Recently I discussed the prospective increase in allowance given to the leader of Bristol City Council. Another topic worth some consideration is the salary of the Chief Executive of the council. But it's worth clarifying the respective duties of these two offices.
Leader of the Council
The Leader of the Council is a representative of the people, elected by the members of the council, who are themselves elected by secret ballot of all registered electors - effectively all council tax payers - in their respective wards. The Leader's role is to propose a strategy for the governance of the city, to define what are the council's priorities and more importantly what are not priorities. Job Security is, depending on how you look at it, quite good or quite bad.
The Leader is ultimately responsible, answerable and accountable for the actions of the Council and all of its employees.
Chief Executive
The Chief Executive is a salaried employee of the city, selected from a shortlist of candidates and ultimately by a panel interview. Their contract of employment is unbounded, specifying a 37 hour work week and a 3-month notice period.
The role of the Chief Executive is to execute the policy defined by the Leader, and manage the staff and resources of the Council on a day-to-day basis.
If you have a look at the Recruitment Consultants' dedicated website for the Council Chief Exec (strangely, still active), you'll see this basic job spec has been jazzed up a bit and defined as:
To provide pace, rigour, confidence, ambition and above all, inspiring leadership to the strategic management of the City Council.
Proactively support the Leader in their external and ambassadorial role on behalf of Bristol, and where appropriate (and particularly with the business community), undertake external-facing tasks to the benefit of the City
[and so on. That's what you get when documents are written by a committee.]
The Big Shake-Up
Last week, recently hired Chief Executive Jan Ormondroyd, announced a shake-up amongst the senior officers in the council. According to the Evening Post report:
[Ormondroyd] is determined to ensure only the best operators continue to head up departments. [...]
When the new team is in place - probably by the late summer - Mrs Ormondroyd wants them to work more effectively with partner agencies and local communities. [...] They will also be expected to share leadership responsibilities with each other instead of focusing only on their own departments. [...] Heads of department [...] will all have to re-apply for top jobs.
The number of departments will be reduced and it is possible at least one current chief will be made redundant or given early retirement at the end of this exercise. [...] Responsibilities will change, too. Departmental names will change and many functions will be reallocated between departments.
There are elements of this concept that sound plausible: clearing out an under performing team and simplifying the organisation structure are two obvious starting points for turning around a dysfunctional organisation. Other aspects sound less plausible, in particular "sharing leadership responsibility"; leadership can be delegated, but never shared.
Unfortunately the positive intent of the process would appear to be sabotaged from day one. The now-out-of-retirement Bristol Blogger has identified that the exercise is largely artificial, in that applications for the posts are generally limited to the existing set of senior officers. One would hope that, when this proposal is discussed at the next Council Cabinet, the Leader of the Council mandates that the selection be open to all-comers, or at the very least to all current employees of the council.
The Bristol Blogger highlights the salaries of the senior officers within the council, which is an interesting point for discussion. In the absence of a market signal, it's very difficult to identify a clearing rate for senior management. In the private sector you can perhaps use share price or other performance metric, but the link between these figures and actual performance is not necessarily causal. It's even tougher in Local Government where the underlying goals are at best linked to a subjective measure such as "value for money".
A more interesting question would be: What is the marginal benefit associated with employment of a more expensive candidate? For example, consider the post of "Director of Children and Young People’s Services" (CYPS). The salary band associated with this role is £115,223 to £127,778.
The performance of a council officer is overwhelmingly constrained by political decision making. So if we chose to fill this role at a reduced salary of 10%, 25% or even 50% less, would it reduce the quality of service? And would increasing the salary for the role attract "better" candidates and thus lead to an increase in the quality of service, in the absence of any change in political direction?
These are not questions for which an answer can be calculated on paper and theoretically "proved" so, given the large amounts of money being spent by the council on senior management, some aggressive practical experimentation is certainly warranted. I would approach the problem as follows:
Recognising that we're entering a tough economic period, we should be looking to reduce the absolute expenditure on staff and simplify the organisation structure. Therefore the council ought to:
- Require the Chief Executive and Deputy Chief Executive to act as functional department heads in addition to their more general duties.
- Collapse the top two or three employment grades and associated salary bandings into a single grade with the salary band of the lowest grade.
- Open the recruitment process for senior staff positions to all council staff and external candidates.
- On completion of recruitment of senior staff, fill any gaps in the organisation chart from existing employees without rebanding or salary increase.
This would not be a pleasant process. It would be politically difficult, unpopular with unions, staff and management and ultimately it is not guaranteed to improve council performance in the absence of other changes. But it would be a way to take a slice off the top of next year's council tax bill and a place to start for reducing the burden on hard-pressed local families. Especially those having difficulty navigating the convoluted tax-credit system.
And Finally:
Is there anywhere in Bristol you can buy a bacon-fried hot dog? I'm minded to buy one just to annoy these people:
