Monday 12 June 2023 – How Rather Than Why

March saw the scandal of Suella Braverman in Government being accused of potentially breaking ministerial rules by questioning the impartiality of civil servants over policy and dealings with asylum seekers.  And Brexit and Tory culture wars and general distasteful social intolerance.  Other Conservative members weighed in saying that they blamed “an activist blob of leftwing… civil servants” for defying the Government in executing its instructions.  Of the small boats policy, one Home Office Civil Servant was quoted by the Guardian as saying, “I’m finding it hard to reconcile both… civil service values [to execute the policies of democratically-elected politicians] and my own personal ethical convictions…”

I do sympathise with the civil servant.  I have stated from the start of this diary that I want to help people.  It is a moral decision.  I don’t want to do this job if I’m not helping people.  But if the council changes its planning policy saying that they don’t want developers to help train and employ our unemployed residents, unlike the civil servant, I will move on.  That’s politics of which I’m not in the business.  I won’t leak any conflict between my convictions and council policy to the Guardian and I’m surprised they are interested in the convictions of this Home Office employee rather than that of the Home Secretary who “the people” voted in to represent them (except, perhaps, it matches their own convictions).  However, the General Secretary of the FDA, a union for civil servants, asked the Prime Minister last month to stop letting ministers call officials “’lazy, woke, inefficient, remainer snowflakes” or brand them “machiavellian geniuses” trying to unseat the government” in reference to a claim by then Secretary of State, Dominic Raab.

Despite the quote from the Home Office official above, civil servants generally dismiss the idea that they are defying the Government based on their own morals, and the previous UK head of the civil service, Bob Kerslake, said in April that the Prime Minister needed to speak out against the “torrent of invective against the civil service”.

No-one is accusing council officers of the same thing.  And I don’t know if civil servants are applying their own politics to the execution of their work, but council officers seem to me to do it.  I’m not sure why; most I have met have little conviction of anything.  But they do seem to be easily led by big business.  I was invited by the West London Alliance (WLA) to a meeting in Ealing Broadway today for Local Planning Authorities to come together “to understand how we might foster cross-borough collaboration on S106 skills and employment benefits.”  The West London Alliance is a construct of the Mayor of London’s Greater London Authority: a non-political sub-region of London boroughs that make up West London.  To what end he (originally Ken Livingstone, but retained by Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan) doesn’t say.  It does have power, sort of, since the Government devolved some education and employment & skills support funding to it in 2019, but not really (Adult Education Budget is allocated by the WLA to colleges as it always was by the Government’s Department for Education before it was devolved, and Employment and Skills funding to support unemployed residents is still specified, and the programmes monitored and managed, by the Department of Work and Pensions.  The WLA gets to decide which colleges to fund (colleges in the Capital are much the same as they always were) and Employment and Skills providers so long as the sub-regions could demonstrate an objective tender process (East London’s boroughs, “Local London”, all awarded the funding to themselves, apart from Enfield, but I suspect that, having worked there, it is because Enfield senior managers didn’t understand what was going on rather than lacking an impulse to impropriety – see reference to Fr Dougal in What Do Procurement Officers Do?).

The WLA is also a vehicle to co-ordinate efforts towards the common goals of all member councils in a larger geographic area if it makes more sense to do so.  To that end, the WLA, whatever type of quango it is, employs people.  And here they are inviting me to a cross-borough meeting to do just that.  The agenda for the meeting said that “The Skills and Employment Leads of the 7 boroughs received a letter from the Construction Employer Advisory Board [no, I don’t know what that is either and neither does Google] (letter below) making clear they are for cross-borough working on S106 to enable developers to better deliver their obligations.  [The Head of Employment and Skills for Barnet Council], on behalf of the Skills and Employment Leads, attended [a] Planning Officers Group to get their buy-in to take this work forward.”

My Head of Service has been invoked here as supporting this, so I accepted the invite to the meeting.  The letter from the Construction Employer Advisory Board in the meeting agenda, addressed to the WLA, which it says it represents, says it is made up of, among other unspecified developers, Flannery Plant Hire, Berkeley Group (represented by one of my rhinos) and Laing O’Rourke (represented by my Rhino on the Olympia Exhibition Centre), and claims, “Our core purpose is to bring West London’s construction sector together and work collaboratively to seek positive solutions to skills and employment challenges.” 

No developers attended the meeting so they obviously don’t mean they, the employers, collaborate to do anything to help deliver S106 obligations.  They must mean us council officers.  Employment & Skills Advice leads, S106 Employment & Skills officers (including me) and planners were invited.  So, rather than developers collaborate to train and employ local residents, they mean we council officers collaborate to change what we ask of them to make it easier for them to get planning obligations discharged from their planning permission.  Specifically, the letter goes on to say, “We believe the number of West London’s residents benefitting could be boosted if there was more flexibility relating to resident’s [sic] postcodes, i.e. They [sic] are able to move across borough boundaries to benefit from employment opportunities close to where they live.”

The main agenda items were:

·       “A shared approach… of residents starting a[n apprenticeship] placement in one borough, and finishing the placement in another WL borough [and]

·       “Proposed model policies and S106 clauses that boroughs can use in the SPD [our planning policy documents], furthering future opportunities for collaboration.”

What we discussed in the meeting, led by the WLA, now operating for the developers with the stated approval of my Head of Service, and the Head of Service for Barnet now inexplicably operating for the WLA (insomuch as it wasn’t explained to us why he was leading the meeting on behalf of the WLA when he doesn’t work for them and, in turn, the developers) was how can we work together to enable developers to claim employing people living anywhere in the seven boroughs that make up the West London “sub-region” towards their local S106 obligations?

We were split into three groups on tables to discuss what we could do and barriers to doing them.  I was nominated scribe on my table and immediately corrupted my new role by writing the first point without discussion.  I wrote. “Barrier: it isn’t up to us."  Developers employing residents local to a development, and therefore impacted by it, to mitigate the negative impact to them, is national planning legislation.  And our democratically-elected councillors have decided on the policy to define “local” as our local council areas.”  In presenting our table’s flipchart points back to the room, I categorically stated that it is not up to us to change our planning policy; that’s up to politicians.  Why are officers having this political discussion?  Has anyone asked them first?

The Head for Barnet stood still for a moment before moving on to the next table.  He was waiting to hear how we would do this, not be questioned on why.  I don’t think he knows why he is chairing this conversation.  I know why he is chairing this conversation; it’s because the developers told him to (under the apolitical guise of the made-up, but official-sounding Construction Employer Advisory Board, and aided by the non-politically-led and not-sure-what-they-are-for WLA).  We in this room are “The Blob” of rightwing activist capitalist-supporters defying the political will of our, other than at Hillingdon, all-Labour cabinet members.

And I don’t think anyone in the room realised they were doing it (despite nerdy-looking planning policy officers being present).  We are so used to doing what big business tells us that we forget that we are here to govern out their worst excesses as determined by councillors’ policies.  But does it also kind of sound reasonable to help remove the barriers to developers employing our residents?  Isn’t that a good thing and in the spirit of what our councillors want us to do?  The letter in the meeting agenda from the group of developers who are not part of this group or agenda said, “S106 obligations and targets placed by Local Authorities (LA’s) on employers to exclusively recruit people living within a local authority boundary can often deny nearby residents of a chance of securing work placements, apprenticeships and employment.  A simple example could be an unemployed person applying for a work placement, job or other opportunity that is part of a Local Authority’s S106 agreement and being rejected simply for living on the wrong side of a road - that happens to be the borough boundary.”

A simple example indeed.  But I’m sure a rare one in reality.  Plus you have to draw the line somewhere and, for politicians, it is the boundary lines where voters can vote for them or not.  And why stop at the side of a road where West London ends?  Why not all of London?  Or the UK?  Or Europe?  Or anywhere in the world?  The reason is is that we are trying to restrict who developers can employ.  We do this to force them to train up and employ people who wouldn’t otherwise be trained up or employed by developers and who wouldn’t think that employers would want to train them up and employ them.  These are long-term workless people who may be disabled or have caring duties, a learning difficulty, a criminal conviction.  They must be accommodated by employers to be employed in a paid job.  These are people who need preferential treatment; positive discrimination to be included in the labour market.  But developers don’t want to put in the time, effort and money to doing that if they can just employ a skilled, experienced and qualified construction worker from anywhere in the pool of c2m people living across West London.  I’ve always told my S106 employers they can move our residents to any site they want if the resident is willing to commute to it to complete a placement or continue to be employed.  So long as they are employing a Hammersmith & Fulham resident, I don’t care if he (it’s almost always a he in construction) is working in Hillingdon.  So why would I allow them to claim a Hillingdon resident towards their already relatively low 10% local labour target?  It is solving a problem that doesn’t exist to give developers more liberty to recruit whomever they wish.  Someone needs to tell the Head from Barnet that “liberty” is the opposite of “government”, and he is a government officer.

West London Alliance’s guidance to its “members” to create supported internships: tell employers they don’t have to provide so much support.

I have my one-to-one with my Head of Service on Wednesday and I will ask him if he did, in fact, endorse this agenda.  But I doubt it.  I doubt he has even read it for the interest he takes in what I do.  I don’t think these WLA and Barnet and other officers from other London boroughs question these things if they can make things easier for the businesses with which they spend most of their working lives.  And perhaps Suella Braverman is right and civil servants let their so-called leftwing “wokery” creep into their everyday work without noticing either.