In the news today are various stories accusing Local Authorities of wasting public money on sundry irrelevant and pointless non-jobs. Some of the posts that that journalists are quoting include a:
- Director of regeneration and employment
- Future shape programme manager
- Bouncy castle attendant
- Walking co-ordinator
- Cheerleading development officer
- Roller disco coach
- Nuclear-Free Local Police officer
There are all sorts of statistics being bandied about in the news concerning these positions and how much they cost the ratepayer but, when it comes down to it, what is the truth?
I spent 5 years in Local Government and was brought in to attempt to commercialise the arm of the council which provides the workers who carry out roadworks and ancillary tasks such as streetlighting and signing. In those 5 years, I got to see, firsthand, the problems that stand in the way of any attempt at streamlining local government. In the end it beat me and I had to leave although I’ve kept in touch with former workmates.
To summarise everything that’s wrong in one editorial piece would be impossible, however here are a few pointers to the way I see the issue.
To my mind, there is an unhealthy obsession with positive discrimination. I don’t propose to go into all the rights and wrongs of that can of worms but, in my humblest of opinions, you can’t legitimately ‘positively discriminate’ in favour of someone who isn’t capable of doing the job in the first place. Which requirement ranks higher – the need to employ a ‘minority’ worker who isn’t competent to perform a specified task or the need to use public funds effectively? The immense and insuperable power of the Personnel Department comes to bear.
For example, I’ve seen jobs advertised for Chief Education Officers where non-literate (we used to call them illiterate) persons could apply and Treasury jobs where those who are innumerate are declared to have equal opportunities. What next, a Swimming Pool attendant who can’t swim? The Public don’t get to see these full job descriptions; the versions published are usually abridged.
There is also the strange notion that it is the job that has a value attached to it and not the individual performing it, therefore people are paid according to the job they do and not according to how well they do it. Not helping is the fact that an individual cannot really be dismissed unless they commit an act of gross misconduct. As a result, there are many jobs where, as long as you kept your nose clean, no-one cares.
We had a chap who used to inspect trench reinstatements. His job was to go out and look at where a trench had been dug in the road and see that it had been resurfaced properly so you could drive over it safely – not a particularly technical job but an important one nevertheless. One day we had a phone call from an irate ‘customer’ who claimed that he had ‘missed her’. It turned out that for the previous 18 months he had been coming into the office, clocking in and then going out on a window-cleaning round. Why had no-one picked up on this?
I’ve seen rubbish bins with hand-painted town crests that cost hundreds of pounds each and antique-looking streetlights that cost thousands (both dozens of times more expensive than the standard versions) purchased merely because the council had money left over in its budget that it had to spend. We’ve put in miles of hardwood edging and water pipes and laid hundreds of tons of gravel as hardstandings for ‘travellers’ who have immediately ripped it all up and sold it. We even came back and gave them more because we needed to be seen to recognise the uniqueness of their culture. Is this how the Public wants their money spent?
Part of the idea behind my post was that I would oversee the competitive tendering for all our work (brought in by the Thatcher government). We had two divisions: one made up of men who had been taken on at the end of the war ‘to give them a job’ and who felt the world owed them a living, and the other where the men had actually been recruited and were, for the most part, capable of working to a reasonable standard.
Our department was hamstrung with staff who served little to no commercial purpose and, in any other company, would not have been employed. We also had equipment we didn’t want and premises that were more expensive than we could justify retaining. On top of that, things like car allowances were set by Personnel therefore not even our MD had any say in the expenditure on overheads. Not that our MD cared much, anyway. He used to nip off most afternoons to the totty he kept and he’d only got the job of MD in the first place because it was commensurate with the grade he was on and also because there was no practical job he could be trusted to do.
As a result of this, we were stuck with huge overheads that no-one could do anything about. If, for example our MD had (in a moment of unprecedented forthrightness) said, “Right, you, you don’t need to use your car any more for work,” the person he was addressing could have zoomed off to Personnel bleating about how his contract guaranteed a minimum mileage. Our MD would have been seriously reprimanded by Personnel.
Not surprisingly, we lost our main annual service contract to a private company who took the job at below cost in order to get rid of us and seize our depots and offices – basically they asset-stripped us.
When it came to redundancies, Personnel and the elected councillors decided that the ones who went should belong to the major works division (which had lost its contract) and the ones to stay should be the old boys with the bad attitude because they were quantified as being profitable. The only reason why they were profitable was because our division (or what was left of it) was reimbursed by the Treasurer’s Department for whatever it spent on these people with a percentage on the top for profit!
Thus the malingerers stayed on and the decent crews left. The private sector company which took over hiked up its prices the following year (now that our competition was gone) and proved no more efficient than we had been. Of course, they’re a private sector company and, therefore, for the purposes of both numbers and non-jobs, they don’t count as Local Authority staff.
There’s no point just latching on to a few spurious posts (non-jobs) and crying out, “Eureka! There’s your problem.” The rot is deeper and more insidious. It’s not non-jobs that are the issue; it’s the inbuilt resistance to change and the wastefulness that are at the heart of it. Regulation-driven Personnel Officers, often with their own axes to grind, and inert Department Heads who are intimidated by the idea of innovation, are not about to adapt. This all happens while essential jobs get axed – that’s what needs tackling.
Related posts:
- 1,100 jobs to go at Wirral Council Wirral Council has just had its budget sliced by over...
