Thursday 3 July 2025 – Collaboration

Today we had our Directorate’s away day at the construction Skills Centre in Edgware.  Led by our Director for Housing, Economy and Place (HE&P), it was a follow-up to the online meeting we had on 10 June (see Liberty and the Existential Crisis of a Government Officer).  On the agenda was an effort to unpack the feedback given by team members one enigmatic word at a time on Slido.  Also, we were to review the draft mission statement and explore how the three teams can work collaboratively to combat future events in an “ever-changing world”.

We started off with a review of national events to which the teams in our directorate had to react and contend with over the past eight years.  2017 saw that wind, nuclear and solar power created more UK power than gas and coal combined, Theresa May becoming Prime Minister and Donald Trump being inaugurated for the first time, the launch of TikTok and Nintendo Switch and the Manchester Arena and Grenfell atrocities.  Not sure about the others, but Grenfell had a huge impact on how local council officers work as I have written about in these pages.  One would think we would have got better at how we scrutinise bids for works and be better at holding our suppliers to account, improving the role of Building Control in planning applications and ensuring developments are safe.  It didn’t really; in fact, counterintuitively, it caused us to scrutinise our suppliers less: the scandal highlighting to senior officers that notoriety was good for their careers and other councils wanted a share of the ignominious limelight and started bribing suppliers with potential new contracts and less competitive tendering and contract-management in return for resources to “celebrate” Grenfell (see For the Betterment of the People).

2018 saw the Windrush scandal unfold, the launch of Lime bikes in London and the BBC’s obsession with small boat crossings.  Again, one would think that the Home Office’s institutional amnesia on why families historically from Caribbean countries were British and not necessarily had been given documentation by the British Government at the time would be a lesson to other public service providers to check what the legislation actually says before deciding how to apply its authority, but, as I have talked about in numerous examples, this didn’t really take either.

But what stood out most on the slide on 2018 was the depiction of Carillion.  I was surprised to see this recognised as a historical event significant to how councils operate.  The Director explained that the collapse of Carillion brought to a halt a huge amount of public construction works across the country.  He didn’t really go into why how we public authorities commission those public works caused it.  In United We Stand, Money-grabbing We Fall, I talked about how Government departments and local authorities not managing how public money awarded was used by suppliers towards public works and asking for it to go towards the benefit of society, including public infrastructure but also contributing to social value as legally required of them to consider in the Public Services Act of 2012, enabled a money-grab by directors of big developers such as Carillion who simply stole the money for themselves.  Rachel Reeves, current Chancellor of the Exchequer and then chairwoman of the Commons business select committee said at the time, “Ministers must learn the lessons from the disaster at Carillion so that business works in the best interests of the wider economy – not just those in the boardroom.”  Barnet has a Social Value policy but does not apply it or impose it on our supply chain.  Yet, here we are, on our day out to sunny Edgware, listening to our Director showing us slides of portentous moments in recent history teaching us lessons he hasn’t learned.  He certainly didn’t mention our Chancellor’s message of what we must do differently.

The slide our Director talked through about impactful events in 2018.

Instead, on our individual tables, we were to discuss amongst ourselves how we different teams could and would work together better to see off future unknowable events and, so, improve our services as well as make them more resilient to external forces through better collaboration.  On my table were housing enforcement officers and an Environmental Health Enforcement Officer.  What issues were they facing in their jobs I asked, kicking off the conversation.  “Our IT is rubbish”, one remarked.  “The cameras on our [council-issued] phones are not hi-res enough to capture black mold on walls when we go into homes, so it’s hard to prosecute [private] landlords”, another added.  These are genuine concerns and why our senior leaders pay so much on our salaries but don’t provide us with the equipment we need so as not to waste our expensive time, I don’t know, but it shouldn’t be a complex problem we need to come all the way to Edgware to examine and feed back to our superiors; that’s obvious.  So, I talked about the integrity we officers must have in managing our supply chains to allay the inevitable next scandal.  No-one knew what I was talking about.  They didn’t understand the Director’s references to Windrush, Grenfell or Carillion because policy and supply chains have nothing to do with their day-to-day jobs.  This was becoming a painful conversation and we were not sure what our table was going to present back to the whole group.

As we re-grouped, the Director seemed pleasant enough on the whole.  He is very tall and imposing but not in a bad way, just in the way that it is a qualification to be a Director.  Yet he seemed uncomfortable leading such a disparate group of teams containing mold inspectors, café inspectors, employment and business support advisers, social housing tenant liaison officers and whatever the I-don’t-know-what-else-all-those-senior-managers-in-the-room-do do.  But, after his thoughtful application of major events in history, the tables’ presentations on what they discussed was a bit of a non-sequitur.  Rubbish IT equipment featured prominently. 

Being gracious about the feedback but not really knowing how to engage in it (complaining about why our laptops reset for a software update in the middle of a Teams meeting wasn’t why he brought us here today), his follow-up question for those who volunteered to feed back on behalf of their tables focussed on, “How often should we meet as a directorate to discuss these issues?”  More not wanting to be rude or aggressive about being dragged here, each said that this gathering is a good idea and we should meet regularly, maybe a couple of times a year?  Once a quarter was suggested.  Once a year another proposed.  The Director seemed unsure why we workers would want to meet at all.  It was all far too polite.  No-one wanted to question, including the Director, what the point of the Directorate was.  Why are housing, economy and place lumped together?  How many random restructures have been done in the name of austerity over the past fifteen years to end up in this particular combination of teams?  What do Environmental Health Officers, deemed none of their business in every previous iteration of the directorate they happened to be in, care about the regeneration impacts of major development like Brent Cross Town?  In discussion with them, they clearly don’t.   What do Place officers do other than decant social housing residents out of their homes to be replaced by private housing that almost no-one can afford?  Why does our mission statement include making Barnet “a great place to invest”?  Why would our residents care about that?  Barnet is a suburb of London, not an industrial hub, and no-one asked for it to be otherwise.  It feels like “inward investment” is just an excuse for senior officers and councillors to indulge in a bit of narcissism and be part of a bigger financial world by sucking up to the captains of industry and maybe share a bit in the super-profits, with residents if policy allows, but also themselves if they play their cards right.  And how can we as a group discuss the merits of this strategy when no explanation is given as to why it is in there or what it’s got to do with our individual jobs?

However, this question of “Why inward investment?” was put by the Director to the Assistant Director for Brent Cross Town.  She seemed surprised to be asked to contribute but I listened carefully because I wanted to know the answer too.  She mumbled something incoherent.  She didn’t know any more than the Director.  All she knew is she was employed to sell flats and commercial floorspace.  She is a glorified, well-coiffed estate agent, not a macro-economist.  Never mind.  Maybe we could discuss the common goal of better camera resolution in our next gathering instead because no-one seemed interested in our senior leaders mumbling either enigmatically or incoherently about history and economics anyway.  In the meantime, perhaps the Senior Leadership Team could tell us how we can work better together because, if they are asking us what we have in common in nugatory meetings in Edgware, the resounding reply was, “we don’t know”.

“Informing our themes:” who asked us to make Barnet an attractive place to invest in?  How can we workers collaborate “across organisational boundaries” to build affordable homes, keep residents safe and include them all in the economic development effects of all this construction?  It’s hard to see how and why these three themes fall under the same directorate.  We certainly didn’t work it out on our day out to Edgware and our Director seemed a little bit uncomfortable trying to get us to inform him what he is supposed to be directing.  Can he go home now?