Tuesday 5 September – The Little Things
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than evil”, wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, after the accession of Nazism leading to his country invading Europe and committing genocide. This was a dark time for his home and his fellow landsmen. But you can fight evil. People recognise evil and we are naturally averse to it. They sense that it is unreasonable. We can always erect barriers to willful malice. But, as for idiots, he said,
“Against stupidity we have no defence. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved – indeed, the fool can counter by criticising them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions. So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied… For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
Today we had our meeting about purchasing Social Value Portal my Assistant Director asked me to put in the calendar (see What Happens Next? 2). To be clear, I am not comparing my AD to megalomanical and genocidal monsters. But two other things happened today as well. Firstly we had our All Staff Meeting led by the now permanently appointed Chief Executive (see I Asked You To Break The Law), and Birmingham City Council, her previous employer, and the largest local authority in the country, declared bankruptcy. And one cannot help but see the link between stupidity, distinct from malice, and the inevitable self-satisfaction resulting from it, and the dire consequences for our public services.
ITV News reported this evening that the financial mismanagement by the council that tipped Birmingham CC into declaring a Section 114 notice was £147m used to equalise gender pay in the council plus a £100m overspend on an IT project. Female-dominated jobs such Teaching Assistants and Care Workers have historically been paid less than male-dominated jobs, an ITV news presenter reported. Equalising those discrepancies, she told us, cost the council £147m. Although the first part of this report is undoubtedly a horribly true statistic, Sharon Lea is a woman and she was paid £414,000 pa to head up Birmingham’s waste management department before coming to Hammersmith & Fulham, and I am very sceptical that Teaching Assistants and Care Workers saw any of that money. It is not far-fetched to imagine that, at those rates of pay, senior managers equalising their salaries to the highest paid in the senior leadership team such as Sharon then was could easily account for the whole £147m between those few.
In her introduction to the online All Staff Meeting this morning before the public announcement of Birmingham’s critical failure, in a prescient message (or else she already knew something), Sharon tried to warn staff of the dangers of not having a plan. She said, “The council’s finances are secure, currently, but we must avoid the risk of bankruptcy. To fail to plan… is… to fail. Or something like that. Benjamin Franklin said that”, venerably demonstrating how to fail to plan for her All Staff inspirational talk by not learning the quote properly. The Chief Executive, ladies and gentlemen! Paid £414k because she is worth it, L’Oriel, headquartered in the borough, must have informed her.
Next up was our old friend, the Assistant Director for Auxiliary Councillor Afterthoughts (see What Are People Thinking?). “I am an Assistant Director”, he introduced himself, wisely not trying to explain what he was an Assistant Director of. His agenda item was to talk to staff about the new Corporate Plan being drafted to which the Chief Executive was leading up. This is the council’s overall objectives for the foreseeable future; Sharon’s Plan.
This was to be an interactive session. A link in the web presentation opened a website where we staff could answer simple multiple choice questions about the diversity of residents in the borough. “What proportion of residents were born overseas? 28.5%, 37.5% or 45.5% were the three options. I made my guess by selecting one of the three and, back on the web presentation, a bar graph depicting the three options moved up and down as other staff members made their selections. “I’ll wait until we get to 200 responses and then I’ll tell you the answer”, the AD said, which he did. Still the bars kept moving. “Some of you are submitting after I’ve given the answer” he told us, desperately trying to group-control over 1,000 officers he couldn’t see and finish his section in the time allotted to him. Respondents, nonetheless, continued to guess an answer they had just been given until he managed to move the page on to the next question. By then, a further 300 officers had responded.
This next question required staff members to enter a text answer; one or two words. The question was, “What do you think is a unique characteristic of our borough?” Back on the web session, a word cloud swirled with words entered, with the most common answers generating the biggest words in the centre of the cloud. “Diversity” was by far the biggest answer that staff unimaginatively entered, not at all being influenced by the previous questions! The AD had covered that. What more was there to say? The staff was giving him no material to respond to. He was looking desperate at this stage by how badly this was going. But, mercifully, the chair interjected and said he had time to do just one more question.
Again, a text-based answer of one or two words was required by respondents: “What aspect of Hammersmith & Fulham’s future gives you the most excitement and optimism?” “David Jeram” popped up large and proud in the middle of the word cloud and seemed to remain for what seemed like an excruciatingly long time as other unique words swirled around it in mini form before, again mercifully, common words started to dominate. Curious, I looked him up on the council directory. David Jeram is an IT Helpdesk Manager, arguably the dumbest breed of council officer (see Nihilism in the New Year). What must have happened is that, despite it being the last question, not understanding what he was being asked to do, instead of submitting what excited him most about the future of the borough and that gave him optimism, he chose to answer by typing in his name. It was an unwisely wordy question posed by the AD for such a forum, but shouting out your name because you don’t know the answer in a desperate attempt to fit in just singled out David Jeram in front of the whole council as other staff members paused to understand the question and think of an answer, leaving his name rotating on the screen in big letters.
In the following Q&A, the AD just had time now to take one question. “How did we perform on the KPIs in our last Corporate Plan?” someone submitted. Alas the AD had no idea; no-one was paying any attention to it.
Next up was the Chief Digital Officer. Her talk was on the importance of
cybersecurity. Her first presentation
slide posed the question, “How can I identify a phishing email?”
“Watch out for poor spelling and grammar” was one bullet point. “Report all suspicious emails to the IT Helpdesk.”
So, from now on, we should report about 90% of our emails that officers send to each to the Helpdesk (see The Traditional Spelling) if only we knew how to contact the Helpdesk in the first place (see Nihilism in the New Year).
There was no word from the CDO about the new “Modern Desktop” rollout. This is the £4.6m contract awarded to a supplier, CDW, due to start in April this year, to provide the council with new laptops. She did tell us that we should make a note of the asset numbers stuck to our current laptops; in case we lose them, we can notify the Helpdesk and they can know which laptop to wipe of data so that our residents’ personal information is not stolen. Does this mean that the IT Service has not been keeping a record of what laptops they are giving out? This would seem like a simple security measure, never mind an asset-management measure, to keep track of about £4.6m worth of the council’s assets.
And this goes some way to demonstrating how Birmingham City Council might have overspent on the “IT Project” by £100m reported by ITV News along with the general idiocy of the average council officer. And, along with officer salaries, ITV News claimed it was this £100m that tipped the council into bankruptcy. The leader of the opposition was interviewed on the news report and said that the Labour-led cabinet had been warned by opposition councillors, officers and auditors that their spending plans were unfeasible. The Leader of the council took the blame and said in the report mistakes had been made because, as far as his pride will allow him, he thinks he is in charge. But he is not. That is simply not how councils work. The Chief Finance Officer, nominated the “Section 151” officer, meaning she is personally legally responsible for sanctioning budgets, should simply not allow expenditure that would bankrupt the council. It is her responsibility, not the Leader’s. Such catastrophic overspend can only be caused by the mis- (or non-) management by officers of the council’s accounts, suppliers and not keeping a list pinned to the office corkboard of who you gave laptops to (or perhaps they could have created some kind of IT solution instead to keep track of them but that probably never occurred to them).
And let us not forget the role corruption plays in the destruction of public finances, namely awarding contracts to “friends” whose services don’t work. So to our AD’s meeting today. That he re-purchased Social Value Portal after three years of we using it and it not working, I understand: Jobs for the Boys. That he then arranged a meeting that includes me to discuss using it when everyone already knows it doesn’t work is more surprising. What would he say that wouldn’t sound like a bad script from a sitcom? Also invited was his obsequious sidekick, the Head of Strategy, and my ineffectual manager, the Head of Employment and Skills. So maybe he would just announce its “continued” use to his management and not address me at all. Because SVP doesn’t work and we would therefore have no monitoring at all, and along with having no procurement governance, contract management or contract enforcement, this would absolve me of managing the council’s social value delivery completely. Shockingly, though, he did want to discuss it, and with me! So to the script:
Setting: Microsoft Teams meeting with the Assistant Director (AD), Head of Strategy (HoS), Head of Employment & Skills (HoES), Strategy Officer (SO) and me, the Employment & Skills Officer (Paul). All cameras are on apart from that of the HoES because he usually spends most of his working hours driving his children around and is currently sitting in his car with his iPad and doesn’t want to advertise the fact.
AD [addressing the group]: How do we want to do this? Would it be useful if I gave just a bit of a general update on kind of where we’re at with SVP discussions? Would that be a helpful place to start?
Others overlapping: Yes, okay etc.
AD: Okay, so, ‘cos we haven’t all met for a while, the point a couple of months ago was, Paul, you correctly flagged that SVP contract was coming to an end but let’s remind ourselves that that money [to pay SVP] comes from the contractors; we give them a very small amount of money. So we had to make a decision whether we continue working with them or not. I felt, talking to [the AD for Corporate Procurement] that we weren’t in a position yet to make that decision because we didn’t know whether it was a hundred percent rubbish or a hundred percent good where it sat was my sense. So, I, and you’ll recall Paul that they wanted to meet me and [the AD for Corporate Procurement] which I kind of did because it would have felt rude, kind of, not to when [the owner of Social Value Portal is] well connected to politicians et cetera. And then they invited us, me, to go to their place and see it which I also did. So what we’ve now done is extended it until the end of December because I wanted us to have the kind of breathing space to explore it properly and I think this is costing us like three and half k. And what I wanna do over the next, like, we’re now in September, so between then over the next couple of months, is just work out whether, not roll out the whole thing, just work out whether, as a model, it works for us. Potentially. And to do it in a way by doing one or two contracts to do that. And, I guess, one option would have been to have gone to an external kind of consultancy for how we can get a new pair of eyes to sort of look at this in a way that is a change project. I didn’t want to do it in the team without raising some money [presumably to pay for the consultancy] but also, in my head. the kind of [HoS’s] area, industrial strategy, yes it’s writing the strategy, but it’s also doing kind of internal change projects and acts of [indiscernible mumbling] consultancy so it felt sensible to bring [HoS] in and [SO] to support that while also Paul the business-as-usual kind of stuff. You know, it’s business as usual although what I would say on that is that I would like us over the next few months for business-as-usual to be SVP portal on this rather than any other spreadsheets we’re using now. Now, I get why those spreadsheets have come into being: out of frustration, but I think it’s a bit confusing.
So, that’s the sort of intro from me. I guess, [HoES], Paul, did you have initial kind of thoughts, questions on that?
What are my thoughts on that? So, the AD hasn’t decided whether SVP works or not. The council has been using it for three years and I have told him categorically that it doesn’t work. Added to this, that the owner of SVP name-dropped a councillor means it would have been rude not to buy his product. So, in lieu of not having any money to commission a change consultancy to examine it, he wants the Head of Strategy, his sidekick, to assess it because that is “kind of” his job anyway. So, as part of this change management study, he wants two or three contracts to be put on SVP. In the meantime, as business as usual, Corporate Procurement puts all contracts on SVP. This seems like a contradiction in his scientific method that is not in my control. I have simply been subsequently giving those suppliers, at least the ones that feel the need to deliver their contracted social value, a spreadsheet to report evidence of it when they find that SVP doesn’t work. This was not out of “frustration” but necessity because SVP doesn’t work and the only alternative to the spreadsheets is that those suppliers’ social value is not evidenced and they breach the terms of their contracts.
These are my initial thoughts as well as that the AD has already bought SVP and raised a purchase order so what does it matter now what I and my Head of Service think? If he wants me to stop monitoring social value delivery and let the Head of Strategy do a change study on something we have seen not working for three years, then have at it. I’m an employee and should just do what I’m told, not be persuaded by the AD. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “If you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.” So why, then, did I express an opinion? But I did:
[Paul]: I take your point that you get a sense that it hasn’t been tested yet. Just a reminder here that I did previously say that we have been using it for three years and my assessment is that it doesn’t work at all. And my assessment hasn’t changed there so I’m not sure why we are assessing it again.
[AD]: I think, and tell me if this is wrong Paul, one of the problems we’ve got is, organisationally, culturally, we are not buying into social value at the level of seniority we should do? Would that feel right?
[Paul]: I mean, yes, but that’s a separate issue. From a mechanical point of view, Social Value Portal, in terms of, I’m talking about monitoring now, I don’t really know about the procurement side; it might be working for [the AD for Corporate Procurement] but, from a monitoring point of view, I mean it doesn’t work in terms of monitoring and evidencing social value contributions.
[AD]: So, in a way, if we slightly park the kit because, for me, what I want [the HoS] and [SO] to do, to look at, is, in the round, think about what is the council’s approach to social value. What are we looking to achieve, what outcomes from the industrial strategy, how do we think the governance is going to work and, then also, how we’re going to deliver it…
[Paul interrupting the AD]: Isn’t this just an issue of monitoring? I mean this is just one small part; a mechanical part of social value. I appreciate everything you are saying but, with regards to Social Value Portal, what it does here is it just monitors the social value contributions made by suppliers.
[AD]: So, my understanding, and, [HoS], feel free to take part in the conversation, what they are actually wanting to do, and they do with a number of councils I know to be pretty good, is do the kind of thing I just said there in the round and approach social value in the round. Now, for a whole host of different reasons, I think that this hasn’t been working effectively here?
[Paul]: Yes. Now I get that and that needs to be addressed separately, certainly. But, I mean, from SVP’s point of view, its use is just to do monitoring. My understanding from other London boroughs, even those who have got a licence [to use Social Value Portal], are doing the same as Hammersmith & Fulham: they are not using it for monitoring. None of them are that I have spoken to.
[AD]: We will get to a point where we, as a group, need to understand what we do or what we don’t use Social Value Portal for. What I’m really interested in is what our approach to social value is as a council.
OMG! But what has the council’s approach to its social value policy, including governance, contract management, enforcement and deciding what social value we want to ask for and directing it accordingly, which should stem from the Industrial Strategy which is the Head of Strategy’s job and not, as the AD has bizarrely explained, change management consultancy of operational processes, got to do with commissioning a monitoring tool which we know after three painful years of using it, doesn’t work, reinforced by the fact that no other council uses it (apart from Waltham Forest for a very disturbingly symbiotic reason – see What are People Thinking) other than it would be “rude not to”? Yes, senior managers’ ambivalence, including his own resistance, to Cabinet’s social value policy is alarming and surely illegal, and this needs to be looked at, but what has that got to do with a monitoring portal that doesn’t work? It’s the little things that make the difference but he can’t see it. The only person of seniority that is of any importance here is the AD himself. He is the one lying in contract award reports to CAB about the implications of recommended suppliers not delivering social value. He is the one not attending CAB and governing that social value policy is considered in major procurements like his predecessor did. He is the one that decided not to take responsibility for social value delivery and instead leave it to Corporate Procurement, who have absolutely no interest or responsibility, to agree a contract schedule with Legal to enforce commitments. And he is the one that ignored my review of the range of social value measures (the "TOMs") that we use (without any input from the Head of Strategy despite the AD asking him to provide it to me) which currently have almost no bearing on the council’s strategies. The AD is ultimately responsible for the council’s social value policy which is why we are here today talking about it. Maybe my Head of Service can explain this point better than me…
[HoES]: Can I come in and say something? Just going back to the operational point around the mechanics of monitoring, I think that if we say we are going to use Social Value Portal from the monitoring side which is the bit that particularly doesn’t work, there are areas we can discuss around national TOMs and the overarching social value work that SVP do which is interesting but not our business-as-usual everyday work with Social Value Portal. It’s specifically around monitoring. My fear is that, if we move away from the manual reporting system, we won’t be recording it. This is going back to Paul’s point about working with them over the last three years. It’s not functional. The monitoring function of SVP does not work for a host of technical reasons but, in my head, the most simple thing is, when a supplier reports social value to Social Value Portal, it just gets uploaded as an attachment. There’s not something that indicates that something is delivered that then enters into contract management and Paul can see what has been attached but it doesn’t link back to the data. We’ve been providing them this feedback for the last couple of years at least?
[Paul]: Well, for me, about a little over a year.
[AD interrupting the HoES]: Yeah, yeah…
[HoES interrupting the AD]: So, so, just to finish my point, all I would say is, your point about using SVP, that’s fine; we carry on their contract but, in terms of the monitoring, I really feel that we should continue recording the good work that has been coming through with the manual system.
Wow, did my manager just back me up?! He didn’t say anything that I haven’t already said but now it’s two against one. Not that this is a democracy; it’s a corporation and the AD is the executive decision-maker. But, then again, it was the AD who wanted to discuss this. But then again again, he has already raised the purchase order.
[AD]: Okay, before [the HoS] comes in, just on the detail of the kind of “the reporting doesn’t work”; it’s not flagging to the right kind of [mumbling], we did flag this. There has been reassurance, I sense, that it is fixable. No new system will ever be perfect although it is fixable. Is that your understanding [HoS]?
[HoS]: Yeah, I think, again, without being very close to the detail of what has and what hasn’t worked in terms of picking up the nuts and bolts, I mean, there is something about the cultural point and the fact that it matters whether the contract owners own social value, probably in the way that they haven’t been because they haven’t been leant on to do that, and that’s no fault of yours Paul; it is an organisational point around the importance that has or hasn’t been attached to it that needs to shift. I think, without that, it is actually quite difficult to make SVP work at a detailed level because you almost need all parts to be functioning in the way they should, I suspect, in order for the nuts and bolts, the mechanics bits of the monitoring to work properly. I got the sense from [the AD for Corporate Procurement] that we were making some progress towards making that happen which then means, hopefully, we can test whether it really does work because we’re playing ball across the council through all contracts.
And this is why the writers of Twenty Twelve, as as close to accurate as I have heard from sitcom writers as it is, Siobhan Sharpe still couldn’t be this inane and vacuous in the meetings she attended. The Head of Strategy could just as well have said “We are where we are and that’s never a good place to be” but the way he put it is more verbose and less gnomic. Although basically just summarising what has already been discussed except to add that the reason an IT system isn’t working is because council officers didn’t wish hard enough for it to (we should change its name from SVP to Tinkerbell); that the reason an IT system to count measures might not work is not because it doesn’t have a search bar to search for contracts or the coding doesn’t actually count the measures evidenced but, instead, the problem with the IT system is that the AD for Corporate Procurement has not engendered a culture of contract-management by officers in the council whose job titles are “Contract Manager”, he does go on to suggest how we can get to be someplace better, referencing better efforts needed from, and made by, the AD for Corporate Procurement WHO HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH, AND HAD NO INTEREST IN, MONITORING SOCIAL VALUE DELIVERY, NO LESS DONE ANYTHING ABOUT IT!
[Paul interrupting the HoS]: [The AD for Corporate Procurement] wouldn’t know about monitoring.
[Uncomfortable silence]
[AD]: Just on [the HoS’s] point, I think this is a really important cultural shift. I think, and it’s a big [piece of] work [the Head of Business & Enterprise] and I are doing, a place-based approach, is social value needs to become a whole [part of the] organisation as a whole. And this means there is a named person in individual departments, so let’s pick Housing, who is responsible, accountable for social value. And, so, in a sense, the conversation about whether that’s going badly or wrong is a conversation between the Director of Housing and that person. You know, you are just… we, as an Economic Development team, are just supporting and enabling this. It is not us who are responsible for it. And that’s a really, really fundamental change I would suggest because, how it works right now, we’re being blamed for absolutely everything. Which is not particularly right or fair.
He just doesn’t want to take responsibility for social value. As inconsistent as his expressed opinions on Economic Development have been since he started last October, on this point, he has been steadfast. It somewhat contradicts his point that a problem has been that people of sufficient seniority have not taken responsibility for social value when he is the most obvious senior manager to take a lead on making social value a thing the council does. Economic Development, for which he is AD, is responsible for governing that social value is included in major procurements. This he has undermined. So too could monitoring it. Which he is undermining by re-purchasing SVP which he knows doesn’t work (even if he does believe it is fixable which he has no reason to because I have just told him we have been trying to fix it with SVP for over a year). We were never responsible for contract-managing social value and the contract managers that sit in each directorate, such as Housing, always have been. But, one reason they don’t is because SVP doesn’t work, so how can they monitor progress of the delivery of their contracts and, anyway, there are no repercussions if the contracted social value commitments are not delivered? There is no “really fundamental change” here. If the AD listened to his own officers as much as his own voice, he would know this. Even if the contract manager did know what progress had been made and there were repercussions to non-delivery, what would he or she say to the supplier? Social value is too big for them to know how to guide it. By contrast, Economic Development, with its Industrial Strategy, can co-ordinate suppliers to make the contributions we want to see in the borough. The AD is suggesting here that this is part of the Head of Strategy’s wider change project, which makes sense (except I have already mapped this all out in a project plan and submitted it to the AD so this piece of work has already been done, just not implemented), but this still all has nothing to do with the mechanics of an online database, the coding of which is dysfunctional and unusable, for which the AD has sanctioned the owner of SVP to continue to top-slice fees from the council’s £270m of contracted spend, at least, now, until the end of December. Otherwise the AD is right; the £3,500 the council will pay SVP directly is negligible and is probably less than the lunch and hospitality SVP put on for the two ADs for their visit in which my AD concluded then that it would be rude to now not buy the thing; a decision I predicted and won my bet with, and pint from, the Strategy Officer.
The application of the council's social value policy needs directing officers across different departments, and a strategy to direct the contributions, but the Assistant Director and Head of Strategy don't want to take responsibility for that. Instead, employ the highly-paid Head of Strategy on a change project for an operational tool that we have already been using for three years. If the AD is worried about being blamed, wouldn’t it make more sense to just do his job better rather than find clumsy (and ultimately doomed because he doesn’t understand how the council works) ways to shirk it?
[AD cont.]: My problem, [HoES and Paul] with manual reporting is, organisationally, corporately, we’ve committed to SVP. Whether it is working or not is a slightly separate thing but we’ve committed to doing that. So, us as the Economic Development Team, instituting a separate reporting line looks like us deliberately undermining the thing that we’ve corporately signed up to.
If I understand this argument, the AD says he cannot not use SVP because, three years ago, Cabinet decided to use SVP and, despite now knowing it doesn’t work, the AD cannot make an operational decision based on that, even though he knows the social value policy is doomed if we persist with it, and Cabinet won’t countenance officers’ technical advice because the owner of SVP remembers the name of the Cabinet member responsible for Economic Development from three years ago. I doubt councils do work like this but, if they do, what do we need senior managers for, then, if we officers are bound to knowingly deliver the craziest, dysfunctional services because a councillor once made a decision three years ago and never gave it any thought since and we can never advise him again after that decision was made? I really don’t think Cabinet cares about the minutia of the mechanics of what tools we use to manage the delivery of policies so long as their policies are delivered; they leave the little things up to officers. But my AD, in his wisdom, thinks not. Or else he is painfully wriggling to justify why he has handed over all our suppliers’ top-sliced contract money to his mate at SVP. If it’s the latter, he is doing a very bad job of it.
But perhaps Bonhoeffer was wrong when he said, “Against stupidity we have no defence. Neither protests nor force can touch it. Reasoning is of no use. Facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved… Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” Never say never; let me try one last time:
[Paul]: Does it matter if none of that is true?
[AD]: Yeah! Sorry, but that massively matters.
[Paul]: But the alternative is we are not monitoring social value whereas, previously for the last year we have been monitoring social value.
[AD]: I think there is something about us in all these imperfections, there are bits and bobs of contracts where Social Value Portal is working…
…and he goes on, round in circles, repeating assertions that SVP does work in the round, the bits and bobs that don't pushed aside as trivial exceptions that are fixable. Why he should know it works, he doesn’t say. Why he should pretend that he never heard my repeated assertions that it doesn’t work at all and I base this on having used it for over a year and a half, is delusional. But short of bonking him on the head with a mallet to stop the stars spinning and bring him back to sense, there is nothing more I can do. I have to accept Bonhoeffer’s idea that the AD is a self-satisfied idiot and so it’s not worth arguing with him. But we knew that already.
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