Another month, another new word – pingdemic! No doubt you will have seen in the news, or even be experiencing yourself, a shortage of staff due this new phenomenon called a pingdemic. This is further exacerbated by the years of budget cuts councils have been forced to make, meaning that most waste services are now operating with the minimum of staff to begin with, all year round. Added to this is the HGV driver shortage and so it’s no wonder local authorities are having to withdraw certain services in order to maintain the more essential ones. However, as from Monday 16 August, those that are fully vaccinated can avoid the need to self-isolate, so hopefully this will help ease the situation a lot of councils are experiencing.
I do feel that a lot of the general public have no idea what council workers do, and that they still think we sit in our offices, feet up with endless amounts of tea and coffee, being paid large sums of money to dream up ways in which we can make our council taxpayers lives as miserable as possible. You and I know this isn’t true, and local authorities are full of hard-working people trying to make a difference to their community, not just in their professional lives but also out of hours. Many go above and beyond to make their part of the world that bit better and take pride in doing so.
Which is why I always look forward to judging the entries for the LARAC awards. It reminds me of what a difference we are making, and it’s great to be able to recognise and reward that difference. The deadline for entries to the awards has passed and so me and the panel of judges will be heads down soon reading through all the entries in the six categories. We hope to announce the shortlisted entries shortly after the judging day on 1 September, and the winners will be announced live at the LARAC Celebration event on 6 October (the evening of day 1 of the LARAC UK Conference).
I think one of the reasons why local authorities can be resilient in the face of adversity is due to a lot of sharing best practice, and so I wanted to take this opportunity to give a shameless plug to the LARAC Discussion Pages. Please do take a look, post/reply to others where you can, as you never know when you will need that same favour. You will need to login to this part of the website, and so if you need any help, please contact admin@larac.org.uk
