Coronavirus: Peterborough city council chief reports on response and next steps

At the historic first online meeting of Peterborough City Council (Monday, May 11) members of the Cabinet discussed the response to the COVID-19 crisis and what approach should be taken towards recovery.
City council Chief Executive Gillian Beasley, told councillors: “This is the first report to Cabinet in relation to the council’s response to the CORVID-19 crisis.
“It outlines the work being done by the Local Resilience Forum who are Category One Responders, including Local Authorities, the Police, Fire and Ambulance Services, Health, Public Health and other organisations who have come together charged with planning for public emergencies.
“Collectively, they are responsible for mobilising the Influenza Pandemic Plan requiring a group to be set-up called the Strategic Co-ordinating Group of which Peterborough City Council are a part.
“That group are then responsible for the actioning of the various plans to face and defeat the current coronavirus emergency.
“These can include communications, PPE, specific community issues and of course the eventual recovery from this pandemic.
“I co-chair the Strategic Co-ordinating Group with Jan Thomas from the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough CCG and together we declared ‘a major incident’ on 23 March to coincide with the government lockdown plan.
“Since then, we have been working as a planning team and a strategic team to deliver the actions needed to defeat the coronavirus.”
Ms Beasley outlined the most immediate priorities that the council has been following over the past three weeks:

- Understanding and make plans to mitigate against the potential impacts and key risks to delivery of effective critical services, both directly provided and commissioned services.
- Ensuring the sustainability of adult social care during the COVID-19 outbreak, particularly the links with planning and action in the NHS including response to new Hospital Discharge Guidance.
- Ensuring that effective business continuity arrangements are in place to maintain all other critical services and establish a Coordination Hub so that shielded and vulnerable self-isolators are supported with supplies of food, medicine, and other essential support.
- That vulnerable children are supported during the pandemic, including work with schools and settings to ensure that arrangements are in place to support both vulnerable children and children of essential workers and provide accommodation and services to rough sleepers, and those at risk of rough sleeping, to support social distancing and self-isolation.
- Optimising the deployment of staff and volunteers to support critical activity and implement measures to protect and support our workforce in line with national guidelines whist maintaining critical services and allowing effective emergency planning, all while maintaining public trust and confidence by providing reassurance, frequent communication and to amplify the clear public health and Government guidance.


Leader of the Council, Cllr John Holdich said: “As a council we’ve been at the forefront of leading the response to the pandemic, diverting most of our effort to ensuring that the public and businesses are supported through what is an unprecedented emergency in modern times
“We have a significant degree of influence and accountability for the public’s experience of living and working in Peterborough. Our ambition, our relationships with system partners and our significant investment in change and innovation over the past few years, makes us very well placed to contribute to the recovery and redesign that will be required in Peterborough in the coming months and years.
“It is very likely that the Council and the services it delivers may need to be different once we have dealt with the immediate response required by the crisis and when we have understood the future needs of Peterborough’s society as it is re-established post COVID-19.
“While significant levels of local authority resources are redirected to the front line and current emergency, it is important to ring fence capacity and expertise to start planning for the aftermath and recovery as quickly as possible.”
Gillian Beasley added: “To plan for these phases, the Joint Management Team has started to build a recovery framework.
“The first steps will be to identify the risks, both the immediate operational risks and the after-effects that could destabilise organisational and financial sustainability, service delivery, communities and suppliers.
“Then we must forecast the social and economic impact of different scenarios to the Council and communities.
“We need to capture opportunities and think and learn about the changed behavioural aspects that we might wish to permanently embed (for example community resilience and support, climate impacts during lockdown, changed attitudes to travel and agile working)
“And then, of course, we must plan for the reintroduction of those services that have been suspended during the pandemic.”
Cllr John Holdich thanked Gillian Beasley for her report and said: “I think under the circumstances you and your team have worked a miracle bringing together a report so concise as it is.  We as a council thank you and have noted the work that you are doing and we will be doing in the coming months as we draw together to defeat the coronavirus.”