Don’t blame councils for the harm done by government ideology

First published in the Guardian Tuesday 21st August 2018

Far from ‘smashing up the public sector’, we’re trying to provide services in the face of austerity

Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty has vividly described “pulverism” – the idea that councils should use financial crises not merely to make savings but to smash up and reshape the public sector – and claims it has gone nationwide.

No it hasn’t, at least not in my experience of working in all kinds of councils around the country over the past decade.

Most councils, far from being ideological about smashing up the public sector, have been trying their best to mitigate the impact of the ideology and policies of austerity that successive governments have put in place since the coalition introduced the first round of cuts in 2010.

There has been a clear and deliberate ambition by the Conservatives to reduce the size of the public sector and blame the national economic crisis on public spending, with local authorities bearing the brunt of the cuts. Spending on neighbourhood services, such as bins, planning, potholes and leisure, for instance, fell by more than £3bn between 2012 and 2017.

David Cameron’s “big society” idea, which is being revived, was an explicit attempt to shift responsibility for essential services to communities, the voluntary sector and individuals. And it was clear to anyone who worked in local government that Eric Pickles, communities and local government secretary from 2010 to 2015, had nothing but contempt for councils. He continually put councils in no-win situations with diktats about weekly bin collections (for no good reason, as many councils had legitimately found ways of saving money by reducing weekly collections, in consultation with residents) while slashing their core funding and refusing to allow them to increase council tax.

Most councils reacted sensibly to all this. They assessed what they legally had to provide and what was most important to residents. They looked at the benefits of their discretionary services and the impact of cutting them. And they looked at how to run things differently internallywithout affecting frontline services.

These impact assessments were provided so councillors could make hard decisions on cuts. Some councils then decided to cut services such as libraries as a way of saving money without putting vulnerable people at risk.

But the biggest mistake a lot of councils made wasn’t outsourcing services or paying consultants to help find ways to work more efficiently – it was cutting preventive services.

The biggest issue for most councils is the continual rise in demand for housing and social services. Prevention and early intervention are key to managing demand, but many councils cut these services to focus on protecting acute services. This is not the most effective use of resources.

Nonetheless, even in councils under Conservative control, the main consideration has been safeguarding vulnerable people and trying to mitigate the impact of austerity on local communities, not ideologically following the Barnet “easyCouncil” model. This model didn’t make it far beyond a handful of councils because it quickly became apparent that it was not the solution it promised to be.

Most councils have tried to be pragmatic. Hammersmith and Fulham, for instance, has a long record of keeping council tax low and even freezing it, while continuing to provide frontline services – despite its government grant being slashed by £66m since 2010. Barking and Dagenham council announced in March that it will deliver 50,000 homes by 2035, having already committed £350m to improving council stock. And councils continue to deliver social care services competently despite the cuts, according to a recent report by thinktank Localis, which shows most users of adult social care remain satisfied with their care and support.

But the bottom line is that 10 years of austerity and two years of focusing on Brexit have left local government on the ropes.

The rebalancing of the UK economy to ensure “a truly national recovery”, which the government has been talking about since the July 2015 budget, has failed to materialise. Councils face a funding black hole of more than £5bn by the end of the decade and it’s still unclear how they will be funded beyond 2019-20.

It seems government is determined to continue to accuse councils of financial mismanagement, even where it is demonstrably untrue. The real impact of cuts can be seen in places such as East Sussex, a well-run council that feels it has no other option than to reduce services to the bare minimum.

If councils really are being pulverised, the blame lies firmly at the door of central government. We need a complete rethink of the way councils are funded. And we need to stop blaming local government for the ideological fixations of Conservative central government.

Merging councils is no magic bullet to fight austerity

First published in The Guardian Public Leaders Network Monday 5th March 2018

Council mergers may look efficient, but local government reform is like Brexit: a wasteful wild-goose chase.

On 26 February, the government gave the go-ahead for Dorset’s nine councils to create two new authorities. On paper, this looks like a no brainer. But it’s a decision officials, councillors and residents in the county may yet come to regret.

The new structure, aimed at saving £108m over six years, would come into effect in April 2019, assuming it gets parliamentary approval. Separate councils for Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole will be replaced with one new unitary council, while the second unitary council will comprise what is now Dorset county council and the district councils of East Dorset, North Dorset, Purbeck, West Dorset, and Weymouth and Portland.

Support for the decision is hardly surprising. There are 353 local authorities in England: 27 county councils, 201 district councils, and 125 unitary authorities, including 33 London boroughs and 36 metropolitan boroughs.

In 2016 a report by EY for the County Councils Network (CCN) concluded (pdf) that creating 27 unitary authorities in England could save up to £2.9bn. The single unitary option has the shortest payback period and the most effective platform for financial sustainability and reducing council tax for residents. Counties also have the lowest back office and management overheads – just 6% of their budgets, compared to 46% at the average district council.

However, there is no official government guidance on what constitutes an acceptable model for local government. A range of models are being proposed, many of which make little sense and may actually end up adding extra cost. Proposals in Oxfordshire and elsewhere suggest creating four or even five “district unitaries” and then a small combined authority to provide additional capacity to deliver strategic services.

Breaking up counties into smaller unitary authorities doesn’t make sense geographically, and could unnecessarily fragment services at a county level if they don’t have the same boundaries as other public services like fire, police and the NHS. It’s true that there may be value in rethinking who delivers services such as housing and planning, but strategically that would mean looking to larger, not smaller, units.

But the real point is that local government reform is not and has never been about efficiency; it’s about politics, with a large and small “p”. There can be elements of gerrymandering – when the Labour government sought to consolidate its power base in Devon in 2009 by creating a unitary authority in Exeter, it would have effectively cut the heart out of the county both financially and geographically, and impoverish the parts of the county more likely to support the opposition. The whole notion of localism is too often about what the government wants, rather than what makes most logical sense for residents and communities.

In Dorset’s case, the councils’ chief finance officers have stated that authorities within Dorset are solvent and have sufficient balances to remain this way for the foreseeable future . Four options were proposed for Christchurch council after consultation in 2016, one of which was no change, an option later rejected by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government.

Many believe t the whole debate about reorganisation could simply distract councils from delivering savings and ambitious devolution deals. Paul Carter, leader of Kent county council and CCN , has claimed (paywall) it could result in three years of misery, as well as creating friction and tension between councils.

I can heartily agree, having myself lived through a tense legal battle over local government reform that wasted an estimated £200,000 of our council’s budget and reduced our capacity to deliver essential services because of the chaos it created.

Of the nine councils that will be scrapped in Dorset, three did not fully support the proposal and Christchurch council still plans to find a legal means to oppose being merged with neighbouring councils.

Local government reform is like Brexit: at best, a disingenuously simple answer to a complex question, at worst a smokescreen. Either way, it’s a wasteful and lengthy wild-goose chase where nobody can clearly define how to deliver a way forward that works for everyone.

Carillion’s collapse should make all councils rethink privatisation

First published in the Guardian Public Leaders network 29th Jan 2018, also published on De Montfort University’s Local Governance Research Unit blog 30th Jan 2018

Bad as it was for the public sector, the collapse of Carillion may not affect local government too badly. But if companies like Serco, Capita or Veolia were to fail, the impact on councils would be much more serious.

Carillion mainly ran large private finance initiative contracts – building hospitals, for instance. But firms like Capita, Serco and Veolia run a huge range of different council services, from IT and HR to waste collection, recycling, street cleaning and maintenance. If they were to fail, the risk to councils would be very high.

It has become increasingly clear that the business model around outsourcing – or managed services in local government speak – is fundamentally at fault.

Local councils have been under ever more pressure over the past decade to cut costs – and one seemingly straightforward way of doing this has been to outsource many services, particularly administrative services.

I first came across this in 2009, when I was working in the organisational development team at a large county council. We were looking across local government to find innovations in improvement and efficiency. Barnet council, dubbed “easyCouncil” for its strategy of providing a “no frills” service, had drastically reduced its headcount from 3,200 to just 322, mainly by outsourcing.

I could see this approach might solve some of the immediate issues councils faced, but I had a gut feeling that it just wasn’t the right thing to do.

To make running services cheaper than keeping them in-house, the only contractors able to put in competitive tenders were the giants, like Capita (in Barnet’s case) or Serco.

My own experience of working for a council with managed services showed that they compared poorly in terms of service and value to in-house services. The most frustrating aspect was that the terms and conditions were set by the service provider, with no flexibility if circumstances changed – until the contract came up for retendering. Councils often don’t have good enough contract management skills to avoid getting locked in to this kind of contract.

This placed unreasonable constraints on councils. One IT service provider, for instance, refused to enable staff to work remotely using their own equipment, even though this would be more efficient and staff were likely to have better quality laptops, such as MacBooks, at home.

It is easy to see why companies see government deals as a cash cow. Carillion, for example, continued to win contracts despite being in dire straits. Political pressure on the public purse means having to go with the cheapest offer.

I also feel uneasy about the fact that these decisions tend to be made without consulting either staff or residents. Handing over large service areas, without having an open dialogue about the potential risks and impacts with the community and local partners, seems wrong. Councils are not just bodies that commission and deliver services, they are a democratic, accountable level of government – and if the 2010 coalition government hadn’t dismantled the Audit Commission, which oversaw local government, we might have seen this coming earlier.

There is an opportunity for councils to learn from this and start reviewing existing contracts. But the truth is that there is no money to take services back in-house. And even if there were, it is an outdated model and would be a backward step, because too often in the past, in-house services have been inefficient too, and often also based on an inflexible approach. No one would benefit from going back to that.

There are other options, such as councils sharing services. Some councils have been working towards this for many years. West Devon borough council and South Hams district council, for instance, haveshared services since 2007. But this does require a great deal of effort and goodwill – and isn’t always easy to implement or even propose.

More could also be done across the public sector as a whole. By working more closely with key partners such as the NHS, councils can aim to pool assets and resources. Moves to do this are already under way in Greater Manchester and there are other examples. In 2016, for instance, NHS England, Public Health England, the Local Government Association, the Chief Fire Officers Association and Age UK published a joint statement setting out new ways to work together to improve public health.

At the very least, councils must learn from Carillion’s demise and develop stronger tendering processes and contract management skills. They must also prioritise working with contractors with a stronger public service ethos – and a greater commitment to service outcomes over shareholder value.

If all that happens, further damage to public services might be avoidable.

I live in a tower block, but I don’t want to be rehoused

First published in The Guardian Housing Network 27th June 2017

In the wake of the Grenfell tower tragedy, one of my neighbours expressed concern about the cladding on our building. Initially I was incredulous and dismissive; our building is only two years old and was built by a housing association, which would have had to conform to stringent safety standards and regulations. However, like many other residents in London tower blocks, it turns out that I live in a building clad in Reynobond PE panels – the same as those used in Grenfell Tower.

This fact came to light in emails from the housing association, which has been extremely transparent and responsive in communicating with residents. Nonetheless, there has been a degree of panic and outrage, and some residents have complained to our MP, who has demanded that we should all be rehoused immediately and the cladding removed.

But this is not social housing; the residents of my building are leaseholders. And as a local government officer myself, I believe it would be wrong to waste public funds rehousing us for no good reason.

I feel that the anger towards the housing association is misplaced. Who’s to blame here is not clear cut. It’s the same with the 600 other buildings across the UK.

At a national level, there are huge questions over the regulations, the supplier of the panels, the builders who chose to use them and whether or not councils and housing associations were aware of the issues with the cladding. Given that this particular housing association has invested almost £50m into 100 shared ownership apartments, of which they are still the primary owner, I do not believe that it would deliberately jeopardise that investment.

I’m not suggesting there is not a problem here. One of the issues is similar to the often naive or inadequate approach to contract management experienced by many councils. In the past I have complained about poor management of costs by this association and the resulting service charge increase, but on the whole it is a good housing association that cares about its residents and is committed to working with us on any issues we have.

Just after I moved in, for instance, the housing director came round to talk to residents about tackling antisocial behaviour on our estate. Since the Grenfell Tower fire, the housing association has been quick to reassure residents that fire safety was carefully considered when the the building was designed and that the fire brigade rates it as low risk.

We have a sprinkler system, and communal areas free of possessions and rubbish. There is a fire fighting lift, compartmentalisation of dwellings and areas of the building, a wet riser, emergency lighting and power and automatic opening vents, which enable escape and access routes to be kept clear of smoke in the event of a fire.

All the equipment is inspected weekly and serviced in line with manufacturers’ recommendations. Fire risk assessments are carried out annually, and last week the housing association asked the Building Research Establishment and independent experts to carry out a review and make recommendations regarding potentially removing and replacing the cladding. Additional patrols and safety checks have begun in the meantime, as well as visits to every flat to check fire doors and test smoke alarms.

With all of this in mind, I personally feel that we are lucky and should retain a sense of perspective. The focus now needs to be on addressing the failings that led to the Grenfell Tower tragedy, supporting the victims and prosecuting those responsible.