“I work as part of a policy team at a city council, running consultations. Over the last couple of years the council, which had a big deficit to fill, has restructured and made lots of changes designed to reduce costs. First they looked at where savings could be made; then where we could charge fees; then they started looking at staff. This is where the biggest transformation has been made; there have been lots of redundancies.
The redundancies have had an impact on our team. When the internal structures were changed, I had to reapply for my job. I’m a single mum and the thought of losing my job was really stressful; there aren’t many jobs in this area, as industry has all but disappeared. We feel short-staffed. However, we’re trying to do our best with what we’ve got, and on the whole I enjoy my day-to-day work. We’re doing a good job at making a difference by involving local people in decision-making.
There are any number of consultations running at one time. Some are statutory projects such as consulting internally about the budget or on the local transport plan, but we also run external consultations such as social housing surveys, library consultations and general public satisfaction surveys. We write the questionnaires, administer them, run focus groups with neighbourhood panels and analyse the data. The council is proactive when it comes to the results. Lessons are learned and issues that people have reported are followed up. There is a lot to do, especially with the shrinking resources available.
We used to have to report ‘best value performance indicators’, which monitored many areas of performance and general satisfaction levels. These were removed in 2010, when the government changed to a programme of ‘national indicators’.
These look at everything from buildings’ energy performance to the number of people in each locality, but there are now fewer indicators to collate and we can choose what we monitor. We also don’t have to report as much data to central government, and performance is monitored locally. It’s given us control over what we monitor and we set our own indicators, so it feels less like Big Brother is breathing down our necks.
Our team also has to look at how central government policies might affect local communities. For example, Big Society and the Localism Act have been big things lately. However, we’re still unsure about exactly what they mean for us. We know the aim is to devolve decision-making to local people, but not much more than that. It’s obvious, though, that we’ll have to change the way we work. For example, we have good contacts and connections in the city centre and at the ward level, but if people are working together at the street level then we’ll need to engage more closely with local communities. However, we’re still waiting to see what’s going to happen next. If it hadn’t gone quiet at the top, we’d be doing more to work out what these policies will mean for us; we’d be trying to get things going. But we haven’t been pushed, and with so much else to do the impetus isn’t really there for us to do the extra work.
Despite all the challenges and changes, everyone has continued to do a really good job and performance hasn’t dropped. The senior management team gives us positive feedback, and the chief executive visits the different departments and thanks them.
This is really important, and if I could ask one thing of senior officials and ministers it would be that they appreciate their frontline staff. The cuts have impacted on us with redundancies, pay freezes and changes to our pensions, and we’re also the ones who have to face the backlash from angry residents who have had services cut.
Many residents think the cuts are the council workers’ fault. One bloke phoned me about a survey the other day and said he bet that I’d done nothing but drink tea all day! I have to keep my mouth shut but it makes me really cross, especially when I also read negative comments in the press about public sector workers. Public perceptions of us are completely wrong; I wish they could be changed. Government should be proud of its employees and what we’re doing, and should make sure other people are proud of us too.”