Council Jobs to Go -10% Staff Saving Needed

olly300

DirectDebacle wrote: »

Metropolitan Councils, County Councils, District Councils, Town Councils, Parish Councils. I think we are a bit light in the council sector and don't see where there could possibly be any overstaffing. :rolleyes:

Depends where you are in the country.

I only have a local council and the Greater London Authority.

treliac

beingjdc wrote: »

Largely because the largest slices of the Council spending cake are schools (for which the Government has mandated big increases) and old people (who are growing rapidly in number as society ages).

The average local government pensioner currently receives a pension of approximately £80 a week.

Because from Thatcher onwards the public sector has been forced to outsource its basic jobs to the private sector. So the top managers are still public sector employees, but the bin men, security guards, and cleaners work in the private sector, even though they're cleaning schools and security guarding hospitals. Obviously that will push the average up, but it's meaningless.

Frankly if I was going to be held to account in the national tabloids for a mother and her boyfriend's decision to murder their baby, I'd want quite a lot of media training. I also note that Haringey have significantly increased what they're prepared to pay their next Director of Children's Services. I'm not surprised - they want the best, and nobody's going to take it on because it's a low-stress job in a nice part of the world.

Bless.

An excellent post beingjdc. Everything and more that I would have liked to say myself.

Why is it that those who seem to know so little profess to know so much?

beingjdc

olly300 wrote: »

Depends where you are in the country.

I only have a local council and the Greater London Authority.

Me too, and actually I'd quite like a parish council too, to deal with the little local stuff locally. I'd happily make the sums add up by reducing the number of London Borough Councils, we could easily get by with 18 or so rather than 32. In my local case, I'd merge Lambeth and Southwark. Might as well, they have the same problems that need to be handled, and nobody really understands where the border is anyway.

While we're at it, instead of three councillors for each local area, there should be one for each, so the population covered by each Councillor would still be lower under my system than the current one, quite apart from the economies of scale of only having one Chief Executive, one Head of Finance, etc etc.

I'd probably go for 84 Councillors in all for 84 local areas, rather than the current set-up of 126 Councillors for 42 local areas (63 and 21 in each of Lambeth and Southwark) so halve the size of the area covered by each electoral ward, and save 30% - 15% to be an actual saving, and 15% to be invested in giving them better support staff to help them do a better job at being Councillors.

I should do this for a living really. Oh, wait...

Davesnave

macaque wrote: »

Before you denounce others with your pompous put downs, bear in mind that many of us heartily sick of the lazy, over paid busy bodies who have infested local and central government in recent years.

I don't think there is anything particularly pompous about defending people like nurses & teachers, who don't really deserve the kind of snide remark I was objecting to.

If you bothered to read my post, I did suggest that there are middle layers of management that might be usefully culled, and maybe positions higher up too, but I wouldn't know about those.

Frankly, I think it was naive to suggest that public sector workers would not expect to be affected by the recession, for as others have said, efficiency savings have been made in the past, during the so-called 'boom' years. However, it is easy to start with an unfounded assumption about what other people think, and then rail against it.

nickmason

I think I read/heard somewhere that parish councils are about to be introduced in urban areas. Whether the message actually is reflected in reality is of course yet to be proven;)

I think I agree with most of your suggestions re restructuring, especially removing multi-member wards. That said, I know I am in a minority on this - most councillors I know think multi-member is the way to go, and sometimes for reasons other than their own convenience!! But I don't get it. One of the benefits posited is that you can accommodate different sorts of councillors within a multi-member ward; so you can have one doing the local community/pastoral work, one doing strategic/cabinet, one doing probably not very much. There are always some, after all!
But as I say, I'm not convinced!

olly300

beingjdc wrote: »

Me too, and actually I'd quite like a parish council too, to deal with the little local stuff locally. I'd happily make the sums add up by reducing the number of London Borough Councils, we could easily get by with 18 or so rather than 32. In my local case, I'd merge Lambeth and Southwark. Might as well, they have the same problems that need to be handled, and nobody really understands where the border is anyway.

While we're at it, instead of three councillors for each local area, there should be one for each, so the population covered by each Councillor would still be lower under my system than the current one, quite apart from the economies of scale of only having one Chief Executive, one Head of Finance, etc etc.

I'd probably go for 84 Councillors in all for 84 local areas, rather than the current set-up of 126 Councillors for 42 local areas (63 and 21 in each of Lambeth and Southwark) so halve the size of the area covered by each electoral ward, and save 30% - 15% to be an actual saving, and 15% to be invested in giving them better support staff to help them do a better job at being Councillors.

I should do this for a living really. Oh, wait...

Makes sense really as loads of services are already shared. However I don't see the Head of Finance etc. of the current councils being happy to stand down.

beingjdc

nickmason wrote: »

One of the benefits posited is that you can accommodate different sorts of councillors within a multi-member ward; so you can have one doing the local community/pastoral work, one doing strategic/cabinet, one doing probably not very much. There are always some, after all!
But as I say, I'm not convinced!

That's the one I hear most often. Frankly I think it's nonsense.

Firstly in most areas none of the Councillors will be on the Cabinet. On the other hand in some areas, two might be! I used to work for a Leader who was a Councillor in a single-member ward and he seemed to manage. Admittedly he had District Councillors underneath him, but you'll know yourself that you can't just shuffle casework and campaigning between the tiers like that.

If people really think the split between strategic councillors and community councillors is so great, then I would suggest they should be elected separately anyway, so that the public can decided which gets to be which, rather than the party groups carving it up after the election.

The main advantage of multi-member wards in South London appears to be that the parties can engineer a situation whereby they have at least one white candidate, at least one non-white candidate, and at least one man and at least one woman, standing in each area, without having to make too many really difficult choices.

neverdespairgirl

olly300 wrote: »

I was never educated in classes of a large size due to the fall in birth rate after the baby boom years. In fact in the 80's and 90's all the schools in my area where losing teachers either through retirement or forced redundancy.

I think the year I was born (1977) was a low point in the birth rate - certainly we were aware that our age group was smaller than those a few years ahead of us at school.

nickmason

olly300 wrote: »

Makes sense really as loads of services are already shared. However I don't see the Head of Finance etc. of the current councils being happy to stand down.

We didn't replace ours - now we "borrow" from a neighbouring council.

Sorry to bang on, but it has been a real eye-opener into how lean councils can become.

The thing to remember though, is the amount of work involved in every new "initiative". This is where the money gets haemmorhaged away; training, systems changes, briefings, (statutory) rewritings of plans, strategies, assessments etc.

Local government is extremely complicated; each new swathe of legislation means that new techniques need to be applied, or perspectives adopted. This takes time to learn - in the meantime staff are less efficient. No sooner are they up to speed with the latest changes, than a new raft is introduced.

I've noticed that when a rowing eight chooses to change direction, the cox tends to make a quick, sharp adjustment and then lets the boat hold its course. Continual tweaking of direction causes drag and slows the boat down. I've often thought it a useful metaphor.

nickmason

beingjdc wrote: »

That's the one I hear most often. Frankly I think it's nonsense.

Firstly in most areas none of the Councillors will be on the Cabinet. On the other hand in some areas, two might be! I used to work for a Leader who was a Councillor in a single-member ward and he seemed to manage. Admittedly he had District Councillors underneath him, but you'll know yourself that you can't just shuffle casework and campaigning between the tiers like that.

If people really think the split between strategic councillors and community councillors is so great, then I would suggest they should be elected separately anyway, so that the public can decided which gets to be which, rather than the party groups carving it up after the election.

The main advantage of multi-member wards in South London appears to be that the parties can engineer a situation whereby they have at least one white candidate, at least one non-white candidate, and at least one man and at least one woman, standing in each area, without having to make too many really difficult choices.

I agree entirely!