However the page below was only provided last Friday, which accounts for a further £241.10 claimed (October 2013).
This breaks down to:
1) Mersey Tunnel tolls Fast Tag (£1.30 * 10 (5 return trips on 17/10, 18/10, 21/10, 23/10 & 24/10)) = £13
2) Return train from Liverpool to London for LGA Workforce Board meeting (21st October 2013) = £220.80
3) London tube for LGA Workforce Board meeting (21st October 2013) = £7.30
Total (for 17/10/13 to 24/10/13): £241.10
These were for meetings to see an unspecified Police and Crime Commissioner (which could be Jane Kennedy), a meeting of the City Region Cabinet, a meeting of the LGA Workforce Board (in London), a meeting of NWIUF (spelt incorrectly) and the LEP (Local Enterprise Partnership presumable the Liverpool City Region one).
In fact NWIUF is an error on the expenses form and should instead be NWUIF (which is the North West Urban Investment Fund).
For four meetings that are not at Wallasey Town Hall (Police Commissioner, City Region, NWUIF and LEP) Cllr Phil Davies should have included the place he was going to on the form. However, as he claimed Mersey Tunnel tolls for going to these meetings, it is assumed they are all outside the Wirral and to the east.
Looking on the bright side though, Cllr Phil Davies’s expense form is typed, which makes it far easier to read than those councillors who fill them in by hand! The total of £241.10 seems to have originally been a different figure, but then tippexed out and replaced with £241.10. However it is to be expected that the Leader of Wirral Council has a busy schedule and diary.
Cllr Phil Davies expenses claim 2013 page 1 of 1
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So as Wirral Council has the Chief Executive’s three-month notice period (30th September 2014 to 31st December 2014) to find his replacement, what’s happened so far?
Well because the Chief Executive is a political appointment of councillors, the politicians have to decide. So a meeting of the Employment and Appointments Committee has been set up for the 27th October 2014. Graham Burgess is also currently Returning Officer (many people reading this may also know what a Returning Officer is but in simple terms it’s the head person at Wirral Council for elections), Electoral Registration Officer (another role to do with elections) and Head of Paid Service.
It is proposed that Penna PLC be paid about £15,000 for helping find a new Chief Executive and a further about £15,000 for finding a new Head of Specialist Services (who is also leaving in December 2014).
However paying out about £15k to Penna PLC to aid Wirral Council’s Human Resources department is not enough! No a “professional adviser” from the Local Government Association will also be advising the Appointments Panel.
This in fact has always struck me as a bit of an anomaly. Penna PLC and the LGA aren’t officers or councillors at Wirral Council. In the past though, they’ve remained in the meeting room after the press and public were excluded from the public meeting.
So who is the Appointments Panel going to be and what will it do? It will consist of seven councillors who will make a recommendation for the post of Chief Executive to the sixty-six councillors. It will probably be four Labour councillors, two Conservative councillors and one Lib Dem councillor. I have some guesses now below about who will make up this appointment panel for the Chief Executive. It hasn’t yet been decided yet which councillors will be on it, but below are my names along with my reasons:
Labour (4 councillors)
Cllr Adrian Jones * reason is already Chair of Employment and Appointments Committee
Cllr Phil Davies * reason is already Vice-Chair of Employment and Appointments Committee & Leader of the Council
Cllr George Davies * reason is Deputy Leader of Wirral Council, Cabinet Member and Labour councillor on Employment and Appointments Committee
Cllr Ann McLachlan * reason is Deputy Leader of Wirral Council, Cabinet Member and Labour councillor on Employment and Appointments Committee
* Note although Cllr Moira McLaughlin is a possibility, she’s unlikely for the reasons listed above
Conservative (2 councillors)
Cllr Jeff Green * reason there are only 2 Conservative councillors (apart from deputies) on Employment and Appointments Committee
Cllr Lesley Rennie * reason there are only 2 Conservative councillors (apart from deputies) on Employment and Appointments Committee
Lib Dem (1 councillor)
Cllr Phil Gilchrist * reason only Lib Dem (apart from deputies) on Employment and Appointments Committee
The seven councillors on the Appointments Panel will all be from the Employment and Appointments Committee and due to the high-profile nature of the appointment unlikely to be deputies. The Employment and Appointments Committee has eight councillors on it (plus twenty-one deputies). So the seven will come from those twenty-nine.
The Appointments Panel doesn’t actually choose the Chief Executive though. They just recommend who the Chief Executive should be to a meeting of all sixty-six councillors at Wirral Council.
From a practical perspective though, as Labour have a majority of councillors on the Appointments Panel and Wirral Council it will be down to the Labour councillors to decide who the next Chief Executive/Returning Officer/Electoral Registration Officer/Head of Paid Service is. As the process will probably be going on after Graham Burgess leaves and it’s a legal requirement to have somebody appointed to some of these roles, temporary people will have to be found before a permanent appointment is made.
Looking back to July 2012 when Graham Burgess was appointed as Chief Executive by Council, he then had to serve his period of notice before starting in post in September 2012.
If the new Chief Executive has to also serve out a period of notice, it could be as late as May 2015 before he or she starts (which if it is after General Election and local elections it will make the election side of their job easier).
Certainly it will be interesting to see who the politicians eventually recommend for this key post at Wirral Council! If anyone wishes to leave a comment comparing the appointment of Wirral Council’s Chief Executive to the complicated process of appointing a Doge of Venice, feel free.
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Isn’t it time Cllr Phil Davies remembered his 2009 U-turn on closure of Ridgeway and did the same now on Lyndale?
Isn’t it time Cllr Phil Davies remembered his 2009 U-turn on closure of Ridgeway and did the same now on Lyndale?
Councillor Tony Smith (Cabinet Member for Children and Family Services) at the Special Cabinet Meeting of 4th September 2014 to discuss Lyndale School L to R Cllr Stuart Whittingham, Cllr Tony Smith (Cabinet Member for Children and Family Services), Cllr Bernie Mooney and Lyndzay Roberts
Last year, Wirral Council wanted to introduce a banding system for the extra costs at special schools. However at the last-minute they withdraw their application to the Secretary of State to do this.
Despite the fact it actually couldn’t be implemented in 2013-14, the policy was agreed by a close 8:7 vote at a call in meeting back in February 2014, so if it gets implemented next year for band 5 children at Wirral Schools the top up element for band 5 children is capped at £16,000 (this is in addition to the £10,000 each school receives per a child).
If however a child with special needs based on the Wirral is at a school outside Wirral or at an independent special school (such as West Kirby Residential School) on the Wirral this £16,000 upper limit at least by my reading of the policy doesn’t apply.
When questioned at the Coordinating Committee meeting on October 2nd 2014 and asked to explain this unfairness, David Armstrong (Assistant Chief Executive) explained that because independent schools are run as a business, Wirral Council pay more to independent schools because such businesses are run to make a profit.
I used to go to an independent school, called St. Anselm’s College. Between the ages of 12 and 14 the school complained bitterly at people like myself whose places were funded by Wirral Council because we were all told many times that the school got (if memory serves me correct nearly 20 years later so I may be a little rusty on the figure) £100 per a term less than this was actually costing them and this meant in effect they had to cross subsidise the education of people like myself by putting fees up. Across about 35 pupils, this was a deficit of about £10,000 a year at 1992 prices.
The school felt (or maybe influential parents on the board of governors felt) it was unfair to expect the well off parents to subsidise the education of other students and they chose to opt out of the local system becoming grant maintained in the mid 1990s (as grant maintained schools no longer exist it is now called an academy).
In other words even when I was actually a child in the Wirral education system (and too young to vote), I was being made aware of how angry (and let’s face it political) schools got at Wirral Council’s funding formula a whole two decades ago! This may sound awful to write like this but to a lot of large schools, each child at the school meant £x,xxx a year, which meant management trying to balance the books each year veered towards seeing children as a source of income and forgot that people prefer to be treated as people and not a line on a balance sheet. Each year children got old enough to leave, so there was the usual advertising in the local newspapers and open evenings each year to try and persuade parents to pick that particular school for their children.
That is the mistake that I sadly feel politicians and upper management at Wirral Council have made. It is very easy to just see Lyndale School as a line on a balance sheet and that there’s an underspend in the budget for closing schools and try and spend that budget. The debate has sadly got too much about money and dare I write the unthinkable “nobody really understands the full complexities of education funding anyway”?
It’s harder to look at the social fabric of what makes up a school, not just the staff and children at it but its place in the community. To give one example of this there’s the history of a school and the fond place in the hearts of people who no longer have children there but did at one stage. These are not factors that can never truly be measured by accountants at Wirral Council. Unlike other consultations, the consultation responses made to the Lyndale School closure weren’t published by Wirral Council, although you can read them as an exclusive on this blog.
In the recent past there was a move to close Ridgeway High School (a secondary school) here in Birkenhead. Ridgeway was the controversial political issue back then (I even remember speaking on TV about it), there was a large petition of thousands against closure handed in to Wirral Council and a call in meeting held in the Council Chamber which a lot of people associated with the school attended. It was controversial, but in the end in 2009 the Labour/Lib Dem Cabinet did a U-turn and Rock Ferry closed instead. The rest as they say is history.
Back then Cllr Phil Davies was the Cabinet Member for Education and was quoted as saying this about that U-turn in the Liverpool Echo, he said that it was a “pragmatic decision, based on the clear view from Ridgeway that they do not want to be part of these options” and “We are not going to force the school to close and be part of a review which they now no longer wish to be involved in.”
In the interests of balance I will point out the same article has a quote from Cllr Stuart Kelly saying he is “delighted” and this quote from Cllr Jeff Green “The Cabinet really must start thinking things through before making such critical decision on the future for Wirral residents. The anguish and alarm the decision to close Ridgeway created was wholly avoidable by a simple application of common sense, it would also have prevented this subsequent embarrassing climb down.”
Now, five years later when somebody else is Cabinet Member for Education (Cllr Tony Smith) and Cllr Phil Davies is Leader of the Council where have those fine principles of pragmatism that Cllr Phil Davies displayed back in 2009 gone? Where is the politician’s desire to actually represent the views of thousands of people that signed a petition against closure of Lyndale? Try replacing Ridgeway in those quotes with Lyndale and you will get the following two quotes (the kind of words I’m sure plenty of people wish Cllr Phil Davies would actually say):
Cllr Phil Davies that it was a “pragmatic decision, based on the clear view from Lyndale that they do not want to be part of these options” and “We are not going to force the school to close and be part of a review which they now no longer wish to be involved in.”
and Cllr Jeff Green “The Cabinet really must start thinking things through before making such critical decision on the future for Wirral residents. The anguish and alarm the decision to close Lyndale created was wholly avoidable by a simple application of common sense, it would also have prevented this subsequent embarrassing climb down.”
Certainly if those words were said today (and for the sake of everyone involved in this let’s hope something similar is said in the near future!), Cllr Jeff Green’s position would seem to be entirely consistent over time if you compare Ridgeway in 2009 to now. Ridgeway of course is and was back then a much larger school that Lyndale is, so therefore had the clout back then and political influence to make sure it was never closed.
Why does the Cllr Phil Davies of 2014 over Lyndale not display the same sense of pragmatism he showed over Ridgeway in 2009? What’s happened in the last five years? I know U-turns are embarrassing for politicians to make, but he should take a really long, hard look at one of his predecessors as Leader of the Council Cllr Steve Foulkes who refused to U-turn on library closures until the Minister launched a public inquiry and learn the lesson that that it can be disastrous for the Labour Group’s reputation to rely on the “professional” advice of Wirral Council officers and listen to those Wirral Council officers more than the views of many Wirral residents. Aren’t politicians supposed to be there to represent the public in the political process?
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Is Lyndale School under threat just so Wirral Council can provide a further £2 million to a company that already has plenty?
Is Lyndale School under threat just so Wirral Council can provide a further £2 million to a company that already has plenty?
Councillor Tony Smith (Cabinet Member for Children and Family Services) at the Special Cabinet Meeting of 4th September 2014 to discuss Lyndale School L to R Cllr Stuart Whittingham, Cllr Tony Smith (Cabinet Member for Children and Family Services), Cllr Bernie Mooney and Lyndzay Roberts
Last Thursday morning I visited Lyndale School in Eastham. This was my first visit, although regular readers of this blog will know that I have written extensively on the topic and filmed many public meetings of Wirral Council on the many stages involving its potential closure in January 2016.
Thankfully the Lyndale School appears to be behaving in a far more “open and transparent” way than Wirral Council is!
I wanted to start this piece by describing my impressions of the school as some of my observations about a visit to Lyndale School raise further unanswered questions.
On the same plot of land as the Lyndale School is also Eastham Youth Centre. Clearly the current consultation is about the Lyndale School, however I know relatively little about this Youth Centre. Is this Youth Centre open, closed, working or threatened with closure itself? I don’t really know the answer to that question and would appreciate somebody better informed, or more closely connected to Eastham than I to leave a comment.
Moving to the Lyndale School itself, it looks from the outside like many other primary schools do on the Wirral. Unlike when I went to school in the 1980/1990s where there literally was an “open door” policy at primary schools, these days (as is common with all other schools on the Wirral now) you need to press a buzzer on an intercom system to be let in.
There is then a reception area on the right, which at the time of my visit had many stuffed toy animals on the counter. To the left is a visitors book for visitors to sign and visitors badges on which the names of visitors can be written. On the wall is also a photo of each member of staff who works there and their job title.
My personal view on the latter point, is that organisations that do such a thing, tend to be more open and transparent than those who try to hide behind a bewildering, faceless and largely unaccountable bureaucracy.
As we had both been walking up from Eastham Rake train station, someone we both knew, who lives in Eastham had been passing in their car and had kindly offered us both a lift to the Lyndale School. So we both arrived earlier than I expected, which gave me a chance to see people coming and going for a while and how things were going. Despite the pressures the Lyndale School is going through, staff were professional and the “open door” policy referred to at the call in I saw in action as one of the parents arrived while we were waiting. If a decision is made to close the Lyndale School, this is one of the matters that the parents of the children at Lyndale School have expressed concern about as they cannot see this in operation at the other schools suggested.
There is obviously a lot of trust that exists between the parents of children at Lyndale School and the staff there. Certainly there is (despite the stress the School is under because of the political issues) a lot of goodwill between the parents and staff at the school. That’s something that never appears on Wirral Council’s balance sheet as it’s something that can’t be quantified. This is part of the reason the parents of children at Lyndale School want the School to stay as it is, as they don’t see the same ethos at Lyndale School at either Stanley School or Elleray Park.
Echoing what I have heard Julia Hassall (Director of Children’s Services at Wirral Council) say many times, I will also make the following point. Some schools are closed down because they are “failing schools”. Lyndale School doesn’t fall into that category and that is not one of the reasons behind the consultations on its closure. I wish to make that as clear as I can (as has Julia Hassall at many public meetings). The view from the public can be to jump to the conclusion that schools are only threatened with closure because things at them are going pear-shaped. This is not the case at Lyndale School and I will also point out that no final decision on closure of Lyndale School has yet been made by Wirral Council’s Cabinet.
I have referred before in articles describing Lyndale School as a “hospital school” as personally I think it is probably a more accurate description of what goes on in Lyndale School. Think of the political fuss that would happen if say in the lead up to a General Election (and I’ll point out now that I know of no such plans) that there was a consultation on closing the children’s ward and the hospital school at Arrowe Park Hospital? Think of it purely from that perspective and you can perhaps see how emotional an issue it is for both the people directly involved and the wider community.
There are many new matters involving Lyndale School I could write about but instead I will explain what I was at Lyndale School for. There was a very interesting meeting of the Friends of Lyndale School Association held there which was a private meeting, so there is a limit about what I will write here about it.
However, I had better explain what and who the Friends of Lyndale School Association are. The Friends of Lyndale School Association are a small charity set up in March of this year and registered with the Charity Commission in June. Their charitable objects are:
To advance the education of pupils in the school in particular by:
developing effective relationships between the staff, parents and others associated with the school;
engaging in activities or providing facilities or equipment which support the school and advance the education of the pupils.
It’s hard to describe exactly what the Friends of Lyndale School Association is, but the closest easily understood comparison to it, is a parent-teacher association or PTA for the Lyndale School. As with all PTAs they raise money to be spent on their charitable objects and you can (if you wish) donate to them online on the webpage on Justgiving website for the Friends of Lyndale School Association.
If the Lyndale School closes, the Friends of Lyndale School Association have made it clear that any remaining funds would be donated to Claire House (which is a children’s hospice on the Wirral). The Wirral Globe are also printing interviews with the parents of Lyndale School (which if you wish to read the first three are on the Wirral Globe website starting here, continuing here and the most recent one is and I will at this stage (and I don’t often do this about someone else in the local media) thank Emma Rigby of the Wirral Globe for her reporting in the Wirral Globe of this story.
Yesterday evening there was supposed to be a meeting of all councillors at Wirral Council. However as most people probably know already a lot of public sector unions went on strike and that meeting was shifted to the evening of the 20th October 2014. One of the matters on the agenda is a minority report (no not the film Minority Report with Tom Cruise this refers to something different) but a minority report about the recent Lyndale School call in.
After the call in meeting on 2nd October 2014, the second consultation on closure of Lyndale School should’ve started as the Cabinet delegated this matter to Julia Hassall. She therefore probably knows more the timescales than I do. As far as I know (and Wirral Council’s constitution has been through a lot of changes in the past few years), a decision of a call in committee is still implemented by officers even if a minority report is submitted to the next Council meeting (which should’ve taken place yesterday evening but was I would guess put back a week because of the strike).
My concerns about the entire process in this matter over the last year and how this has all been done I’ve written about before. I am not going to repeat myself here. There are however concerns about corporate governance at Wirral Council about this matter that I haven’t expressed in public.
Personally I think it is a crying shame, that on an issue as sensitive as Lyndale School, that all political parties now represented on Wirral Council (whether Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem or Green) can’t come to an agreement (behind closed doors if need be) to pause this whole process and have a review.
Wirral Council claim that they can’t keep the Lyndale School open in 2015-16 due to a shortfall between what the Lyndale School predicts they will need and what Wirral Council is willing to give them. The shortfall will be
~£190,000.
I have written on this blog before that Wirral Council could easily find this small amount of money if they wished and move it around from existing budgets if the political will was there. In fact papers that went the Wirral Schools Forum last week showed that through reductions in this year’s budget they found ~£2 million. So where’s this money going? It’ll be put in a reserve and used next year to go to Wirral Schools Services Limited who have a PFI Schools contract for various schools (and two city learning centres) with Wirral Council as part of a ~£12 million/year contribution.
Wirral School Services Limited’s account show that for 2014 they had £1.93 million in cash assets, which is £6.33 million in assets minus their £4.39 million in liabilities.
What’s amazing is that a Labour Council, who trumpets its “socialist values” in election leaflets, it is seemingly happy to make £2 million of cuts in year to the Wirral Council’s Schools Budget for this year (which obviously need Wirral Schools Forum approval and Cabinet approval) to help plug a financial gap in the 2015-16 Schools PFI contract, but when it comes to an amount ten times smaller than that to be found no report I’ve seen so far even lists finding the money to keep Lyndale School open in 2015-16 (from such as underspends in existing budgets) as an alternative option!?
Despite the words of Wirral Council in the past that they would put vulnerable people such as the pupils of Lyndale School first, it seems that the school is under threat whilst capitalist greed gobbles up the available funds. If Wirral Council so wished, it could either end or renegotiate the Schools PFI contract. The schools system should not be run to feed the profits of private companies!!! Nor should vulnerable children have such a low priority!!! These are two of my main frustrations with the current situation.
I will repeat again, if you wish to donate to the Friends of Lyndale School Association you can here. The Justgiving website takes a 5% cut of all donations and charges £18 a month to the Friends of Lyndale School Association. However the other 95% (minus £18/month) is paid directly to them.
I know I will continue to get criticism (and I really don’t mind comments on this blog attacking me) from some quarters for how I’m reporting the Lyndale School issue, there has been however nothing so far that convinces me that all the decisions taken by Wirral Council so far have either been taken in the right way or for the right reasons. If everything was done so far “by the book” and in an “open and transparent” way, I would not be as irked by how the matter has happened as I am.
On a personal note, I realise there has been a deterioration in relations between Wirral Council and those associated with the Lyndale School. If other special schools on the Wirral think they will escape whilst Wirral Council’s focus is on Lyndale School, they will need to have a drastic rethink and not bury their heads in the sand. I will repeat here what I said at Lyndale School on Thursday.
There is a current consultation that the government is running on the draft Schools and Early Years Finance (England) Regulations 2014. These are the regulations (a type of law) that Wirral Council has to conform to when setting schools’ budgets annually.
At the moment, because of a part of the law known as the “minimum funding guarantee”, for this 2014-15 year Wirral Council could not drop school budgets such as Lyndale Schools by more than 1.5% based on what their previous year’s budget allocation was.
However the draft regulations being consulted on, whereas they (in draft form) keep the minimum funding guarantee for mainstream schools, get rid of the current minimum funding guarantee for special schools. Personally and I’m going to get quite political now, I think it is morally wrong to protect mainstream funding for mainstream schools, but at the same time allow local councils to (if they so wish) to totally change the budget (and therefore nature) of special schools which can in extreme cases ultimately force them to close. Obviously the draft regulations may be altered post consultation, but you can respond to that consultation run by the Department of Education here. That consultation closes this Friday (17th October) at 5.00pm.
If the new regulations (following consultation) abolish the existing legal protections for special school budgets, it will be perfectly legal for local councils (such as Wirral Council) to come up with a schools funding formula for 2015-16 that leads not just to the potential closure of schools such as the Lyndale School but dramatically changes the funding allocated to other special schools as the new banding system was agreed earlier this year at a call in a controversial 8:7 vote.
Wirral Council has shifted money out of the agreed budget for special schools to cross subsidise other parts of the education system, such as PFI. This is of course entirely legal if officers get the necessary approvals from the Wirral Schools Forum and others. However in other local authorities, an underspend in the special education side of matters would not be used to plug financial holes and financial instability elsewhere. Other Schools Forums take the prudent approach that underspends on the special educational needs side are put in financial reserves earmarked for that area of education.
The spare capacity such as underspends of money that was agreed should be spent in the special schools system, has instead been used to cross subsidise other parts of Wirral Council’s Schools Budget. The money however always seems to flow out of the special schools system and never back to it. Had these political decisions not been made, there would be more than enough money to keep Lyndale School open (at least for the 2015-16 year and possibly beyond). However instead the influence of a large company such as Wirral Schools Services Limited with large financial reserves has been listened to, whilst the pleas of Lyndale School parents merely to continue with what they already have, have so far been met with a lack of political will to explore alternative options and a knee jerk reaction to blame the situation on the Coalition government, the Church of England and even the Lyndale School itself, without apparently getting across to the public the personal responsibility that politicians at Wirral Council must take for each decision they make.
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Graham Burgess (Chief Executive) announces he will retire from Wirral Council on 31st December 2014
Graham Burgess (Chief Executive) announces he will retire from Wirral Council on 31st December 2014
Above is Graham Burgess in July 2012 at the Council meeting that chose him as Chief Executive
Below is the text of a media release issued by Wirral Council and distributed by David Armstrong, Assistant Chief Executive to those at the Cabinet meeting this evening. Usually I don’t just reprint press releases, but as it’s late and it’s newsworthy I think people had better know.
Wirral Council Chief Executive, Graham Burgess announces his retirement
Wirral Council Chief Executive Graham Burgess informed tonight’s meeting of Wirral’s Cabinet that he is to retire on December 31, 2014.
Graham officially joined Wirral Council in September 2012. Previous to that, he had been Chief Executive of Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council, and remains a leading figure in the Local Government Association (LGA).
He said: ‘When I took up post, I said that first and foremost, my role was to help shape the transformation of Wirral. Wirral is now a very different place to when I arrived, and I feel now is the right time to hand over to let the next phase of this work begin.
‘I have enjoyed the opportunity to work with the organisations and communities that make Wirral a special place, and I will continue to take a strong interest in the borough’s future. I would like to thank the people I have worked with, including residents, Councillors, and staff for their hard work. There are many excellent people working for Wirral and I wish them every success as they take the authority forward.’
Councillor Phil Davies, Leader of Wirral Council today paid tribute: ‘Graham joined us at a very difficult time and has been a positive and transformational catalyst for change. I would like to thank him for galvanising a collective will to move forward positively and constructively.
‘I am sad to see him go. We have been a good partnership forged by a shared appetite for change and innovation. However. we will continue the positive progress already made, and look forward to choosing a new Chief Executive to continue to take us forward into the next phase.’
Before joining Wirral Council on a full-time basis, Graham had spent a considerable amount of time in Wirral, including as a member of the Council’s LGA-led Improvement Board.
Graham, who was born in and lives in Liverpool, was previously Chief Executive of Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council. He began working for Wirral Council as part of the LGA Improvement Board, after series of external reports highlighted major weaknesses in the authority.
Since taking up the post of Chief Executive on an interim basis, then later being permanently appointed to the role, Wirral has been selected as one of nine authorities to participate in the Public Services Transformation Network.
The Council’s improvement has also been named by the LGA as being the fastest turnaround of any Council in the country, and is held up by the LGA as an example of best practice.
Since Graham joined the authority, Wirral has made significant progress in managing the financial risks and challenges it faces. An independent ‘Value for Money,’ report, compiled by auditors Grant Thornton, and published in September, also found that Wirral had made significant progress in managing the financial risks and challenges it faces.
