South Kesteven – A district to be proud of
Welcome to South Kesteven, one of the biggest and widespread districts in the UK, covering 365 square miles of some of England's finest countryside. Our four traditional market towns; Grantham, Bourne, Stamford and The Deepings, together with over 80 villages are home to over 130,000 residents.
As you might expect, this presents us with a unique challenge. How best to serve the needs of our urban, densely populated towns and our sparsely populated, widely spread rural communities?
And our population is growing and becoming increasingly diverse. South Kesteven is one of the top five fastest growing rural districts in England with population growth of just under one percent per year – almost twice the rate of increase for the rest of England and Wales. It’s also home to around 3,100 businesses and has a lower unemployment rate than the UK average.
Ours is a beautiful area of rural England. We have a number of nationally renowned visitor attractions, large areas of our district are classified as sites of special scientific interest and the town of Stamford was recently voted one of the top ten places to live by the Daily Telegraph. With our excellent communication links; London is just over an hour away by train, and the A1 and A52 provide easy links by road to the north, south,east and west, making South Kesteven a fantastic place to live.
Our Vision
Here at South Kesteven we have a simple but ambitious vision,
“To provide brilliant services to our customers”.
Everyone at South Kesteven is committed to making this vision a reality. To get there, we need a clear plan for everything we do on your behalf.
How will we deliver “Brilliant Services?”
Our people
We’re a people business and our 700 + staff deliver vital services for the people and business of South Kesteven. Our team has a huge range of skills and experience. They are passionate about customer service with centres in Bourne, The Deepings, Stamford and Grantham and providing brilliant services for you from our depots and offices throughout the district.
People are our biggest and most valuable resource and just as we must improve our buildings and vehicles, we also recognise that it’s important to continue to improve the skills of our people.
Technology
Technology touches all our lives and it gives us countless opportunities to improve our services. The technology behind our CCTV system has made our town centres safer places to be.
We also support hundreds of vulnerable and elderly people with our care alarm system, allowing them to remain living in their own homes for as long as possible.
Spending your money wisely
We want to make sure we get the best value from every pound we spend. We are on course to deliver over £700k in efficiencies which has been reinvested into our priority services. For example, increasing our green bin recycling scheme and further improving our customer service centres.
Our Values
To make sure we identify the issues that are most important to you we use a three step approach we call listening, learning and delivering.
Listening
Taking your views into account and demonstrating a real passion for customer service.
Learning
Being open and honest, and learning from things that go well and do not go so well.
Delivering
Being innovative and using this to do things that make a difference.
What did you tell us your priorities were?
Our priorities match what you told us you wanted more of and what you wanted less of. They are divided into four categories:
Key priorities
Delivering a lot more, a lot better
We’ve identified six key service areas where we’ll make significant investment in people, money and technology to drive substantial improvements in service delivery.
We have achieved a huge amount in the last few years but by working with our residents, we aim to improve further so that we can provide even more brilliant services. We hope you find this website useful. As with all our other services, we will be working hard to improve it, to make it easier to use and would welcome your views on how we can make it better.
Duncan Kerr
Chief Executive
SKDC