Thursday 18 April 2024 – What Are You Gonna Do Today?

Today we were formally consulted on the team’s staff restructure and the deletion of our existing jobs… again.  The previous Assistant Director for Economic Development was seconded from Camden to restructure the Economic Development Team as her final act before going on to retire.  I was employed into that new team structure in 2021.  Then in 2022, the then new Executive Director for Economy (see The Cost of Living is Adding Up) did another restructure as he was clearly unhappy with what the outgoing AD had done.  The current AD started soon after, clearly frustrated at being pipped to the post by his new boss and so unable to restructure his new team, started employing lots of new officers into roles that no-one seems to understand what it is they do, including those doing those new jobs themselves.  Eventually, in 2024, he has decided enough time has passed, nearly 18 months, since the last restructure to justify doing another one, clearly and openly unhappy with what the outgoing Executive Director (he has recently been mysteriously sacked by the Leader) had done.

Forrest Gump (1994): And I met the President of the United States… again.

I don’t think doing another restructure again so soon is justified.  To paraphrase a tired, but telling quote, To mess up one service restructure so totally and immediately may be regarded as a misfortune.  To mess up two so totally and immediately looks like carelessness.  In fact, an employment tribunal, should this matter be brought before one, would almost certainly see it as carelessness as it is in breach of employment legislation (AKA illegal) to sack a member of staff because their job was deleted because it was deemed redundant if, within the following two years, the employer deemed it wasn’t, in fact, redundant and recreated it and employed someone different into it.

The AD, responsible for the promotion of employment and skills in the borough governing equality and fairness by employers, doesn’t seem to care that much about the UK’s minimal employment protections, egged on by an HR service that will happily and egregiously sack staff members and then perjure themselves, poorly, in a tribunal (see I Asked You to Break the Law) and damn the impudence of Council Tax payers complaining about the cost (£4.6m awarded in recompense to the aggrieved party in this case).

One may ask what is he doing this for?  As a further potted history thus far, the previous Executive Director published the Industrial Strategy in 2016 in partnership with Imperial College agreeing to them building a new 178,102 sqm, £870m Research and Development campus in White City.  The strategy would make it a “global economic hotspot for Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) industries and Digital Media.”  She managed the hugely problematic Housing Service, managed a plan to end homelessness, oversaw more affordable housing being built and raised funds for the new Hammersmith Town Hall replacing the existing carbuncle.

Since she left due to ill-health in 2020, it is hard to see how her legacy and celebrated foundations have been built on by her successor.  In the then new Executive Director's in-box on starting was refreshing the Industrial Strategy with the submission of Imperial College’s White City planning application in 2018 on which, since, no supplementary planning policy has been published, drafted or even considered to get those STEM jobs for local residents, rising homelessness post-Covid since homeless residents were housed as part of Lockdown and no longer, a Housing Service that was to go on to receive its fifth maladministration notice by the Housing Ombudsman, making it the worst local authority in the country despite having the second smallest housing stock in London, and the new Town Hall becoming delayed by over a year and hugely overbudget (perhaps his sacking is not so much of a mystery).

The current AD was employed by him to lead on the Industrial Strategy refresh and a new Head of Strategy to write it.  It would include “inward investment” of (attracting) new STEM industries into the new campus being built in White City and using planning and procurement powers, S106 and Social Value, to obligate them to include economically-excluded residents in education, training and new jobs created.

Since then, no-one has seen a strategy.  The pair did do a presentation on it last summer in an all-council (online) meeting which was largely gobbledegook interspersed with stock photos of people in white lab coats and goggles inexplicably grouped round and grinning at a Bunsen burner (see Overshooting on the Positivity Message) that I, a member of his service, couldn’t understand, never mind the other one thousand council officers from other services attending.  He, delegating responsibility to his Head of Strategy, still has not written the new supplementary planning policy for economic development, unduly and illegally delaying planning applications (see Red Cards and Injuries) that could include affordable housing, losing all track of what financial planning contributions are due and letting them expire (see What is it You Think Bishops Do?), swung wildly in his opinion on whether to impose social value obligations on the council’s suppliers before eventually settling on dispensing with governing that contract awards are compliant with them and, for contracts already awarded with social value obligations, dispensing with monitoring them altogether (see The Little Things).  In the meantime, his Employment Support team continues to help people who don’t have a right to work apply for jobs by helping them draft CVs riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes (see Meta-feedback) recording all this support on a Customer Relationship Management database procured in 2021, and paying for the licence since, still to be specified as to what it should do.  Yesterday, we had another inter-service meeting with Strategic Planning in which the AD asked the Planning team again what the timeline was for negotiating S106 asks for the Earls Court development.  The answer, as before, was it started in September with the planning application due in June (see Living the Dream).

So, after nearly 18 months, today he has decided that his lack of any progress on anything and numerous missed opportunities is because he doesn’t have enough capacity in his team to achieve what he wants and has embarked on a new adventure to restructure it.  The Executive Director, it seems, now gone, got it all wrong on his crack at it and the Leader, Finance, HR and the union (UNISON)  have given him the licence to do anything he wants despite it appearing to most that his lack of any demonstrable skills, achievement and wild caprice up to this point in his tenure is the result of some unfortunate learning disability and unearned bravado.

Boy on school bus: What are you gonna do today, Napolean?

Napolean Dynamite: Whatever I feel like I wanna do!  Gosh!

So, today what he did is, announce to the team that it is clear that the service “has moved on since the last restructure wouldn’t everyone agree?” without pausing for a response, and settled on a decision that the economic development “levers” (powers) that the council has, planning S106 and procurement Social Value, are central to his service’s ability to affect economic development and therefore vital for the Industrial Strategy, something I have been trying to convince him of for nearly 18 months.  Therefore, my job will be deleted, replaced by a new team of five people, creating more jobs than before, funded by the money I have negotiated through S106, and his new appointees who he, them and I not knowing what it is they are employed to do, and certainly nothing to do with S106 and Social Value because, up until now, the AD didn’t believe in these levers, will be assimilated into those new roles because their current jobs are “essentially the same”.  However, I am to be sacked because my job as S106 and Social Value Officer is essentially different to any in this new team, including a “S106 Officer” job and a “Social Value Officer” job depicted on his new team organogram.

The Head of Strategy chairing the meeting, presumably for comic effect, added that they were mindful of HR’s policy to avoid staff redundancies if at all possible but that some, presumably in this case mine alone, were inevitable.  It was an overly elaborate plan to curb me successfully imposing obligations on wealthy businesses to make contributions while also giving them an opportunity to mock councillors’ weak attempts at providing legally-imposed employment protections for its officers with the added embellishment of inviting UNISON reps, having had to leave their desks in the HR office to attend the meeting without ever having consulted on the proposed restructure given to them in advance by their colleagues and workmates in HR with their paying members.

Does anyone have any comments to make, the Head of Strategy asked the attending staff members affected by the proposed restructure/me?  I have just one comment to make to the AD, I thought but didn't say, “You may not know anything about economic development but, on so elaborately and unconvincingly contriving my sacking without any pushback from the corporate structure: skills!”  Instead, misadventure fell upon my misfortune and I gave the poor man rabid counsel on the ways of leadership that has surely squashed any remnant of favour that would be bestowed upon me when he selects candidates for these new jobs.

Napolean: Nobody’s going to go out with me!

Pedro: Have you asked anybody yet?

N: No, but who would!?  I don’t even have any good skills!

P: What do ya mean?

N: You know, like… nunchuck skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills… girls only want boyfriends who have great skills!