Category: Ealing and Northfield

I have just spent another couple of hours looking at the budget papers, here. The first impression I get is that this is a either a stunningly ideological or a tragically stupid budget. This budget insists that less must mean less. Little attempt has been made to do more for less. As I said a week ago this budget is the equivalent of cutting off each finger, each toe, your nose and ears and sticking pins in your eyes in order to “distribute any cuts as equally as possible”. There are no big ideas, no strategy in these documents, just a tactical “cut everything” approach. Labour’s approach is calculated to make everyone involved in the council, whether as a provider or user of services, feel pain.

I did word searches through the documents for the words “hours”, “terms” and “conditions”, “holiday”, and “sickness”. They do not appear in the documents in the context of tightening up the council’s somewhat lax terms of employment. 35 hour weeks and long holidays remain in place. There is no attempt to build on the Tories’ good record of bearing down on sickness over four years.

The words “shared services” do not appear in the documents except for one unquantified possible future saving in the tiny HR department, an area where people have been doing shared services for years.

It is clear that only minor attempts have been made to clear out the heads of service layer of management where the council spends £6.8 million on 77 people, £88K per head, see here. Maybe five to ten posts. We are talking about 10%. Yet this layer of management could be radically reduced and the effectiveness of whole groups of staff improved by aligning the organisation to classes of users rather than siloed services.

On the other hand the council is proposing a massacre of frontline services that the public really appreciates. The parks front line is being reduced from 27 to 14, a cut of 48% with the popular ranger role disappearing. The envirocrime officers, whose role is not universally well understood but nonetheless key to ensuring that the borough is clean and well ordered, are being reduced from a team of 26 to 15, a cut of 42%. The team that run our community centres is being cut from 19 to 10, a cut of 47%.

The budget does have a go at union facility time, something I have written about here. But the cut in facility time is only 20% compared to frontline service cuts of 40-50%.

One of the most brutal cuts is the “invest to save” proposal which aims save £5.8 million by hiring bureaucrats with tick lists on clipboards to say no to disabled people and keep them out of the system. The language is not designed to inform:

Placement Reviews and gate keeping – Following investment in additional review officers.

I have previously explained how the council’s loss of 28% of its government grant translates into a cut in total expenditure of 5%. These frontline cuts are out of proportion with the total overall cuts. Labour are taking us for a ride.

Tony Palmer shows himself to be an ignorant man if the piece I saw on Ealing Times this week is any guide. Moreover, he is a rude man. Just read his piece and make your own mind up. He is rude to Ealing and its people, rude to the council, its councillors and officers, rude to an MP and he patronises Save Ealing Centre calling it “well meaning”.

When I call Palmer ignorant it is not a casual insult it is a judgement I can stand up very easily. Palmer is ignorant of both the political and economic implications of what he is saying.

His first target is the council’s work on the Local Development Framework (LDF). Mr Palmer is not the only person to find the LDF process unexciting. The council is legally required to follow this process. Hopefully the new Coalition government will give councils some freedom in this area soon. It is a bit of a red herring though.

Palmer is fixated on the station. He says:

Clearly the station and its redevelopment is the key, and why the Council therefore has such a golden opportunity. The only thing that can be said about the present station is that anyone arriving there now is so horrified that all he or she wants to do is get straight back onto the train and get the hell out of here.

So we need a station that is gateway to our Borough, something so spectacular and welcoming that it would attract the very people we need – businessmen, entrepreneurs, artists, residents who are happy to arrive and not flee in panic.

Perhaps he sees the new Birmingham New Street station as a model? If so he needs to explain where the £600 million is coming from. Not from Crossrail. Although I am certain we should be arguing to get a better station at Ealing Broadway out of the Crossrail project it is quite understandable that the Crossrail programme is not going to weigh itself down by trying to re-engineer every station on its route.

He talks about levelling our town centre and calling it a piazza without explaining where the £100 millions would come from. He fails to explain how a concert hall would compete with Wigmore Hall, half an hour away on the Central line, or the Albert Hall, half an hour away by car – and you can park for free on a single yellow line if you time it right. You wonder if he ever goes to these venues. The reason we have no concert hall in Ealing is the same reason that we have no department stores in Ealing – there is too much truly world class competition nearby. Palmer suggests underground car parking (horrendously expensive). Has he been to Springbridge car park lately? I have never not been able to find a space there.

Palmer’s la-la land vision fails to explain how one of the busiest roads in London just disappears. The 207 bus route running along the Uxbridge Road is reckoned to be the busiest bus route in Europe. It just ends at Palmer’s piazza. We may not love the Uxbridge Road but designing around it is a huge challenge.

What Palmer is suggesting is that the Council should spend money it hasn’t got to buy a site it cannot afford so that it could then borrow some £100 millions to develop it. The kind of work required to move major roads and build a public transport interchange are in the £100 millions territory too. Palmer’s vision has a price tag in the order of £500-£1,000 million. It is unaffordable nonsense.

If he is interested in the financial realities of local government he might take a look at the budget set by the outgoing Conservative administration which is still in force, the next budget being tabled for discussion next week. If Palmer looks at Table 13 he will see that the total capital programme over four years amounts to £250 million of which £110 million is dedicated to school building, mainly primary schools. Palmer makes his living around classical music and he may want the council to build him a concert hall but the council is legally obliged to provide school places first. Once it has done that it will hopefully want to follow the Tory lead and prioritise road repairs and improving basic amenities such as parks.

It is self-evident that Palmer is rude. It is not hard to prove that he is ignorant into the bargain. According to the piece Palmer has been a local resident six years. I suggest he finds somewhere else to live.

Reading the budget papers I am profoundly dismayed at how tactical and downright myopic the Labour thinking is. There is no evidence whatsoever that the council is moving to do things better. This budget is the equivalent of cutting off each finger, each toe, your nose and ears and sticking pins in your eyes in order to “distribute any cuts as equally as possible”. It would have been better surely to lop off a hand or a leg?

There is no evidence that the council is using this opportunity to do things better. Where is the talk of shared services? I don’t think I have spotted one shared service proposal in this budget. Where are the proposals to tackle the council’s terms of trade with its labour? If we have to have less staff they may as well work the kind of hours that most of their customers do. 35 hour weeks are simply unacceptable. This one change alone is worth £23 million. On its own the council’s top team costs £9.7 million, £100K each for 98 people. Changes here look minimal.

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 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, cleaning monitoring people and community safety could be similarly aligned with wards. Add in the 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 to keep the centre strong and slash the frontline.

Dumb and Dumber are in charge.

The big local news today is the publication of the council’s budget proposals on their website. They include proposals for £28.6 million worth of savings and outline plans for an additional £20.9 million of further savings.

The council’s press release uses the “c” word (“cuts” obviously) but fails to mention that the council’s pledge to hold council tax at the same level for the third year running will be funded by central government, some £3 million a year for four years.

You can see the papers here. There is a lot of detail here which I will go into in more depth over the next few days before the cabinet meeting on 30th November where this will all be decided.

The most newsworthy change so far seems to be the re-organisation of the ranger service to the point of destruction, see here.

I know that the term Socialist Worker is an oxymoron but the latest front page of their magazine shows their contempt for the law.

The front page headline is: “The student revolt shows how to fight”. I guess the “workers” think that destroying property and terrorising people is justified. The reason that Stalin and Mao could murder tens of millions is because they could argue that the ends justify the means. SWP still think the same.

According to one of the articles inside the magazine one of the Ealing Labour councillors spoke at a hard left meeting last Thursday along with bully boy Bob Crow of the RMT. According to this piece:

Cuts meetings in Exeter and Ealing

Anti-cuts meetings are taking place across the country. Ninety activists in west London agreed to establish the Ealing Alliance for Public Services on Thursday of last week.

A local Labour councillor and RMT union leader Bob Crow both spoke at the meeting.

The group now plans to organise meetings and protests.

Sixty five people also attended a defiant anti-cuts meeting in Exeter on Tuesday of last week where there was enthusiasm for a united fight against government cuts.

So, a local Labour councillor and RMT union leader Bob Crow both spoke at the meeting. I wonder who the local councillor is? I don’t suppose that they will rush to broadcast their hard left credentials to Ealing council tax payers.

Don’t forget that these are Gordon Brown’s cuts and that we need to put another £5,000 on every real worker’s credit card every year just to pay for Gordon Brown’s deficit madness.

Facility time is one of those strange parts of our politics/law that is not talked about much. Probably because it is hard to justify. Apparently Scout leaders volunteer. Lifeboatmen volunteer. School governors volunteer. Lots of people give their time for others without reward. But, trade unionists have won paid time at work to do their union business. It is called facility time. Trades union types get very huffy when people question this arrangement so are quite happy that it is kept quietly hidden from view.

Earlier this year the TaxPayers’ Alliance estimated that this facility time was worth some £85 million across the UK state. They asked government bodies how much staff time was allocated. Ealing council answered 3.0 FTE. The TPA used a figure of £27,083.69 to cost this labour and thus came up with a figure of £81,251 for Ealing. At the time I suggested that this was an underestimate and that the figure was rather higher. Little did I know.

At the last council meeting the leader of the Conservative group on the council, Jason Stacey, asked the following question:

Question 43:

Could the Cabinet Member for Finance and Performance please give the figure for the budget for Trade Union facility time?

Answer 43:

Non teaching employees Trade Union Facilities budget (including non teaching unions in schools)
£112,400

Trade Unions facilities budget for Teachers
£138,500

So the total bill is £250K. This kind of money would buy you six to eight experienced teachers or social workers. Instead the council is paying union reps to organise at work. Can’t they do this in their own time?

Almost exactly one third of the council’s total revenue spending was spent on people last year, some £346 million on wages and related staff costs out of a total of £1,031 million on the revenue side. Most of these people do a great job for Ealing and too often they get unfairly criticised by politicians, journalists and the general public.

One of the most important ways that the council will be able to live with reduced means over the next four years whilst not impacting frontline services will be to manage this spending very carefully.

I asked the following question at the last council meeting.

Question 33:

Can the portfolio holder answer the following questions in relation to the terms and conditions of directly employed staff?

1. Number of hours to be worked per week?
2. Holiday entitlement (including any changes with length of service)?
3. Any additional holiday days beyond the standard public holidays (8 including Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday and May Day, Whitsun and August bank holiday)?
4. The total value of any overtime, anti-social hours, special responsibility allowances, attendance allowances or similar payments made by the Council in the last financial year.

Answer 33:

Number of hours to be worked per week?
35 hours per week
Chief Officers: Undertake such reasonable hours of work as necessary to fully perform duties

Holiday entitlement (including any changes with length of service)?
Less than 5 years service: 24 days
Between 5 and 10 years service: 27 days
More than 10 years service: 30 days
Chief Officers: 30 days

Any additional holiday days beyond the standard public holidays (8 including Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday and May Day, Whitsun and August bank holiday)?
Extra Statutory Holiday: 1 day (National Term)
Extra Leave: 2 days
All additional holiday days usually taken between Christmas and New Year. For each of these days worked, a day is added to that year’s leave entitlement.

The total value of any overtime, anti-social hours, special responsibility allowances, attendance allowances or similar payments made by the Council in the last financial year.
Figures are for financial year: April 2009 – March 2010 and exclude schools

Overtime: £840,634
Anti-social hours: £721,234
Special responsibility: £201,080
Attendance allowances: None recorded as being paid to employees in 2009/10

Most working people would think a 35 hour working week extremely cushy. I am sure that many of our council’s workers do more than their prescribed hours and are very conscientious. But the same would be true for most who do a basic 37.5 hour week. If your working week is only 35 hours it is 6.7% shorter then that most full-time people put in and that means that the council has to employ 6.7% more people. It also means that the council could save 6.7% of its £346 million staff bill. This is the equivalent of £23 million. The savings that the council is looking for are £53 million. This one area could deliver almost half of that of that in one go. No loss of services. Excellent conditions and pay for council staff.

The council’s holiday offer looks too generous I am afraid. The 24 days basic rate with 3 extra days over the Christmas holidays looks too generous by 4 days. 4 days lost out of a typical working year of 222 days (after holiday, public holidays and national average sick days) is a 1.8% loss. Taken across the whole council’s staff bill of £346 million that is another £6.2 million.

Finally, much of the £1.8 million of special payments made by the council last year would not be countenanced in the private sector and certainly most organisations enduring financial hardship would simply ban overtime straight away. Typically most roles can be filled by people who want to work the hours that are offered. Very rarely do you need to use special payments.

Such changes to terms and conditions could not happen overnight and it would take some persuasion I am sure, but what a huge prize? The total value of these three savings would be £30 million and would do most of the work required for the council to continue to provide good services whilst dealing with a very difficult financial settlement.

At the last council meeting the Leader of the Conservative group, Jason Stacey, asked a series of three questions about the costs associated with the council’s top team.

Question 40:

Could the Cabinet Member for Finance and Performance please confirm how many members there are of the Corporate Board? What is the total combined annual salary costs (based on 2010/11 salary levels), including pension and on costs, for the Corporate Board – assuming all work continuously for a 12-month period? Please include any long-term agency/interim staff within your figures.

Answer 40:

Total number of members of Corporate Board – 5
Total combined Annual Salary Costs including on-costs – £938,702.72

Question 41:

Could the Cabinet Member for Finance and Performance please confirm how many Directors there are employed at Ealing Council? What is the total combined annual salary costs (based on 2010/11 salary levels), including pension and on costs, for these Directors– assuming all work continuously for a 12-month period? Please include any long-term agency/interim staff within your figures.

Answer 41:

Total number of Directors employed at Ealing – 16
Total combined Annual Salary Costs including on-costs – £1,967,639.04

Question 42:

Could the Cabinet Member for Finance and Performance please confirm how many Assistant Directors and Head of Services are employed by Ealing Council? What is the total combined annual salary costs (based on 2010/11 salary levels), including pension and on costs, for Assistant Directors and Heads of Services – assuming all work continuously for a 12-month period? Please include any long-term agency/interim staff within your figures.

Answer 42:

Total number of Assistant Directors/Heads of Service employed at Ealing – 77
Total combined Annual Salary Costs including on-costs – £6,773,101.95

Across the whole group that is pretty much 100 people who cost £100K each.

One of the first actions of a returning Tory administration would have been to look very hard at this group. Such changes need to be made early in an administration and it is a measure of how unprepared the Labour group were to be in power that they have not moved in this area. Even though the council’s management structure has evolved considerably in recent years it still looks top heavy compared to many other organisations. It is unlikely that the Labour group have the skills or the confidence to manage this group.