Tuesday, 20 March 2007

This morning I travelled to Stevenage to Chair a meeting of the Hertfordshire Infrastructure Consortium. Kally was there from CapacityBuilders and I think she likes the Hertfordshire set-up – at least she claims to quote us as an example of good practice when she visits other regions.

The big issue for HIC is that we must use the new CapacityBuilders toolkit to assess our performance and set out targets for the future. We need to look at accountability, our engagement with front-line organisations, access to services, linkages to local strategic plans, etc, etc.

I suspect that we are going to find this quite challenging – although we are certainly better prepared than many other Consortia around the country.

In the afternoon, I finalised a covering note for the draft 2007-08 budget, read through some excellent information sheets that Vanessa has produced following her recent trip to Vale CVS in South Wales, and prepared for Wednesday’s meeting with Watford Borough Council.

In the evening, I finished reading Pretty girl in scarlet rose (8). A book of real originality. But why does the author persist in saying he lives not in Islington, or Highbury, or Finsbury Park, but “near the Arsenal”; that is so wrong in so many different ways.