Thursday, 15 September 2022 – The Cost of Living is Adding Up

A manager from Children’s Services sent me his procurement strategy for an interpretation and translation service asking for my comments on the strategy for social value.  The total weighting of social value on the overall score wasn’t 10% as it should be.  Before adding my comments, I emailed him so that he could correct it first so that I could then say the strategy was compliant:

“Social Value must account for 10% of the total score and I must comment that this has been confirmed in the strategy.  But, on page 6, it says both that SV will account for 12% of the 60% Quality weighting which equals 7.2% and “12% of the overall score”.  Sorry if I’m not understanding these statements but neither seems to be 10%?”

 

He replied,

“Sorry, my bad.

“SV is complicated to the layman.

“I need your guidance here.  I have it down as 20% of the 60% Quality score.  Which I equated that to be 12% of the overall score.

“Have I got that formula incorrect?”

 

Yes, you have got it incorrect.  But this is not some complicated, esoteric council policy that the layman couldn’t be expected to fully understand; what you’ve got incorrect is basic maths.  And this is the level of intellect I am working with at the council when I am asked to tell a senior officer at the council how to work out what percentage of 60% makes up 10% of the whole (the answer is 16.7%).  Just to be clear, I’m not the council mathematician.  As with illiteracy I have already talked about (see The Traditional Spelling), it is acceptable, and of no shame, to have this level of innumeracy if you work in a senior role at the council, to the point where you can email a colleague in a different department to do a simple calculation for you.  For the record, I did politely reply with the answer.

And it was with this cynicism that I accepted an invite from my colleague in my team, our Policy Officer, to a meeting of the council’s new Cost of Living Crisis Group on 31 August.  Chaired by the Strategic Director for Social Care, its remit is to deliver services and resources to vulnerable residents who will be unduly affected by current rises, and scary near-future forecast rises, in the cost of living.  “Unduly” might relate to a large number of residents this winter.

“What’s the cost of living crisis got to do with the council”, I asked the Policy Officer, “we’re not the welfare state?”

 

“Councils have always been at the forefront of the welfare state!” he replied, shocked at my uncaring attitude.

 

It’s not that I’m uncaring, I’m just not sure what the agenda of this group could be because the council doesn’t have any resources to help residents with this kind of thing.  Councils are already stretched and do not have the resources to help everyone we would like to in normal times, never mind help more people in a time of crisis when costs are inevitably going to rise for the council too.  Councils have historically been part of the country’s welfare state but a lot of that has been eroded away since 2010.  Austerity has cut a lot of services and any extra capacity.  Universal Credit has centralised welfare benefits from the DWP, HMRC and councils to just the DWP.  Government social housing policy has reduced the stock of housing available for vulnerable residents and, including temporary, emergency accommodation, is vastly oversubscribed in London already.  Council Tax Support and Business Rates collection rates are set by the Government.

What more can we do?  Arranged by our Policy Officer, I have been invited to talk about social value contributions due from our contracted suppliers.  That is a potential resource and I understand why I have been invited.  Otherwise, what else is there?

In the agenda was a link to an “ideas list”.  In advance of the meeting, I had a look.  At the top of the list is “warm hubs”.  These have been talked about in newspapers and radio programmes recently as something local government can do to help the most vulnerable this winter.  But are they all serious?  Are we expecting the old, infirm and families hovering around the poverty line to all huddle together in “libraries, community halls and [council] offices” like penguins this winter?  Are we expecting them to abandon their own homes because they cannot afford to heat and power them?  When the snow falls and the roads ice up, do we expect old people to get out onto the streets and head for the council office?  Where exactly are we going to put them?  Do they sit at empty desks for the dark months?  Where do they keep food and their belongings?  Do they sit there with nothing to do all day?  How do they cook?  Where do they go to the toilet and wash?  I understand that some retired people already do go and sit in a Wetherspoons all day to eat and drink because it’s probably cheaper than sitting at home with the heating on and cooking for oneself.  And librarians are probably used to familiar faces sitting at tables all afternoon reading the newspapers rather being at home alone in front of a turned-off electric heater.  But do we expect the large number of the population that are going to be affected by energy poverty this winter and, as far as I can tell with our current Government’s and the world’s governments’ policies of relinquishing our energy security and climate emergency policy and action to the world’s profit-orientated oil companies, indefinitely, for people to basically live forever more in the library?  And this is all assuming that the council can arrange anything.  We’re not renowned for being effective.  Who is even going to pay for the extra heating in public spaces?  The council certainly doesn’t currently have the budget.

But this is a long list.  So, what else?  “Supporting the climate alliance initiative to reduce business energy needs.”  Isn’t this a National Grid thing?  We can certainly subsidise businesses converting to more energy efficient methods but asking for long-term investment from local Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) during a cost crisis is ambitious to say the least.  “Provide a consistent training package to lead VCS [Voluntary and Community Sector] organisations to ensure support is joined up, providing continuity in advice…, developing energy efficiency guidance, proposing [an] SME engagement plan… [and] train [council] staff to support residents…”  Even if we did have the nous and leadership skills to be able to organise the proverbial nun-shoot in a nunnery, why would the council know what advice to give businesses and households?  Why would the VCS organisations listen to us (assuming we knew who they are)?  And what are we going to train our staff to do?

“Campaign to drive up socially responsible employment (e.g. London Living Wage).”  Are you kidding me!?  Haven’t we been doing this for decades and, like Social Value policy, with an ambivalence that has led to almost no success?  And, even if this were even remotely likely, I don’t think the effects are going to kick in before we have to turn the heating back on this autumn.

“Encouraging social tariffs among utilities.”  Again, there is no reason given to think the utility companies are going to listen to us.

“Launch a ‘getting ready for winter’ campaign for preventative education.”  Utility companies and the Government has already been criticised for telling people to put a jumper on.  It is a dangerous thing to preach to the impoverished to be more parsimonious.  Oscar Wilde famously warned us, “…to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting.  It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.”  Except, it is not “like” this if we implement this agenda; our call centre staff actually will be trained to tell residents to eat less as far as I can tell from this list.

There are then a number of agenda items about “clear messaging” of the above unclear messages to council and community frontline services, schools, housing associations and other VCS organisations.

Technically, local authorities can make Discretionary Housing Payments (DHPs) to unique cases of hardship where the alternative, eviction, would create more harm both financially for the council in supporting these residents, and socially for the borough.  But, by definition, they shouldn’t be applied to cover a macroeconomic problem affecting everyone; the council simply doesn’t have the budget, and it can only help council homes tenants.  This is the same for other council-managed grants such as for free school meals and school uniform grants.

There is a Government grant being made available to councils (which, bizarrely, councils have to bid for such that Government grants are made only to councils with the most articulate bid-writers, and which Hammersmith & Fulham is yet to be awarded so, the agenda items here are, in effect, counting the council’s chickens before they have hatched), the Housing Support Grant, which is being suggested can be spent on such items as laundry vouchers, microwaves (“[that] use a fraction of the power of alternatives”), “welfare visits to tenants from Housing Officers”, “free white goods”, “lease radiant electric heaters”, “review… rent”, “community clothing”, “free childcare”, “work with charities to stop pay-day-loans uptake”, “switch all tenants from top-up electricity heating to smart meters” and “offer an energy saving audit for council tenants…”  These, I think, are all reasonable and helpful ideas.

But they are expensive, and the grant, should we get it, is about £350,000.  This won’t touch the sides.  Benefits advice might, though.  I suggested this to our Policy Officer.  About 75% of all eligible benefits are claimed.  If we can advise residents how to claim more of what they are entitled to, this could make a big difference to household budgets.  And the Government would be paying for what they have simply budgeted anyway, not the council.  This is already on the ideas list with the comment in brackets “(manifesto commitment)”.  There are online benefit calculators on the Council website, but no one-to-one Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) is available.  We should have already been providing this very simple welfare support all along since the Labour Party took control of the council from the Tories in 2014.  Why it hasn’t is simply because we as council officers struggle to organise anything new within years or decades.  It has always been this way; new councillors and policy change means little to ensconced, conservative and ineffective senior officers (see Why Do Officers Do It above).  It is telling that this agenda item falls under the list entitled “New ideas”.  Other, long-standing Labour-controlled London boroughs such as Islington have long-established income maximisation advice services, in Islington Council’s case, iMAX.

The meeting on 1 September itself was characteristically filled by the senior leaders, mostly the Director chairing the meeting, and her Assistant Director (AD), engaging in long, pointless, filibustering speeches about things too nondescript to listen to or recount here but something along the lines of how they, personally and, by extension of the fact that they are important senior leaders of the council, the council, are committed to intervening and helping residents in this time of crisis.  It was more of a political husting than a working group, except it was a campaign to officers who have no choice but to do whatever the directors say anyway.  Not that they said anything.  There was then little time in the 90-minute scheduled meeting attended by 33 officers to actually run through this agenda and any new ideas.  I was scheduled to speak.  I was going to present my idea on the £663,786.44 of social value commitments by our suppliers of financial donations to community projects, as well as 11,634 hours of volunteering time that, with some assistance, I could direct to their cost-of-living agenda.  Alas we ran out of time spent, instead, hearing about the senior leaders’ heroic commitment to this cause.  But, at the end of the 90 minutes and as the Director was wrapping up, our Policy Officer intervened insisting the group overruns by a few minutes to listen to my idea.  And the Director announced at the end that she was glad they did.  Here, potentially, was a serious resource to do a lot of things on the agenda that the measly Housing Support Grant, should the council get it, was simply not going to cover.

I was asked to email the details of the commitments and what resources I needed to collect and direct them.  So, what do I need?  What I asked for in my email was:

1. 1. for Corporate Procurement to compile and share with me the names of the officers                 responsible for commissioning and contract-managing those suppliers with social value     commitments, something that they and Legal have been alarmingly unable to do when I     asked for it previously (does the council not keep a record of the money it spends             commissioning companies?),

2. 2. those contract managers directed by their own directors to not actively resist me doing my      job in collecting them by applying the council’s policy and enforcing what is simply a private   agreement between the supplier and the voters of the borough in asking their suppliers to       make their social value contributions,

3. 3. a seconded administrator to help contact all the suppliers (that I should have had anyway      before Corporate Procurement took the post and did nothing with it),

4. 4. a cost centre to where I can direct suppliers to make a payment, and

5. 5. ideas from their “List of Ideas” about where I can ask them to volunteer their staff.

But the AD (for Programmes, Assurance and Analytics, whatever made-up role that might be) replied no.  “This is much more complicated [than what, he didn’t say] and with transaction/admin costs.”

Assuming an hours’ staff volunteering time, according to the Local Government Association, is worth £21 per hour, here are contributions worth c£900,000 and these admin costs I asked for, and basically should be being done by the council anyway, no less as a statutory duty, are too expensive and complicated to collect £900,000?  Okay, good luck in assisting the direction of programmes, assurance and analytics in buying everyone a microwave because they can’t afford to use their oven, and heating libraries for them in between their mealtimes as they commute between their, now, two homes without any budget because the council can’t afford the admin costs of one temporarily seconded administrator and ask Corporate Procurement to be bothered to make a list of which officer commissioned what, amounting to £280m a year of public money.  “Go ask your own director for these resources” was the, probably more sensible, advice the group gave us instead.

I have never met our Director before.  He is responsible for the Economy directorate which includes us in Economic Development and, on a much larger scale, the Housing and Property Service (mostly responsible for all the council’s residential properties, their maintenance and, by extension, our council housing tenants) as well as the Planning service.  He started working at the council earlier this year and the email announcement we got of his employment was accompanied by a picture of him looking leaderly and pioneering atop a council tower block literally overseeing the borough and its multitudes.

Our new Director shared this picture of himself as his introduction to his staff atop a council building looking leaderly and pensive, not to be confused with Stalin striking a similar pose, shared with the multitudes on public buildings across the Soviet Union.

To be honest, I’m not sure I can be bothered with this guy and I have no reason to think he is interested.  But our Policy Officer assured me our Director will move whatever it takes to make this happen if he thinks it’s a good idea.  He will arrange the meeting with him and I will pitch my idea.  Again.  This he arranged for the Monday morning on 5 September.

“So get on with it…” was the first thing the Director said to us in the meeting, and the first thing he ever said to me because we had never met before, “…because I’ve got better things to do.”  Charming.  Nice to meet you too I think sarcastically but too taken aback by his rudeness to actually say it.  How does he know he has better things to do until he has heard what I have got to say?  So, I explain to him the resources at hand, but the council’s directors need to give a direction that their officers need to be less ambivalent in committing to collecting these contracted commitments and direct them towards the cost-of-living agenda, not least by setting up a cost centre into which to make the donations.  Throughout my concise but comprehensive (it’s not complicated) explanation, he had a snarl on his face except for when he jammed his finger up his nose rooting around and then took out a flossing pick, an actual dental instrument(!), and started flossing.  He’s a sociopath.  Of course, I know he’s a sociopath because all people who get to direct councils are sociopaths because you have be to not be embarrassed to politically campaign in such a way (see image above) and socially corrupt to become a director of a council to start with.  But does he have to be this arrogant about it that he can suggest, “I can ostentatiously pick my nose and floss my teeth in a video call with you”?

Luckily I haven’t had much exposure to Directors in my council career (except for an unfortunate (for me) one-to-one with my director at Enfield Council when I came to realise just how insane and removed from reality this species is, a space needed to tell this story separately), and my initial instincts to avoid them turned out to be warranted.  “Just give it to [the Assistant Director of Corporate Procurement] to deal with” was his wise conclusion after I had finished.  “No!”, I bravely intervened before he could end the call, “The bottleneck is with Corporate Procurement and the social value has already been procured; the problem now is collecting it.”

“Explain to me in one sentence what it is you’re proposing”, he replied, clearly not having understood or, seemingly, listened, to my pitch.  “I have about £660,000 in cash committed and eleven thousand hours of staff volunteering time I can direct if you give me an administrator and a cost centre and you tell the SLT [Senior Leadership Team] to tell their officers to co-operate with me in managing their supplier contracts.”

“Okay”, he eventually concluded, “you were right to bring this to me.  Write up what you’ve told me and I will get you what you need.”

 

That was ten days ago and he hasn’t got me what I need or even got back to us.  Maybe I should have been clearer on the maths that £900,000 is a lot more than the cost of the time of a temporary administrator.