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News and Comment April 2024

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17 April - Three failures

The Cabinet met last night to hear for themselves reports of the three mini-disasters that have already been discussed at Scrutiny meetings. The poor results of the Customer Survey, the abysmal management performance revealed by the Staff Survey and the SEND failures.

David LeafThe meeting was Chaired by Deputy Leader David Leaf so it was something of a relief when it lasted only an hour and forty minutes.

The Deputy Director and the Head of Service did their best to put a gloss on their failure to be decent managers to the extent that staff are scared of them and mental health issues have become a serious problem. You will be pleased to know that the people who helped cause the problem have plans to remedy it. It will involve recruiting even more HR staff. We heard the usual platitudes about staff being the Council’s greatest investment and asset from Cabinet Members Munur and Diment. It was said that the current level of 23% temporary staff was a good position to be in. “A committed workforce” was vital in a service focused organisation. Nice to know that has been recognised.

The Agenda revealed something that was not obvious before, that only a miserable 7·4% of staff had bothered to complete the survey. Were the others content or too disillusioned and believing their opinion would be ignored?


StrategyThe six point plan that will transform Bexley from HR failure to the pinnacle of excellence is shown in the panel alongside. It is going to take four years. Many would consider four months to be excessive.

Labour Leader Stefano Borella thought it might help if Managers could say Hello to staff when they passed by. Councillor Leaf went further and suggested the occasional shared cup of tea might not go amiss. (I second that; used to do it every day in my own management role.)

Labour Councillor Nicola Taylor (I hope that ID is correct, the audio is indistinct and the video image is worse because the camera failed to zoom in) linked the staff mental health issues with the Tory Government’s failure to address the cost of living crisis. David Leaf reprimanded her for addressing him as Chair. He is Chairman and a chair is an item of furniture. (Trivial maybe but I have always thought that Bexley Council insisting on the correct use of language is what marks them out from the Loony Left.)

The Chairman moved on to the Customer Experience Strategy. Another four year plan. The Council aims to do better by moving more things on line in order to free up resources for ֹ‘the digitally excludedֹ’. It will always be possible “to get through to a human being”.

Cabinet Member Philip Read was critical of the fact that nowhere in the Strategy was there any reference to the speed of response to residents. “There was an absence of any kind of commitment”. The excuse was that different departments will inevitably have different response times; uncollected bins and planning applications being examples.

Councillor Taylor made a plea for better facilities for the deaf including webcasts to be signed. If the fuzzy video is not deceiving me she stood and used British Sign Language to make her point. (In so doing the former ID was confirmed) The Chairman was not unsympathetic.

It was then confirmed that the Council has submitted its response to the adverse OFSTED SEND report (“widespread systemic failings”) and the Department of Education will be carefully watching Bexley for the next 18 months.

The response is to be published within the next few days.

Note: I should probably declare my antipathy to HR Managers. In 1981, faced with a particular statistical problem I asked for one of the new fangled desktop computers to be installed in my office. I was told that British Telecom International had declared a ‘no computer’ policyְ as the boss of that division (George Brittain) said they had no place in an office environment. I bought one with my own money and then almost doubled the expenditure when it became obvious that I needed an A3 width dot matrix printer.

It took six months to learn how to program something specific to BT’s requirements but the time taken to process a particular job fell from three weeks to about six hours. However before successfully getting
the thing up and running news that I had defied the no computer edict reached the boss of Personnel. The Director himself made a special unannounced visit to my office to inform me I was to be charged with stealing British Telecomְ’s electricity. As we all know from the Horizon scandal, the Post Office (and BT until privatisation in 1984) is able to bring its own prosecutions.

I remember my response absolutely word perfectly. It was “F*ck off out of my office Brian” and I never heard another word about it. Within a year all of BTI’s telephone exchanges and offices were running my programs. That original computer is still rotting away in my garden shed.

Don’t expect BIB to be forgiving towards any of Bexley’s inadequate HR Managers. Four years to fix their problems! If the creator of that problem was so very bad he should have been sacked, not allowed to go with a fat pay-off.

 

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