed over this to chair the meeting of the Hertfordshire Compact Working Group.

So much is currently happening on voluntary sector Compacts, and particularly in Hertfordshire: in April there will be a major Hertfordshire-wide conference on transforming public services (pulled together almost single-handedly by Andrew Burt), Hertfordshire’s PCTs are possibly returning to the Compact table, NCVO have produced a new system for evaluating Compacts, Watford Borough Council is looking to reinvigorate our local Compact, Hertfordshire has a new draft Code of Practice for Funding and Procurement, Three Rivers and Welwyn Hatfield Councils may soon actually move to develop Compacts, Hertfordshire County Council has again won a commendation for its Compact work, and NAVCA (with a tiny bit of help from WCVS) have got the Cabinet Office to “Compact-proof” its local authority performance awards.

This is heady stuff!

But it was disappointing that so few people attended the meeting of the Hertfordshire Compact Working Group. I think at the peak there were seven of us out of a possibly twenty-plus.

Well, it was a busy day for meetings.