Speeches

Speech given by Kate Priestley to the Standards Board Annual Conference
5 September 2005

I want to talk about the next ten years and the future challenges facing local government and local governance.  Over the last ten years we have seen considerable attention focused on eradicating poor performance. Our future challenge should be much more about how to stretch the best to even better performance. I hope that the establishment of the Leadership Centre might be a sign of that change of emphasis being more widely recognised.  Though we too were born in this climate of tackling the poor and weak in our creation we have clearly indicated an agenda for excellence. In developing this argument I hope you can see the resonance with the wider conference agenda. 

In looking forward I want to focus on the types of challenges local governance faces and what this means for how local government must operate.  As a starting point for this I want to talk about what Professor Ron Heifetz calls the adaptive challenges. 

Heifetz insists we must distinguish between technical and adaptive challenges. He asks two questions. What’s the work? For technical challenges this is about applying current know-how, but for adaptive challenges we need to learn new ways. He then asks who does the work.  For technical challenges authorities can deliver, but for adaptive ones it has to be the people with the problem. 

Let’s bring this alive through Heifetz’s own journey from medicine to Harvard leadership guru. He started training as a surgeon. As you may know I spent much of my career in the NHS so I can recognise his description of the mindset of many surgeons as one where you get the patient, knock the patient out, fix the patient, wake him or her up and send the patient home.  

Move now to Heifetz’s next career in psychiatry, and we see the limitations of this particular approach to that discipline. Instead you have to engage with the patient, and the relationship is much more complicated but ultimately does require the patient taking some responsibility for finding the solution. 

Now I don’t want to downgrade technical challenges.  Indeed if you ask the public whom do they admire more the surgeon or the psychiatrist we all know who would win that particular contest. Indeed let’s recognise that much of our success as a society arises from our ability to rise to technical challenges. Local Government in particular has a long tradition of technical achievement. Many in this room will have read or heard Tristram Hunt.  In his book “Building Jerusalem” he describes the phenomenal technical achievements of Victorian local government in creating the infrastructure of the modern city. 

But as an illustration of where we go wrong when we confuse challenges let us consider the post war housing strategy. Viewed as solving a technical problem (shortage of housing) it was a great success, but, precisely because it was wrongly viewed as a technical problem, today we are still living with the consequences. Instead of just doing things TO people (we the council re-house you the poor) we now recognise that sustainable communities require us to work WITH people and they require active citizens who have helped shape their communities and taken some responsibility for those communities. 

So if in the words of that song “its not what you do it’s the way that you do it” what does how we do it mean for local governance. What would be my modern CPA or standards assessment of the “how” comprise?  What are the key how’s in this new world? How should we judge them/How should we achieve them?  I want to highlight five particular themes. I call this “Project Steer”- the five themes creating the steer for our work. 

First I want to talk about how we communicate with people. Political theorists and policy wonks today often talk about the need for a compelling narrative. I prefer a simpler phrase- story telling. Many of you will remember Max Bygraves- the centre stage of his performance was Max sitting on the stool and saying he wanted to tell us a story. It was compelling. Well we in local government have not been the best story tellers, but recognition of the importance of this is increasing. I welcome the reputation project that the LGA announced at its annual conference.  In developing this strategy Ben Page of MORI stresses the need to improve services- but equally reminds authorities that public confidence also requires authorities to communicate with its citizens, its customers so they understand what the authority is doing. And in so doing we too need to be compelling. 

Secondly I want to talk about talent.  Local government is a people business- yet somehow, almost as a completely unintended consequence of our early pioneering on equal opportunities we seem to have lost sight of the fact that people businesses only thrive if they can recruit, retain and develop talent. As the largest employer in Britain local government needs to be at the top of the lists of organisations graduates want to work for, not half way down the table. The truth is that we are in a competition for talent- both for officers and for elected members. We are seeing an outward movement of senior people within local government and an increasing difficulty to recruit to the most senior roles. Go back ten years and the idea that a council would proudly announce it had successfully recruited an interim would have been unimaginable. But equally now for councillors there is much more competition for civic engagement- with government having created so many new roles. We need a step change in our attitude to talent management and how we treat talent. We need to move outside the traditional mindset. 

Thirdly let’s look at the way we operate with our councils.  In providing local leadership the key argument for local government being primus inter pares is the democratic mandate that councils have.  Yet this mandate possesses no legal authority to secure commitment from other stakeholders- rather it is the moral authority that comes from this mandate that gives the bite. But moral authority can slip away. When our mindset was about solving technical problems we often recognised “effective” leaders whose faults were all too evident, but who delivered the “solutions”. Though born in the North West I have spent a significant part of my career working in Newcastle, and I still live in the North East. I remember that culture and the characters that sustained it.  In truth there was some tolerance of unacceptable behaviour because the focus was on delivering outcomes. But if the new outcome is the HOW then being an ethical council is not a nice to have ambition, it is a requirement. So I am delighted that the Standards Board is discussing this at this conference, moving the agenda on from basic requirements of what NOT to do to more ambitious targets of how to do it well. 

When the corporate responsibility agenda started to emerge in the private sector there were a lot of cynics- those who doubted the private sector would really mount to the challenge, but also those within the private sector who thought this was nice window dressing, which would be quickly abandoned once times got tougher. However as time has gone on those cynics are fewer in number- and I think the reason why is that people have recognised the wider impact of this corporate responsibility. In the old phrase- you can do good by doing good. What firms have discovered is that it’s not just the feel good factor in the boardroom. Proper social responsibility motivates the workforce- indeed can be critical in people deciding whether they join the workforce, it also influences the consumer. HOW companies operate is now part of the consumer choice agenda.   We in local government have an advantage over most private firms- what we do is in nearly all cases self evidentially for the public good. But what the private sector experience reminds us is that it is also HOW we do it that forms people’s opinions. 

I particularly want to challenge the political parties about their role in sustaining ethical behaviour. One of the benefits of strong political cultures is the ability to develop and enforce discipline that rules out certain types of behaviour. The creation of the Standards Board in part arises precisely because political parties have not risen to this challenge, but your creation does not absolve the parties of their responsibilities. One thing we have learned about public behaviour is that if people believe that there is a tolerance for bad behaviour that is what we get. We have learned about zero tolerance strategies, perhaps this culture might also be promoted by political parties for their leading members and not just for the general public.  If we look at the pattern of length of service of councillors we see an increasing tendency for many councillors to serve only one term.  There are a variety of reasons for this- but one is clear. Many find the culture just not congenial, we need to address this canteen culture issue. 

As well as step change in our ethical ambitions we also need to make engagement come alive. ODPM has been tracking how councillors spend their time. Despite all the aspirations that the ways of working would change the way in which councillors work only a small percentage of councillors’ time is spent engaging outwards. The average executive member spends only just over 5% of their time on such external engagement. So no new brave dawn yet. 

Whilst we might be disappointed by these findings I don’t think we should be surprised. It is difficult enough for councillors to grasp the complexity of their council’s own operations yet we have expected councillors to make this transition to this new governance role without any significant investment in their learning and development to either skill them for these new roles or to give them the level of knowledge to allow them to effectively operate. 

Finally, Local government is no longer just about service delivery.  It is now as much about working with others and acting as champions as representatives of local communities. So how are we doing in terms of representation? Well the scorecard is mixed.  We now have regular surveys of councillors. The findings make for worrying reading. Despite all the rhetoric about diversity the facts tell a different story. Over the last seven years the average age of councillors has increased by 2.4 years to now nearly 58 years. Whilst 45% of the population is under 45 only 13% of councillors are so. In terms of ethnicity the total number of non-white councillors has increased by a mere 21, accounting for only 3.5% of councillors.  Whilst there has been some improvement in the percentage of women a 1.3% increase over seven years hardly suggests radical change. 

There are issues to be addressed here such as the expectations of councillor commitment in terms of hours, the level of remuneration etc but we are also setting down a set of challenges to the political parties in particular.  It is not for us to determine the particular internal processes that a political party adopts.  We recognise the value of party tradition and culture- after all without such differences what would the purpose of different political parties be. However in the same way that councils are now expected to be judged by their performance I think the parties must accept that they too need clear and binding targets. To ensure we are at least on the way to a more representative set of representatives.  

This representational challenge is even greater when we think of the increasing role that councils play in community mediation. Sometimes reading some of the missives from Whitehall its almost as if here is this community just waiting for some community leadership- in fact as any long standing councillor will tell you their electorate comprises many different communities- geographic as well as special interest. The challenge is to mediate between different interests- but unless those different interests can see their reflection in the council mirror but in becomes increasingly difficult. 

So in summary I see these five big challenges, our ability to tell ourSTORY
TALENT MANAGEMENT
ENGAGEMENT
ETHICAL STANDARDS
REPRESENTATION 

Taking the initial letters we have our PROJECT STEER.  I look forward to working with you as we try and steer authorities into this new agenda of themselves steering their local communities.

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