This was the part of the modernisation spiel that drove everybody insane: the 'we have to cut services because we're out of money' line.
Au contraire, the people cried.
The people were right, too. The council's line about being too short of money to keep providing public services was total balls.
On the very same day that the above-described calamitous Town Hall meeting took place, a small group of helpful moles stole over to the union with a lorryload of purloined reports that show exactly the huge sums of money that the Council a) had at its disposal and b) was prepared to piss away in its attempt to woo voters with ill-defined and completely unproven Efficiency projects.
Examples included cheques for several hundred thousand pounds for the council's private IT company partner to 'change manage' the council's shift to a standardised electronic procurement system (the money wasn't to develop the software for this online-buying system – it was merely for telling staff and vendors that the new system was in place), some $60,000 for two months' work on a new content management system for the council's website, nearly £200,000 for a new team of IT personnel that would identify IT projects that sounded Efficient (for example, new networks, customer relationship management systems, and joint council-private sector, profit-making venture companies) and that the private IT company could then offer to deliver at further astronomical cost, and several hundred thousand pounds to the private IT company for a few months' project management work on a corporate electronic document management system.
Those were a few examples of the small stuff.
The larger stuff featured several million pound-plus projects that largely centred on the council's new and much-vaunted Clients' First strategy.
Grasping the concept of Clients' First was a bigger challenge that the union imagined it would be when first presented with it. This was largely because nobody – even the ones who'd done a turn at university - could understand what the hell the council's CF report authors were talking about. It was difficult to imagine a larger and less-penetrable pile of shit. For example: Clients' First, according to these reports, was about identifying the council's 'customer clusters', and 'developing a profile of the council's customer base and its current and desired interaction with the council,' and 'using the council's strategic goals to challenge and test existing patterns of consumption by customer clusters…' There was plenty more, but the branch secretary banned people from reading it, especially when they were alone.
According to these reports, this Clients' First concept would enjoy a close relationship with Efficiency - ie, that customer cluster research would prove that borough residents wanted fewer staff at the council.
The union suspected that the council wanted the Customer Cluster research to prove that council customers wanted a call-centre. That sort of research would justify cutting the number of front-line staff – the staff that vulnerable (ie not rich or bureaucracy-savvy) service users relied on to help them negotiate complex council procedures and applications for much-needed housing, benefits and care support. It would also justify encouraging the surviving staff to move into the call-centre, man the phones, become less and less skilled, and take a cut in pay after a couple of months.
Research indeed demonstrated that some residents wanted a central council number to call for inquiries, and to be able to contact the council by email, and online. What it did not demonstrate was that residents wanted to pay through the nose for that technology, or for the trade-off for it to be the closing of welfare-advice centres and schools, the sacking of much-needed and much-utilised frontline housing staff, and private companies taking over care and supported-housing services.
Plenty of research pointed to the fact that vulnerable service users were disadvantaged by the switch to call-centres. Disabled service users and people who did not speak the local language fluently suffered when they only had a call-centre to use when they needed help.
Another interesting point was that the council had actually been asking the borough constituents what they wanted for years. Why, in that case, did it need to pay new private companies even more money to survey people again? No group had been more extensively surveyed in the history of man as the people of this borough had. Formal surveys, citizens' panels and forums, consultation exercises, public questionnaires and census data had been used extensively to work out who council customers were and what they wanted. Suddenly, though, the council had decided it was necessary to pay a private company millions to investigate and report back on notions like the borough's Customer Clusters.
The union didn't feel that the council needed to change the methods it used to work out who its customers were and what they wanted. Council customers wanted decent housing, schools and social services, to complain about their neighbours and to be able to contact the council easily with planning, council tax, rubbish collection and noise nuisance queries. Nobody had ever – ever – filled in a response questionnaire saying that they wanted their council tax to be spent on consultants.
Nor had anybody ever told the council that they wanted the thought leaders, branding consultants, business analysts and client index analysts that the council's Clients' First reports claimed were necessary to developing the Clients' First strategy. There wasn't a piece of paper in the whole council that said anybody had ever asked for those. Sure, residents wanted their council tax kept down, but it was the union's view that this could be done by ditching agency staff and consultants and the number of senior managers who earned more than £50,000 a year (the number of managers in this category, ironically enough, had doubled in the two or three years that the council had been pursuing Efficiency concepts). The council spent many millions each quarter on agency staff, and an equally impressive amount on consultants. That was more than enough to finance even a half-assed socialist Utopia - one that delivered the improved schools, better council housing and a much-needed frontline staff that would help people who weren't born to it get something out of life.
There was another extraordinary proposition buried in the pile of reports and paper – a proposition that the council had been extremely quiet about to date. The proposition was for the council to go into the IT business with the private IT company that was about to make millions out of the Clients' First free-for-all (the company that would provide the IT for the call-centre, 'change-manage' the council's move to e-procurement and deliver whatever other IT projects that the council found for it).
The council's idea was that it could set up a joint company with this private IT company and sell IT services to other councils and public-sector organisations in the area. In other words, this joint council-private company company would tell other councils and public-sector organisations to abandon their current IT services and contracts (some of which were years long and couldn't be abandoned), sack any staff they still had in-house, and buy IT services from the new joint council-private company company.
The really amazing thing about this idea was that it had already proved a spectacular failure elsewhere - not only across the nation, but across the world. The self-same week that the union read the report about the proposed joint company, a council just up the road had paid millions to get out of a contract for a similar joint company. The contract had failed because the joint company had simply not been able to generate the business that its creators had promised it would. It had not been able to convince other public-sector organisations to abandon their existing IT services, and buy them from the new joint company. Which was very sad. In the end, that council's reports on the progress of its joint public-private company simply stopped mentioning that the idea of joint companies had ever been floated.
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