Councils should use imperial measures

There is much debate about whether the Conservative pledge to hold an in/out referendum on the EU will win votes from UKIP, or whether UKIP supporters are more concerned with other issues such as immigration. However Lord Ashcroft's research last year suggested that UKIP's support base stemmed not from policy, but outlook. It found exasperation with the political and administrative class speaking in a different language to the rest of us. Too much jargon and not enough straight talking.

If a council says it is "engaging with communities" it is a pretty good sign that it isn't. Often Conservative councillors find their capacity to think eroded by all the bureaucrat-speak.  For example, take the word "investment" - as in "investing in children", "investing in libraries", "investing in parks", "investing in the community", "investing in people". What is meant is spending. Such spending might or might not be justified. By calling it "investment" users avoid making a rigorous judgment.

It is against this background that the newly elected UKIP councillors in East Sussex have challenged the use of metric measures. Good for them.

Selby is the Council of the Week

Local Government Minister Brandon Lewis MP with his series celebrating excellence in our Town Hall 

This week's champion council is very different from other examples I have shared over the last few weeks. Back in April 2011, Selby District Council became a 'commissioning' council. The service wing - the bulk of the organisation - split from the District Council to become 'Access Selby'. The District Council remained as a core body, with only 14 employees. These include the Chief Executive, Monitoring Officer and various democracy support officers. Access Selby now has around 220 members of staff - a 30% cost in staffing levels.

This reduction in numbers has not had the negative impact on services that one might expect. Indeed, customer satisfaction is now above 90% and significant savings have been included into the bargain.

Selby have not stopped there however. The council is now in talks to bring about greater co-operation with North Yorkshire County Council. This co-operation would include the sharing of both frontline and back room services. We have seen over the past few weeks the huge financial benefits such agreements can have for residents, as the savings are translated into council tax cuts or freezes. I have every confidence that Selby, a council which has already used new and innovative methods to cut costs and improve services, will be highly successful in this new venture. Selby residents will continue to enjoy better services and, through cutting unnecessary costs, pay less each month in council tax.

Improving the performance of the Whitehall/Town Hall machine

Cllr David Burbage, Leader of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, says removing Town Hall officials should be made easier

It’s the old story that it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.

Politicians are formally / properly / brutally (select your preferred adverb) held to account by the electorate every four or five years. Moreover, we are also held to account by the press and public, the blogosphere and the political opposition - all of the time.

Think about the following scenario – Party A fails to operate a successful Council, because although their hearts were in the right place, things just didn’t happen and there was underperformance. So Party B takes over that failing local authority by winning an election. . . but then has to deliver its programme through precisely the same team who let down Party A for all those years.

Eric Pickles’ announcement that it will become easier to remove senior town hall officials is to be welcomed. Under the current rules, it is virtually impossible to remove a top official who doesn’t want to move without incurring maybe hundreds of thousands of pounds expenditure either in pursuing a capability procedure or a mutually agreed compensation. Now, anyone wrongly defenestrated should be protected by the existing employment laws that apply to everyone else.

Equality without paperwork

In a guest poster the blogger Systems Thinking for Girls advises on on what councils could really do to reduce discrimination

Equality Impact Assessments are worse than polishing a turd. They add a new turd.

Take the case of Adult Social Care. A council buys hundreds of level-access showers at a discounted price for disabled people. This is done in the name of efficiency - economies of scale. The council says to disabled people, “you can have anything you like, as long as it’s a level access shower”. But not all disabled people want or need a level access shower. Some people have one because it is ‘free’, others have one but find it’s too complicated to use. For many, a new shower is unnecessary because they would prefer a modification to their own bath. But no matter, this is the council, they’ll get what they’re given.

This service costs the council a lot of money. It is universally poor because it does not treat disabled people as individuals with different needs.  The job of a social worker is to get the assessment form filled in and get back to the office to put it into the system to meet the target. Never mind what the person needs, a service shaped solution is pushed onto everyone because the procurement specialists think in terms of unit costs. Social workers can only recommend solutions off the standard menu. Meanwhile, people’s basic needs go unmet and the council has to pay to store hundreds of unwanted showers.

The additional turd is added when, in an attempt to shield the council against legal action, the manager writes in the Equality Impact Assessment under the ‘Disability Section’:

“A Plain English version of the Joint Commissioning Strategy for Vulnerable Adults Executive Summary and Action Plan will be developed”

Great! What a treat. You can’t have a wash but at least you can read the Joint Commissioning Strategy for Vulnerable Adults - the very strategy that recommended buying all those duff showers! Absurd.

Two turds. Two costs.

The first cost - providing a service that doesn’t meet peoples’ needs. A cost that comes back to bite you because people return later with more serious problems that cost more to deal with.

The second cost - paying someone to write and monitor an Equality
Impact Assessment that doesn’t deal with the cause of the first turd.
This is not unusual.

Who wants to equal access to read a document about a universally bad service?

A good Adult Social Care service recognises that we want:

• Help when we need it.
• To be understood.
• To be listened to.
• To be treated with respect.
• Not have to repeat ourselves or fill in loads of forms.
• Not be passed from pillar to post.
• To deal with the same person

How does a manager do this within the budget?

It’s simple:

First, get rid of everything that stops the frontline workers from meeting someone’s needs. In the case of adult social care:

• The requirement to fill in databases.
• Only being allowed to offer services from standard menus of equipment or care (commissioned based on the flawed logic of economies of scale).
• Only being allowed to do certain things (more than my job’s worth).
• The requirement to meet government targets.
• Filling in endless assessment forms.
• Eligibility criteria (you’re not vulnerable or ill enough yet, come back when you are).
• Pressure to save money in the short term

Second, social workers spend only 26% of their time with their clients – the rest of the time they are feeding the system with forms and data for the following people to process:

• Procurement officers (the ones who buy hundreds of duff showers)
• Data entry officers
• Policy officers
• Strategy officers
• Access teams
• Referrals teams
• Personalisation officers
• Equality officers
• Performance officers

If social workers stop filling in databases and forms, the back office won’t have much to do. What should they do instead? How about retraining them to help social workers instead of getting in their way?

Now you have two lots of people available to do a proper job. The original social workers and the ex pen pushers.

Train both lots of staff in professional social work - dealing with people on a case by case basis, in their own homes and contexts, helping them to live the lives they want to lead. Once the assessment forms, templates, targets and procurement rules have gone, social workers can spend time in people’s homes understanding what they need.

They can work creatively with people to help them solve their problems and where possible, help them to lead more independent lives. If it’s legal and ethical, professional social workers should be trusted to get on and do it.

This approach reaches the hard to reach every day, not twice a year via a survey. Equality is designed in from the beginning. Everyone is understood as an individual, not as a category or number to meet a target. Social workers learn. The service becomes truly person-centred and not procurement or legislation centred. It’s cheaper because you only spend money on what people actually need instead of wasting money on stuff no one wants. Staff feel good because they get to do a good job.

Treat people as individuals and equality on the frontline looks after itself.

Councils advised to scrap "Equalities Impact Assessments"

The absurdity of "Equalities Impact Assessments" has been chronicled at the Systems Thinking for Girls blog - by someone who used to write dozens of them.

Following the Prime Minister speech to the CBI, the Local Government Minister Brandon Lewis has sent guidance to councils to scrap them.

Mr Lewis says:

The Government Equalities Office has given clear guidance to Whitehall departments that Equality Impact Assessments are not and have never been a legal requirement. Indeed, they can be resource intensive and take staff away from planning and delivering important public services.

This advice applies to other parts of the public sector. Local councils should be able to use their judgment to pay due regard to equality without resorting to time consuming, bureaucratic, tick-box exercises at the end of the decision-making process.

Windsor and Maidenhead Council scraps post of Chief Executive

Cllr David Burbage, the Leader of the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead Council and recently nominated for the Taxpayers Alliance Pin-Up of 2012, reports

At our full Council meeting on Wednesday Members resolved to change the senior officer structure to remove the traditional post of Chief Executive Officer and replace it instead with a “first amongst equals” structure with four Directors, one of whom is the Managing Director.

This arrangement will save over £200,000 on an annual basis, and deliver a better interface between the executive Members and their teams in the relevant Council departments.

The salary level of the most senior Council officer will fall by around 10%, the new Managing Director position to be at £129,000 rather than the £140,000 + performance related pay of the former Chief Executive.

The proof of the pudding will, of course, be in the eating.

Taxpayer funding to apply for Judicial Reviews must end

Last year there were 11,200 Judicial Reviews. This compares with 4,207 in 2004. Only the very rich or the very poor can afford to apply for Judicial Reviews - usually they are undertaken by the latter who can claim Legal Aid. Thus the taxpayer is paying for the lawyers on both sides.

Nobody knows what the total cost is but the costs for each case would often by £100,000 - sometimes less but often a lot more. That is just for the initial application, much more in the minority of cases where a full hearing is granted. Then there are all the QCs getting fat on the money paid by public authorities before they consult on a proposal to try and avoid a Judicial Review being mounted.

I would be surprised if total public spending on Judicial Reviews was under a billion a year, probably much more. A billion pounds is a lot of money - it could for instance raise the threshold on our earnings before were start being charged income tax from £8,105 to £8,305. 

The ultimate success rate of these Judicial Reviews is a tiny 1.6%. Routinely a Judicial Review is undertaken in the name of the poor - yet the upshot is that the process transfers money from low paid taxpayers to high paid lawyers.

Heseltine's call for council reorganisation is likely to be rebuffed

I can see the advantages of unitary authorities. There is more accountability. For instance, if the Council Tax bill is made up of different elements, it is harder to be clear about who is responsible for it. There are also savings in having fewer layers of politicians and officials. Lord Heseltine is producing a report which is expected to call for a "path to unitary status."

On the other hand, voluntary arrangements for sharing services can also achieve savings without forced reorganisation. In any event, Lord Heseltine's proposal is not likely to be taken up.

The Department for Communities and Local Government feels that now is not the time. Even if there might be long term savings, the short term costs of reorganisation are considerable.

The Municipal Journal reports (£):

Government keeps vast council snooping powers

Despite the constraints of coalition in many areas the Conservatives have delivered on areas where the civil service might have been expected to be obstructive. But the promise to curtail powers of entry by the state into our homes has not been kept. Far from slashing the 1,400 different grounds under which council staff can enter your home without a warrant, the Government have added 20 more.

The Lords have proposed an amendment to the Protection of Freedoms Bill which would have greatly reduced this list. But the Home Office Minister James Brokenshire rejects this and says instead there will be a "review." Sir Humphrey seems to have him well trained.

This should be an important issue for the Conservatives who regard, as Margaret Thatcher put it, "the state as servant not master." One would hope that there would be a few liberals in the Liberal Democrats who would also be concerned about it.

Councils should learn from orchestras

No doubt much money is wasted on management consultants in both local and central government - although this is an area where there is rather more rigour than under the Labour Government. While they grew rich the consultants would often find it frustrating - all the time wasting meetings, the reports that nobody read, the confusion over what the project was supposed to be about.

But this should not mean that councils should be inflexible about their employment arrangements. Sometimes taking someone on for a particular task - which might be temporary or part time - makes perfectly good sense. It could well offer good value for money. Of course it should be done within the rules and it should be transparent. But there is nothing wrong with hiring people via personal services company.

There was a predictably shoddy and politically biased piece of BBC journalism this week on this subject in a Radio 4 File on 4 programme by Fran Abrams. I have already written about it in a Daily Mail blog.

In contrast I found it refreshing to read a column (£) by Derek Myers, chairman of SOLACE (the trade union for Council Chief Execs) for the Municipal Journal. As part of an economy drive we share him as our Chief Executive in Hammersmith and Fulham with Kensington and Chelsea.