Wirral Council’s Cabinet to decide on whether to have public meetings on Monday mornings from 2016

Wirral Council’s Cabinet to decide on whether to have public meetings on Monday mornings from 2016

Wirral Council’s Cabinet to decide on whether to have public meetings on Monday mornings from 2016

                                               

Councillor Phil Davies at a Cabinet meeting earlier this year
Councillor Phil Davies (Leader of Wirral Council) at a Cabinet meeting earlier this year

There are many decisions on the agenda of Thursday’s Cabinet meeting and many are about changing how Wirral Council does things to be more like how they’re done at Liverpool City Council.

I’m going to write about one proposed change that could be described that way and explain the problems it might cause.

Item 9 with the exceedingly dull title of Executive Arrangements and Pledge Champions (the latter doesn’t mean some councillors are pledging to stop drinking alcohol) proposes that from next year instead of Cabinet meeting in the evening, Cabinet meetings will be on Monday mornings at 10.00am.

From a public relations perspective I can see why they’d do this. For example each year for the past years I can remember, a rabble rousing trade union representative has turned up to a Cabinet meeting with a lot of supporters (I think one year so many it had to switch to the Civic Hall) which would be nigh impossible to do if your trade union members were at work on a Monday morning.

If Cabinet meetings had been on Monday mornings when a decision was made about Lyndale School, that would’ve meant the staff (including the headteacher) or the children affected couldn’t attend the meeting where politicians decided about their school.

On the plus side, public transport during the day means councillors would able to get to and from meetings without relying on taxis, but that’s not the point as strictly speaking public meetings are for the public not for the councillors.

Essentially having a Cabinet meeting on Monday mornings will rule out the public turning up or at least the ones with jobs. Of course some councillors have jobs too, but their employers have to give them paid time off work for this sort of thing.

Now the decision states that the Leader can decide to change the time of the meeting away from Monday morning. However if the agenda is published, the date and time of the meeting is set, then a topic on the agenda kicks up a fuss with large numbers of Wirral residents, how will it be possible to change the time of the meeting without confusing people as to when the meeting is?

Of course going back to public relations, a meeting on Monday evening would mean reports of Cabinet decisions could make the next edition of the Wirral Globe. I would be interested to hear people’s thoughts on changing Cabinet meetings to Monday mornings as there may be issues with this change that I haven’t thought of.

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VIDEO: A round-up of local Wirral and Merseyside politics by John Brace (part 2)

VIDEO: A round-up of local Wirral and Merseyside politics by John Brace (part 2)

VIDEO: A round-up of local Wirral and Merseyside politics by John Brace (part 2)

 

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John Brace on local Wirral and Merseyside politics (part 2)

Part 2 of this video series is shorter than part 1.

As before, this transcript of the video will include relevant links. After I recorded the video I found another bundle of papers that make up the BAM Nuttall contract on the scanner. There are also pages Wirral Council didn’t give me because of commercial confidentiality reasons. However I think you get the point that it’s a long contract!


still from a Youtube video about politics part 2 thumbnail
still from a Youtube video about politics part 2 thumbnail

Hello, I’m John Brace and this is the second part of my videos about local politics on Merseyside and on the Wirral.

One thing I’ll be talking about today is the Bam Nuttall contract. You may not have heard of Bam Nuttall, but they replaced Colas. If I went into the whole Colas saga and the senior officers that were suspended and paid oodles of money because Wirral Council didn’t quite get it right, well I’d probably use up all the tape on this camera.

But anyway going back to Bam Nuttall, in must have been 2014, Wirral Council signed up to a contract with them and the contract called, let’s see the Highway Services Contract. So for instance stuff to do with road works. Anything I think over a certain amount to do with traffic lights is someone else’s responsibility but I’ve scanned in the first bit of the contract which is here, see that’s the bit I’ve scanned in, but it’s an absolutely massive contract.

This is the next bit, bit not the rest of it! Then there’s this. That makes up the contract.

I have asked Wirral Council not to give me things on paper and to save the planet, not cut down so many trees and give them to me on a CD, but Wirral Council always seem to prefer paper.

Anyway the other thing I’ll be writing about in the near future is, this is some of the invoices I got during the audit for various things. For instance, this one is an invoice for £7,389.50 for the Moscow Ballet doing Giselle at the Floral Pavilion.

Moscow Ballet invoice Wirral Council Floral Pavilion 2014 £7389 50 thumbnail
Moscow Ballet invoice Wirral Council Floral Pavilion 2014 £7389 50 thumbnail

Now you may well say well what’s the point in getting an invoice for that? Well, the taxpayer actually subsidises the Floral Pavilion to a large amount of money.

So whereas for example Wirral Council sees closing down Lyndale School as a priority because they say they don’t have the money, they do have the money to be subsidising the tickets of rich people going to see the ballet at the Floral Pavilion. OK, I could look up the amount later.

The other thing I was going to talk about is Liverpool City Region Combined Authority. Now of course this was only set up in the recent past and has mired itself in all kinds of controversy over the devolution deal, price, prize, all that and elected Member stuff.

Anyway, what I did notice and this came as news to me, even though I report on the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority is that Knowsley Council has set up a website for the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and they’re currently running a consultation on the things that make up the devolution deal.

Now, firstly before the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority was set up politicians quite categorically said, I’m not going to name the politician here but I’m sure people can find this out, I’ll probably find this out when I write this up on my blog.

They said the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority won’t cost any more money than the existing arrangements. Now registering a website, having a website hosted, dealing with all the stuff to do with a website does cost money! OK, the politicians will probably turn round and say, well this is from existing budgets or something, but it costs money that can’t be spent on something else.

So anyway, when I write this up on the blog, in the transcript I’ll include a link because to be honest it was news to me, it hasn’t been in a report that was submitted to the Combined Authority and as far as I’m concerned the only mention online about it is from Knowsley, whereas the Liverpool City Region Combined Authority is all the councils on Merseyside plus I think Halton and really speaking you shouldn’t just consult with the people of Knowsley, you should be consulting everybody.

So that’s a few things that I’ll be doing, let’s see today’s weather is cold, hence the jumper. When I was looking into market research as to what people want from a blog, one of the things that came up was weather forecasts. Now you’ll be glad to know that unless there’s a big demand I’m not going to start up with a map behind me and little symbols of clouds and sunshine, wind and all that because I really don’t fancy being a weather forecaster probably because people would love turning round and saying, “Well you said it would be sunny today John and now it’s raining!”.

But anyway if you really do want weather forecasts, there’s the Met Office website for that.

So that’s a summary of where I’m up to, this week there are hardly any public meetings because of the half term holidays and of course there’s Halloween at the weekend. One of the things that’s coming up of course is Bonfire Night and the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, ok I’m sure people are probably sick of me talking about Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service.

Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service are running, in I think conjunction with Wirral Council, trying to clear up the, say for instance the bits of wood and stuff like that people put together for bonfires because Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service probably really don’t want to be going round putting out a lot of small fires on Bonfire Night.

I mean they’re not being killjoys or anything, there are Council organised fireworks displays and things like that so people can go along. I’m sure there’ll be one in Birkenhead Park this year, people can make the usual jokes about taxpayer’s money going up in smoke, that kind of thing.

But anyway, that’s what I’ll be doing today, I’ve decided to keep it short because typing up these transcripts takes a while, but if there’s anything you want to leave a comment on or you think I should write about then please get in touch.

OK, thanks for listening.

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VIDEO: A round-up of local Wirral and Merseyside politics by John Brace (part 1)

VIDEO: A round-up of local Wirral and Merseyside politics by John Brace (part 1)

VIDEO: A round-up of local Wirral and Merseyside politics by John Brace (part 1)

                                                            

Screenshot from Youtube video of John Brace
Screenshot from Youtube video of John Brace

Below is a transcript of a video I’ve recorded about a range of local political matters. I’ve added some extra detail which I don’t say on the video in [] brackets and of course links to more detailed stories. I realised when I finished recording that I’d been talking for nearly eighteen minutes. It’s about a variety of local political issues.

At the time of publishing this blog post the video has been uploaded to Youtube, but is still processing at Youtube’s end.

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John Brace on local Wirral and Merseyside politics (part 1)


JOHN BRACE: Hello, I hope you can hear me clearly. I’m John Brace and I’m going to be filming a series of videos as due to the half term holidays next week, there’s a shortage of public meetings.

So, I thought I’d start off by looking at one of the bigger stories on my blog this week.

That was about what I said at a meeting of the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority to the Chair Cllr Dave Hanratty and his response about councillors’ expenses.

I suppose I’d better briefly explain what the situation is regarding councillors’ expenses and allowances.

Councillors on the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority are entitled to claim expenses for instance for travel to public meetings and each year they’re supposed to publish a table detailing each councillors’ name and how much has been spent over the year in expenses for that particular councillor in various categories.

In fact that’s a legal requirement, a very basic level of transparency.

However unfortunately what Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service was doing was, where they received invoices directly rather than councillors claiming back expenses they’d incurred themselves, where trips were booked through Capita, train travel that kind of thing, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service were invoiced directly but this wasn’t appearing on the actual annual lists so that about £6,000 or so of expenses were being left off. So I have been pointing this out over the past few months.

There’s also the issue that councillors get paid allowances and on this National Insurance and presumably things like income tax were paid. Now those amounts weren’t included in the annually published lists either.

I did ask Councillor Hanratty earlier, I think it was the day before yesterday whether these amounts would be included in future, didn’t get an answer.

Asked a question about this at the Birkenhead Constituency Committee, told it was a matter for Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service/Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority.

I think they don’t want to give me answers on this, I think they hope I’ll just stop writing about it and move on to other things. After all I think there are far less councillors getting a taxi from home to the public meetings now since I started publishing what these expenses were for.

Anyway, another news story that’s seems to be popular on the blog is that Merseytravel’s Chief Executive David Brown is leaving. I think he’s leaving from some time next month to become Chief Executive of Transport for the North. Obviously that’ll be news for people that work at Merseytravel and I suppose you’re wondering what Transport for the North is!

Well it’s a new kind of regional body that’s been set up regarding transport matters and eventually it’ll become like Merseytravel is and the Combined Authority a statutory body. So I wish him luck in his new job and I think the Deputy Chief Executive Frank Rogers will be Acting Chief Executive until councillors decide on who the permanent Chief Executive should be, which should come to a future meeting in the future.

Anyway, another thing I’ve written about on the blog recently is to do with the whole Lyndale School closure matter. Now for those who have been following this story this is probably going to repeat what you already know, but Wirral Council officers said the reason the school had to close was that from 2016/17 which is the next academic year, that funding that they’d get for education from the government would be based on pupil numbers rather than place numbers.

Now at the moment I think there are about forty places at Lyndale School and about must be a dozen or so pupils. So basically they were saying that from next year, there would be a shortfall in Lyndale School’s budget.

But this hasn’t happened!

The Cabinet still decided to close the School, but the funding changes haven’t happened, Wirral Council will get the same funding as they did the previous year.

However despite them getting the same funding, they have actually made cuts from the SEN budget because there is flexibility at Wirral Council in that they can move money around within the education budget. They’ve still got to spend it on education, but they can move money around from say that allocated for teaching assistants for special educational needs to something else within that education budget and one of the things that’s been causing pressures on the budget is that they have a massive contract, I think it’s about half way through thirty years or something.

I’ve read through the contract and it’d take too long to go into here, but it’s a contract with Wirral Schools Services Limited for basically to rebuild a number of schools, but as well as the payments that relate to that there are also payments of millions a year I think that the schools have to pay this private company for services to do with the schools. For instance I think school meals is part of it, possibly cleaning and maintenance.

So the situation had been that Wirral Council was getting a grant from the government for some of this, but the contract meant that the costs were rising each year for PFI.

What was happening was, this money was being funded outside the education budget by Wirral Council. But then a political decision was made [by Wirral Council councillors] not to do this, which meant that a few million had to be cut out of the education budget elsewhere.

Hence why special educational needs got a cut, but again one of the other interesting twists and turns that came out in the Lyndale School saga is that the whole issue of whether the School should be closed or not seemed to arise around the time there was a revaluation of the land and buildings.

Off the top of my head I think the valuation was about £2.4 million [it was actually £2.6 million]. I’d better make it clear at this stage this is a what they call a technical, what’s it called, depreciated replacement cost value. It’s not a they send in an estate agent and they say how much would would we get for this and how much would we get for the school playing fields and so on?

No, it’s more they have to have on their asset list, a list of how much their assets are because obviously as a Council they have liabilities, they have to offset that with their assets.

But it’s a great shame what happened regarding Lyndale School, it’s not closed yet, it’ll close at the end of the academic year, but I think it could’ve been handled a lot better.

Obviously there’ve been recent revelations come out that the person that chaired the consultation meetings on the Lyndale School closure wasn’t in fact a Wirral Council employee, but is a what do you call it, a temp, a temporary worker because they couldn’t recruit somebody to the post [for £775+VAT/day].

He’s called Phil Ward and the problem was that, there was quite a bit of criticism levelled at him for the way he chaired the consultation meetings. Now obviously you can criticise anybody for chairing high profile consultation meetings. I’m sure there were criticisms of how Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority did their consultation meetings.

But moving back to Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority, the Saughall Massie issue, it was agreed by councillors on the Fire Authority to go ahead, they’ve agreed the four or so million pounds in the capital budget and a planning application has been submitted.

Now I’ve checked on Wirral Council’s website and I can’t see a planning application there yet but obviously they have to scan it in and put it on the website for consultation so people can make their comments and so on.

The other issue is there was a vote recently on whether Wirral Council should give the land or they may get something for it I don’t know, maybe they’ll give it to them, should give this land to Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority for this new fire station in Saughall Massie.

Now, that was a five for, five against vote with one abstention so it got deferred to another meeting.

Now obviously it would be better if Wirral Council could make a decision reasonably quickly but I understand the point that councillors made at the meeting, that they felt they were only hearing one side of the argument and that they hadn’t got the information in front of them regarding the emails that had been released under Freedom of Information Act requests, they hadn’t heard the Fire and Rescue Service’s point of view because nobody had been invited along from the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service and basically better decisions are made by politicians when they have the facts in front of them and they don’t like making decisions if they’re going to be made fools of later when it turns out there’s something they should’ve known or was in the public domain.

An example of that New Brighton car parking Fort Perch Rock fiasco. Now that went out to budget consultation, was agreed by Cabinet, was agreed by Council but what wasn’t known at the time was that Wirral Council had a lease for the Marine Point complex and that lease said that if Wirral Council introduced car parking charges at Fort Perch Rock, that they could be introduced in the car parking elsewhere there and Liverpool Echo journalist I think it was Liam Murphy got in touch with the company that runs the Marine Point complex and they said yes they’d have to introduce charges because obviously if Wirral Council had introduced charges at Fort Perch Rock car park then it would’ve displaced some parking to the free parking elsewhere, so then they’d feel they’d have to introduce charges themselves, but once these matters came out then there was a U-turn done on it and they decided they’ll make up the budget shortfall somewhere else.

But that goes back to my point about politicians having the information in front of them so they can make reasonably informed decisions. Now the reports that go before officers, sorry politicians whether that’s at Wirral Council, Liverpool City Council, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, Merseytravel and so on are written by officers. That is employees of the particular public body that the politicians are politicians for.

But there’s a question of, officers can have a particular point of view and make a recommendation and therefore ask the councillors to approve it, but officers aren’t actually going to know everything, but where do the public fit in all this?

Because of course in an ideal world, like for instance the Planning Committee yesterday where the public gets to speak for five minutes if they’ve got a qualifying petition. In an ideal world, if you were making a decision, say a major decision about a fire station being built, well that’s two decisions really, it’s a planning decision and whether Wirral Council give them the land. When you’re making a major decision like that, then not only should you have some sort of consultation with the public and by consultation I don’t mean publishing the papers for the meeting a week before, although that does give some advance warning so people can lobby the decision makers.

I’m talking about that people who are affected by the decision should have their say at a public meeting and I know there’ve been consultation meetings, that the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service have run and that’s fine. But what I’m saying is the ball’s now in Wirral Council’s court, there has to be the usual consultation on planning applications, but it’s a very emotive issue.

And I think basically if I can sum up the positions, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service have received a grant for some of the cost of this fire station and of course with the West Kirby and Upton fire stations being closed, they’ll receive something for the sale of those but basically they want to build it now in Saughall Massie because the site in Greasby has been withdrawn.

But the problem is that this is greenbelt land and there’s a lot of resistance from the residents regarding a fire station there.

Now in the not too distant past Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service did put in a planning application for a temporary fire station in Oxton while Birkenhead Fire Station was being rebuilt. I know that was later withdrawn but that caused a similar level of fuss and outrage and politicians saying they were against it and so on.

But the problem was that was only a temporary ~12 month arrangement, eventually they found some way round finding somewhere else. But the same issues that were brought up then, have been brought up regarding this Saughall Massie issue, you know the issues regarding sirens, traffic and so on but I think the elephant in the room really for Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service is that a number of the fire stations they’ve got are part of the PFI scheme, so they can’t close those without massive penalties.

I mean I think Birkenhead Fire Station is one example of one of the fire stations they’ve got under this PFI scheme.

So there are fire stations they can’t shut, so that leaves if they want to make any budget savings, for instance through cutting jobs and merging fire stations, they’ve only got the ones that aren’t the PFI fire stations that they can choose from.

And that’s part of the reason why Upton and West Kirby got chosen.

But I think one of the things that has currently got the public going, is that after there was pressure put regarding the Greasby site, that the offer of Greasby where there’s a library and community centre there was withdrawn and people are asking why Wirral Council isn’t doing the same thing with Saughall Massie?

Well basically these are decisions yet to be determined, it’s a party political matter because three political parties involved in the last decision on this voted three different ways, but I can see a problem because firstly Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service can’t keep Upton and West Kirby open. They just don’t have the budget for the amount of firefighters that would take.

Now one alternative is, just keep Upton open, now the downside to this according to the Chief Fire Officer is that this would increase response times to the Hoylake and West Kirby area, so that’s why they want somewhere roughly in between the two stations.

However then people raised the issue of Upton’s close to Arrowe Park Hospital, so it’ll take longer to get to there so wherever you have a fire station there’ll be people that have a quick response time and people that have a slow response time.

But the fire engines aren’t always at the fire station all the time, I mean about half the time they’ll be called out on a job, well maybe a bit more than that, they’ll be out somewhere else and that can’t really be predicted where they’d be at, whether they’d be fitting a smoke alarm or something like that.

So there are a lot of issues to do with the Saughall Massie fire station and basically I’ll be reporting on it, but at the same time I think it’s interesting seeing both the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority meetings and the Wirral Council meetings and how this issue has been dealt with at both of them.

Of course if the government hadn’t offered Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service a large grant to build a new fire station there, then I doubt this would’ve gone ahead, admittedly they could’ve borrowed the money or found the money from somewhere but I think that what’s interesting is I did make a FOI for the grant application that they made to DCLG, was told that this information would be published in the future so I couldn’t have it now and I’d have to wait till after the consultations were finished and by that they didn’t just mean the Upton and West Kirby consultations but they meant the other consultations because this grant is not just for a fire station at Saughall Massie, there are similar consultations and mergers and closures happening elsewhere across Merseyside.

So hopefully that will sum up things and I’ll point out that tonight at the Wallasey Constituency Committee, I won’t be there but I noticed because I read through the reports and the agenda, that the Motability, they have a little place in Birkenhead that hires out wheelchairs and things like that are looking to set up a place in New Brighton, so people can hire wheelchairs and that kind of thing.

So that’s a possibly positive move for New Brighton, because I know there’s been a lot of criticism at New Brighton and a large petition over the dropped car parking plans.

Anyway I’d better finish for now, but thanks for listening.

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What are the changes to funding for special schools for the 2016/17 academic year?

What are the changes to funding for special schools for the 2016/17 academic year?

What are the changes to funding for special schools for the 2016/17 academic year?

                                        

Phil Ward (SEN Lead) who chaired the Lyndale School consultation meetings
Phil Ward (SEN Lead) who chaired the Lyndale School consultation meetings
  

A report that went to last night’s Wirral Schools Forum about funding for special schools makes for interesting reading. The report’s based on the operational guide (schools revenue funding 2016 to 2017) published in July 2015.

Those with long memories will remember that the reason given for closing Lyndale School by Wirral Council officers was that funding for special schools would change starting in the 2016-17 academic year. Officers confidently stated that instead of funding being based on place numbers it would instead be based on how many pupils were at a school. In their view this meant that Lyndale School not being financially viable as the large (and increasing) difference between pupils and places at Lyndale School would result in a shortfall in funding.

A report to yesterday’s Wirral Schools Forum states (EFA stands for Education Funding Agency) “In respect of High Needs Funding (funding for special schools, bases, non-maintained special schools, independent special schools, alternative provision, EMAP and the Hospital School) the EFA have indicated the allocation for place funding and other high needs funding will remain at the same level as 2015-16.

This was confirmed in the operational guide which states in a section on high needs funding starting on page 30, “The full year 2016 to 2017 allocation will therefore be based on the 2015 to 2016 academic year place numbers, and for the remainder of the high needs allocation there will be no change to what was allocated for 2015 to 2016.

More detailed reports about the changes for special schools funding were published in September.

Sadly this news arrives too late to make any difference to the Cabinet decision to close Lyndale School at the end of the 2015/16 academic year.

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16 Wirral Council invoices for temp senior managers (IT & SEN), other temps and catering

16 Wirral Council invoices for temp senior managers (IT & SEN), other temps and catering

16 Wirral Council invoices for temp senior managers (IT & SEN), other temps and catering

                                                       

Below are sixteen invoices (among many) that I requested from Wirral Council during the short inspection period when local government electors can inspect and receive copies of contracts and invoices for the last financial year. Each thumbnail image links to a higher resolution copy of each invoice.

I made a trip on Friday afternoon to pick up copies and thought I would start with ones that relate to the recent story in the Wirral Globe Wirral Council freelance staff and consultants are costing taxpayers millions which follows on from my blog post in March Why has Wirral Council spent £6,003,273.07 on temporary staff over the past 10 months?. All except one of the invoices below are for agency staff.

Eleven of the sixteen invoices (various numbers below) are from Odgers Interim who describe themselves on their website as “a leading UK interim management recruitment firm”. These are for the services of an Interim Head of IT (the previous Head of IT took redundancy in March 2013 as the Head of IT post was deleted in a senior management restructure) and an Interim Strategic SEN Lead (the previous SEN Lead Paul Ashcroft left Wirral Council in December 2013, just before it was made public that Lyndale School could close).

The Interim Head of IT (bear in mind the Head of IT post was deleted in the 2012 management restructure to produce “savings”) provided by Odgers Interim cost Wirral Council a daily rate of £695+VAT/day according to the monthly invoices.

Phil Ward (SEN Lead) who chaired the Lyndale School consultation meetings
Phil Ward (SEN Lead) who chaired the Lyndale School consultation meetings

The Interim Strategic SEN Lead Phil Ward (see the photo) was also provided by Odgers Interim. He cost Wirral Council (surprisingly) more than the Interim Head of IT. Odgers Interim were charging Wirral Council £775+VAT/day for his services.

Four of the rest of the invoices (numbers 497-500) are also for agency staff. Invoices 497 to 499 are from Badenoch & Clark. Unfortunately I only have been given the first page of these two page invoices (presumably the second missing pages are timesheets). Each of the Badenoch & Clark ones are marked “STRICTLY PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL” . I presume that the rates (£348.10, £345 and £348.10) are daily rates, so these invoices are just for short-term cover mainly for a week, but the last invoice is for three and a half days.

There is also a CIPFA (invoice numbered 500) (Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy) invoice for 19 days of interim cover at £710 a day for an “associate” (total including VAT £16,188).

Finally invoice 889 is for £1,303.25 + VAT (total £1,563.90) is from Carringtons Catering Limited for the catering at the public meeting on the 2nd June 2014 at the Floral Pavilion. This was the meeting last year at which Cllr Steve Foulkes was made Mayor.

Having these long-term temporary arrangements has to be more expensive to Wirral Council than recruiting new people. I do realise that in the Wirral Globe article that Joe Blott explains that they’re had trouble recruiting to the SEN post. It also makes you wonder why in the first place in 2012 that the Head of IT post was deleted and whether the “savings” of that 2012 management restructure (slightly offset by the three new strategic directors posts) were achievable?

Wirral Council invoice 67 Odgers Interim March 2014 Interim Head of IT 19 days @ £695 + VAT £15846 thumbnail
Wirral Council invoice 67 Odgers Interim March 2014 Interim Head of IT 19 days @ £695 + VAT £15846 thumbnail

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