Redrawing district boundaries

Is it possible for a council to avoid cutting staff, maintain local services and keep funding the voluntary and community sector? Manjeet Gill reckons you can – and achieve a whole lot more. Austin Macauley meets her

If ever there was a council boss with their head above the parapet it’s Manjeet Gill. By insisting it’s possible to maintain services, avoid job cuts and actually invest in new initiatives she’s not so much peeping over the top as jumping up and down on it.

That she’s doing it at a district council merely ups the ante – challenging the widely held belief that government cutbacks would be too deep for some authorities and hasten the death of the district.

No wonder then that Local Government Chronicle named her ‘one to watch’ in its recent list of movers and shakers. Ms Gill has taken a corner of England traditionally well below the radar and plonked well and truly in the limelight as an area that’s not only going to buck the nationwide trend for cutbacks and job losses but also give the Big Society agenda some meaning. Now all she’s got to do is deliver.

RIGHT JOB, RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME
Meet her and you’re left in no doubt about her conviction. A gallop through her career path to date – with numerous jumps from post to post, taking in Leicester, Nottingham, Bristol, Northamptonshire and Salisbury councils along the way – leaves you with the impression that everything has been leading up to this point: holding the reins of a district council at a time of unprecedented change and opportunity.

She no doubt could have landed a bigger, better-paid job. But West Lindsey Council in Lincolnshire ticked all the boxes when she became its chief executive at the beginning of last year. With the prospect of public sector cuts and a change of government on the horizon, the authority was under investigation by the Audit Commission and relations between officers and members were poor. On the upside, it had been run prudently and had healthy reserves.

It was, she says, the ideal opportunity to ‘start afresh’, refocusing the council around a new model drawing on her long-held beliefs around community development, empowerment and the need for a business mentality – the latter reflecting her entrepreneurial roots having set up a fashion business in her home city of Leicester before embarking on a career in local government. But it all hinged on how West Lindsey dealt with the £2.5m cut to its budget over the next two years, described as ‘the worst district council settlement on government funding in Lincolnshire and amongst the worst in the country’ by council leader Burt Keimach.

‘All of local government seems to be moving to economies of scale. Doing more with less,’ she says. She believes it’s a flawed strategy but wasn’t prepared to go public with her alternative before getting the council’s budget sorted out.

‘We had to ask ourselves, do we want to be the same model with less money or do we use this opportunity to consider how we deliver results and outcomes with less money and make ourselves less grant dependant?’ In terms of the council’s reserves it was a case of ‘we can either spend those resources or use them ourselves to generate more’.

‘We didn’t want to just balance our budget,’ she adds. ‘We have social issues here and want to look at new ways of tackling them.’

PUTTING THE THEORY INTO PRACTICE
The final details are still being decided and will be presented to the council next month. But what is emerging will be closely observed by local authorities across the UK. Essentially, the West Lindsey approach is a combination of three strands.

Manjeet Gill outside West Lindsey Council’s offices in Gainsborough.

There’s a finance strategy which seeks out efficiency savings but examines the business case in each instance. The example Ms Gill cites will be familiar to local authorities the length and breadth of the country – that of shared services. There was a proposal to merge the revenue and benefits service with two other districts. On the face of it, a sensible move. But when West Lindsey looked at the business case it found it would have saved less money than if it modernised the service itself.

Secondly, the introduction of co-production – the idea that all sections of society should play an active role in services. ‘I see it as us moving from being a player who solves people’s problems to being a coach and then a groundsman. Community development is the process to get there.’

This is an area close to her heart. She realised the true potential of community development while at Northamptonshire Council where she took charge of regeneration and partnerships. ‘The leader wanted to take community development into the 21st century. For me it was exciting. It wasn’t about community development as a service but as a way of working that goes through everything and in my various roles I have been fine tuning that belief.’

On a practical level that means creating the infrastructure needed for what she terms ‘active society’ to thrive by working with organisations like the CVS and Citizens Advice. It’s also where the council’s much publicised £4.5m fund for Big Society initiatives comes in.

‘We talk all the time about importance of empowering communities, community development and so on but organisational development is
just as important. It’s patronising
to just say the community needs developing.’ Although it’s been attached to the Big Society agenda and all the woolliness that goes with it, it’s rather more nuanced than that and is actually a capital and investment fund. It includes £3m to invest in small and medium sized businesses and social enterprises, a move that’s earned West Lindsey numerous tags, from the ‘entrepreneurial council’ to the Dragons’ Den council (a reference to it providing support to small businesses struggling to access finance).

Ms Gill prefers ‘the social enterprise council’, having been bitten by that particular bug while she was a non-executive director of Social Investment Business, the social investor set up in 2009. West Lindsey is a member of the Social Enterprise Coalition and was named social enterprise partner of the year at the SEC’s annual awards for helping to create jobs for 130 young people, many of them disadvantaged.

While there’s a major emphasis on community development, Ms Gill is adamant it will be matched by organisational development within the authority. ‘The organisation has to come along with the change. We talk all the time about importance of empowering communities, community development and so on but organisational development is just as important. It’s patronising to just say the community needs developing.’

While councillors have got behind the changes, she admits the new ways of working have been a challenge for officers. But she accepts that’s hardly surprising, given they are the people who have to put the ideas into practice. ‘People were saying “we’re not a business, we’re a council”. But it’s a journey.’

The third and final strand relates to income and trading. She is quick to point out that while the council has looked at ways to increase income, it’s not about income for income’s sake and any decisions must reflect its social objectives. So when it vacated an entire floor of its shiny new offices in Gainsborough, it didn’t rent them out to the highest bidder but instead created a business incubator with hotdesking.

And like all councils, it’s had to exploit every opportunity. For example, the latest issue of the council magazine carries an article promoting advertising space on the side of its refuse trucks.

A CRITICAL PHASE
One of the main reasons West Lindsey has attracted so much attention is the sneaking suspicion that it may have found a way to give Big Society some meaning. Music to the government’s ears, particularly given it’s a Tory-led council. Ms Gill herself believes the government has struggled to articulate the Big Society and has so far failed to link it with the localism agenda.

‘We feel we are making this coherent. It’s about small state and Big Society working together. It’s about a different type of state – in between laissez-faire and paternal state. Big Society is about how we empower people and it all has to be within a framework of localism.’

Some will question what, if anything, West Lindsey Council will prove even if it’s successful. A small, relatively affluent district made up of market towns and villages that’s not weighed down by political infighting or entrenched deprivation – what can larger urban authorities possibly learn from it?

As with most local authority areas, it still has social and economic issues to deal with and its rural nature brings with it isolation and pockets of poverty that are hard to reach. Its localism and community engagement strategy proposes to take things down to street level in order to ensure all communities are involved. Plans include boosting area forums to highlight and deal with local issues and to increase its councillor initiative fund – money that can be used to support community projects in each ward – from £1,000 to £4,000 per elected member over two years.

It’s also proposing to introduce a £1.2m community asset fund to help get projects such as the development of local allotments and community buildings off the ground.

Much of what’s either already happening or in the pipeline can be found across the country. The difference, says Ms Gill, is the fact that all the elements are wrapped up in an overriding strategy.

‘When I came to West Lindsey people were talking about the death of districts, but I think they are very agile. This is an exciting opportunity to develop local government and demonstrate that districts can work.’

And she certainly doesn’t accept that whatever works in a small, rural district like West Lindsey can’t be applied elsewhere. ‘I think it is replicable in a larger council. The key ingredients apply even more to a larger city-based conurbation, especially organisational development.

‘The key thing here is developing something at a scale – it demonstrates to people that it’s possible.’