Board changes:
There have been some changes to the membership of the Board in recent weeks. At last Friday’s meeting, we said cheerio and a huge thank you to our Director of Communications, Wayne Chandai, who has decided to step down from the Board but will remain as an active member of ADSO. Wayne’s achievements in his role have been significant; not least of all a new website and terrific support to the annual conference. We will miss his energy and enthusiasm on the Board, thank him most sincerely for his hard work and hope that he is rightly proud of how he has helped shape ADSO over the last few years. The Board has appointed Joanna Boaler from Essex County Council into Wayne’s role on an acting basis pending the annual elections in November. We welcome Joanna and look forward very much to working with her.
As already covered in a previous bulletin, our board representative for the North-East, Yorkshire and Humberside region, James McLaughlin, has been successful in securing a Director role at Derbyshire Dales District Council and has stepped down from his role at the Board. We thank James for his many years’ dedicated service to ADSO and are pleased that he intends to remain an active member and advocate. We are delighted to welcome back to the Board Michael Robson from North Tyneside Council to take on the region and we hope to announce a second regional rep to work with Michael very soon.
Finally, we were delighted to welcome Liz Kerr from the North of Tyne Combined Authority to her first Board meeting, who along with Trudy Bedford from the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority are joint representatives for the new Themed and Combined Authorities region.
Online training:
The Board considered an excellent paper from our Director of Training on how to move forward as quickly as possible with our online training offer, working closely with our open training programme partners, East Midland Councils. The Board endorsed the proposals unanimously and we look forward to being able to supplement our very successful face-to-face training offer with a range of courses delivered remotely.
Webinar facility:
Along a similar theme, the Board agreed to accelerate the development of ADSO’s webinar facility and we hope to have this in place in the next month or so.
Model Code of Conduct:
We were joined at our meeting by Paul Hoey from Hoey Ainscough Associates, who have been working with the LGA on developing the new model code of conduct. You’ll be aware that the model code is currently out for consultation until 17th August, so it was a timely discussion. The Board used the Zoom breakout rooms function (get us, eh?) to talk in more detail about the consultation questions and seek guidance and clarification from Paul. It was a very useful exercise and has helped ADSO to begin to frame its response to the consultation, which we’ll post on the website to offer members an opportunity to comment on before the deadline in August.
ADSO Awards:
Finally, the deadline for the ADSO Awards 2020 is now only a little over three weeks away (31st July). We are hugely proud of our wonderful governance colleagues all over the country and really want to celebrate your fantastic achievements with the awards this year. I really want the judges to have to do some serious head-scratching to choose the winners, so please get those nominations in to me – peter.sass@richmondandwandsworth.gov.uk – as soon as possible!