Just about managing
Jef Smith
The Bains Report on the management of the new local authorities was published in mid-August, the one month of the year when most of the councils to which it is addressed were in recess and many of the officers who need to take notice on holiday. Even allowing for the near Impossibility of obtaining Stationery Office publications at most seaside resorts the document is hardly ideal reading for bedside or beach, and by the time I got back to London at the end of the month and trotted down to the government bookshop it was out of print. It is not too fanciful to interpret all this as evidence of a certain ambivalence among local authorities and in Whitehall, Tragically the great debate about what sort of local authorities we need is ending more or less in stalemate. Thinking towards the making of social policy occurs because people are interested in an issue, and this enthusiasm is the art's scarcest resource. On the subject of local government re-organisation interest is drying up fast, and the legislation completing its passage through Parliament embodies perhaps the best agreement that could be reached before concern dies altogether. The marginal scale of the resulting changes — here a merger, there a boundary revision, overall a slight variation of powers — hardly justifies the title ' reform '; one has only to recall the ideas being knocked around in the early heady days of the Maud Royal Commission (city regions, remember?) to recognise the retreat from any sort of radical proposals in what is currently being enacted.
The reason of course lies in that familiar paradox of democracy — change requires the consent of precisely those threatened by it. No councillor could fail to oppose the demise of his own authority, no alderman see his office abolished without a fight. Among staff, though few lose and some gain from reorganisation, life is chanciest at the top, among the chief officers who by and large have been briefing their councillors on policy during the period of consultation. It is indicative of the power of the present local authorities to determine the shape of their successors that the Bains working party contained only one member, a retired company secretary, who is not currently employed in local government. The report is therefore a fairly conventional statement of the application of current management theory to the work of the sort of councils that will emerge from the 1973-74 shakeup. As such it suffers from many of the errors that plague allegedly progressive thinking in this area.
First, it assumes that a straightforward hierarchical structure is the only one possible within local authority departments, The review of Bains in one of the municipal weeklies mistakenly reproduced one of the staff charts upside down; for a moment I thought that something really radical was afoot, a single Chief Executive at the bottom of the system and a whole inverted pyramid of officers bearing down on him. No such luck. The design on the cover of the report tells the real story — a series of nicely jumbled blobs are rearranging themselves into a neat hierarchical tree firmly linked with constraining lines. But life is more complicated than this. The bureaucratic model the report embodies is directly challenged by the professional groups represented in the staffs of local authorities. The report's only attempt to deal with the phenomenon of professionalism is in a section mentioning the tendency of certain groups to be suspicious of each other. A much more fundamental characteristic of professionalism is the insistence on individual operational responsibility for practitioners which runs directly counter to any hierarchy's attempt to define precise lines of accountability running from chief officers down to the front line units.
The national Health Service proposals — a document on the management principles of the new structure came out shortly after Bains — are much more realistic on this point. The prickliness of doctors is of course well known; that of planners and social workers, to mention only two of the professional groups among local authority employees, is both less acknowledged and as yet less assertive. But it is quite unrealistic to expect a director of social services to be anything but notionally accountable for the daily practice of junior staff. Much of a social worker's activity is carried out in the confidentiality of the clients' own homes and the only reports seen by any superior officer of what takes place are those compiled by the social worker himself. The skills the individual social worker has acquired through experience and training are by definition subject to no organisational control. All this is of the essence of professionalism and no neat chart plotting the levels of delegated responsibility can either describe or control what actually happens.
More serious is Bains's apparent unthinking adherence to the fashionable concept of corporate planning. Local government has traditionally been organised through a number of separate departments, their chief officers of roughly equal status and their activities loosely co-ordinated by the legally qualified clerk of the council. Increasingly now the old-style clerk is being replaced by a chief executive who, freed of detailed departmental work himself, has the task of leading and directing the whole of the council's activities. But what in fact do local authorities do? The Bains claim that "they have an overall interest in the economic, cultural and physical well-being of their communities" is arrogant nonsense. The authorities responsible for the personal social services after 1974 for example will in no instance have any responsibility for income maintenance, the health service, or the social work aspects of the work of courts, and in many places will not even be the same councils as operate for education and housing. A local authority is no more comprehensive than an arbitrarily built-up conglomerate in the business world. Its departments have very varied objectives which are often in conflict and corporately a quite unbalanced medley of the life of the community.
What corporate management often means in practice is the amalgamation of highly disparate activities into a manageable number of directorates for purely administrative purposes. No one can pretend that schools, museums, parks and libraries, to quote one typical grouping, form anything like a single logical unit in terms of the staff employed or the issues presented. The heads of these maxidepartments are then formed into a management team charged with producing a corporate plan to define priorities though the areas they have to evaluate are often those for which no known measurements exist and the matters so lumped together really represent totally separate questions. Services such as research, recruitment and training are also centralised with a similar loss of specialist professional expertise.
At committee level the process is repeated. The specifically subject area committees, often statutorily established to ensure that particular fields of activity were given due priority, are replaced with abstract bodies charged with areas like personnel, resources and performance review. One has grave doubts whether elected members who are known to prefer service on committees with rather concrete duties will cope with the level of conceptualisation to make the new system work. It is not after all as if reform will do anything to improve the quality of candidates standing for election, both parties having declined to consider the payment of local authority members, though this is the one step which could have introduced radically fresh blood. Ask yourself — would you be prepared to sit in a dusty committee room on four evenings a week, probably at least one afternoon, and a part of most weekends, for nothing? Together with about three-quarters of the electorate, I can hardly bring myself to vote for anyone who would.
What's wrong with local government can be seen from looking at almost any town hall — it has pretensions to be monumental. The preface to the Bains Report refers to the new structure lasting into the twenty-first century. Can one imagine any commercial concern or indeed any central government department counting on continuing unchanged for thirty years and more? The speed of demographic and organisational change makes the need for flexibility in local government structure more urgent than ever before. I certainly hope to see more rounds of reform in my lifetime; I hope too that what emerges is more exciting and a deal more relevant than the Bains predictions for the late 1970s.
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