Category: Ealing and Northfield

Many councils are seeking big savings from the concept of shared services. In London Labour councils Islington and Camden talked about sharing chief executive and senior management teams but this seems to have foundered, see here. They are still talking about sharing a number of services but have so far only agreed on saving £270K from procuring school dinners jointly. Conservative councils Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Hammersmith & Fulham are involved in a wide ranging service merger, see here. There is no doubt that such initiatives require a lot of work and are fraught with dangers.

Our council has been noticeably silent on this issue. If you scan the budget document you will see reference to one only one future, undeveloped, shared service proposition in the area of HR.

In Ealing the council’s chief executive is against the idea of sharing services directly, for instance merging identical benefits administration operations all following the same prescriptions from DWP. He does accept that jointly procuring externally provided services is a way forward and the current budget includes an inititative to save £1 million from the procurement of adult placements by doing this jointly with the West London Alliance (of west London councils). This initiative had to be driven forward in the face of officer opposition by the previous Conservatvie leader of the council. Plans to repeat the initiative in the area of childrens’ placements do not seem to be being carried forward with the same zeal.

Labour’s lack of forethought and their inability to come up with a strategy beyond ask officers what to cut and accept their ideas mean that Ealing is being short changed. Rather than hearing how Labour will do things differently all we are hearing is the head-banging insistence that less must mean less.

Online in the Gazette today council leader Julian Bell said:

The scale of the cuts to Ealing Council’s budgets is unprecedented.

Over 30% of its controllable budget is being slashed by the Conservative led government over the next 3 years. This means £66m is being axed from our coffers with more to follow.

Put aside the fact that a large part of his “cuts” are growth items next year and that the council spends over £1 billion per annum so maybe 6.6% does not sound quite so horrible you have to agree that the council has a large challenge in front of it. I would suggest that the majority of individual decisions in this budget would have been made in the same way by a Conservative administration. In the last few days I have tried to draw out some of the areas of difference. I have dwelt rather on the detail. A huge point of difference has to be the overall strategic approach taken by Labour.

Labour have not had a strategy. They have merely reacted. As we saw yesterday they are not inclined to tackle the marked disparity between their own staff Ts and Cs and those generally enjoyed by the majority of residents in the borough. Surely such a change in funding was the obvious opportunity to change the council’s terms of trade with its own labour force?

There is no sign of fundamental service redesign in this budget. One of the biggest challenges facing the council is how to stop duplicating contacts with the same people, especially those that misbehave. The person who fly tips, gets involved in anti-social behaviour, noise nuisance, dog fouling, etc is often tackled many times over by different “silo-ed” council services, each with its own staff and databases that don’t readily talk to each other. Layer in local health services and police repeating the same interactions and you can immediately see how massive efficiencies could be achieved. Not a peep in this budget about such fundamental service design even though its horizon is three years. When will the council start getting smarter?

In the same way ward focused resources such as ward forum co-ordinators, envirocrime officers, park rangers, cleansing monitoring people and community safety could have been similarly aligned with wards and police Safer Neighbourhood teams rather than being ripped up altogether by Labour. Add in the local knowledge and skills of councillors and the enthusiasm of residents and you could achieve amazing things by localising these services. Push the budgets out to the wards and the priorities will be seen to quick enough. You can only assume that both the Labour cabinet and the officers don’t see the ranks of Labour councillors as being capable of leading that kind of change. Far better in their minds to keep the centre strong and slash the frontline.

In the last nine days I have looked at six areas where I think the Labour administration has been unwise to cut and three areas where I don’t understand why they have gone easy. It is always important to say where you think the money should come from if there are areas you want to protect. If I wanted to protect the £1.5 million of spending that I have identified here’s how I would do it.

There is at least £10 million to be found, not immediately I will grant you, in bringing the council’s terms and conditions for staff into line with the kind enjoyed by most of the people who actually pay council tax. I would point out that the Labour administration has had 10 minths to look at this and happily ignored it unlike councils such as Croydon and Birmingham, the London Fire Brigade and the police.

For instance, council staff work a 35 hour week, they get 27 days paid holiday which rises to 30 after five years service and 33 after ten. In addition staff receive special payments of £1.8 million. The value of the 35 hour week compared to the 37.5 that most work is £23 million. The value of the extra holiday if you reckon that the terms are at least 4 days too generous is £6.2 million. The total value of these concessions to the workforce is £31 million. See blog here.

If we could just negotiate one third of this, £10 million, we could start to unwind some of the frontline cuts that Labour have made. Sure it would be a hard negotiation to have with council staff but if it meant more frontline services for residents I am sure they would want to talk at least – and we are after all only asking for one third of the difference between their terms and those enjoyed by the rest of us.

The council’s scrutiny function is not well understood by many residents but plays a significant role in the council. Scrutiny meetings challenge the executive and hold it to account. It is also the way that new councillors learn their way around the council.

On paper cuts to scrutiny look proportionate. £55K out of £193K or 28%. The reality is much worse as one of three officers is going but the manager role will look after all of the committees from now on, not just the scrutiny committees. As a result the number of scrutiny panels will reduce from 9 to 5 or 44%.

This might seem like a technical change but it means that the council and councillors will both be worse by a long way. The Labour back benchers have been obdurate in their unwillingness to see their allowances cut. This change will mean that not only do they not want to share the pain but also they will have less work to do. They already have a reputation for not turning up to meetings, now they won’t have to.

One of the important questions the Tories asked when they came into power in 2006 was why if we were paying to have our streets cleaned were they not clean? The answer was that the street cleaners were not checked. We might have hoped that they might check themselves, which was clearly the old Labour administration’s hope, but the contractor simply weren’t doing it. Rather than hope we spent your money on a team of cleansing monitoring officers to measure what was actually happening. The streets got cleaner when we had the evidence to manage our contractor with.

Recently Labour have been happy to boast of this team’s achievements. Unfortunately Labour think that they can get away with doing less monitoring. In November they proposed to reduce the team from 6 to 2. After lobbying and re-negotiation the team has ended up being 3.2 people (some are part-time). This is a 47% cut in this service.

At the last council meeting council leader Julian Bell boasted that Labour had met 64 of its 101 manifesto commitments. Time will tell. Bell was clearly confusing making budget provisions with actual achievement on the ground.

One promise that Labour have been very proud of is their 24/7 Grimebusters hotline. Their manifesto listed it as one of their top five key pledges:

According to opposition leader Jason Stacey each of the 122 calls received in the first three months of the scheme has cost £182, see here. The hotline is a typical Labour politician’s shiny bauble. Looks good in a manifesto. Costs a lot of money.

Cllr Jason Stacey, Conservative Group Leader, said:

Even with all the fanfare and publicity surrounding the Grimebusters Hotline theses figures show that it has been a complete flop. In the current economic climate there can be no justification for a simple phone call to report graffiti and fly tipping costing taxpayers £182.

It is ironic that the Labour administration has wasted this money on a hotline very few are using at a time when they are cutting the number of graffiti teams operating in our borough. I would have thought residents would much prefer money to be spent on having the teams in place to actually remove the graffiti rather than wasting it on a gimmicky reporting scheme that has fallen flat on its face.

Another of the frontline cuts that Labour is implementing is in the area of community centre staffing. In this paper, pages 2 and 3, it outlines how the community staffing would have dropped from 18 to 9. Not all of the old roles were full-time. They were the equivalent of 14.78 FTE.

After a lot of protests and some work with the community centres themselves, they have committed to paying higher rents, some of these savings have been put back. Instead of being cut back to 9 people the workforce is being cut back to 10.5. So the cut in this area is 14.78 to 10.5 or 29%. Not quite as eye-watering as some of Labour’s cuts but far worse than the areas that Labour is protecting.

Cllr Hitesh Tailor, Ealing Labour’s housing supremo, is getting himself a reputation for being extremely partisan and not really being that bothered with the truth.

The tweet above is derived from one paragraph in this article:

Ms Payne also conceded there is a lack of research to support ministerial claims that private sector landlord will reduce rents once local housing allowance caps are imposed.

You can use basic laws of supply and demand to argue that if LHA is capped rents will have to drop. You don’t need research. What research can you do? Any landlord with time to answer the question would tell you that they would never lower the rent. Every landlord with a void would take what is on offer. LHA rents tend to be higher than market rents in many areas in any case, certainly in Ealing. This article makes pretty eye-watering reading, describing how Labour’s LHA system has been abused.

Maybe Cllr Tailor can tell us how many people lost their homes as a result of Labour’s James Purnell limiting LHA to the five room rate in April 2009 as a result of the Acton Afghan case. Just find one family Cllr Tailor and I will write it up councillor.

On Saturday Cllr Tailor was trying to keep Labour’s 2010 local election campaign lie alive. It might work for the base but it doesn’t cut any ice with most voters.

One of Labour’s most controversial cuts has been in the area of park rangers. The opposition felt that the administration had gone much too far with this and called in Labour’s decision. The cabinet did relent and put back in two rangers but the cuts are quite eye-watering all the same and will lead to a material change for the worse in our parks I am afraid.

Labour will say that the Tories cut rangers too. They are right, but they are wrong. You can see the details here. Over three years ago, in the context of the Tories making £60 million of savings over four years we re-organised the rangers from four teams of five with four team leaders to two teams of ten with two team leaders. This change preserved the frontline labour force of 20 whilst making a sensible saving. It is hard to argue that the service was much diminished. The team leaders might have relished the chance to do some hands-on rangering rather than manage bigger teams but it was a reasonable ask. So in 2008 the rangers went from 24 to 22. Two team leaders and twenty rangers.

Since that decision an apprentice ranger post was added to the team leaving it at 23 at the end of the Conservative term of office.

The original Labour proposals published in November saw the team of 23 replaced with four area rangers and a conservation team comprising a team leader and four staff. So 9 people covering the same space. For the detail see page 8, 9, 21 and 22 of this document. It is worth noting that when the proposals were published all 22 ranger related posts were filled (although one was an agency worker). The only unfilled post was the apprentice. Now that two area rangers have been added back in you could say that the ranger team has gone from 23 to 6. It might be fairer to say that is has gone from 23 to 11 as the current rangers do conservation. This is a 52% cut in headcount terms. This huge priority for our residents has been treated much more harshly than areas such as comms, union facility time and service heads.

Whilst I have been methodically going through Labour’s budget line-by-line Conservative group leader, Jason Stacey, is extensively quoted in today’s Sunday Express lambasting Labour’s choices.

Councillor Stacey said at least £13million was being lavished on pointless projects. These include spending £5.5million on a new car park in Southall, just yards from an existing one which is never filled to capacity.

A further £3.6million is being spent on upgrading computers and £1million on shaving a foot off the length of desks to squeeze in re-located housing staff.

“You can understand why people are angry and upset,” said Councillor Stacey. “Spending millions on new computers can hardly be a priority when the day care centre is closing.

“How can you justify the fact that the top three tiers of management, some 98 senior managers, keep their jobs when 400 people are facing redundancy?

“As for spending £1million on desks, it seems nuts. It may not be a massive amount, but it is an example of the sort of decisions that are being made.”