Week One London

Follow me on Twitter on @SallySudworth Joining the Learning and Recovery Team in London was exciting. Their work is fast paced and I found myself having to run to jump on board! The task we face is immense. We have over 1000 projects around the country to get underway. The government's expectation is to complete the work before the next Winter period. Anyone who is involved in the delivery of infrastucture projects will know what a challenge this is yet where there's a will there's a way! We have £160m worth of civil engineering to put in place! I'll keep you posted on progress. Witnessing democracy in action was fascinating. Eric Pickles chaired the Ministerial Recovery Group meeting in Westminster and I felt the weight of government scrutiny - no pressure then! One of my personal highlights was walking along the Thames on Tuesday evening. Big Ben is spectacular by night! Next week I am going to ask my team to pause and take stock. They have been in incident mode for many weeks and working at that sort of pace isn't sustainable long term. We'll be planning our approach for the next phase of our work and I'm really looking forward to spending time with them all. There will be further Cabinet office meetings to prepare for and attend as well as working with my colleagues in the National Capital Programme Management Service (ncpms) to secure support from our framework contractors. What am I looking forward to the most in the coming year? Well as a civil engineer who is passionate about her work, I'm looking forward to visiting some of the locations that were savaged by the storms, where we will be carrying out repairs to protect people and communities from further flooding. I'll be posting photographs. Since the storms everyone has an opinion on flooding which is brilliant! I hope to work with the experts in helping to get the facts "out there" so that we can all be better prepared to face the future. I'll update the blog at least once a week but follow me on Twitter for daily updates. With a wing and a prayer and an "army" of people working together we can make this happen!