Thursday, 31 May 2007

I again planned to work from home today to make progress on our BASIS bid and prepare for our audit next week. But circumstances conspired against me and I first needed to pay a visit to the office: I stole in around dawn to minimise traffic delays.

Back home I started work about 8:30 and had ten urgent telephone calls to make before I could really focus on anything else. I managed to complete these and spend some very useful hours on BASIS.

At one point I had a meeting on the Herts Compact at HCC County Hall with Andrew Burt (of HCC) and Jacquie Hime (of N Herts CVS). As I've previously written, there are some serious issues emerging for the Compact.

In this meeting, we were each wearing our "Herts Compact Group" hats, so our brief was simply to examine process and on this the discussions were productive. I think we also reached a sort-of-solution to the long-running problems over HomeStart funding where HCC appear to find themselves in a bit of a mess. But give the hats we were wearing, this "solution" has to focus on getting the various parties to resume meaningful dialogue.

All this may be too late to rescue the 8 June Doing Business with the Public Sector event organised by HCC. The first invitation was only circulated on 16 May and this is simply not sufficient notice for people to organise themselves and their diaries. And faced with a diary conflict, the HomeStart situation certainly does not encourage people to give HCC the benefit of the doubt.