Strawberry-Tasting Chief Exec Gets Top Civil Service Post

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Chris Game

UK local authorities are among the largest in Europe, spending billions of pounds annually on hundreds of diverse services. Yet it is the fate of some to be associated in the public consciousness, almost solely and seemingly forever, with a single image.

My guess is that at this time each year, the conker season prompts recollections that it was Norwich City Council that cut down roadside horse chestnut trees because of the supposed risk of conkers falling injuriously on children and pedestrians. It never actually happened – the felling, that is; I’m not sure about the falling – and it’s now 11 years since it didn’t happen, but why let that ruin a good story.

Similarly, it’s 14 years since Winterval was cancelled, but I’d be surprised if you get much past the mid-November opening of the Frankfurt Market before you hear someone recall how Birmingham was the council that ‘abolished Christmas’.  It was a complete, and cynically propagated, myth – as even the propagators-in-chief, the Daily Mail, last year finally officially admitted – but it won’t go away.

Northamptonshire County Council’s a bit different, in that its abiding image – at least among those who give it any thought at all – is one that it, or more specifically its chief executive, positively sought. Yes, we’re talking ‘Taste the Strawberry’, and the reason for talking about it is that the former CE in question, Katherine Kerswell – aka the Strawberry Lady – has just got herself a flash new job in the Cabinet Office, as Director General for Civil Service Reform.

It’s an interesting appointment for several reasons. First, it comes at a time when the exodus of several women permanent secretaries was, and still is, threatening to leave Whitehall senior management maler and paler than it’s strugglingly become over the past few years.

Second, Kerswell will be working alongside Sir Bob Kerslake – ‘Two jobs Bob’ – who, when not being Permanent Secretary of the DCLG, moonlights as part-time Head of the Civil Service. Macho man though he is, he could use the extra pair of hands, for the Kerslake-Kerswell combo faces one of the trickier tasks around: implementing a Civil Service Reform Plan that aims to cut an already demoralised service by a quarter by 2015, while improving the policy making process and increasing accountability to Parliament. That both have made their names in local, rather than central, government might just prove advantageous – or just possibly not.

Kerswell’s senior management career kicked off in here in the West Midlands – as CE first of Redditch Borough Council, then for seven years of Solihull MBC. By the time she moved to Northamptonshire in 2007, she had already acquired a reputation as a strong advocate of customer service and transformational change, and she quickly concluded that both would need pushing in her new authority. Hence Taste the Strawberry.

In an early motivational address to the Council’s nearly 20,000 staff, she emphasised the importance of residents recognising that any and every council service they used was provided with their money and shared in common the Northamptonshire CC ‘brand’ – except that, instead using the nasty marketing jargon b-word, Kerswell coined her instantly famous metaphor:

“I want you to think about ‘Taste the Strawberry’ as a message, and that strawberry flavour will be the flavour that is Northamptonshire County Council.  Sounds a bit weird, but I hope I’ve got you interested, because we’ll develop what that flavour really is that we get across to all our customers.”

Some staff undoubtedly found it – and Kerswell herself – not only interesting, but positively inspirational, and certainly in some sections of the council it proved a useful prompt for thinking about and challenging the way in which services were designed and delivered.  Councillors, however, always slightly sniffy about officers usurping their role as the public face of the council, were generally less enthused, and as for the Great British Public, well, what do you think? 

The address went on to YouTube and quickly became one of the most popular ‘news and politics’ clips – long since withdrawn, sadly, though the key bit and Kerswell’s own explanation are still available in a mocking BBC news report. 

In a similar vein, BBC Radio Northampton’s ‘Drivetime Bard’, Martin Heath, was inspired to compose and perform a not entirely adulatory ‘Strawberry Song’:

“Some councils are like lions, proud guardians of our land.

Some see themselves as angels, always there to lend a hand.

Some are just like soldiers – their courage we salute.

But I see mine as a strawberry and that’s a kind of fruit.”

There were further verses of equal wit and sophistication, but ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ it wasn’t.  Then along came, almost inevitably, Stephen Fry. In an edition of his Radio 4 programme, ‘Fry’s English Delight’, the ubiquitous broadcaster proceeded, contrary to the impression given by the relevant Google headline, not to bury Kerswell, but to praise her.

His theme was that banning words, even weird management-speak, is fruitless (sorry!), and he had no time for the LGA’s ever-growing list of words that councils should be barred from using. He was quite happy, therefore, to embrace not only strawberry flavouring, which I personally quite like – both in reality and metaphor – but also blue sky thinking, step change, synergies and the rest, which I mostly don’t.

Kerswell herself has never, as far as I know, expressed any regrets at all, even about the Strawberry Lady tag. It got her generally low-profile council talked about, inside and outside County Hall, and clearly did her personal career, already on a rising trajectory, no obvious harm.

Some of the criticism did get tied up with attacks on her nearly £200,000 salary, which, though lower than that of her predecessor, still made her one of the highest paid local government CEs in the country. But, to her credit, she proceeded to publish full details of both her salary and expenses on the council’s website, set out details of what she did to earn it, and argued – before Eric Pickles was in a position to require it – that her fellow senior officers should do the same.

In her new post, this won’t be necessary. Her £140,000 salary is already public knowledge.  It’s considerably less than she’s earned at any time since leaving Solihull, which might seem to imply that sorting out the civil service is a bit of a breeze, compared to transforming Northampton County Council.  I wonder.

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Chris is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political  leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Roaming Buffalos, High Speed Trains and Localism?

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Ian Briggs

As the government seeks to develop measures that stimulate the economy through the relaxation of the local planning processes, should we stop for one moment and think about some pretty fundamental issues about the relationship that we, as citizens, have with the locality where we reside – issues that localism may be ignoring?

The predominant notion we have in the UK is that (with due respect to women) an ‘Englishman’s home is his castle’ – however, as the details of the 2011 Census are eagerly awaited we are aware that we have a society that is perhaps more geographically mobile than ever before – mobile through commuting to work or mobile though national or international migration. For most communities today, even those that have relatively fixed populations, the proportion of those who have been domiciled in one locality for more than one generation is shrinking. This means our emotional connectivity to place is changing – this is not to say that many localities have populations that don’t have a strong commitment to place. Rather, it implies that we see connectivity to place through economic factors more than any other. However, many communities have powerful and longstanding psychological commitments to the locality where they reside going back generations and generate fierce local loyalties that policy makers and politicians often find hard to recognise.

The concept of land ownership is not always recognised in other societies. Throughout the world there are examples of where the concept of ‘ownership’ is reversed – it is not the fact that the landowner actually has titled deed to the land where they reside but the land has ownership of the very people who reside upon it. This has been often misunderstood in places such as Australia, New Zealand and certainly parts of North America.  Where indigenous populations have been resettled there are numerous occasions where the sense of displacement is cited as the root cause for various social problems. The Native North American notion of the ‘Washee’ is not a catch all term for white North Europeans – it is a term better translated as a ‘trespasser’, as someone who this land does not recognise as within its own ownership.  This notion that the people belong to the land is more important than we have perhaps recognised – the sense of belonging to ‘place’- despite how challenging it may be to quantify or measure – is a key factor that local councillors have to account for, and a mistake that government at local and national level seem to continue to make when decisions are made that fundamentally impact upon communities.

People do have a sense of belonging to locality and this is now being demonstrated through the rather extensive and turgid consultation processes around HS2. As a resident who is impacted by this development I have been active in a number of local and regional meetings, where the debate is moving from the awareness of the economic advantages and disadvantages associated with building the railway to one of a strong sense of hurt caused by politicians’ failure to recognise the desire that many local people have to hand down the ‘belonging to the land’ from one generation to the next.

The sense of betrayal that many in the North American Native self governed communities feel is often characterised not by a sense of loss of entitlement to the land but that the land has something missing – it has lost its people and the arguments are less economic and more socially psychological and spiritual. The deprivation and social problems in many of the Native American self-governed communities is plain to see and has been overlooked for far too long by Washington.  It is only now that steps and measures are being taken that make better connectivity between these communities and the land they occupy. So, what relevance does this have for us in the UK? Perhaps, HS2 can be used as a litmus test and a broader set of parameters applied to considering its worthiness?

The tone of many of the public meetings and consultations around HS2 is starting to open this debate up – however strong the economic arguments are or are not as the case may be, the feelings of hurt and imposition by a government of a rail line is an issue that local councillors are going to be left to deal with for potentially generations to come. Government can perhaps be a ‘trespasser’ and impose things on the land and the people but where that strong link between place and people is broken other problems always seem to follow. If HS2 is to be completed then there could be major economic gains.  Whilst this is questionable to some it is indeed possible – the local building industry could be stimulated through a relaxation of local planning regulations – there could be a higher price to pay that may take time to emerge and leave us with many more problems to solve.

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Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Local Government Studies.  He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

Nothing to declare. A troubled time for parishes?

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Philip Whiteman

Chaddesley Corbett Parish Council is an ordinary local council like many others but whether its councillors’ decision not to sign a declaration of Disclosable Pecuniary Interest sets it apart will be of interest.  However, one suspects that their decision is not unique when considering the uncertainty and discontent amongst many that the new standards regime for the local tier of government is not fit-for-purpose.  Chaddesley Corbett Parish Council and others will soon start providing both Monitoring Officers and the Government with an increasing headache on what to do next. 

The declaration is difficult enough for principal councils let alone back-water parishes with minimal service responsibilities or budgets.  This is shame when considering the values of probity and good behaviour in all tiers of government as promoted by the late Lord Nolan.  Whereas councillors were previously required to declare personal and prejudicial interests, this requirement has now been extended to their spouses.  In a small parish, this may present a whole raft of problems. Unlike principal councils where elected members represent only one part of their council’s geographical ward, parish councillors generally have a representative role covering the whole parish.  This increases the chance that on many matters of fact, the interest of their spouses will prohibit those councillors from fully discharging their duties or voting on local decisions.  In Chaddesley Corbett’s case, the councillors expressed a belief that the new the declaration is an invasion of privacy into family life. Given parish councillor’s sense of voluntary contribution to the ‘good of society’, the requirements set out by the new Act are more likely to alienate than engage an interest in high standards.

As an advocate of standards in public life and the need for legislation to govern councillor conduct, one has to support some form of regime but the new requirements are excessive and ill-considered. Councillors should have been required to sign a code of conduct but the declaration is excessive. It is a mystery why government, whose earlier intent was to totally remove any form of standards regime, should then introduce such burdensome regulations.  

Figures have not been produced on how much the investigation of infringements at the parish level cost but one can suspect that the cost may exceed that of the parish precept where complex cases are raised. We can liken the new regime to the multinational firm that employs an army of auditors and tiers of bureaucracy to govern its employee’s expense claims.  Sometimes it is cheaper to ignore an employee’s claim of a few pence too many and not to instigate a heavy handed investigation.  The transaction costs of instigating regimes and investigations can often outweigh the benefits.  After all, some parishes do little more than award an annual hedge cutting contract!

Dr Philip Whiteman is Editor of Local Government Studies

Facing the Future

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Professor John Stewart.

To face the future is no easy task for local government. There are deep uncertainties in society challenging government generally. The unknown impact of continuing austerity, the revitalising of the economy   barely begun, the neglected issues of climate change and growing inequality all demand a response from government in what could be an increasingly troubled society.  These uncertainties make it impossible to specify with any confidence the policies required so government needs to develop a capacity for learning with the public and for using that learning in action.

The role of local government is crucial. One does not learn easily from the uniformity of centralism except sometimes that a mistake has been made everywhere. One does not learn of society generally in the enclosed villages of Whitehall and Westminster. It is the diversity that comes from local choice and the potential for public involvement  in those choices that should provide learning for the whole of government in dealing with the uncertainties of the present and the future.

The future may be unpredictable but local government can build resilience for the challenges ahead. Local authorities can best prepare for the future by rediscovering and reasserting those principles of local government; collective choice based on representative democracy and justified by public accountability.

Representative democracy has to be strengthened for current times. Participatory democracy can be a means of strengthening representative democracy but that requires understanding of the relationship between them. Advocates of participatory democracy and community involvement too often neglect the need for strong representative democracy as if the principles of representation and participation are opposed. A complex and changing society requires representative democracy to achieve accountable and effective government.

Effective representation requires new modes of interaction between the council and public and between councillors and citizens. Councils and councillors should develop new approaches to interaction with citizens enabling learning, explaining listening and hearing. Participation supports and informs representative democracy but the public rarely speaks with one voice and there will always be voices unexpressed. The task of the councillor and council is to seek out and balance differing views through political judgment.

Local government should recognise its task is to sustain the public domain in which the public interest is sought through collective choice for which councils and councillors are accountable to the public as citizens. There is a dangerous fallacy that local government and public services should be managed in the same way as the private sector. Managing for public accountability differs fundamentally from the market accountability dominant in the private sector. Many of local government’s relationships with the public are not with customers. Local authorities at times have to inspect, regulate, refuse a service, even enforce and compel and prosecute in pursuit of the public good. The public are citizens whose views are entitled to be heard even when they are not customers. Local government has to balance needs, demands and interests in ways beyond the scope of the private sector. The management of scarce resources is at the heart of local government. The private sector provides no guidance since price is its dominant means of rationing. Local government can learn from the private sector where tasks and conditions are the same, but where they differ, then the private sector has much to learn if they operate in the public domain. In the public domain, politicisation trumps privatisation.

A new emphasis is placed on choice in public services and that is taken to mean individual choice. Local government can enable or deny individual choice but should recognise individual choice has limits. Many choices are not individual choices but collective choices. Policies are decided, parks planned, buildings designed, planning decisions enforced and budgets adopted on the basis of collective choice. The challenge is to increase the capacity of local government to make collective choices well, by strengthening representative democracy and public accountability.

The era of uncertainties requires local authorities not to deny their principles by adopting a private sector model but to work out how those principles can be strengthened so that they can best face and meet the challenges of the future.

 

 

John Stewart is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham. His is a former Director of INLOGOV and Head of the School of Public Policy. He has written widely and lectured to many officers and councillors on the politics and management of local government, on the case for local government and on public management generally. In 2007 the Society of Local Government Chief Executives gave him the inaugural Presidents Award for an outstanding contribution to local government.

Having a holiday may deliver more than you expect!

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Ian Briggs

“It is surprising what a holiday can do for you” started the telephone conversation with a senior manager this week. Expecting the usual stories of chaos and entropy usually associated with such exchanges when the top boss reappears to take up the helm – it was a pleasure to find the reaction was indeed quite the opposite. There were stories of people who when faced with having to resolve complex issues when the boss was away – of doing things of their own accord that led to citizens and residents feeling that their local council had served them well.  He went on to tell me of the organisation became unintentionally decentralised – no Chief executive, no councillors around and even fewer senior managers leading to willing staff taking on issues and problems and seeking to resolve them with no one to seek permission from to actually do things.

It is this unintentional decentralisation that creates a condition not too dissimilar from what Ori Brafman was pointing to in the seminal book of 2006: “The Starfish and the Spider: The unstoppable power of the leaderless organisation”. Despite having the usual resilience plan and senior people being ‘on call’ during the holiday period there were numerous occasions when the chain of command was broken and the choice was either to do nothing or to do something. That staff chose to do something was clearly leading to residents and citizens feeling that their council was serving them well. What Brafman made as an acute observation was that if a spider losses a limb it is doomed – it has a centralised neural system that at best copes with disadvantage but at its worst leads to death; a starfish on the other hand has a decentralised neural system and adapts to attack and challenge.

The dilemma he now faced was how to keep this going? “My job” he said, “was to have overall responsibility to ensure that we had capacity to do things” – the mechanism being one of clear accountability, hierarchy and transparent systems. This ensures that when things go wrong I can see who is responsible and put it right ensuring that it never happens again. But – it does happen again – that is the problem.  Perhaps now the issue was about how to make the organisation ‘intentionally decentralised’ to be more of a starfish than a spider. The environment in which we operate expects us to be spiders – to have a centralised neurological system – the councillors want this and do Whitehall. Perhaps even the citizens expect it – to have a head to chop off in the event of major problems. However, the recent evidence does suggest that Brafman may have been right – he was clearly onto something in that hierarchy gets in the way.

Until the next holiday then – it may deliver more than an aching credit card and relaxed state of mind.

Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Local Government Studies.  He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

Police and Crime Commissioner elections – where the 18.5% turnout figure came from

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Chris Game

Getting exciting, isn’t it? Just 78 days and 21 hours (at the time of typing) till polling stations open for the Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections on 15th November. At least, that’s what Birmingham City Council newsroom’s dedicated website says –   It’s been running for nearly three weeks now and, given the dearth of information emanating from the Government, is well worth a visit.

It particularly is if you happen to be planning to set your alarm for polling day. There’s a competing countdown clock on the Get Out and Vote! website, set up to boost the participation of British Muslims in our national life, but it’s set 12 hours behind the Council’s, which, even allowing for the extra hour at the end of British Summer Time, seems odd. Unless it’s a tactic aimed at generating a last-minute voting surge and repeating the queuing embarrassment caused at several polling stations at the General Election. 

If so, I fear it’s seriously misconceived.  Voting, let alone queuing, seems likely to be at a premium. A couple of weeks ago, we heard an embarrassed, and embarrassing, Nick Herbert, Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice, repeatedly refuse to tell the BBC Today programme’s Evan Davis whether a turnout as low as 15% would be acceptable for this radical and controversial innovation. Evidently it would – any turnout at all, in the Minister’s view, representing greater democratic legitimacy than the present system of appointed police authorities. 

Davis’ 15% seemed to be plucked from the proverbial thin air, but we now have something apparently much more authoritative. The Electoral Reform Society (ERS) have done some sums and are asserting that the PCC elections “are set to have the lowest voter turnout of modern times – projected at 18.5%”. Brilliant – not ‘under 20%’, or 19%, or ‘around 18%’, but an eye-catchingly precise 18.5%. And, judging from the frequency with which the projection has been quoted, it’s worked – even though none of the mentions I’ve seen either explain or question just how the categorical claim was arrived at. I’m trusting, dear readers, that you may be a tad more curious.

In fact, the methodology is disarmingly simple: you think of a baseline number, then subtract stuff from it. The baseline figure chosen by the ERS is 34%, on the grounds that “recent local election turnouts are in this region”.  Surprisingly, considering how fundamental it is to the whole exercise, there is no further justification, yet it is certainly questionable. 

One difficulty is that the ‘region’ in which recent local turnouts have fallen is actually rather large. This year was calamitous – a 32% turnout in the English local elections taken as a whole.  It was also, however, the lowest overall percentage for 12 years.

Last year’s picture was significantly different. The overall average turnout across English authorities was around 43%, comprising all metropolitan boroughs (38%), and most of the unitaries (41%) and shire districts (44%). Birmingham and Coventry, 28.4% and 27% this year, both managed 37% in 2011, and these disparities between the two years were not exceptional.

I’m not suggesting that 2011 was more typical than 2012. Part of the reason it was ‘good’ was that it was the year in our four-year electoral cycle when the ‘all-out’ district and unitary councils are elected, and they consistently produce higher turnouts than those electing their members one-third at a time. All the English councils voting in 2012 elect by thirds, have elections in three years out of four, and, perhaps not surprisingly, have relatively lower turnouts.

All I suggest, then, is that 2012 was not typical, at least of the past decade. Yet, in choosing 34% as a baseline, ERS have picked a figure that, while 2% higher than 2012, is at least 2% and generally around 4% lower than any other aggregate figure in the past 10 years.

The remainder of the ERS projection involves estimating the percentage drop in turnout likely to be caused by three additional turnout variables, and subtracting these estimates from the 34% baseline.

First of the three is the fact that the PCC elections will take place in cheerless November, rather than what in most years ought to be the lustier month of May. Voter turnout in council by-elections has been shown to be statistically related to the number of hours polling stations are open in daylight, and therefore to sunset times. Studying over 4,000 by-elections held between 1983 and 1999, Professors Rallings and Thrasher of Plymouth University’s Local Elections Centre found a 6.6% average difference between turnouts in May by-elections (38.1%) and those in November (31.5%). Call it 6%, and the 34% drops down to 28%.

Secondly, there is the Government’s refusal to allocate state funding for mailshots, as in parliamentary elections, in which information about each candidate is posted out to voters. At up to £35 million it would be too expensive, say ministers. Instead, there will be an information pack from the Electoral Commission to all households, explaining about the elections, and a single national website, giving details of all candidates that will be posted free to those electors motivated to request them.

 

There is parliamentary election evidence that turnout can be boosted by up to a third when candidates receive mailings both from sitting MPs and their main challengers. There are no free mailings in local elections, so it could be argued that this factor has already been allowed for in choosing a local turnout figure for a baseline. The ERS, however, think it needs to be further adjusted, by a rather arbitrary 5.5% – so we’re down now to 22.5%.

 

Finally, there’s the absence of party political broadcasts. Derided as they often justifiably are, PPBs have been shown to be at least as effective as local campaigns in getting a party’s less committed supporters to drag their indolent butts along to the polling station. There will be no such mobiliser this time, but the effect is hard even to begin to estimate, so let’s just say a further 4% off the baseline. And so, ladies and gentlemen, we’re left with a projected turnout of 18.5%. It’s not rocket science, hardly even political science, but could you do any better?

 

 

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Chris is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political  leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.