Category: Council Excellence

Wirral Council – Council Excellence Overview and Scrutiny Committee 12th July 2011 Part 2

Cllr Gilchrist moved on the minutes of the meeting of the 16th March 2011. He asked if there were any matters arising or inaccuracies? He also asked if the content of the minutes was agreed. They were agreed. To enable officers to go home or to future meetings he asked that the agenda be rearranged … Continue reading “Wirral Council – Council Excellence Overview and Scrutiny Committee 12th July 2011 Part 2”

Cllr Gilchrist moved on the minutes of the meeting of the 16th March 2011. He asked if there were any matters arising or inaccuracies? He also asked if the content of the minutes was agreed. They were agreed. To enable officers to go home or to future meetings he asked that the agenda be rearranged so that items 13, 17 and 18 would be heard first.

It was going to be item 13 first, but then changed to item 17 which was on the supplementary agenda. This was introduced by the report author Chris Hyams. She said it was a report the scrutiny committee had requested so she was reporting back. She repeated what was in the three page report and its two page appendix at length.

She said the People Strategy had been agreed by Cabinet, then the Employment and Appointments Committee. She talked about the principle of investing, supporting and leading the workforce and the effective people framework. She said there were five key themes and that the achievements were detailed in the appendix. The Corporate Plan identified the themes about improvements in delivering an efficient and effective Council.

She wanted to highlight the key achievements in what had been a challenging year in Human Resources. The key initiative had regarded leadership development. The communication strategy had been improved which led to a briefing system that cascaded down the structure and allowed feedback to be given and questions to be asked over key organisational issues. There was also a focus on corporate/leadership behaviour and an updated training programme which included an MBA in Leadership and ILM qualifications.

Wirral Council – Council Excellence Overview and Scrutiny Committee 12th July 2011 Part 1

The agenda and reports for this meeting can be found here.

Present:
Cllr Phil Gilchrist (Chair)
Cllr Ron Abbey (spokesperson)
Cllr Alan Brighouse
Cllr Tony Cox
Cllr Darren Dodd
Cllr Paul Doughty
Cllr John Hale
Cllr Chris Jones
Cllr James Keeley
Cllr Steve Williams
Committee clerk: Andrew Mossop (replacing Mark Delap who’s on holiday)
Also various officers and two members of the public

The Chair, Cllr Gilchrist welcomed the new councillors to the committee Cllr Tony Cox and Cllr Paul Doughty. He said if they could survive 36 years as a councillor as Cllr Hale had they must be enjoying themselves. He said although they were new to the council that they should not feel bound by that not to ask obvious or awkward questions. He said they needed all councillors to take part and contribute to get debate going. People had commented on the length of previous meetings but he would take as much tim as was needed to properly deal with issues without getting bogged down or stifling discussion. He would however stop them going round in circles and they had to deal with the issue of Vice-Chair.

He asked for any declarations of interest. No declarations of interest were declared. He said Andrew Mossop was the committee clerk because Mark Delap was on holiday. For Vice-Chair he proposed Cllr Brighouse, he had already raised this with the spokespersons. They had almost agreed Cllr Brighouse to become Chair when he had been in hospital, however Cllr Brighouse had managed to escape being Chair despite being poised to do so. He welcomed officers and members of the public.

Social Services & Martin Morton

It’s good to see some local press coverage in the Wirral Globe (with 37 comments) and other local papers about this issue, which I wrote about on the 19th in relation to the Cabinet meeting of the 14th.

Changing an entire culture of an organisation and how councillors do scrutiny in the future is always difficult. Wirral Council will need to bring people like Mr. Morton on board if things are to change. The public call for people who didn’t do their job to be fired and the finger of blame pointed at certain named councillors of various political parties as well as the full story as to what happened and why and will be clearer once the report is published. However Wirral Council needs to move on from the past and embrace change.

As pointed out in previous reports, it was not just the Cabinet Member’s responsibility but at the time of the special charging policy there was a separate Social Services committee with a Chair and party spokespersons whose role was scrutiny of Social Services. People involved in political parties at the time of the special charging policy do know who was involved in these at the time, but (perhaps as many are still serving councillors) these names haven’t been released to the general public.

Although weaknesses were exposed at the political/councillor level there were also massive failings within Social Services management and internal confusion regarding its policies and procedures.

In politics, only certain things are taken up and campaigned on (and this partly depends on the numbers that want something). The rest, councillors, MPs etc and others in political parties do their best about. Mr. Morton was standing up for disabled adults (many of which sadly at times encounter prejudice or in some cases due to their disability have difficulties in communicating). Many councillors have a very good understanding of physical disability (eg glasses, walking sticks, wheelchair users etc) but don’t fully understand the nuances (and differing severities) of adults with learning difficulties or learning disabilities.

Yet what is the employee body of Wirral Council as a whole like? Wirral Council itself was named joint “Scrooge Employer of the Year” for 2008 for poor staff morale and where staff felt their efforts went unappreciated. If you read the Council’s Workforce monitoring report for 2009/2010, that you were more likely to get a job if you were female or disabled. Yet if you were from a non-white ethnic background or male you were less likely to get from shortlisting to the job.

As the report points out “The success rate of disabled applicants is marginally above the norm. The high percentage of shortlisted disabled applicants is due in the main to the Council’s guaranteed interview policy. This policy guarantees that a disabled applicant who meets the essential criteria is shortlisted and is interviewed. The most significant trend is that whilst non-white ethnic background applicants have a greater chance of being short listed they appear to be less successful at interview stage.”

A quarter of its employees choose not to answer the question on disability. I hope Wirral Council working in the future with organisations such as Operation Black Vote will move things forward on race and by working through the issues flagged up by Mr. Morton Wirral Council will start getting things right for disabled people, rather than being branded the worst Social Services department in the country.

The author is a former student representative on the Disability SubGroup of University of Liverpool.

Cabinet meeting (Wirral Council) 22/02/2011 Part 1 – the Conservative/Lib Dem budget cometh and Labour is not happy

Well yesterday the Conservative & Lib Dem Cabinet “unveiled” their Wirral Council budget for 2011/2012. Labour’s (opposition) budget will arrive by noon on Friday the 25th February.

Next Monday (1st March) the full Council will vote on the budget, although with 41 (yes I know it’s 42 including the Lib Dem Mayor but generally he doesn’t vote as he’s supposed to be politically neutral as part of his office) “progressive partnership” councillors to Labour’s 25 24 (edit – I sometimes forget Cllr. Knowles had switched from Labour to Tory and the independent Cllr Kirwan isn’t still with Wirral Council) councillors, I’m sure even Labour can do the maths and realise Labour’s budget will be defeated next Monday (with no need for Budget Part 2 on the evening of the 9th March) by around seventeen votes.

Can you see which bits of the Budget are from the Lib Dem side and which from the Conservative side? Yes you can see “the seams” between the two halves as we continue to be two independent political parties with minds and policy making processes of our own. If you look really hard you can see the bits influenced by yours truly and others (for example the 4-year rolling programme for 20 mph residential zones discussed last year by the party when Cllr Quinn was Cabinet Member for Streetscene and Transport) now carried forward by Cllr Rennie.

One Lib Dem policy coming into play is the pupil premium which means about £5 million extra for Wirral Schools to spend on children on free school meals, looked after children and service children. You should’ve heard the “wails of anguish” at the Wirral Schools Forum from headmasters/headmistresses from the more prosperous parts of the Borough when they realised £5 million would be spent on improving the educational chances of the most needy! Clearly Wirral is a place of large social divides and the extra money will be a welcome boost to the schools in Bidston & St. James.

So what may you ask is “in the budget”? Well, first to deal with the elements of the council tax that are made up by Merseyside Police’s budget and Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service’s budget. Both Merseyside Police and Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service froze their contributions from Council Tax compared to last year (2010/2011).

Due to increased costs and inflation (as well as a high proportion of its costs being on staff), Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service will be cutting some jobs. Their Chief Exec/treasurer explains the situation in a self-styled “podcast” (I don’t think he quite knows what a podcast is but I have to give them a few marks for trying), which unfortunately with my browser Firefox either opens a blank black window or six video windows of him at once creating an echo effect so I’ve uploaded it to Youtube (which has slightly better audio quality than five echoes).

For the purposes of any copyright lawyers out there, as the work has been made previously available to the public (and still is on Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service’s website at this location), this is classed as “fair dealing” under s.30 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and is being done for the purpose of news reporting (and making sure you can hear what the speaker says).

Quite why councillors on Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service left it to an officer to record a video to explain the cuts is a mystery I’m sure my humble readers can enlighten me on in the comments section (or maybe I’ll just ask Cllr Ellis, Cllr Niblock, Cllr Rennie or Cllr Roberts next time I see them).

Council Excellence Overview and Scrutiny Committee – 31/1/2011 Part 15 – Strategic Change Programme update (continued)

Cllr Davies continued by asking why the PACSPE (project 24) was only realising £200,000/year of savings?

Mr. Green said that was very unfair. Cllr Davies said the EVR had happened with the privatisation. Ian Coleman said there had been a reduction in the saving being of the EVR. Also certain areas had been taken out of the project’s scope reducing the saving.

Cllr Davies asked if the numbers relate to the outsourcing only? Mr. Green said they were making the savings now. Cllr Davies said what about the services not affected by outsourcing?

Cllr Gilchrist said that they welcome the progress report. He said the confidence in the office in delivering the projects is to be noted. He thanked the Cabinet Member for his attendance. Cllr Green said in a humourous way “God bless you, guv’nor” followed by saying he had a choice of attending either this or his daughter’s birthday.

The Council Excellence committee then went on to consider a report on performance management by the Interim Head of Corporate Planning, Engagement and Communications. Cllr Gilchrist said (in reference to Eric Pickles) that he was shocked when the saw the detail of which targets had been removed on the Department for Communities and Local Government website.