Accountability (public sector newspeak version) is complexity.

Scrutiny

“Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.” Franz Kafka, The Castle

Accountability in public services matters and probably matter more than accountability in traded private services. As consumers we do not get much choice in who provides our refuse collection service, our health care, our social services and much else besides - short of migration, that is.

I don't know about you but I've a suspicion that accountability is talked about more and made more complicated than it needs to be, and because of this the extent to which public services - and servants - are accountable is compromised. You only need look at the contortions engaged in by NHS grandees in avoiding personal accountability for services under their direction, to know there's a problem. And just so you know, the same goes for local councils, for the MoD and for services such as prisons and courts.

Part of this lies in the perversion of accountability as a concept. Here's a paragraph from an interview with academic, Toby Lowe, who specialises in public sector management. I present it in two halves so you can appreciate the point I'm making:

True accountability is not about counting but asking people to give an account of their actions as part of a dialogue in which they explain the decisions they have taken in the specific context they are working in.

This is a pretty good description of accountability and something that happens too infrequently and, when it does, very badly. You only need sit in a typical local council scrutiny committee or watch MPs parade their prejudgements at a select committee to appreciate the problem with our process of holding public servants to account for "...the decisions they have taken in the specific context they are working in."

Lowe chooses, however, to complicate the simplicity of "what did you do, give us the basis for that decision, how did you plan to assess whether your decision was right, what was the review process" - straightforward scrutiny - by producing an elaborate and extended further qualification of accountability:

It’s also not just about the traditional hierarchical relationship. There are multiple accountable relationships. Your peers could ask you to account for your decisions, as could a member of the public who is receiving the service – or an ombudsman or professional body. The main thing is that real accountability involves a conversation.

For sure we're broadly accountable in all these ways (to a greater or lesser extent) but the essence of public sector accountability is that services are accountable, through their representatives, to the public. It's not that, in an purely administrative context, there aren't other relationships involving accountability but that if you don't understand how accountability in the relationship with a colleague is less important than accountability to the public you serve then you've missed - and I suspect Toby Lowe has - the whole point of public accountability.

The problem here is that accountability becomes just a management tool - Lowe talks about 'learning' and 'autonomy' but at no point recognises the central requirement that the service is, first and foremost, accountable to the public. The process becomes personal or management development rather than accountability:

The learning element in particular requires a radical rethink. How within an organisation do you create safe spaces for learning and reflection, where people can talk openly about errors and uncertainty with their peers?

Probably a good thing but we need a further step - if we are to base service delivery on greater autonomy (again probably a good thing) then those delivering the service have to "give account of their decisions" in a place and a manner that allows those to whom they are accountable to make a judgement as to the effectiveness, the ethics and the efficiency of those decisions. Simply saying "it's complicated" strikes me as a cop out and merely provides a screen behind which those who should be accountable are able to hide.

We have a variety of problems with public accountability, from the distance between the theoretical decision-makers and the actual service through to the use of appointed boards to oversee provision without providing adequate space for any real scrutiny of the service's ethics, behaviour, decisions, and effectiveness. This is made worse by the conflation between 'accountability' within the decision-making process (to colleagues, managers and so forth) and real accountability to the public. This not only provides cover for politicians but also allows senior management to bury their responsibility and accountability in a confusing and complicated set of management processes.

Accountability is not complicated. In the private sector, if I don't like the service I get from one supermarket, I can complain and get satisfaction or exercise consumer sovereignty - make the supermarket accountable - by taking my shopping elsewhere. We don't get this option with public services and this is doubly true for vulnerable groups like the ill, the disabled and the homeless. And right now the effectiveness or otherwise of these services - their accountability - is either lost to the point of non-existence in Kafkaesque bureaucracy or else is under the direction of badly chaired, poorly briefed and overly partisan political scrutiny processes. Changing this, not creating "safe spaces for learning and reflection", is what we need but that would require political leaderships and senior managers to accept real accountability and the responsibilities that go with it.

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What's wrong with the NHS? Bureaucracy - that's what's wrong

Let me introduce you to the Bradford and Craven Integrated Workforce Programme's workforce strategy (this will be referred to as the IWP so often you'll forget what it stands for at some future point). The IWP - Integrated Workforce Programme - reports to the Bradford and Craven Integration and Change Board (ICB) and "aims to work collaboratively to address the commonly identified system wide workforce challenges..."

OK so far? The ICB and the IWP that reports to it works in the context of the Five Year Forward View and the Five Year Forward View Next Steps for Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs) and the work of these STPs will be delivered through new Accountable Care Systems across the Bradford District and Craven. Part of this delivery cross institutional boundaries and there is an Integration and Better Care Fund Narrative Plan 2017-19 for the Bradford District.

In amongst all this there are "a number of national, regional and local drivers and associated service strategies and plans..."

Five Year Forward View sub-strategies (GP Forward View, Mental Health Forward View etc. etc.)
West Yorkshire and Harrogate STP (WY&HSTP)
Better Health Better Lives (part of Bradford Council - BMDC - plans)
Bradford District and Craven Health and Wellbeing Plan
Bradford District Joint Health and Wellbeing Strategy
North Yorkshire County Council's Health and Wellbeing Plan
Home First Plan
Children, Young People and Families Plan
CCG Primary Care Strategies

This list is preceded by the word "including" which implies that there are perhaps some other plans and strategies not referenced.

In order to "support the delivery of the transformation agenda" there are a "number of collaboratives" which include:

Local Workforce Action Board (LWAB, WY&H)
West Yorkshire Association of Acute Trusts (WYAAT)
WY&H Mental Health Partnership
'Team Bradford' Employers Conference
Bradford Health and Care Education, Employment and Skills Partnership (BEESP)

Apparently the IWP will "ensure alignment with these enablers" and will "work on the footprint deemed most appropriate in facilitating realisation" of the plans. (Takes a deep breath).

There are some workstreams including plans for a West Yorkshire National Skills Academy Centre of Excellence for Support Staff Development and plans for a new medical school in Bradford (apparently the University has to have permission from the NHS or the government to train doctors something that further underlines how stupid this whole system has become).

Somewhere in all this soup of bureaucracy and management mumbo-jumbo there's perhaps some good work going on. The difficulty, however, is that reading the reports reveals little but an enormous and costly bureaucracy directed, in this case, to answering the relatively simple question "how do we improve the quality of our workforce, reduce turnover and meet future needs." Multiply this 'collaboration' across all the UK's myriad health bodies and the result is uncounted millions in taxpayer cash splurged on a pyramid of acronyms, plans, strategies and (new one to me this) narratives.

The NHS doesn't work. And it's only the persistence and creativity of front-line staff (most of the time) that stops the bureaucracy completely preventing anything happening at all. This isn't about funding - most cash will likely, as we've seen with Better Care Fund, result in more new bureaucracy. Indeed what is clear from any encounter with the management of the NHS is that the organisation is at its most creative when it comes to inventing new and ever more complicated systems of bureaucracy.

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Quote of the day - the 'kumbaya' school of leadership...

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Politics matters. Even your much maligned office politics. Learn it.

“I was universally liked across the company, a team player who put in more hours than anyone else,” she said. “I was heads down on delivering results, shared my inner self and built trust…everything I was trained and even coached to do.”

With those words, I recognized what had happened immediately. Jill was one more victim of what I call the “Kumbaya” school of leadership, which says that being open, trusting, authentic, and positive — and working really hard — is the key to getting ahead. The Kumbaya school is doing the Jills of the world a great disservice, leading them to often act in ways that are detrimental to their careers.

Depressing I know. But true.

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It's time that NHS management started earning those big bucks they get paid

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It's a couple of weeks before the latest 'comprehensive spending review' so we can all understand the explosion of shroud waving, sorry tales of budget cuts and screams of 'crisis, crisis'. Indeed I've indulged (I think rightly) in a little bit of this myself.

However, we need to think very carefully about what we mean by 'crisis' - as in 'the NHS is facing financial ruin':

By next year, hospitals’ deficits may have escalated to such a degree that the NHS could face widespread financial collapse.

Now it's true that hospitals (and the writer is Chief Executive of a hospital trust) are facing something of a problem. We saw recently that the total deficit has reached over £800m and that most of them report continuing pressures on delivery. But Christopher Smallwood, the writer here, is just scaremongering as part of a timely lobby.

The inference in these arguments is in two parts - first that hospitals are the NHS and second that the problem is a consequence of cuts to the NHS budget. Neither of these two suggestions are right - hospitals are responsible for just about half of NHS spending and expenditure on the NHS is programmed to rise (funnily enough by the £8 billion the NHS said it needed and the government promised).

The problem here is that while the Department of Health has a specific amount of cash allocated though the national budget, this doesn't apply to hospitals - NHS Providers in the jargon - which operate on a tariff system and mostly get paid according to how many operations (or whatever) they undertake. As one consultant put it to me - 'each time a new patient arrives in hospital for an elective procedure it's "kerching, kerching".

The problems with this system are many and varied but the most egregious is the widespread belief in hospital management that fewer patients means less money for the NHS. The managers (who really should know better) think that because their hospital gets less money this means that the whole system has less money. And this gives rise to one of the more pernicious criticisms of extending the choice of providers in the health system - 'cherry-picking':

Around half of all NHS-funded hospital care – about £40bn a year – is paid for through a national tariff, where hospitals are paid a set rate for each patient, depending on the treatment given. As private hospitals generally do not treat complex or emergency patients, critics claim private contractors can profit by “cherry picking” easier patients.

What you need to understand here is that we're being told (by those same people complaining of inadequate funding) that the NHS should commission more expensive provision through general hospitals because otherwise those hospitals, in some way, would be less viable. Instead of purchasing elective surgery from the lowest cost provider meeting the necessary high standards, we are commissioning from general hospitals on the false premise that the more cost-efficient approach would cost the NHS more money.

The central issue for the NHS - and one of the reasons it has failed to meet (or even tried to meet, in truth) its efficiency targets - is that the dominance of general hospitals over the system has made it nigh on impossible to develop a market of specialised providers or to shift low-risk procedures into primary care. The moment these systems start to reach the point where their impact on the system is positive (ie releases more money for other NHS activity) the result is NHS Trust deficits giving the impression that there is some sort of crisis. This may or may not be the case but so long as the hospitals' budgets assume utter market dominance, we will continue to fail in making any meaningful efficiencies in the NHS. And there'll be this gun pointed at the government's head:

The choice is stark: more money every year or a sustained decline in the standards of healthcare and a financial collapse. How much more money? Even if the efficiency gains achieved in the next five years matched those of the past five, the government would need to increase annual budgets by £2bn-£3bn a year between now and 2020 to preserve standards. But since the NHS cannot continue to raise productivity at this rate, at least £4bn a year extra will be necessary, starting in April.

When I look at what local government - for all its faults and failings - has delivered over the past five or six years, I am forced to assume that these same opportunities exist in the NHS. But I - like the government and the public - would like the management of the NHS to make those changes without the blunt instrument of actual cash budget cuts. So far that management has avoided anything that requires structural changes and have resisted - to cries of "no privatisation" - any substantial attempts to use the private sector to help develop a significant and innovative delivery of high quality elective surgery and treatments.

I'm prepared to defend the high salaries of NHS management but that, I think, gives me the right to tell them that they need to up their game. If we're going to pay NHS Trust bosses £200,000 or more then those bosses need to start showing the creativity, innovation and invention those big bucks are paid to secure. And the message to people like Christopher Smallwood is to stop waving shrouds and start to make the case for a dynamic, flexible and responsive system - even if it means there are fewer huge general hospitals and more small, specialised and independent providers.

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Of course the NHS is out-of-control. It has been out-of-control for decades...

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Of course the NHS is out of control. We really shouldn't be surprised to hear this from a minister - indeed it's perhaps the first honest thing we've heard about the NHS in my lifetime. Except, of course, that's not really what the minister meant - what she meant was that the service was out of her control.

A Tory health minister was at the centre of controversy after she was secretly recorded saying that the government could no longer exert much day-to-day control over the increasingly stretched NHS.

Read that carefully - the words used are "day-to-day control". In other words, the reforms to the system introduced under this government have finally (or at least in front of 'private' party meetings) ended the pretence that government ministers and officials in Whitehall "run" the NHS. As the defensive response from a government spokesman put it - doctors are in charge of the NHS.

Now I've a little insight into the NHS as a member of a health and wellbeing board. This doesn't make me an expert (partly because the NHS uses a language that is, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, 'almost, but not quite, entirely unlike English') merely that I have a little knowledge. The reality out there is that there is no effective 'control' anywhere in the NHS - at least not in the management sense of control. My amazement is that an endless search for strategy has replaced any sense of actually doing stuff.

Now health and wellbeing boards are that very thing - 'high level', 'strategic', 'focused on partnership' - that frustrates us normal folk when confronted with public sector management. The NHS likes to call this 'leadership', presumably invoking some sort of sympathetic magic that says if you call something 'leadership' often enough it will become leadership. The reality is that this high level strategic partnership approach to NHS leadership is more akin to a nebulous, ill-focused exercise in projecting managerial self-interest as strategy (and this is without commenting on the use of misleading statistics on public health and health inequality as the basis for planning - mostly because they fit the ideology of NHS management).

At the mish-mash of meetings where we consider vast swathes of documentation all written in that almost comprehensible NHS language, we have been told about a thing called 'the funding gap'. This is a chthonic darkness looming over health services in Bradford - the £364 million bogieman of the care economy. And we discuss this 'gap' as if it is real rather than constructed from a combination of speculation, guesswork and spatulamancy.

So because everyone present knows that the bogieman is probably a little old man from Kansas rather than Godzilla, the aim is to direct any changes away from each person's particular interest. The truth about that 'funding gap' is that it is almost entirely founded on the idea that healthcare cost inflation will exceed general inflation, that demand will rise and that the NHS will not improve its productivity or efficiency. This is pathologised by the setting off of pseudo-panic - 'if nothing is done now then the NHS will be in crisis' or 'the funding gap presents the biggest leadership challenge since the foundation of the NHS'.

Really? Over the life time of the NHS its inflation rate has always exceeded the general inflation rate, demand has always risen and any advances in efficiency have been resisted by unions or swamped by managerial mission creep. The current crisis is the same crisis as before except for one thing - we're assuming that the magic money tree won't provide meaning that the service really does have to think about its productivity. And faced with this fact the 'leadership' is like the proverbial bunny facing the pick-up truck, completely frozen, unable to act.

This inability to act is because the NHS is uncontrollable - even out-of-control. Take the review of hospital provision in London and consider how Labour used it to run a series of egregious campaigns during an election. Why would any politician do anything but resist any change at all to health services knowing that proposing - or even agreeing to consider - such changes will result in an unpleasant, personal attack from the other side. We talk about putting doctors in charge, huge investment in 'leadership development' is made and the chairs are reorganised into a nice new pattern.

But we're not going to make the changes needed to get a more efficient health service because too many people inside the service are banking on political pressure working. These people - at the front of the crowd are the trade unions but there are others like the risible 'National Health Action Party' lined up alongside - see defending the health system's inefficiency as some sort of holy mission. And because these campaigners can press that 'Our NHS' button, get people to say 'the NHS saved my life and nothing should change', the result is sclerosis - the arteries of the system are clogged with years of indulgence.

The NHS is out-of-control because - so far as I can see - it has no leadership brave enough or strong enough (indeed with the authority needed) to face down the vested interests of unions, assorted medical colleges and NHS management. So the service will sputter on - most of the time, in most places doing an OK job and certainly saving lives every day.  And the funding gap will get lost in the running of internal deficits, in salami slicing of non-essential activity and in skimping on investment.

So yes, the NHS is out-of-control.

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Local Councils increase reserves (what was that about cuts?)

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The LGA is weeping crocodile tears about Council's using reserves to manage the process of budget reductions (we should really call it 'rebasing' but that is rather too much of a jargon term for little old me). Apparently prudent local councils (who have stashed away £17 billion for a range of rainy days) will run out of money if the "cuts" continue:

...the LGA has said that the £17bn saved in cash reserves by the most prudent authorities will be used up in five years time if employed for the management of Government austerity measures. 

Of course a council may choose to use some of its reserves to extend the period over which the budget is reduced from its current base to a new base. This allows for fewer redundancies, gives space for effective service redesign and allows for the impact of any service reductions to be ameliorated. It is - in a period of savings - good budget management. Which explains of course why Bradford's Labour leadership has chosen to keep the reserves and cut the services. I call it the machismo of cuts.

But the LGA then comes up with a whining little reason why Council's shouldn't spend reserves:

This will leave councils without funds to invest in growth promoting infrastructure projects or support any further financial risks...

Pretty scary! Especially when we see the actual situation - what has really happened to reserves during this period of massive budget cuts:

Over last year, town halls outside of the capital were found to have added £2bn to their reserves, while authorities within the Greater London Authority furthered their reserves by £0.6bn. 

So it seems that, during a period of severe budget cuts, local councils have managed to squirrel away yet more cash for ill-defined and often unspecified future purposes - "strategic revenue reserves" and "change programme funds" abound providing senior officers and politicians with handy little slush funds to bung at preferred schemes and vote-buying campaigns. 

But the boss of the LGA - a Tory for heaven's sake - still bleats on about how this is all terrible:

'Councils are working extremely hard to shield frontline services from the 28% cut to the money they receive from Government. But cash reserves can only dampen the impact, not fill the gap. If councils plundered their reserves to cover the cuts, the cupboard would be bare within five years and there would be nothing left to invest in the growth promoting projects Britain desperately needs.’

So tell me Cllr Cockell, why aren't councils investing in these 'growth promoting projects' now? Why are councils continuing to hoard cash - Bradford has over £170 million, Manchester getting on for £250 million - against some proverbial rainy day? What are revenue reserves for if it's not to allow effective restructuring and the proper management of a reducing budget?

This is just special pleading - I would say ignorance but I simply don't believe that the leadership of the LGA are ignorant. This is deliberate wibble, an attempt to wangle a little more cash out of the government this autumn. That is all.

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Callers at Police Stations and the closing down of police stations

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From this gentleman:

Police Constable 3415 Michael Walls Retired
Holder of the Police Long Service and Good Conduct Medal

Comes an e-mail (Michael is also a Bradford Councillor) - it says a lot:

Once upon a time there was a Police station in Bradford Called Toller Lane, it used to be open 24hrs a day and lots of people called in for help and advice as the Police officers who worked there were very friendly and helpful and took the time to talk to people, and the people liked this and thought very highly of the Police Officers but eventually when some Senior Police officers became involved in running costs and forgot why they joined, they decided to limit opening to 0800 to 2400 hrs. But people could still call, which they did in large numbers. Then one day a certain Ch Supt who we shall call Long called at the police station to park his own car and drive down to H Q in the Div Police car to save his petrol as he did every day. One Day he said to one of the office PCs... stop keeping the Callers Book (this was a book...was one in which every caller at the police station was logged.) Being a very astute officer this PC took no notice and continued to keep the book.

Some months later The Chief Supt called as usual to use the police car to drive to and from work and informed the officers at the station that it would soon be closed in the evening as there was no demand for it to be open. The PC produced the Callers Book and said what about this demand! Mr Long was very angry and snatched the book from the PC and threw it across the room.

And so the police station was closed in the evenings and eventually closed down completely and the people who would have called in now started to ring in and ask for a police officer to come and see them, and so the police officers were very busy!

And so our police "service" continues to fail to serve!

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In which I explain something about public procurement to Eoin Clarke

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The ever passionate and often completely wrong Eoin Clarke has uncovered dark truths about the relationship between Monitor, the NHS regulator and McKinsey, a leading consultancy firm. As readers here will know, I’m no fan of public procurement (here and here and here)  processes and am prepared to accept that some established suppliers can and do muddy the waters of process. However, in this case there is absolutely no evidence of impropriety – by supplier or contractor. Eoin has made his soup from the thinnest of stock!

Let’s look at the allegations and claims:

1, McKinsey has earned (at least Eoin accepts they did some work) £468,000 from the NHS since May 2010. Note that Eoin hasn’t asked whether this leading consultancy business did any work for the NHS prior to May 2010. I’m prepared to bet that it has done. However, it does not seem to me that paying consultants 0.0005% of the total NHS budget for advice on management and strategy is a terrible thing.

                                           

2. Officials at Monitor accepted hospitality and what Eoin calls “trinkets” from McKinsey – a trip to the opera, a seat at a black tie dinner and attending a summer drinks reception. Apparently this practice blurs “...the lines between government and private contractor and should be discouraged especially where a health watchdog is concerned.” There is no suggestion that officials of Monitor acted improperly by taking this hospitality or even that it might have influenced decisions on the appointment of external consulting contractors.

3. McKinsey “...improperly used private channels...to discuss several commissioning decisions.” This consisted of the firm seeking feedback after the tender decision because they hadn’t got the business. It may be news to Eoin but providing feedback to unsuccessful bidders is normal – and good – business practice. And it is also normal for this to be done verbally.

4. Eoin appears also to have a problem with McKinsey asking for something and not being given it – “McKinsey also harried Monitor to prematurely divulge the granting of NHS Trust status decisions...but to be fair to Monitor they sent a fairly curt reply.” So there you go – a consultant asks for information prematurely and isn’t given the information. Anyone got a clue what Monitor has done wrong there?

5. Our feisty investigator gets closer to pay dirt with using private channels to pitch for business – “They canvassed Monitor officials to have an input into decisions over how to deal with Heatherwood &Wrexham Park Trust... This in the end was accepted and McKinsey went on to have an input in the decision to close Heatherwood and flog the land.” When you look at the e-mails Eoin claims for private pitching, one is the sort of e-mail many businesses would send existing contacts and another says:

“Can someone get back to us about this tender?”

So it wasn’t a private deal – indeed the e-mail traffic suggests that there was a tender process since McKinsey refers to being “shortlisted” and to a formal ITT number. In other words Monitor conducted a proper process to appoint advisors for a given project.

6. Apparently hosting (at no cost to the taxpayer) foreign delegations is wrong because “...UK government officials are possibly inadvertently aiding McKinsey's solicitation of business in France, and de facto advancing McKinsey's financial gain.” Shouldn’t the British government be keen to showcase the wonders of the NHS (we know from Eoin just how much better it is than any other health system) and to support British firms in getting foreign business?

7. And finally Eoin complains because McKinsey asked Monitor for a reference. It’s pretty clear that Eoin has never completed a public sector “pre-qualification questionnaire” since that would require at least two (and in one awful case I recall, six) references. And the expectation is that these references will be public sector references from places where the bidder has delivered a contract. Again this is normal and proper business practice.

It seems to me that Eoin Clarke, in his enthusiasm to castigate the current government, has turned what appears to be normal business practice into something of a scandal. There is nothing in the e-mails to suggest that Monitor has acted improperly in tendering for and appointing consultants or other contractors. Indeed, all Eoin can do is call for “clearer boundaries” despite the evidence here that Monitor’s officers – regardless of the relationship with McKinsey – have resisted any requests from the firm that might compromise the procurement process.

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Privatise town centres? A thought on reading The Portas Review

In her statement of “vision”, Mary Portas gets it about right:

“I want to put the heart back into the centre of our high streets, re-imagined as destinations for socialising, culture, health, wellbeing, creativity and learning.”

OK so it’s a little bit gushing (this is a TV ‘expert’ after all) but above all Ms Portas recognises that the future of the town centre doesn’t lie with retailing. Except that the entire report focuses on retailing, rolling out the same set of solutions that have failed in a myriad of places. “Town Teams” were a feature of Yorkshire Forward’s ‘Renaissance market towns’ projects – arrogantly shoving aside existing groups, town councils, district and county councillors and shipping in ‘experts’ from elsewhere who proposed stupid things that divided towns.

The Panel welcomes the idea of bringing together a fresh group of people to generate ideas for the visioning and Master Planning process. The Panel considers, though, that lead consultants have misinterpreted the flexibility of this approach and this has led to a lack of consistency in how Town Teams are set up and a lack of clarity regarding their role, remit, and how they relate to existing democratic structures. This ambiguity has caused considerable conflict in a number of towns.

All this gets back to the advantage that shopping malls have over town centres – single ownership – and setting up a town team, however this is done, doesn’t address that problem. Yet the reality of most town centres is that most of the land is in a single ownership – the local council. But that this owner doesn’t treat it as such preferring instead to see it as a collection of unrelated activities – roads, parks, markets, theatres, sports halls and office blocks.

Ms Portas wants town centres run “like businesses”:

“High streets should be run more like businesses. And businesses are run on the basis of strategic vision. However, unlike the sophisticated shopping malls or large retailers, high streets aren’t overseen by a single landlord or professional management body.”

Hence the town team, ‘business improvement districts’ and other similar initiatives. This isn’t a radical solution to decline in the town centre (less so when you couple it with proposals for more planning controls on out-of-town developments), it’s just a repeat of using “pseudo-business” structures to try and ape what happens in the mall and the supermarket. Remember the Urban Regeneration Company, what of town centre management companies and a bewildering variety of special purpose vehicles aimed at “regenerating” town centres.

A radical approach would be to transfer all that council owned land – the streets, the pavements, the market halls, the offices and the parks – into a for-profit company. Where, as in many places, the council owns freeholds of retail premises these can be added to the pot. And use that asset to create the excitement, the events and the environment – the “21^st Century urban entertainment centre” that Ms Portas describes. That would be a radical approach rather than the rewarmed versions of existing – and mostly unsuccessful – strategies presented by Ms Portas.

The ownership of the company could vary – maybe co-operative or mutual, perhaps the local council or possibly a combination of these approaches. But it is essential – if the town centre is to be run like a business – the company is for profit. For it is the search for profit that makes the shopping malls and supermarkets creative, innovative and focused on getting the experience right for the customer.

Into this approach can be build structures akin to business improvement districts. Councils can be flexible on business rates. And can no longer use parking as a cash generator for the pothole repair fund.

Town centres are not about retail any more, they are about a place of interest, engagement and excitement – and the best of these places, as Mary Portas demonstrates again and again in her report, are privately-owned, privately-managed and run for profit.

 It's a thought...

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Do public sector employers "buy" union reps?

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Not my usual source for interesting stuff but a very interesting observation from the loonier part of the left here:

My own experience of partnership working has been in the public sector. It was nothing more than a social club, monthly committee meetings, followed by a huge buffet and chit chat. The organisation decided that the senior union committee members did such a good job for the workers, that they would give them all a pay rise of between £10,000 - £15,000, over and above their substantive post and for the duration of their time in a full time union position.

All the facility time was given to reps that the staff side ‘leaders’ wanted, rather than who requested it. This meant that the union leaders would always win the annual election, as most of the reps had their facility time and other perks tied in to certain individuals winning elections.

All very cosy and, for the lefty agitator the result:

Certain individuals saw themselves as part of the board of directors, naively thinking they were part of making decisions, when in actual fact they were ridiculed and laughed at behind their backs. There was actually was ‘partnership’ working that took place. It was the board of directors and the unions working in partnership to try and soften the blow on every bad thing that was handed down to workers.

The union reps behaved like arrogant, pompous, slippery politicians. Never answering the questions of members directly, patronising workers, telling them that they ‘don’t understand’ etc. etc. They also colluded and collaborated with senior management when reps get out of line.

The solution? Stop funding trade unions representatives with tax money and start funding them from union subscriptions. Simple really.

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It's a thought...do Councils need Chief Executives?

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I'm not yet convinced but Wiltshire County Council might have hit on an idea:

Wiltshire Council will operate without a chief executive after the authority ‘deleted’ the post.

As part of a radical management restructure which will see the departure of current chief Andrew Kerr within weeks, it has also reduced the number of corporate directors from five to three in a bid to save £1.4m by 2015.

Since leadership should come from members (don't all rush), is the Chief Executive role limited to the management and direction of senior officers?  Thoughts welcome!

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An epiphany: in which Simon realises what's wrong with the public sector

Today I sat - and contributed to - a two-hour meeting involving various 'partners' (how the public sector loves that word). The meeting was intended to look at issues of community cohesion, neighbourhood, image and participation in the Bradford District*. Almost the entirety of the meeting was taken up with addressing the first question from approximately a dozen questions. And that question was:

Are there any gaps in the data?

We spent over 90 minutes of expensive senior officer time (the meeting involved the Council Chief Executive, one strategic director, one assistant director plus several senior people from the police, fire service, health authority and the university vice-chancellor) discussing how to obtain that holy grail - a near perfect data set and better data sharing. What was worse however is that we failed to agree any action to be taken, make any resolution or even suggest how we might achieve progress towards that better data set!

Maybe we do need a better dataset - although this I doubt. But what we could really do with is a sense of urgency, an idea that if there's something needs doing we should rather get on with doing it even if we're not entirely sure about the data quality. And, if we're not sure about the precise nature of the problem, set off and find out.

However, I fear that this won't happen - the public sector is irrevocably wedded to the idea that there is a perfectible bureaucracy and that the purpose of these partnership arrangements is to search for systems that enable the achieving of such perfection.

Depressing really.

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*Why we insist on calling the CITY of Bradford as "District" defeats me - using City would make a contribution to bettering our image at one stroke

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And who's going to manage it then?

How many times have you heard that plaintive cry? The desperate need for management - for projects to be planned, organised, set out in graphs and spreadsheets?

At the same time have you ever asked what it is precisely that managers - and especially project managers - actually do? You have? Well this thought is for you!

Most of the time the prime purpose of management can be defined as follows:

• Someone to pass the decision-making buck to - "above my pay grade you know, guv!"
• The person or people to blame - "not my fault, mate, just doing what management say, y'know!"
• Someone to compile reports, write memos and interface between owner and worker

Perhaps - in this interconnected age - we're starting to move away from management. Or rather moving to self-administration and self-management. The organisational tools at our fingertips don't just obviate the need for secretaries and filing clerks, they will abolish the need for managers. So long, of course, as we're prepared to share the decisions and take responsibility that is!

Surely an experienced, knowledgeable engineer, teacher or social worker should be encouraged to carry on engineering, teaching or social working rather than - so as to extract value from experience - forced to make decisions for others, take the blame and write progress reports so as to earn an extra buck or two?

I guess it's time to build the B-Ark then!

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On using the right tools for the task...

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I was reminiscing yesterday about working at an advertising agency before the arrival of the Internet and the ubiquity of the computer. We were really excited by a whizzo little in-house communications system, by the prospect of sending finished art electronically to the printer or the newspaper! It is striking that so much has changed in less than twenty years – to the point where the loss of Internet connection at work results in everything grinding to a halt and the phrase –meant in jest – “the computer says no” reveals a truth about how we have become dependent on the computer and all its bastard off-spring.

However, the result of all this is that we seem unable to conceive of a solution to a particular work challenge that does not involve the application of (usually costly) IT. Take the management of personnel records and the administration of time as an example. Assuming this is a requirement – and I guess in these bureaucratic times it will be – a business with fewer than 50 employees will spend time and money creating a secure record system. They may be gulled by a slick salesman into networking the system with timesheets, leave records and sickness all seamlessly undated by the shiny new system. At a cost.

And it’s that last part that gets me. Would it not be simpler to employed an old technology called “the locking filing cabinet” and fill it will folders for each employee into which timesheets, leave cards and other records can be inserted? It’s only 50 folders for heaven’s sake!

Struggling even further back into the murky mists of time, I recall a discussion at a Conservative Party Agents training event (yes, dear reader, I was one of those once) about getting computers. And yes computers are good at storing stuff, at sorting stuff and at not working at critical moments. They will even send you nice prompts! But as one of my fellow agents commented – “they won’t knock on bloody doors”.

It’s taken me a while to get here but the point is that we should use the technology that is most suited to the problem at hand – in a lot of cases this will be some form of IT but not always. Computers are lousy salesmen and using extravagant database systems to order small quantities of data is potty especially when a lot of that data is qualitative. A well-managed Rolodex and ordered folders are as effective a tool for the salesman today as they were 50 years ago.

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I'm alright Jack

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I while ago I posted a couple of questions prompted by a "survey" being conducted at my place of work. The second question was:

If there’s a choice between sacking some people or you all not taking pay rises or annual salary increments but you’re not threatened, would you still take the cash knowing someone else will lose their job?

I have discovered the answer - and it's "I'm Alright, Jack". More people indicated that they'd prefer to see someone lose their job than forgo an annual pay increment. So much for the caring, sharing voluntary sector, eh?

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How accountable are large mutuals?

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I find myself wring about “mutuals” again. Not this time because of some pronouncement supporting mutuals and co-ops – usually from a political leader – but because of a report in the business section of the Sunday Telegraph:

“The Coventry Building Society, the country’s third largest mutual, is in merger talks with its smaller rival, the Stroud & Swindon.”

So what I hear you ask. Why the concern? It’s pretty simple really. Because no one individual can have a greater interest in the society than another there is no mechanism to balance the activities of management – other than at a general meeting. This contrasts directly with the traded company where markets give a clear signal to management and individuals can build up levels of ownership sufficient to influence decision-making.

At the local level, mutual organisations a pretty accountable to their members. As a member of Cullingworth Conservative Club, I feel able to influence (should I wish to) the decision-making of the management. A management who are unpaid and elected from the ordinary membership. In a multi-million pound turnover building society such influence is diluted across the entire membership – so long a management does not directly act to reduce the value of members’ savings those members will not challenge the decisions of management.

Put simply, the management are insufficiently accountable for a business that (in the case of the Coventry Building Society) has assets of £18.4 billion. The primary outcome of this lack in accountability is that management will act in their own interests rather than in the interests of the mutual owners of the business. Increasing the size of the business through merger is clearly in the interests of management – larger organisations have more and better paid managers – but it is open to question whether increases in scale are of any direct benefit to the majority of members since there is little likelihood of such a merger either reducing mortgage rates or increasing savings rates.

So while building society mergers do provide great headlines - “Yorkshire agrees takeover of Chelsea” – they do cast doubt on the mutual model and the degree to which management can, and probably do, act in their own interests rather than in the interests of the actual owners of the business.


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Two questions for public sector managers...

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Staff survey at work – options of no pay rise, no increments, reducing hours and redundancies (unspecified). I have responded appropriately but it got me thinking about the doom and gloom coverage around public sector workers.

So two questions for public sector managers:

1. If you believe what you do to be important, would you be willing to do what thousands have done in the private sector – accept a 10% pay cut?

2. If there’s a choice between sacking some people or you all not taking pay rises or annual salary increments but you’re not threatened, would you still take the cash knowing someone else will lose their job?

Just asking....

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Marketing Strategy - debating above my pay grade!

I guess that entering in to a debate on strategy with the Gingerbread Girl is a bit like someone entering into a debate with me about something I know loads and loads about (there must be something). And I should also remember that being self-deprecating sometimes requires a big neon arrow!

Anyway here we go with some thoughts following from the Gingerbread Girl's five strategy questions:

1. What are my goals? Is this really strategy? Surely objective setting precedes strategy? I would concede that a higher order strategy might set goals for a lower order strategy but I was talking about marketing strategy rather than corporate strategy.

2. Where should I play? I guess this is the very question I argued was central? Clearly the goals set suggest the options and choices around the place of exchange - the word market really answers this since it implies a place rather than an action.

3. How will I win? I contend that these are primarily tactical concerns determined by the goals set and the choice of playground - they are determined by the strategy but are not in and of themselves part of the strategy

4. What capabilities must be in place? Again this is action - the capabilities needed to deliver are determined by the choice of location for exchange. If I choose a sales route, for example, I need skilled sales people and professional support. But that is not marketing strategy.

5. What systems do I require to manage? Using the mail order example we would require systems to create, manage, maintain and exploit customer data - but these are again actions determined by the strategy.

Finally on the joke I plead self-deprecation having been - off and on - a marketing consultant, planner and researcher for best part of twenty years!