Denbighshire Shortlisted For Leadership Award
Denbighshire County Council is delighted to have been shortlisted for a prestigious local government achievement award.
The Council has been shortlisted in The MJ Achievement Awards 2016 (Senior Leadership Team category), which recognises the vital role of the senior management team in a local authority and its impact on service delivery and successful organisational change.
There are 105 finalists and 41 commendations for a total of 17 MJ awards in 2016, with only three councils from Wales amongst the finalist s– Denbighshire, Carmarthenshire and City of Swansea.
In the Senior Leadership Team category, Denbighshire will be up against competition from Peterborough City Council, Suffolk County Council, Southend Borough Council and Trafford Council. The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony being held in London on June 16.
Dr Mohammed Mehmet, Chief Executive of Denbighshire County Council said: “We are delighted to have been shortlisted in this very prestigious category for our efforts to enhance and demonstrate clear and effective leadership.
“Our leadership culture in Denbighshire is defined by our commitment to working together as an organisation; clear accountabilities; being transparent in the way we do business and a strong focus on delivering high quality services for our residents.
“We are proud of how we have provided strong leadership in delivering an ambitious £200m capital investment programme, as well as reducing our revenue expenditure by 15% without adversely affecting services we offer to the public. During these significant times of change and challenges we have continued to perform as the best or amongst the top two councils in Wales. We are fiercely proud of this achievement.
In 2009 the Council pledged to become a “high performing council, close to its communities”. This pledge followed the publication of two critical inspection reports (by Estyn and the Wales Audit Office), both highlighting poor leadership amongst their many recommendations that needed addressing. The Council responded by placing a greater focus on developing strong leadership, a programme of cultural change, a greater focus on its corporate priorities and introducing greater scrutiny of our work.
The transformation of the organisation over the following years resulted in a further inspection by Estyn grading leadership as “excellent”, describing Denbighshire’s way of doing business as “sector leading”. A further inspection by the Wales Audit Office in 2012 came to a similar conclusion.
Dr Mehmet added: “We wanted to learn positively from our experiences and embrace the changes needed. We made a commitment to be accountable and transparent, to work together and to provide strong leadership, whilst putting the resident at the heart of everything we did.
“We have developed systems to challenge our services, involving external regulators and our own councillors. We scrutinise our performance vigorously and we have a stringent process to set and manage budgets.
“We have cross-party support for our corporate plan which highlights the key projects that fall under each of our corporate priorities.
“Our leadership model is fully embedded in the way we do business. There is consistent high performance and continuing improvement, which provides autonomy for services to deliver to the best of their ability, whilst having effective leadership in place.
“The fact that we have been shortlisted for this MJ Award is a testament to the hard work that the whole organisations has put in place to be amongst the best performing councils in Wales”.
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