Weeknotes S1 Ep 4 Resourcing the Skills Shortages

Wow, what a week..

Its actually flown by, probably as I have been so busy, but a day in the life of a Local Government Officer right?

So whittling down to three key parts of the week is a challenge as there has been so much happening. Likely if you are reading this it will be Monday or Tuesday as its already well into Friday PM and I’m only just starting…

One….. Most of the really busy stuff happened in the later part of the week but Monday was a really helpful day in just getting my thoughts together. I managed to cancel a couple of external meetings in the morning to actually get some work done and be prepared for one of my teams meetings in the afternoon.

There are not a huge number of local authority planners in my medium readership so just for context there are not a lot of them anywhere! and they are all overworked! My Strategy and Economy team especially, they have been on a three year journey to join two councils and that means a shared work programme (Which is enormous).

My team are awesome, they have just got on with it but are all working far to many hours and under far to much pressure especially bearing in mind how politicised services like planning are and the level of scrutiny on everything we do…. However I certainly don’t want them to continue as they have done and its really beginning to affect peoples health and well being (I am sure this is a theme across much of #localgov).

So apart from there not being enough planners out there to recruit, we haven’t been even able to go out to market as we are mid restructure due to the shared service so cant recruit to permanent posts…. BIG PROBLEM! We are having to be really creative in this space and my management team have been scratching around to come up with solutions for the short term…

Thankfully we have a couple of irons in the fire, one I’ll pick up in my second key part of the week in a minute. However in the team meeting on Monday I was at least able to give some hope to the team that we were on the home straight and some extra cavalry would be imminent in joining our troops… (sorry, tacky line!). This helped set the tone of a really productive meeting and get some positivity for the enormity of the week ahead. Also reinforced the ‘why public servants are the best’ mantra we need to keep banging on about!

So that moves me on nicely to…

Two….. On Wednesday I attended the assessment panel for cohort 3 of the Public Practice placements down in London at the Connected Places Catapult HQ in Farringdon. Just as a quick context for who Public Practice are; they were set up in 2016 by Finn Williams and Pooja Agrawal on the back of the real and increasing lack of adequate and experienced resources in local authority planning departments; these include planners, architects, designers, ecologists, arboriculturists and a wide range of specialist placemakers that have slowly been leached from the sector into private practice over recent years of austerity. You can read more about them here.

The model they operate is a really innovative mix of maximising the opportunities of both public and private sector skills by engaging with a range of experts and consultants involved in placemaking disciplines and matching them with Local Authorities who have expressed an interest in requiring support/resource in that area. These professionals are then ‘placed’ on minimum of 1 year fixed term employments within the authority bringing skills and resources to the council. Additionally those ‘placed’ within local authorities are required to give 10% of their time to R & D in the form of case studies or research. This is then shared with the wider group of councils to enable knowledge sharing and retention across the wider sector.

We have been really lucky to have been involved with Public Practice from the start and still have one of their ‘Alumni’ Hana Loftus with us after 18months. She has been great and lead our innovative Village Design Guides work which gives a platform for rural villages help to shape the kind of development they want in their areas in a sympathetic and proactive way.

As our team have applied for the latest cohort of public practice alumni to come and help us delivering our exciting regeneration project at north east Cambridge, and help us coordinate the massive Greater Cambridge Local Plan, we were invited down to the prospective alumni interviews where we had the chance to see a really high calibre of professionals who passionately want to come and work in a public sector organisation and help bring skills and experience to delivering fantastic places. It was a really engaging day, and although I had to rush out at the end (Childcare calls!!!!!) I really hope we are matched with one of the great people there this time around…

Three….. The week was really punctuated by the first of our ‘stakeholder’ workshops to give a bit of overview and context around the new Greater Cambridge Local Plan. We are running a number of these events over the next 6 weeks and are for those interest groups, statutory providers and business to give their views on issues affecting them for the forthcoming local plan. We will be extending this out to the general public through the consultation events and engagements later in the summer and autumn too so we can begin to form a collective view on the challenges and opportunities our communities face in the next 15 years. With a collective approach we can begin to work towards ensuring we have properly planned and coordinated sustainable development which can be fit for purpose in a low carbon economy and help to address some of the ‘wicked’ environmental, social and economic challenges of our time.

This first set of workshops were with our elected councillors from both Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Council as they are the decision makers for all council processes and also our direct route into the issues and conversations that are happening in their communities.

I have an enormous respect for local politicians as the job is not an easy one and they dedicate a large amount of time to their communities. The workshop this week really just reaffirmed that view, with some incredibly engaging discussions and a real drive from the group to explore radical and innovative changes we can bring forward in the plan to help bring positive change from the big key challenges including social justice, environmental and climate emergencies to the more localised issues such as social care, and provision of safe housing for all.

The second workshop on Thursday didn’t finish until gone 8pm but I left it feeling so energised by the passion in which we all went about this early round of conversations. I am now looking forward to the same with lots of other stakeholders over the month and hopefully we will be live videoing some of these sessions so I can share with you all but also for those not in attendance to begin getting a flavour of the conversations.

I suppose on a slightly cautionary note we know that as local authorities we don’t always engage well enough with communities in a way that is accessible for them and this is especially important when addressing highly sensitive issues such as land-use planning. In recent years this disconnect has often been exacerbated by lack of resources and communications processes that are stretched and just not fit for purpose in 2019. We are really keen to change that throughout this process and know we wont get it right instantly and also at this early stage are really stretched in delivering our business as usual, however we are developing a very different approach strategy which I hope will be in place later this year and definitely in time for when we have to bring all the sticky issues to the community. In the meantime I will continue to blog and talk as much as I can and utilise existing council channels and networks to communicate.

Things to focus on next week…..

Back to recruitment next week with a real focus on getting some capacity up in key areas.

Other than that not much on in comparison to my recently exciting weeks, i might try and think about starting on some #sketchnotes which I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

Pods this week…..

Really enjoyed listening to Adam Buxton with Maya Foa on Capital Punishment (I know, sounds uplifting…..) This was really insightful and certainly made me think differently! Well worth a listen.

Music this week…..

See link to a great playlist that helped me enjoy the sunshine in the week.