A.O.B.
Obesity at the Town Hall
Published: 23 September 2008
It was a comment by a pal of newspaper days that prompted me to take a closer look at the letter the local authority had just sent me.
My friend was just back from the annual conferences of the Trades Union Congress and of those sudden converts to tax-cutting, the Liberal Democrats. “How was the TUC?” I asked my pal: “lots of familiar, though much older, faces from our past I guess?”
“Well, one or two,” he replied, “but what really struck me is that the TUC now represents virtually all public-sector workers – that much was very clear at this year’s conference.”
So farewell then the horny-handed sons of toil; the boilermakers, the engineers, the electricians, the textile workers. Welcome to the world of the legions of white-collar workers, an enormous number of whom seem to throng our town halls and civic centres up and down the land.
I looked again at the letter from my local authority, which invited me to complete an energy-efficiency questionnaire which, explained the author “…… will help us plan future energy-efficiency grants and projects.”
The author signed herself “Senior Policy Officer (Climate Change)”. Fair enough: worthy work, job worth doing. But then I saw the list of local-authority bigwigs whose names and titles cluttered up the foot of the letter.
There was the Chief Executive, naturally. And then the Deputy Chief Executive. And there then followed not one, not two, but three individuals, each of whom rejoiced in the style and title of Strategic Director. What on earth do these three worthies find to strategise about all day?
There is a serious point here, and the tax-cutting Lib Dems are on to it. Local government – and here’s a new phrase for the strategisers – has become “resource-obese”. Whether the Labour or the Tories want to cut taxes or not, whatever government that succeeds this one will need to make big savings. The incoming Government will be tempted to require every occupant of “director-level” position in a local authority to reapply for his or her own job.
In a straitened economy such as ours, local government chief executives and their “executive teams” would be wise to spend more time considering how to communicate more effectively with their council taxpayers, and to giving value for money rather than wasting council tax on employing three people to do one job.
Peter Hill is a partner in The Governance Partnership.