Weeknotes S1 Ep03

LocalGov Finance or Festivals 😉Weeknotes S1 Ep03

Feel the Pressure….

Hey All,

So I’ve got to week three, yay me…

Slightly different this week for two reasons;

1. I’m going to make this shorter (mainly as my week has not been quite so full) and I’d quite like to mix the style of these up a bit for you and for me…
2. I’m going to try changing it up a little bit, and begin adding a little ‘out of work’ stuff to give a bit of context of other (potentially) interesting parts of my day to day…

Firstly a big thanks to @jukesie for adding me to the #weeknotes Team #weeknotes crew. It looks like a really great network of people sharing diverse experience, and I hope I can contribute into this with some slightly different angles, especially as my background and work in #LocalGov is not service design, or digital, although massive areas of interest for me.

So the reason my week has been less full (certainly of work related stuff) is that I was on leave on Monday and Tuesday. I would like to say this consisted of a lovely weekend break away with the fam or sitting in the garden knocking back craft ale, but sadly it revolved more around putting up shelves and laying really heavy patio stones!

Still I find that this type of work really calms my overactive mind and stops my chronic overthinking; trying to solve work/personal/social/global challenges😬. (I should add that I went to an amazing festival at the weekend called #WildwoodDisco, which seemed to be especially aimed at the 30 plus age group with a passion for 90s dance music… yay #2.

So another good piece advice gained from starting to read a wider range of #weeknotes regularly is to focus on a few key points of note from the week. This week I am going to start with three parts of my week which have been most relevant…

One

Finance and local authority budgets….. Bluuugghh I hear you say! Yes and you would not be wrong. However this is how my 2 days of leave ended, by coming back to work and spending an entire 5hrs working theough finances.

Its really not glamorous, and I certainly can’t be too candid about these parts of my job but in the last few years I have become increasingly interested in how those of us working with budgets in local authorities can increasingly become more astute, aware and have a great deal more control. Especially on the back of 8yrs of austerity with the theme of dwindling public sector funding…

Unfortunately to achieve this it really involves getting down and dirty and interrogating the black art of public sector accounting and finance to sub granular detail.

We achieved some incredible benefits from developing this understanding at Essex County Council and getting to a real baseline understanding of true costs of staff, resources, time management and how/why we procure/ commission (and whether or not we should).

This made budget managers in our team feel incredibly empowered and most importantly gave us real legitimacy with finance colleagues and more importantly cabinet members, through detailed and comprehensive understanding of how we were ensuring best value for the public purse.

I have had less time to do this in my current role but we are making huge strides already and as we are implementing a shared service this is so much more important, as understanding how we cost and recharge accurately across organisations is an absolute non-negotiable.

Definitely an area that I would advise colleagues on a shared service journey to really focus on; and not just overt costs, but time and the make up of the entire system of finance/resource management in those services.

Remember… If you understand and know every cost detail about your service you might not feel the pressure so deeply when those savings targets keeping pinging into your inbox…

Two

The remaining part of my week was Local Plan… Now this needs a whole separate series of blogs on its own, which I will try and put together in due course. However this is a world of challenge for me at the moment, as in Cambridge we are embarking on a joint plan for two authorities within a 2 tier council system with the added combined authority 😬

Good job I am heading to the One Team Gov #Bureaucracy hack next month for hints and tips!!!

Seriously though, Local plans are the most important documents that everyone (outside of planning and local gov) have never heard of and have the ability to really help add policy levers to key social, environmental and economic issues we face in modern society. This includes the most obvious and critical such as housing need and inequality, infrastructure (especially digital) climate/environmental challenges of transitioning to zero carbon economies, social justice and inequality and economic disparity; of which in Greater Cambridge there is a huge amount of (which surprised me when I arrived here).

The list is exhaustive and I will pick this back up in a separate blog at some point.

Anyway, so we are in really early stages of this at work, and just trying to get a steering group set up has been time consuming. However I finished the day Friday really feeling like this week we have started to get heads (nearly) above water; with initial arrangements for early engagement with the vast number of stakeholders and communities that we need to come on the journey with us well underway! A massive part of this local plan going forward will be about how we communicate and engage and integrate far better proportions of our communities through this process than we have previously and this is something I am desperate to change…

So keep tuned for more on this and we will hopefully be engaging with a wide range of different and emerging skill sets form #plantech colleagues (Shout out to Euan Mills)to understand how we can progress a 21st century plan for Greater Cambridge.

Three

Saw a post from Sam Villis on this earlier in the week and definitely need to get involved. I would encourage others to do the same; I’m talking about the NESTA Radical Futures work they are undertaking with One Team Gov. I cant stress enough the importance of those in the sector shaping the future of the sector. There seems to be a real buzz around at the moment and this comes from the challenges we have all faced, mixed wit the frustration we all have and the potential offered by bringing organisations forward into the internet era and capitalise on uncertainty with a positive spin….

Get involved. I, for one would love to see the network of those talking about public sector expand to all parts of public sector and that means profile raising too… Spread the word.

Pods

Just a pod this week… Finding Cleo. This is pretty sad but also reaffirmation of the damage of certain interventions in peoples lives. It really gets to the heart of the 60s Scoop and how horrific this must have been for indigenous people across America and Canada… Definitely worth a listen..

Be good!