VV_Feb Web 21-compressed

practising cooking ginger biscuits, decorated
cupcakes and a Bakewell tart so they are
perfection on the day. Home baked goodies
have been a real hit as we all live, work and
school at home. For the men’s cooking, your
skills at savoury scones or even a mocha
roulade, (the recipe will be on our web site,
Facebook page and the Village Voice web page
too), will give you a great chance to win the
men’s cooking trophy. Young designers can
make a tin can lantern, hints will be on our
website, for Young Cooks a savoury quiche.
For the under 10’s the entries they can make
in advance of the show are; a bug “hotel”, a key
rung and a greetings card made using
thumbprints of animals. You could also practice
your pizza making skills as well.
Printed schedules will be placed in the usual
places in the village for people, unless things
worsen. We will let you know when they are
available. Put Saturday 19th September Village
Show in your diary and look forward seeing you
on the day. Keep looking out for more news in
Village Voice, follow us on our Facebook page
and look out for our new website.
• pennandtylersgreenvillageshow.com
• facebook.com/pennandtylersgreenvillageshow
Buckinghamshire Council Update
Buckinghamshire Council has now been live for
nearly 10 months, and what a 10 months it has
been. No one expected that on 1st April 2020
when we were pulling all 5 councils together to
begin as one, we would be thrown into the most
serious pandemic of our lifetimes. We were
immediately in lockdown and having to arrange
for around 3000 staff to work from home, which
is where many of them still are. This involved
ensuring computer equipment was enabled and
provided, chairs where necessary and also
phones. Around 172 members of staff were
asked to change their roles and work in critical
areas such as food support hubs, food
distributions, prescription collections, transport
to medical appointments. We worked with
partners to keep our residents and particularly
www.pennandtylersgreen.org.uk
Village Voice February/March 2021
the vulnerable safe, and staff even undertook
regular phone calls to check on those shielding.
All this as well as dealing with over 200
councillors becoming members of the new
council because the elections were cancelled.
This meant new email addresses for all, transfer
of old inboxes, new equipment provided where
necessary, putting all meetings on Teams and
training everyone to use Teams The latter in the
initial days being a complete nightmare, “you’re
on mute” becoming the most used phrase!
We also co ordinated offers of support of PPE
production, organised PPE procurement for
those in Bucks who needed it, distributed over
£85m in grants to businesses, offered business
rate relief and worked with Bucks Business first
to offer advice and other support to businesses.
We provided support to care homes and their
staff as well as stepping up support to schools
who were providing care to the children of key
workers, and virtually eliminated rough sleeping
during the pandemic.
All of this whilst standing up a major new
council with all that that involved and carried on
our “business as usual” such as planning
applications, housing, social care, waste
collection and disposal to name only a tiny
proportion of what your Council does. Granted
some of these services suffered either from staff
sickness or delays as it is not easy to do all of
this from home but in general staff have been
amazing in the way they adapted so quickly.
Now here we are again, Lockdown no 3 and
the Council is stepping all these things up again.
However in addition we are now providing
support to the NHS to help them with the
vaccine rollout which is a huge organisational
challenge, setting up some lateral flow testing,
undertaking contact tracing and set up the
Councils Helping Hand service to help anyone
worried about food or warmth during the winter
season and dealing with food vouchers for
schools. We have also started our transformation
reviews in each department where we still have
to review everything to fully bring all the
councils together. In some areas each
7