Is there a gorilla in our midst?
Originally published in the Municipal Journal [22/01/25]
The excitement of drawing boundary lines in maps of our country to fit devolutionary whims is seemingly as irresistible to armchair commentators as it is to MHCLG mandarins and ministers alike. One is reminded of the lines from the W.H. Auden poem ‘Partition’ written in the aftermath of Indian independence. “Time,” they had briefed him in London, “is short. It’s too late/For mutual reconciliation or rational debate.”
Now that we have a grasp of the areas prepared to submit ‘credible proposals’ (only awaiting the small matter of official government criteria to submit against), one has to hope that there will be an adequate passage of time to bring rational debate, if not understanding, to bear on the redrawn map of local authorities and plans for strategic growth deals.
With this in process, and in the run up to what promises to be a very contested and fraught Comprehensive Spending Review in June, we should focus our attention on the reality of human, physical and financial resources available to push this through.
Humankind cannot bear very much reality and our predilection for inattentional blindness is just a human factor. The subject won a Nobel Prize for scientists who ran the ‘Invisible Gorilla Test’. For those who don’t remember the cinema advert, subjects who were asked to studiously watch a video of students clad in black and white tops pass a basketball between each other failed to spot anything out of the ordinary – like a person in a gorilla suit or holding an umbrella walking nonchalantly through the frame.
So, with devolution being the basketball, can we please focus on the invisible gorilla of staffing and resourcing for the brave new world of local governance we are imperceptibly slipping into? Unlike the rest of the public sector, most notably the civil service where middle management has grown like topsy in a middle management boom, the local government workforce has never recovered from the loss of a third of its headcount in the headwinds of the 2010 austerity winds. It is not entirely safe to assume that the existing local government workforce, even if shifted around into the new governance structures, is sufficient to deliver the new missions and objectives of our new foundation authorities and the like.
Currently, the depletion in its staff ranks is putting extreme pressure on capacity to meet ruthlessly increasing demands in many demanding service areas, social care, housing and SEND to name but three. But this is also happening against the steady drumbeat departure of experience and irreplaceable skills at the top strategic level of local government.
In our recent report for South East Councils and South East Employers, Localis argued that restoration for the sake of long-term resilience of the local government profession can be addressed in a whole host of imaginative ways.
These could take the shape of collaborative strategies from pooled joint training programmes, shared frameworks for recruiting temporary staff (modelled on WMTemps in the West Midlands), joint procurement for training or specialist local authority outplacement services to retain local talent during the reorganizational upheaval.
There is a lot to commend the benefits of strategic and integrated workforce planning, better succession plan and workforce analysis, or the employee flexibility afforded by South Cambridgeshire DC’s brave lead in giving staff the offer of a four-day week.
Again, issues of workforce capacity and capability are, like contract management or procurement not seen as deserving of our immediate attention in the rush to construct new regional Jerusalems.
But look we must – and let us first consider where the wheels of devolution will most prominently hit the road of placemaking. The Government’s domestic agenda will face victory or defeat in the ability to translate the desired intentions of the housing and planning legislation for a regionalised strategic and streamlined system into something that has immediate impact in boosting housing supply. Housing minister Matthew Pennycook is aware of the perils of advancing this agenda amid the rigmarole of local government reorganisation. But those 300 new planners promised in the Labour Party manifesto are going to have to spring forth fully armed like a Spartan army grown from dragon’s teeth to fight the good pro-growth fight. But will they come on stream soon enough in large enough numbers to shift the dial?
In the new modern era of two tier we are shifting into, there will be the dynamics and interdependencies of local authority and combined authority workforces to consider. Although there will be some levels of crossover in the new foundation authorities, there should be a case for creative fluidity and secondment between the tiers. Similarly, moving to larger and fewer units of local government may well serve to intensify competition for securing talent in chief executive positions, a contest one presumes the CAs will have the upper hand as the more desirable destination.
As has been frequently noted, the devolution in the United Kingdom is vastly asymmetric in consequence of the New Labour dispensations to Scotland, Wales and London in the first term of New Labour. And within England there are country miles between the Greater Manchester trailblazers followed by West Midlands, the reconstituted metropolitan counties and the largely rural foundation authorities.
There exists already a wide divergence in performance and outcomes among say the troubled West of England CA and the West Midlands CA. In order to bring the newer and emerging combined authorities up to pace and quality with the established institutions, questions of comparative resourcing and recruitment of genuinely capable leaders will be paramount.
And to advance the ambitions of the single settlements, the established CAs will need to rise to the challenge of proving their ability to muster the kind of ironclad corporate governance the centre will demand in exchange for the freedom to repurpose and find new sub-regional channels for what were previously multiple funding streams from five departments of state.
Good local governance demands high quality professional staff. As we noted in our recent report with Grant Thornton ‘Present Tense – renewing and reforming local government finance’ , the catastrophe of audit backlog points to a dearth of financial and commercial capacity within councils and calls for concerted cross-sectoral efforts to attract and retain experienced officers. As with planning, successful devolution will require the reinvigoration of a profession where the pipeline of talent has been allowed to atrophy.
Creating new vehicles from the white paper and the process of transferring previous local responsibilities into pan-regional set ups will require answers to unavoidable issues of capacity, capability and resources.
Ultimately, whatever future structures are established to deliver for place in the course of this parliament, the foundation on which the twin pillars of devolution and public service reform will still rest on will remain those of the broad shoulders of a capable and dynamic local government and combined authority workforce. To this end, the MHCLG Workforce Development Group and the sector must think hard and well on all that will be necessary to address the professional placemaking and frontline realities of our new devolutionary settlements.
Jonathan Werran is chief executive, Localis