Another short week for us (thank you May Bank Holiday) with the sun making another appearance giving some of us the opportunity to enjoy a little time outside to have lunch or go for a walk.

Plate of yummy looking food infront of a mountain landscape

Welcome Mary!

We’re delighted to welcome a new member of the team: Mary who has joined us from the Recreation team.

New Head of Digital, Data and Technology

This week we welcome Ray Sherry, our new Head of Digital, Data and Technology. Heledd met with Ray for an introductory chat. Ray shared his ambition to develop people, teams and culture and talked a bit about the SkyScanner model – focussed on multidisciplinary agile squads, and removing friction to enable work to flow much better in organisations.

Matt Harrington (who’s been our Interim Head of Digital, Data and Technology since January), is with us for another couple of weeks, we wish him well in his new venture and thank him for all his support over the last few months.

Planning and development

Shaun has mainly been working on Planning and Development guidance this week, with the consultation topic list finally taking the plunge into HTML from its traditional PDF.

New guidance on air quality assessments for planning applications has been agreed and is off for translation.

The first draft of guidance on siting telecommunications equipment is with the Planning and Development team for comments.

Volunteering options for a team day

Hannah has started to look at dates for our team volunteering day, which I’m sure is a bit like herding cats as we’re all dotted about the country. It will be nice for us to all get together in person and help do some good at the same time.

What else we’ve been up to…

  • James has been working on updating flood content pages to coincide with the launch of the updated ‘Check your flood risk by postcode’ tool
  • Working with the water abstraction team, we’ve agreed new guidance on dewatering mines, incorporating a troublesome Regulatory decision
  • Sam, Laura and Phil held a forms workshop with species subject matter experts and worked on a new page structure for bird licensing.
  • Phil investigated a new Beta feature in Smart Survey for case management.
  • Toyah met with marine colleagues to progress work on new conservation assessment content.
  • Hannah has had another week of learning the Digital publishing ropes.
  • Kim has started training on amending/creating Workflows and forms in Hornbill.

Final note

We’re ending this week with a little pic of Blake to wish you all a lovely and restful weekend.

Blake the dog having a nap