“A council the city deserves” – this was the grand vision pitched to politicians by John Barradell when he was interviewed in July 2009 for the post of chief executive of Brighton and Hove City Council.
His plan was to improve services to the city’s 260,000 residents but also help the local authority make more than £70 million of savings in the coming years.
More than £1 million was spent on a restructuring of top-level management to head the new system, which has been called “intelligent commissioning”.
Yet two and a half years on, his vision appears to have fallen flat on its face and key figures in the city are now privately calling it the “Emperor’s new clothes”.
Super directors
Nearly 18 months after four £125,000-a-year directors responsible for enforcing change started, The Argus can reveal:
- There is still no information on how much the new system has cost – despite four public reports and a 20-page blueprint being created.
- There is no information on how much it has saved – despite bosses claiming there were at least three areas where the new system was “well under way and delivering”.
- About two-thirds of more than 90 areas identified for change are not at the “implementation” stage, meaning there is no difference to the way they used to work and currently operate.
- Opposition councillors say the majority of areas which have changed are in departments where the “new” system was already in place.
- Only two areas listed have reached the “review” stage, where bosses can see if the new system is working.
Despite the concerns, council bosses remain committed to the plan which they say will be funded out of existing budgets, despite it having to make £35 million of savings in the next two financial years.
Council leader Bill Randall said: “At this stage, the commissioning work plan identifies services to be commissioned and is not designed to show a financial breakdown.
“The funds allocated to each department are covered by the budget, which will be considered by the full council on Thursday.”
The revelations come as a 14-page blueprint which demonstrated the system’s progress and how it will actually work was signed off.
Key figures from across the city remained sceptical. One described it as “underwhelming”, another as “rubbish”.
'Lost way'
Opposition councillors, some of whom helped set up the new system, said they believed it had “lost its way”.
Chief executive John Barradell first proposed the plan for a revised town hall structure when he was interviewed for the £175,000-a-year post in the summer of 2009.
Central to it was “intelligent commissioning” – a way using evidence to see what services are needed and avoid duplicating them with other public bodies and organisations.
Originally proposed under a Conservative administration, the idea was that bidding for running things such as libraries and youth clubs would be opened up to private and third sector organisations.
However concerns have been raised the new Green administration’s belief in keeping public services in public control is slowing down change and preventing the millions of pounds of savings forecasted.
Public services
Two months ago, when the new system was discussed in front of the council’s scrutiny committee, The Argus revealed that:
- Few services, if any, had been commissioned
- Council chief executive John Barradell could not say publicly how much had been spent on commissioning pilot schemes in the past 12 months, and
- Council chiefs spent months gathering information they admitted, on reflection, they did not need.
Directors have now publicly returned to politicians with a new document highlighting more than 90 areas where the new approach could work.
This will also be used by businesses, public bodies and third sector organisations to see what council services they can become involved in.
The Argus contacted a number of public, private and third sector leaders to talk about the new plan.
Due to the close working nature of the local authority with various partner groups, a number of individuals did not want to attribute their names to various comments.
Underwhelming
But one key figure said: “It was supposed to be the thing that saved millions.
“But the new plan does not indicate where we want to be. Quite frankly it’s underwhelming.”
Another said: “There’s all this talk about creating strategies but when are they going to do something?
“Intelligent commissioning is one of those things which sounds good in a presentation to people in local government but when you look into it, it’s a load of rubbish.
“It’s the Emperor’s new clothes.”
From the plan, less than 40 of the 93 listed were either in the “implementation” or the “review” stage, which implies the ideas behind the new “way of working” have been applied to those key areas.
Opposition councillors said the majority of these are in areas where “joint-commissioning” and public bodies working together already exists, such as adult social care and children’s services.
They add the lack of financial information has meant the local authority had been forced to make savings for the 2012/13 financial year using the old method of “salami-slicing”, where individual departments shave off percentages of their funding.
This is despite “intelligent commissioning” being designed to prevent this.
Money saving
Conservative group leader Geoffrey Theobald said: “The whole point of commissioning, and in particular the citywide commissioning with our partners, is that it should lead to more efficient and effective ways of providing services for residents. In other words it should be saving us money.
“This was one of the major factors behind the push to bring in commissioning under the previous administration and the Greens seem to have completely lost sight of this.”
Labour and Co-op leader Gill Mitchell said: “We are currently in the process of setting a budget based on the old salami-slicing method which is what the new system was designed to avoid.
“Next year has to be the year when the council and chief executive make some critical decisions about how this council is run.”
Alex Knutsen, of trade union Unison, said: “There seems to be a large gap between what the council wants to do and what we can do.”
Tony Mernagh, of the Brighton and Hove Economic Partnership, said: “The new work plan is an interesting take on the road to developing a new way of working.
“I’m sure that many groups, both inside and outside the council, will be scrutinising it with great interest to see where they fit in.”
When asked to comment about the 2012/13 budget, a spokesman for the city’s Community and Voluntary Sector Forum, which represents more than 500 organisations, said: “In-house services should not be protected at the expense of those provided externally merely because they are council-run.
“Salami-slicing still seems apparent within the budget.
“Given the scale of the cuts required to 2015/16 this is no longer a viable approach and work needs to speed up a cross council/partner approach.”
A two-page special report with timeline, reaction, and jargon buster appears in the Tuesday, February 21 edition of The Argus.
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