Originally published @ 6:03 pm, Sun 7th Nov 2010
What is it about the names of Conservatives in Nottinghamshire, who were ahead of their national party in wanting to slash services?
Their leader is called Cutts. She’s tires of the obvious joke, but really, just what would her politics have been if she’d fallen in love with someone called Nigel Defend-public-services.
Their finance portfolio holder is called Reg Adair, less famous than the trouble-shooter Red Adair. Red Adair runs around putting out fires at oil wells. Presumably Reg Adair runs around putting out council services.
One of their Portfolio Holders was called Shepherd, but presumably he was removed because his surname was too kind.
Now Reg Adair has decided to nail his colours to the masts and equate his political outlook to his experience as a managing director in textile firms during the eighties and nineties. He’s claiming the council is now following that managerial expertise on change management.
Now I was once in charge of finance and performance management at Nottingham City Council. Oh how I ached to share my knowledge of data modelling and program specifications written in plain English! (You would have been proud.)
As it happens, the lessons I repeated from my time as an IT project manager were risk analysis and management, contingency management, the importance of regular management reporting and being wary of the expense of IT systems.
But I didn’t presume that managers working for the Council were unaware of such disciplines or skills.
Reg has declared his vision in the house magazine of the Local Government Association, “First” (see http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=14783463 )
He’s not at all like Reggie Perrin (of which the second series of the modern version is getting so much better).
He comes across much more like the original line manager, C.J. “I didn’t get where I am today by listening to Audit Commission clap-trap on continual improvement”.
Indeed he gives no impression of having listened to anyone. No recognition for the knowledge of the staff he now directs. No acknowledgement of expertise he’s found in colleagues, predecessors or members of any other local authority.
Just where is the recognition of the kind of rigour we’ve already been through? Inspections based on well rehearsed criteria for effective management of local government services and projects.
(I’d been a Corporate Peer Inspector before taking on finance and performance management and brought back 6 big lessons from the 3 strategic authorities I’d visited, only to find our then new Chief Executive had got fresh plans covering them all.)
Even more alarming, nowhere in this article, that could have been written by a Conservative fan of Neville Chamberlain in the nineteen-thirties, are there any actual examples of his experience having been applied to any effect yet.
Yep, he shares a vision without sharing any success in his own authority. Question: How has it made a difference yet? Answer: none proffered here.
And Reg’s outlook is such an old-fashioned view.
Private sectors and public sectors are seemingly different worlds. Well there are differences, but as it happens, I happened to do the same kind of work for both, and it transpires that much of management work can be the same and private sector bosses aren’t necessarily that good.
The private sector is exclusively focussed on the customer, given the need for profit. Way too simplistic. Suppliers seek to manipulate the market to guarantee on-going profit with minimum risk (marketing, advertising, lobbying, contracting). Yes, councils need customer focus; councils that have not wanted to embrace customer focus do struggle. But ultimately it’s a people focus, and people come in a number of guises - customers, clients, citizens, partners, visitors, providers and staff.
Private organisations are often best placed to respond to the customers’ needs. What’s really weird about this is the presumption that councils don’t commission from across the types of suppliers’ already. In creating a supply chain is to manipulate the market to aim to manage costs, consummate with meeting quality and wider policy concerns such as local jobs for local people.
A “challenging situation forces an organisation to take stock and assess what it is good at and how it can improve”. What, no anticipation? No forward planning? No culture of continual improvement? Just some complacent boardroom ignoring the real world until they’re kicked up the backside. (No wonder the Japanese replaced some of our core industries.) Tell me the private sector is better than that!
We will be looking to provide services differently. Just where is the recognition of the kind of rigour we’ve already been through. We didn’t just get cash for inflation under New Labour; there was a sustained expectation of providing more for the extra grant made available.
“The current economic situation is encouraging the public sector to ensure that the needs of the customer are at the heart of their business.” Er, needs and wants. Consuming in general is way beyond needs now. The private sector markets to create the desire to consume their own products. Our communities are better cos local government meets wants as well as needs. Reg knows this (e.g. a £25,000 project for the Ruddington Framework Knitters' Museum in his division).
We are saving £150m and we expect 2,500 jobs to be lost. The scale of the cuts means not meeting some of the needs, often of those who need the most help. (By the way, “in textiles, moving our manufacturing base overseas was the main way the industry remained successful”. So I’m not sure anyone will believe Cameron’s claims of the private sector taking up the slack in job creation.)
“There is no other option.” Why so keen to close down the options? Remember “C.J.” - “I didn't get where I am today by thinking.”
So we are dealing not with sound business advice, but propaganda and ideology. Given the cuts are about choice and not an inevitability, maybe it gives Reg Adair too much credence to have looked at the points made one-by-one. Maybe we should just embrace Paul O’Grady’s analysis -
“Talking of nits – George Osborne, what do we think? I’d sooner have Ozzy Osbourne as chancellor. At least with Ozzy the only cuts would be the f-ing and blinding from his speech. Do you know what got my back up? Those Tories hooping and hollering when they heard about the cuts. Gonna scrap the pensions – yeah! – no more wheelchairs – yeah! Bastards. I do apologise for the language, that just fell out. I bet when they were children they laughed in Bambi when his mother got shot.”
Please deliver us from the lack of ambition that the re-birth of Chamberlain’s 1930s offers. A proclaimed narrow focus on tackling public debt.
It led to a decade of wasted opportunity for which people remember social inequality and deprivation solved only by war, and not prudence.
(Might it even lead to George Osborne waving a note from Osama bin Laden about no more territorial demands in Afghanistan (satire).)
The point about running the country, or even a £1,000 million p.a. local authority, should not be to narrow its potential and thinking, but to use it to help, defend and bring on the people and the places we represent and serve.
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