well when you next go to pay your council tax, or you walk round your town and think look at the state, remember the following The CEO does not have to bother about revenue and customers at all. Most of the revenue comes from national taxpayers in a pre-arranged annual grant, and the rest from a local tax. All the Council does is send out letters to reluctant payers reminding them they will be put in prison or their goods seized if they fail to pay. Councillors deal with the customers. Most Council executives present their Councillors at the beginning of the annual budget process with a long list of demands for extra spending, and claim that crucial and valued services will have to be cut if the higher administrative budget is not agreed to along with extra tax to pay for it. Why can’t a Council CEO deliver as good or better service for less money (in the way industry has to to stay in business) and volunteers a cut in the Council Tax for the first budget draft. If cost control breaks down during the year in a particular service or area, the CEO simply presents a demand for revised budget amounts to be spent, raiding the contingencies fund and the Council balances to pay for it. The CEO does help recruit the senior management team, and does have the task of guiding and chairing its meetings. However, Councillors are also involved and the responsibility is therefore more blurred than in a business. Does a Council CEOs experience monitor and manage absenteeism, one of the most obvious ways of watching morale. A CEO facing a problem of low morale is as likely to tell Councillors it is their problem than to fix it. The CEO does not report to the Council in the way a CEO reports to a company Board. Individual Councillors have executive roles, and they are responsible for reporting to Council. The CEO is not usually allowed to speak at Council meetings, though in a way these meetings ought to be primarily reviewing the CEOs performance at delivering the Council strategy. A well led Council does not need a CEO to craft or develop a strategy, as the strategy is the set of policy proposals and promises the majority group offered to the electorate when they secured their victory. If Councillors wish to continue with CEOs to their Councils, they need to get smarter at motivating and incentivising them. To some extent, with this government, the CEO will remain whatever the Council does a well paid clerk filling in forms and trying to meet box ticking requirements put on them in profusion by the central government. At the very least Councillors need to specify what the CEO responsibilities are, set some hard targets to hit, and to make some of the large payment to them only if they achieve the results. Surely, for example, the CEO could be set a tough target to cut the total administrative costs and outside consultancy budgets of the Council each year, instead of automatically budgeting for an increase? Most Councils start from a well padded budget in these areas. Those Councils which do offer some performance pay often adopt soft targets which do not stretch the executive concerned. It would be interesting to know how many CEOs have been denied all their performance pay for bad performance. There are other models that could be used. A Council could dispense with a CEO department. The Council chief financial or legal officer could be made the chairman of the executive team, taking on the executive leadership role, whilst the Councils strategy could be very clearly the responsibility of the Leaders office. Alternatively, CEO departments could be slimmed down, and the different nature of the CEO role in local government from business recognised by suitable targets and monitoring of what the CEO can and should do. The current system is not working. A rapacious central government keeps burdening local government with more and more things to do whilst often not offering sufficient grant to do them. At the same time local government can become careless about its own costs, resulting in unacceptable Council tax rises. Often a good Council is forced into extra administrative staff and extra external consultants to comply with the nit picking requirements of Whitehall.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 17:36:10 +0000
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