Friday 13 January 2023 – Why Do People Lie?
People inexplicably report unlikely things. I get it; they’re lying. They want something and they are willing to lie in order to get it. I am not questioning their rapacious amorality here, I am questioning their long-term plan to get the thing they are lying to get. Someone needs to explain these plans to me. What I am talking about is, why lie if they know that their lie is going to be challenged? I am curious to know, when it seems clear they are lying, what are they going to say when their claim will be tested as they know it will be? Why take the first step of lying just to get to the second step of getting what they want if they know their claim in the first step is going to be tested? Second-step testing happens in everyday corporate transactions such as procurement and recruitment. Contracts are delivered (or not). Bids are made. CVs are submitted. Referees given. These are steps one. Then they are tested. Evidence is required. Job interviews are arranged. Claims are examined. Due diligence is done. These are steps two. Everyone knows these steps. They are not a surprise to anyone. And when I read inexplicable claims, I am curious to know what they are going to say next to back them up.
I was asked to be on the interview panel on Tuesday and Wednesday this week to recruit two Employment Advisers to the Employment Support Team. In advance, my manager sent me the job description, including the person specification, and the written applications of the ten applicants he shortlisted for interview. Ten?! Ten isn’t a “shortlist”; it is very much still a longlist! Despite writing the Person Spec, he clearly didn’t know what he wanted from a good applicant. When I asked him about the exhausting number of interviews he had arranged over the two days, his justification for arranging ten interviews was that ten was a far shorter list than the 75 applications he had received, and, in any case, he wanted a “broad church” of different applicants to consider.
Hmmm. This still sounded suspiciously like he didn’t know what he wanted, confirmed when he sent me the “shortlist” of CVs to read. Most had both limited and sporadic experience. Some had not filled out the education section. Almost all had not filled out the question why they had left their last job. They had spelling and grammar mistakes and one was written in broken English with an almost complete absence of the definite or indefinite articles. Most of the jobs listed didn’t really relate to the description of the job to which they were applying but tangentially touched on the fundamental experience needed of having been an Employment Adviser. They were mostly fudged to get an interview. All started with long, rambling blocks of text saying mostly nothing; assertions including (and I quote directly here), “enthusiastic, experienced and highly organised, “a… self-motivated manager”, “I’m a hardworking and ambitious individual who enjoys working as part of a team or independently…”, “Being proactive, self-motivated, enthusiastic, and using my initiative throughout my career has given me the ability to manage…”, “I am a proactive and commercially driven individual…”, “I am a reliable, motivated, enthusiastic individual…”
Quite. There are reams of this vacuous and unqualified fluff on every CV, most going on for over 200 words. I am not sure what they expect us to learn about them from this other than for us to just accept their word for it that:
1. They are individuals,
2. They work well in a team but, if
that is not what is required, they work well independently; they cover all
bases,
3. They acknowledge they will
actually have to work,
4. They have very little interest in
the employer reading any substance in their CV by boring them before they get
to it and
5. They don’t know how to write a CV
for a job in which they have to help our residents write CVs.
Beyond these wordy openings, there is very little substance such as giving employment advice.
But this is the corporate style. The corporate expectation is that one writes a “Personal Statement” at the top of one’s CV. I don’t know why this is, but this understanding was certainly understood by every single applicant just as evidently as they all understood that a CV should be exactly two pages long. What is not clear to me is, if their CV is mostly filler, what do they expect to say when we ask them about their experience and qualifications, given in the person spec as requirements, at the interview? If they have to think about these matters for the interview, why not think about them for their CV? When we ask them about their experience in the interview, which they know we will because it is in the Person Spec, they can’t say they are a “hardworking individual” and list generic corporate qualities like “professional”, “reliable”, “proactive”, “enthusiastic” and “commercial” (this last one was unique and she must have read it in a book once and decided it is something businesses like) and run down the clock. It is understood they are not going to get the job on that basis. So why do it in a CV? Perhaps they don’t expect to get the interview. I certainly wouldn’t have shortlisted them but, to my surprise, and probably to these applicants’ surprise, my manager did. Now what were they going to say? I was curious.
The first interviewee was okay, I thought, during her interview but I uprated her to “brilliant” after we had interviewed all the other candidates. She was offered one of the two jobs today.
The second interviewee, when asked for one, couldn’t think of an example of ever having helped someone into employment despite this being the job and his CV claiming to have ten years’ experience in it. Instead, he filled the time with random idioms and listing corporate qualities like “professional”, “reliable”, “proactive”, “enthusiastic” without any context. I was wrong above: some do think they can do this in an interview as well.
The third, when asked about what he thought is good customer service told us that he often had difficult “customers” but, when they “kicked off”, he would lock them in the “Quiet Room” to have time to calm down (I might need to report this to Islington Council, which subcontracted the service to his employer, as a safeguarding issue).
The last candidate of Day 1 came wearing more gold than Mr T (except did Mr T wear quite so many gold loop earrings?) and false broken, extra-long fingernails. The issue of her attire was not so much how it might offend (or frighten in my case) us interviewers, but make us question what she might advise our residents when preparing them for their job interviews. If this is what our residents would end up turning out to interviews looking like, I think our councillors would have a lot to say to our Head of Service. For a supposedly experienced and senior Employment Adviser as her CV implied (but not explicitly said), then I can’t quite work out what she was doing in her previous jobs. Her biggest selling point was that her CV suggested she was promoted to Team Manager in her last job for being such a good performer as an Adviser, to manage the team of Advisers to achieve the same. When I asked her what her methods were to help so many people into a job, and what it was she was asked to pass on and manage her team to do likewise, she looked to the ceiling, chuckled and declared “I don’t really know”. Her CV said she left this job in October after 20 months in the role citing ill-health. She didn’t address either of these points when asked about her CV. She also couldn’t think of an example where she had helped someone overcome barriers and into a job.
Day 2 and the first interviewee was
the one who wrote her CV in broken English.
Despite the Person Specification requiring extensive and varied
experience and knowledge working in Employment & Skills Information, Advice
and Guidance, her CV included nine months experience as a Placement Officer (a
sort of probationary and nascent assistant to Employment Advisers). Prior to that she worked at Waitrose for ten
years. She was the second-best interviewee.
The CVs of the next two candidates were even thinner and I can’t imagine what they might have to say in an interview. Seemingly, neither could they and both cancelled. I’ll now never know what possessed my manager to add them to his long shortlist.
The next candidate was the most intriguing. He has worked as an Employment Adviser on various contracts from 1995 to 2016 before becoming a full-time carer for his mother. This dates him back to welfare-to-work programmes from John Major’s Government. We should interview him for the history books, never mind a job! But, alas, it turned out this was a relic that we were never going to be able to mine for any coherent info. In walked a man with a Morrison’s carrier bag and overgrown and browned fingernails who blinked, stared and grinned at us like Martini from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I can’t imagine what it must do to your social skills to have to spend most of your time in a house caring for your mother for six years and not have the interactions of life and work. This level of institutionalisation I can sympathise but not empathise with, thank God, but was there nobody in his life that could have told him to cut his nails (any time in the last six years!) and not take a carrier bag before he came to a job interview, even if it was the cashier at Morrison’s? Again, this is a man who is asking us to trust him to prepare our vulnerable residents for job interviews. There was clearly a lot of knowledge in his head but he was not going to share with us what we wanted to know and seemed determined to give us an impenetrable and potted history lesson on 1990s welfare-to-work programmes. He talked over us as we tried to ask him questions and bored us with ancient acronyms like “SRB” and “FNB”, long-forgotten by all except those who worked in the Department of Health and Social Security, and still alive, who invented them.
The last candidate had the stigma of
being from the Government’s Jobcentre Plus: callous, unhelpful and
scolding. Not as callous as HR staff,
but then not as helpful as a gatepost. As
it happens, she was quite nice, possibly because she only had three months
experience as a “Work Coach” at JCP, but she will be marked for life.
The lesson to learn here is that, like a dog chasing a bicycle, the liars don’t know any more than I do what they’re going to do next if they are successful at step 1. And the Waitrose shelf-stacker will be offered a £41k job for an experienced and qualified Employment Adviser role which wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t tried her luck.
But one might expect more from a Council Director than a dumb dog. I never heard back from the Head of Public Health Commissioning about the contract variation for the substance misuse service and the supplier, Turning Point’s absence of reporting any delivery of social value, which she insisted they had (see Turning Point) and, post-Christmas, it was time to retender. If Turning Point was successful in this tender, what was the Head of Public Health Commissioning going to say about them delivering social value in this new contract, a requirement, when they had reported nothing in the last? It’s not really believable to report they have committed to providing social value if experience tells us otherwise. It really feels like she is not thinking ahead and burying her head in the sand about what happens if Turning Point was successful again. And, as if the stars are helping me in my examination of why people lie, Turning Point was the winning supplier (by some margin) and reality has caught up with her. What will she say now? I was curious.
On Wednesday, the Senior Lead for Adult Public Health distributed the draft Key Decision report for formal comments on the implications of awarding the £20,475,000 contract to Turning Point. I simply wrote:
“Social Value contributions should be considered in any contract let with a price over £100,000. The recommended supplier, Turning Point, did not deliver any social value on their previous contract which the council awarded in 2021. This has not been addressed on the last contract nor in this commission. It can be expected that they will not deliver the social value proposed in paragraph 6 above [a brief overview of measures].”
I didn’t even bother addressing what measures they had proposed, so irrelevant I thought it was for CAB, the decision-makers, to know. Yesterday, the Senior Lead for Adult Public Health called me. “Would you be able to soften your comments?” he asked me. “Why would I?” I asked. He asked, “Could you not have some reason to think that they will deliver social value?”
What? How inappropriate is it for this officer to
intervene in the governance process that is designed to seek objective approval
from those whose job it is to ensure the council’s policies are applied? I know this has happened to me before (see Why
Do Officers Do It?), but it still took me aback. Why are the senior managers in the council so
dead set against the council’s policies?
Why work for the council if you don’t like what councils represent? And, if you don’t really care about such matters
of the council, why take such interest in one matter that you are willing to partake
in haranguing an independent officer in the governance process to find a lie to
suit your arbitrary agenda? For senior
managers, it feels incredibly myopic and lacking in understanding of the
overall picture of the role of a council and their own, expected-to-be-high-level-being-senior, part in it. And it is just
plain misconduct and fraud. “No”, I
replied, “your team has given me no reason to think that Turning Point has or
will deliver social value. If you
have some reason to think that they will deliver social value, please share it
with me and I’ll happily reconsider.”
Alas no he didn’t and we left it at that, at least I thought.
Later in the day, his boss, the Director of Public Health emailed me about my comments:
“Dear Paul, we are due to finalise our decision paper on drug and alcohol paper [sic]. I think there has been a misunderstanding of what this contract is. It is a contract which deals 100% in social value as it is a medical treatment centre for the most vulnerable clients who suffer with addiction and blood borne infections.
“You have said: ‘[…] The recommended supplier, Turning Point, did not deliver any social value on their previous contract which the council let in 2021.[…]’
“Unfortunately not true-the entirety of the contact is social value-but done thru a cadre of highly specialist medical professionals. Turning Point are [sic] also a charity provider so I don’t understand the problem. [The Head of Public Health Commissioning] assured me this was solved prior to her departure. I will ring you shortly to discuss. Delaying the contract award is making things very difficult for us. hope [sic] we can explain the contract etc to your satisfaction.”
So that answers my question: The Head of Public Health Commissioning, who told me that Turning Point had delivered social value but implied that her Contracts & Performance Officer couldn’t get her act together to actually send the right report to me, and then never got back to me (see When Good Services are Lumped With Bad People), lied to her Director and then left the council before it came to the retender. Clever. But her inaction does rather leave her Director in a sticky situation. Before I got the chance to reply to her to explain that I was objectively commenting on the council’s policy that “Social Value” is in addition to the core service procured and, therefore, my comments are unfortunately true, the Head of Corporate Procurement, cc’d, got in first:
“Hi – all … I see all points … how about a 10 minute call at 9am tomorrow to reach a position? There are some legal strictures to this. But I want to hear Paul’s views as a very highly valued colleague.
“I will send an invite out for all who can attend.”
This is the same person who declared my fabulousness in What is the Difference Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Value? so it is nice to see he is sharing his opinion of me with others, but this has got nothing to do with him. Again, the governance process seeks independence, not arbitration, not least because Corporate Procurement should not be the supposed independent arbiter of the procurement process. The Chief Solicitor of Legal Services replied agreeing to meet this morning too and it is nothing to do with her either. As it happened, I had swimming training this morning so was unable to attend and I declined the meeting explaining my unavailability.
He didn’t reply and after her fruitless meeting with Corporate Procurement and Legal this morning (because it has got nothing to do with them), the Director of Public Health messaged me asking to meet and I said I was available at 11am. She sent an invite but added to the message:
“ok will invite you. [The Head of Corporate Procurement] has advised that the para [my comments] doesn't apply as no legal basis not to award due to past lack of returns. I will explain or [the Assistant Director of Corporate Procurement] may catch you before 11. I will personally make sure that Turning Pt do the returns for you-that was never raised by [The Head of Public Health Commissioning (who has since left),] the commissioner, so my apologies I never knew you had been struggling to get a response”
I’m not making legal comments, that’s for Corporate Procurement and Legal to do. Why they haven’t added the legal implications of social value in the Key Decision report, I don’t know. I’m simply notifying CAB that they can’t expect any (additional) social value as promised in the bid if they award this contract. What they do with that information is their prerogative. I think the Director knows this, and I think she suspects what CAB’s prerogative will be, because she sent me the invite for 11.
In the meeting, the Director explained that she now knew that it was only the additional social value I was commenting on (presumably the Head of Corporate Procurement told her at 9 this morning) and that this is what I have been asked by CAB to do for all major procurements.
The approach she took with me, then, was to insist that Turning Point had delivered their contracted social value measures. “Just because they didn’t report them to you doesn’t mean they didn’t deliver them!”
“Did they report them to you?” I asked. “No”, she replied, “but, what I mean is, just because they didn’t report them at all doesn’t mean they didn’t deliver them.”
That is quite an existential point to make. If a tree falls in the woods and there was no-one there to hear it, did it make a sound? If no-one was there, does anyone care? I replied. “If a supplier doesn’t report they’ve supplied anything, then we assume they haven’t, or else what is the point of council officers? We assume that, if they refuse to report anything, then we note that nothing has been delivered. It is a fundamental point of what a council officer does. A council is a bureaucracy and we are responsible for accounting for public money.”
That seemed to be the only argument she had to make to me or else she felt so steamrollered by my reply that she didn’t bother arguing with me anymore and she conceded Turning Point had not delivered. From starting out combative, she sounded quite plaintive after that. She told me that her Head of Public Health Commissioning left to go abroad but never really did her job properly managing the contracts and now she was just trying to pick up the pieces. She told me Turning Point is a really good provider and it is a really important service that does good for the most vulnerable of our residents, and this has put that at risk.
I appreciate that Turning Point is an important supplier, not just because of the good they already do in the borough, but because I’ve heard about the squalid conditions St Mungo’s houses those severely afflicted by drug and alcohol abuse. homelessness and ill-health and I am using social value policy to steer the contract towards them as an alternative supplier instead and there’s no reason to think they will deliver social value either as part of their core service or additionally, just because they have not had a contract with LBHF since Social Value Policy was adopted. It is short-sighted and I just come across as a jobsworth. I understand her concerns. But I am not being a jobsworth, I am asked to comment objectively on one policy and process by CAB and it is for CAB to make a decision based on those observations, not me. She acknowledged in her message that I “tried and tried” to get Turning Point to engage and I got no support from her team and the Head of Public Health Commissioning has since gone abroad.
I’m on my own with social value (and I also have Economic Development S106 to manage). In the meantime, she has a Head of Public Health Commissioning, a Senior Lead for Adult Public Health, numerous Contracts & Performance Officers, both the Assistant Director of and Head of Corporate Procurement at her beckon call for 9am meetings the next day and numerous commissioning officers. And it is not like they deliver public health services; Turning Point does that in this case, all her service does is specify, commission and contract-manage it, and they can’t get this much right!
She has a glut of well-paid officers that she doesn’t seem to know what they do or haven’t done. And because of this lack of direction she has given her service, as well as her staff’s inclination to lie at stage 1 of the process and then leave the country before stage 2, she is now in a predicament, but that is not my fault and I don’t know what the solution is. She is correct in saying that there is “no legal basis [to] not to award due to past lack of returns”. Public sector procurement legislation says we can’t consider past non-performance when awarding a contract, only the current bids made. This crazy rule is currently being debated by Parliament with a proposal that we can consider reasonable information such as past performance. But Corporate Procurement, given the task of reviewing procurement processes including Social Value last January(!) and still hasn’t, simply refers to “some legal strictures” here knowing that explicitly saying that my comment has no legal basis calls into question why CAB has been considering social value in procurements for the last two years if it is not up to them and, by turn, up to our democratically elected councillors who decided that we shouldn’t award contracts to suppliers who won’t and don’t deliver social value, and no-one corrected them. And, under her directorship, this can of worms was opened because her Head of Public Health Commissioning lied and then fled the country. I don’t know whether she took her Contracts & Performance Officer with her in her suitcase.
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