Saturday 25 November 2023 – Mid-year Review
“The mission is to stop the boats”, The Guardian reported the Home Secretary, James Cleverly, as saying in frustration at some Tory MPs’ obsession with the Rwanda policy for asylum seekers which isn’t working. “That’s the promise to the British people. Never lose sight of the mission. There are multiple methods. Don’t fixate on the methods. Focus on the mission.”
The Assistant Director for Economic Development would have us believe that the councillor with the portfolio for Social Value would have us focus on the methods and to hell with the mission. In The Little Things, he told me and his team that the reason he recommissioned Social Value Portal (SVP) despite it not working is because the councillor committed to it three years ago and we can’t, now, go against his then preferred methods. “Yeah, absolutely it matters!” he exclaimed when I questioned whether his assertion that the method the councillor happened to select all those years ago, long before the AD started at the council and therefore couldn’t possibly know his commitment or indifference to this throwaway choice, asserted, “My problem… 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.”
Invited into the conversation, the Head of Strategy backed up his AD (surprise, surprise) arguing that the AD for Corporate Procurement said SVP is improving. That I pointed out Corporate Procurement has no relationship with SVP whatsoever was ignored by everyone in the meeting. What relationship Corporate Procurement has with social value policy generally is less axiomatic. Social value proposals are a part of the procurement process and Corporate Procurement officers advise procuring officers on the procurement process. However, Social Value policy is the responsibility of the Economic Development Team, a fact the AD for Economic Development laments and lamented in The Little Things when he told his team of his desire to change this responsibility when he told us, “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.”
The AD for Corporate Procurement must sense his sense of injustice in being given responsibility to direct the delivery of a service, because she has unilaterally, secretly and whimsically undermined his unwanted responsibility. I received an email yesterday from a Commissioning Lead officer asking me to comment on her social value strategy in procuring housing cleaning services (£35m). In it she had strategised:
“Whilst no minimum levels of social value have been set, given the size of the contract, and the high weighting [of the overall score] (20%) it is accorded in the evaluation, it is anticipated that a significant amount of social value will be committed to and delivered across the lifetime of the contract.”
Before I added my comments, perhaps confused by job title inflation and thinking she had simply made a mistake, I replied pointing out that she doesn’t need to have a strategy of her own for applying social value policy to the procurement, just acknowledge in the strategy report that she knows what what the council’s policy is. And this is to ask for a minimum 10% contribution.
Alas, no, she hadn’t made a mistake. She replied to me:
“I understand that the ‘trade off’ of increasing the evaluation threshold of social value to 20% was that the minimum requirement levels were removed – so that minimum 10% figure is no longer council policy…I can’t see it referenced anywhere any more on the [Social Value web]page?”
I replied:
“No, there’s no trade-off. I know what you mean about the SV page and any further guidance (and the 20% weighting isn’t well explained either) but I’m asked to comment to CAB that social value strategies have a 20% weighting and a minimum 10% proxy value.”
She replied again:
“Thanks Paul – just getting very mixed messages on this at the moment as [AD for Corporate Procurement] has informed me that it is no longer mandatory (10%) and whilst we would be looking for the best social value offering (hence the increased weighting) we wouldn’t be excluding bidders for not reaching a threshold?”
Why is the AD for Corporate Procurement giving messages about Social Value at all? It is nothing to do with her at the chagrin of my AD. I replied:
“Ok, news to me. I’ll check with my manager.”
In response, my manager told me he has “sent a query” to the AD for Corporate Procurement. I replied sharing my thoughts:
“Ok, I’ll wait for your reply.
“TBH I thought it was an Economic Development Policy, which is why we comment on reports and CP [Corporate Procurement] doesn’t, so not sure how this has got confused. And if CP did change the council’s social value policy, it would be strange that they didn’t tell the Social Value Officer, even after [the Commissioning Lead] told [the AD for Corporate Procurement] directly that I didn’t know of any change, so I can only imagine it’s a mistake. But I’ll await your reply before I comment on any further social value queries and reports.”
It is this existential craziness that has now tipped this service into being the worst I have ever worked for. I now have a bottleneck of reports that can’t go to CAB because I, as representative governance officer for Economic Development, haven’t commented on them because I can’t because I now don’t know Economic Development policy because a different service is advising services to do something different and the Head of Employment & Skills doesn’t want to undermine a more senior officer from a completely different service for changing his service without telling him, and he wouldn’t want to upset her or this situation. To hell with the service!
With Social
Value policy being usurped by Corporate Procurement and S106 policy being
reviewed by the Head of Strategy, I now have little else to do. However, all staff mid-year reviews are due
by the end of November and, despite it being nearly at that deadline now, and
no word from my manager to do one with me, I have decided to draft my review of
the year so far for my own understanding and to plan for the remainder of the year:
To recap, the AD for Corporate Procurement is telling procuring officers that:
1. there is no minimum threshold on social value
and
2. that social value doesn’t need to be delivered
in the borough but anywhere in the country…
…and when I, the council’s Social Value
Officer, tell them that those are not the council’s policies and, when those
officers email the AD to clarify her directions, she doesn’t reply. This includes for the teams responsible for
the £46m Hartopp & Lannoy housing estate construction, the council’s £146m bins
and waste management contract and the £35m housing estate cleaning contract.
This is in the context of the AD for Economic Development saying that we must use Social Value Portal even though we all know it doesn’t work because, three years ago, a Cabinet member understood we were going to be using it. And, although that inconsequential understanding is sacrosanct and so cannot even be discussed to be changed, Corporate Procurement has changed the fundamental social value policy that there is no minimum threshold and this change came about at a random point in the financial year; in late November.
This, in turn, is in the context of the AD for Corporate Procurement telling the AD for Economic Development that her service is not responsible for social value including the governance of the policy in procurement strategy and award reports, contract management and enforcement.
This removal of the minimum threshold is also in the context that Cabinet instructed the previous AD for Economic Development to raise the minimum threshold from 10% to 20% after the initial three years. At that point in time, in April this year, Corporate Procurement updated the social value webpage saying that the score weighting has increased from 10% to 20% in a sentence that can be generously described as semi-literate, from which one might justifiably infer that they got the wrong percentage and, rather than correct the mistake, lean into inventing a justification some eight months later otherwise apropos of nothing.
Of this change in April too, Corporate Procurement didn’t notify the Social Value Officer. I happened across it myself. The webpage was being managed by the Economic Development Team until it was taken over without warning by Corporate Procurement while simultaneously, it is worth reiterating because it is such a jarring situation for any staff that have to operate under this leadership, that the AD for Corporate Procurement is protesting that social value is not her team’s responsibility.
The AD for Economic Development, in the meantime, has recommissioned Social Value Portal (SVP) despite it not working, which we know from having used it for the past three years, and that I explained in detail why and how it doesn’t work, on the basis that the AD asserts it does work even though he has never used it and never explained why he thinks it works. He told us that he has agreed with the AD for Corporate Procurement that SVP is used to assess the social value proposals by channelling the social value element of bids through SVP so that they will then have the winning bidders’ proposed measures to monitor, thus testing the efficacy of SVP in this trial extension period. However, despite this agreement with the AD for Corporate Procurement, her team is not channelling social value proposals through SVP but are receiving them directly and assessing them themselves. Badly. The last proposal I saw proposed refurbishing 8th Hendon’s scout hut and spending £10 of the contract price with local suppliers in Barnet. And Corporate Procurement officers assessed this bid as “good”.
Throughout this, I have raised the issue many times, and created solutions for, that the National TOMs we use are out-of-date and their proxy financial values therefore have no justification, and that procuring officers have no guidance from Corporate Procurement, Economic Development or Legal on how to include social value in procurements, how to monitor it (not that SVP works anyway), how to contract-manage it, or how to enforce it. Subsequently, almost all contract awards are now falling foul of the council’s social value policy but I, as far as you have told me, am responsible for social value governance in procurement strategies and awards, yet I am not allowed to comment that they are not compliant but, instead, pass reports on to you, my manager, or AD, to leave out the comments on the substantial non-compliant bits lest, as the AD for Economic Development put it, councillors and the public find out that we are not governing their policies because those reports get published. I think it is worth noting at this point that this includes the council’s £77m homecare service of which the Economic Development Team can’t be allowed to know who the suppliers are in case we monitor their social value delivery which, as the Commissioning Lead informed us, is too complicated for our minds to absorb.
In the meantime, the Strategy Officer has been tasked with reducing the number of TOMs to only those aligned with the Industrial Strategy and make them simpler for bidders to understand and, in so doing, removed all employment and skills measures apart from work experience placements (which are afforded two of the allotted maximum nine measures allowed across all three themes, Economic Development being just one theme) despite the Social Value Officer working in the Employment & Skills Team.
Also in the meantime, the Head of Strategy is reviewing the S106 Heads of Terms and, in so doing, asserted to the team’s S106 Officer, also me, that S106 agreements be changed such that delivery plans should need to be agreed before the “Substantial Development” stage of construction rather than the “Commencement” of construction because “Commencement” comes after the “Substantial” stage of construction!
This S106 policy review is being conducted by removing the team’s S106 Officer from the process and, instead, the Head of Strategy, who demonstrably doesn’t understand S106 agreements, is following the AD’s direction that we must be ambitious although without saying what our ambitions are and not yet having an industrial strategy to follow despite the Head of Strategy being tasked with writing it and being in post, now, for over a year, is doing it himself. The AD has given the direction, though, that the planning guidance should be vague so that planning applicants can’t know what contributions to include in their applications in contravention to the material considerations the Local Planning Authority is bound to in the National Planning Policy Framework and the London Plan. In the meantime, at the direction of the AD, the Head of Strategy has invited most officers from both the Strategic Planning Team and the Economic Development Team to monthly meetings to discuss upcoming major developments so that everyone from both teams can regularly do the job of what is normally just the S106 Officer and the Planning Officer if Planning simply invited S106 Officers to pre-application meetings like they are supposed to and for which applicants pay.
This, too, is in the context that, like with Social Value measures, employment and skills contributions may or may not be removed from the Economic Development planning guidance.
All of this is being done under the cloud of all Employment & Skills Officers, whose jobs it is to improve equity and fairness in employment in the borough, having no employment rights as demonstrated in last year’s restructure when all officers were sacked because their jobs were made redundant even though they demonstrably weren’t redundant, and all Employment & Skills officers can equally expect to have no employment rights again two years later when the service will next be allowed to contrive mass job redundancies again, which will be September, and reasonably expect to be sacked again. And this we agreed in our last appraisal.
What I have now learned from this mock appraisal with my manager is, next time, I won’t be reapplying for my job.
😹
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