It’s been very unusual is an understatement
Council chief executive Cleland Sneddon reflects on an unprecedented 12 months at the helm
In 2020, South Lanarkshire Council entered a new era as Cleland Sneddon took over as chief executive.
At the same time, thousands of miles away on the other side of the globe, one of the biggest crisis of the 21st century was just starting out.
Within weeks, the UK was locked down. People were instructed to stay at home, schools were closed and events from football to concerts were cancelled.
One thing that didn’t stop was the local council and, one year on, I had a virtual meeting with South Lanarkshire’s chief executive to discuss a challenging first year in charge.
“It’s been very unusual, I think is the understatement,” Cleland said. “Obviously, all public bodies prepare for a range of different resilience issues and we’d been through things like swine flu and avian flu. “I must admit, when I first heard about Covid, I had no concept about what we were going to go into.
“It’s been a challenge. I think
I’ve missed a lot of the stuff I intended on doing in my first year in the job because we have been focused on Covid.
“In other ways, it brings you very close to your team and it’s meant a different type of relationship with communities so there’s some positives.”
In January last year, news bulletins started telling the tale of what we now know as Covid-19 following the initial outbreak in Wuhan.
“By the end of February, beginning of March, we knew this was something different and we could see the scale of it,” Cleland continued.
“I had asked our guys to look at setting up a wellbeing line so that people who were maybe without some community support or they had to self-isolate, then they had somewhere to phone in.
“That sounds pretty normal now because we’ve had these for a year but at the time we had nothing like that.
“Our IT service built a system to accommodate these calls and to record all the needs of people and they did it over a weekend. We were up and running on the
Monday morning with a product that didn’t exist on the Friday.
“What that allowed us to do was to make arrangements with local pharmacists to pick up medication and take them to people’s doors and before the national food parcels started coming out we were doing emergency food supplies.
“I think we ultimately ended up giving that same system to about eight or nine other authorities to allow them to very quickly come into play.
“That was the bit where we thought: ‘There’s something
We knew this was something different and we could see the scale of it Cleland Sneddon
different here, there’s something we need to do and we need to do this at real pace.’”
Since then, things have changed drastically at Council HQ and to illustrate these changes, Cleland described an incident recently when the building was evacuated because of a fire alarm.
He said: “It was early in the morning, about 9am. We went down to the car park and I counted. There were 57 people. This building normally has round about 1,000.
“We have facilitated people to work from home to such a great extent because of the technology we have rolled out.
“There are a few core functions that we need to have people in but that’s a huge change. We do that deliberately so that people are completely safe in this building.”
As a result, the way people communicate has had to move online and Cleland pulled on his previous experience with another local authority.
“I’d come from Argyll and Bute and because of the geography there, they had been using Skype for business a lot,” he added.
“This wasn’t the technology that tended to be used a lot here and quite early when I came in we identified the potential.
“We changed orders for IT kit into orders for laptops and Microsoft Teams has become the universal mechanism that people have been using.
“To be honest, people have embraced it pretty quickly to the extent you actually think why did we ever just jump in a car to do face-to-face meetings.”
Throughout the year, council staff have risen to the challenges posed by the pandemic.
From the refuse workers who made sure the bins were still being emptied and the social care staff who continued to care for residents, to the leisure and culture staff who became welfare volunteers and the staff behind the new PPE hub, which has distributed more than 26 million items across the region.
“I’m quite proud of the guys,” Cleland added.
“There were other areas of the services that we had to drop down but to be able to ensure people were safe, they were fed, they were able to get medications, they were able to call for any assistance, these were enormous undertakings.
“We also had amazing support from community organisations who sometimes just diverted what they normally do and then a whole range of organisations that just popped up, particularly in small communities, that came together.”
With the vaccination programme well underway, the focus for the council will be about the recovery from the pandemic over the coming months and years.
Cleland said: “I don’t anticipate any time in the future that we would rush back to what we previously had.
“How South Lanarkshire – not South Lanarkshire Council, South Lanarkshire the whole thing – recovers from this is hugely important.
“I’m from Lanarkshire, I’ve worked most of my working life in Lanarkshire.
“The impact on poverty and deprivation on people’s life chances is the thing that really drives you. It’s the thing that gets you out of bed.”