Wednesday, 8 December 2021 – If Something Can Be Bad or Worse, It Will Be

A colleague in the Business Rates team at Haringey Council drafted an email to a local business including the line, “I acknowledge you wrote a letter to which you received no reply.”  He was careful not to end this sentence on a preposition.  I would say it’s not wrong to end a sentence on a preposition and only really insisted on by people who learned Latin at school (as my colleague did), but still, his is inarguably a good construction of a sentence.  Personally, I am not that fussy in my writing and have ended a number of sentences in this diary on a preposition.

He forwarded the draft email to his line manager for approval as is protocol and she “corrected” it transferring the preposition to the end of the sentence, “I acknowledge you wrote a letter which you received no reply to.”  This, to me, seems unnecessarily wrong.  But this is the culture of council officers; if something can be bad or worse, it will be.

At the same time, a resident was supported by our Economic Development team to apply for an IT Support apprenticeship vacancy in our own council.  Apprenticeships are one of the few roles where councils contrive opportunities for new blood, and specifically residents, rather than recycling tried and tired government officers internally or from other local or regional government services. 

The person specification asked for a good attitude to learning the role and successfully completing the apprenticeship course, and providing good customer service.  Although demonstrating an interest in IT was only a preference in the job specification, knowledge and experience of IT was specifically not a requirement as this is a learning role, an apprenticeship.  Nevertheless, he had a background in IT support in the private sector, put this in his application and talked about it in the interview as he was coached by his employment adviser to do. 

Alas, he didn’t get the job.  Despite this being a development opportunity for residents, the interviewers refused to give him feedback so his employment adviser, in a position to talk to her colleagues, insisted upon it.  Eventually, they wrote to her saying that his interview was good and,

“…met the standard that we would look for in a candidate but there were several good candidates and only one post to fill…  It was good that he had hands on experience and knowledge… but some of the other candidates had more directly applicable examples of experience with specific software used within the business.”

 

So, despite this being designed to be a learning role and, other than the graduate programme, the only opportunity focussed on external candidates to get a job at the council, because their interview questions failed to focus on the attributes required in their spec and, therefore, with little else to go on to differentiate applicants, despite it not being a specified requirement of the job, the recruitment panel defaulted to choosing an applicant already with experience working for “the business” and now looking for, in this case, an entry-level role back into a council, not boding well for his or her previous experience.

And this is the culture of council officers: a lack of focus on the objectives of an exercise and a tendency to surround themselves with people proven to be as unfocussed and dysfunctional as themselves.  With this, council officers can remain unscrutinised by their colleagues and charges, and an already poor culture and practices can remain undisturbed.

Without any other knowledge of the internal goings-on of council officers, one might think, in general, that this approach to recruitment does not necessarily promote and maintain a culture of dysfunction.  But, if they were to promote and maintain such a culture, this approach to recruitment would be handy, if not deliberate (and possibly self-fulfilling).  I appreciate that this argument is a bit chicken-and-egg but who knows how these downward spirals start.  What I witness is, in general, poor officers using poor recruitment practices (unique to councils) to recruit poor officers.

I assume wrangling with colleagues who don’t understand the fundamental objectives of a service they’re supposed to be delivering is one of the reasons why my line manager was sceptical that his new S106 Officer could achieve much.  On 2 November, after much resistance and to-ing and fro-ing, I agreed with the developer for Harrods’ new office HQ in Hammersmith that the employment and skills plan they finally produced was satisfactory to reasonably achieve the training, jobs and apprenticeships they were obliged to give to local residents and I emailed the Planning service’s head of the Infrastructure Delivery team to inform her that this planning obligation has been satisfied which, in turn, permits construction to begin.

“Thanks.  We will look into this and get back to you.”, she replied.

 

What does that mean?  I’m not asking her to look into anything.  It’s within my office as S106 Economic Development Officer to determine whether the S106 Economic Development obligations have been satisfied, not hers.  All I was doing was informing her so that she could legally permit construction to begin.  But she doesn’t really know what the role of planning is in a local planning authority despite being a senior manager in Planning.  Her reflex is to defend and promote her seniority and team at my expense and decide herself whether the conditions for allowing construction to start have been met.  Before reading my email, I doubt she has even ever considered pre-construction obligations required in the planning permission as is evidenced by, historically, nearly all construction of major developments I am monitoring starting without an Employment and Skills Plan being agreed or even received.  I doubt her team even monitors when construction by developers start as there seems to be no records kept of it in the council.  In the meantime, the Development Management team continues to obsessively and slowly negotiate these obligations during the planning application process and include them in the S106 agreement, gravely slowing down the planning application and homes-building process which was one of the main criticisms of local planning authorities, and justification, in the Government’s white paper on planning reform published this year.  I don’t know whether the Development Management team know that their colleagues in the Infrastructure Development team don’t bother monitoring the S106 obligations that they so painstakingly negotiate.  And she never did get back to me.

In the spirit of finding ways to improve the economic development contributions from S106 which is in my job description, I raised this issue with my new line manager (the original having left out of exhaustion from trying to achieve much in the job) and, with it, a solution.  This requires an understanding of the hierarchy of the Planning service in a Local Planning Authority:

Planning Policy

The role of the Planning Policy team is to determine and document the council’s planning objectives and policy by combining planning law and national guidance, the Mayor of London’s policy and the Council’s objectives.

Development Management

The role of Planning’s Development Management team is to receive planning applications and apply conditions on and obligate contributions to them, as directed in the council’s planning policy, in return for planning permission.  Planning conditions are like laws: things a developer can’t do and can involve things like design principles, building materials that can’t be used, waste management and not damaging the environment.  Contributions are like rules: things a developer must do.  “S106” relates to the contributions obligated and can include things like transport infrastructure, social infrastructure such as schools and healthcare for more residents and workers moving to the borough, environmental infrastructure and socioeconomic development efforts such as training, jobs, business support and affordable workspace for local businesses and start-ups.

Planning Enforcement

The role of the Planning Enforcement team is to enforce that planning conditions are being met.  This usually involves development site visits (including surveyors from the Building Control team to ensure developments are being built safely).

Infrastructure Development

Similarly, the role of Planning’s Infrastructure Development team is to monitor S106 contributions to the physical and socioeconomic infrastructure of the borough.  This includes monitoring the events that trigger when contributions become due such as the start of construction, completion of construction and occupation of the building.  S106 legal agreements are worded such as to disallow permission for any of these events if the relevant contributions haven’t been made in advance.

The Infrastructure Development team is also responsible for collecting the S106 financial contributions from the planning applicant for infrastructure development when their due dates are triggered, and they allocate them to the relevant council services depending on for what infrastructure the contribution was requested, justified in the council’s planning policy and specified in the S106 agreement.  For example, if a financial contribution has been required to pay for school places, the ID team allocates the money to the Schools team.  If the contribution was for improved public transport, they allocate it to the Travel and Transportation team.  If the contribution has been required to maintain heritage assets, it is allocated to the Heritage team, and each team spends the money on the infrastructure required.  What is required is predetermined in the council’s policies and officers simply implement policy.

Similarly, financial contributions are requested for employment and skills support for local, unemployed residents.  I can’t speak for the other frontline services but the money the Economic Development team, my team, receives from these allocations is far less than what is agreed in the S106 agreements.  As of 2019, it is a statutory requirement (a law) that local planning authorities publish financial contributions received through S106 and what they have been allocated to[1].  This is largely in response to complaints by developers to Government that it is unclear why these demands are being made of them and questioning what the money is spent on, if at all.  The allocations to employment and skills too are far less than the council published[2] have been allocated to employment and skills.  And, in turn, with a bit of amateur auditing, it is clear to me that what is obligated in S106 agreements differs substantially from what is collected.

So what is going on with the Infrastructure Development team?  As I said above, there is no record of construction triggers being monitored.  As a direct consequence of this lack of S106 monitoring, financial contributions are not being sought and developers are starting construction with impunity without first meeting the obligations in their planning permission.  Some payments are requested, but not necessarily at the time they should have been and, even then, not all of them.  Therefore, the published receipt of S106 financial contributions (Reg 121A) does not match the payments agreed in the S106 agreements.  The published receipts as allocated to “Local Employment and Training initiatives, including workplace coordinator” then differ from the allocations made to the Economic Development team.  When I say “differ”, I am not talking about day-to-day accountancy errors, I mean, by a lot.  Millions of pounds every year of public money to deliver much needed services to residents is either not collected or, if it is, is unaccounted for.  I assume, as do developers, these unallocated “allocations” remain unspent.  Upon some light scrutiny, it becomes clear that developers were justified in questioning what councils are doing with their money.

Because developers aren’t asked by the council for the financial contributions due before construction starts, seemingly because the ID team doesn’t monitor when construction of these developments start and enforce any of these obligations, the developers don’t make the non-financial contributions required before the start of construction either.  This includes agreeing an employment and skills delivery plan with the Economic Development team’s S106 Officer, that is, me.  As a result, in my first year of the job, with the rare exception of Harrods HQ, most of my time has been spent chasing disinclined developers to retrospectively agree a delivery plan on pain that, when the development is completed and due for sale or lease, planning permission will be withheld if there is no evidence reasonable endeavours have been made to hit the jobs target in the S106 agreement.  And there is a good argument to be made that reasonable endeavours were not made if the targets have not been hit and there was never a plan to do so.  But I know, and I suspect the developers suspect, that the Infrastructure Delivery team is not asking frontline S106 monitoring officers like me whether the required non-financial contributions have been made before discharging the S106 obligations when construction has been completed.

Therefore, the solution I put to my line manager is that he, as Head of Service, use his authority to ask the Head of Spatial Planning, who is responsible for overseeing the Infrastructure Development team, to, in turn, ask his service manager to report triggers and contributions collected to the Economic Development team (via the S106 officer, me).  This will result in one of two things happening:

1.    S106 triggers and contributions will be reported to me or

2.    2. The person responsible for overseeing the ID team (and I would like to emphasise that this is a whole team, not just one or two people) responsible, and only responsible, for monitoring S106[3] triggers and enforcing, collecting and allocating contributions for infrastructure development, will realise his team is not monitoring S106 triggers or particularly enforcing, collecting or allocating S106 contributions other than in part and in a lackadaisical and aggressively secretive manner.

Without this, or any other solution being implemented, I can envisage a fourth outcome to my stand-off with Berkeley Group: they play off teams within the Council and seek planning permission from the Infrastructure Development team without they having ever confirmed with me whether the Economic Development obligations have been satisfied.  Bypassing me would make my contribution to the council’s value of “Building shared prosperity” defunct.  Surely this isn’t the intention of the council?

I can only imagine that the Head of Infrastructure Delivery was employed on the strength of previously being a planning officer at another council and the recruitment process didn’t afford the Head of Spatial Planning to investigate why she no longer was.  But she must have been let go for something worse than ending a sentence on a preposition.  It’s hard to imagine how she could be doing a worse job than she is at Hammersmith & Fulham.

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[1] The Community Infrastructure Levy (Amendment) Regulations, 2019

[2] Reg. 121A, 1^st April 2019 – 31^st March 2020

[3] The team also collects Community Infrastructure Levy payments which are like S106 financial contributions triggered by the same events such as the start of construction and, basically, in the sense of the process of the role, exactly the same thing.