Frontline: Council social development officer

“I have worked in local government for more than 20 years, having held a number of different roles in regeneration and community development. In my work as a social economic development officer, I have been responsible for running a range of projects and holding consultations to identify needs in the local community. But in recent years my role has moved more towards policy advice.

As part of my work, I engage a lot with people in the community, which means I can see first-hand the impact of government policies at a local level. One area which concerns me is the way consultation is now being carried out. When I used to consult with people on specific projects, we would take a mixed approach – holding a lot of meetings and discussions; circulating questionnaires; undertaking street consultations to identify the main issues within the community; and exploring local people’s suggested solutions.

Now, consultation has become a mere box-ticking exercise. Officials use a kind of bureaucratic language which is very difficult to understand for the residents we’re supposed to serve, and tend to phrase questions in such a way that they’re likely to lead to the desired responses, rather than producing a real picture of what people want.

I have also observed a shift away from serving the public in the best possible way, and towards providing only the most basic of services and dealing short-term with problems as and when they arise. One example is poverty. We’ve just had another food bank open in my area, which may seem like a laudable thing. But rather than institutionalising food banks, the local authority should – as it did in the past – aim to tackle the root of the problem.

The food banks represent a sticking plaster approach largely brought about by funding cuts to local government, plus high unemployment and low pay. To deal with the core issue and to do away with poverty, I think the government should start thinking more along the lines of the regeneration-focused policies tried and tested by America’s President Franklin D Roosevelt. He turned the Great Depression around by introducing ‘wealth compression’: compressing the wealth gap between the rich and poor by introducing a 94% top tax rate, and providing economic support for those at the bottom.

Another area where I feel we are failing in our core purpose of serving the public is in managing financial transactions with our ‘customers’. For example, the thousands of residents who rent council properties from us used to have a rent book: a comprehensive summary of their rental costs, their payments and their current balance. But then the rent book was replaced by a rent swipe card, which doesn’t tell people how much they owe or are owed.

Residents are able to use their card to pay their dues in various shops, such as post offices or newsagents; but with face-to-face public service provision all but gone, they can’t easily find out how much they owe – leaving them with all the responsibility for paying, but none of the data to manage their finances. All they get from the shop is a receipt every time they pay – or a reference number, if payment is made over the phone. This scheme was one element of a drive to modernise the authority. But the use of technology has not been for the benefit of the people in the community; it’s been for the service provider.

Another government idea which sounded great in principle but didn’t work out so well in practice – at least in my local authority area – is the policy of encouraging community asset transfer. This idea, which received a boost from the localism and ‘big society’ agendas, involved transferring surplus or inefficiently-used local authority buildings and land into community management or ownership.

I was managing such a project with the community: the council agreed to transfer a brownfield area of land which would, with my help, host a new business and support centre for the local community. But the council had made some far-reaching mistakes in its land and assets register on this plot, and these only emerged years after the formal agreement to transfer had been made. Unfortunately, with no provision in place to protect the local community in this type of scenario, the people who were meant to have gained an asset have been left with a liability.

I think central government should put some regulations in place which force any local authority to take responsibility for their property agreements, and not hide behind catch-all contractual clauses aimed at transferring all risk to the community when it is the authority that has been at fault.”