Cash-strapped Cheshire East Council is to reorganise its senior management structure which, a report states, is ‘no longer considered fit for purpose’, writes Belinda Ryan.
The council last reviewed its senior management team in 2019 and further changes were made in 2021.
But a report to next week’s meeting of the corporate policy committee states: “The existing structure no longer meets organisational needs, especially given the transformation work that needs to take place to ensure that the council becomes financially sustainable as well as responding to improvements required in children’s services.”
It says the structure proposed for the future “is designed to support clearer decision-making processes and will enable senior managers to provide clarity of risk tolerance and more strategic whole council thinking”.
But it does not explain what these changes will be or how much they will cost.
Those items are excluded from the public part of the report and marked as “confidential” in case individuals are identified.
They will only be discussed in part two of the meeting when the press and public are excluded.
But there are hints if new top bosses are brought in at higher salaries than envisaged, under-pressure public services will carry the cost.
The report states: “The indicative costing assumes appointment at the salary points shown. [These are not shown in the public papers].
“However, if any candidate was appointed at a higher salary point, the relevant service would need to identify funding to maintain our financial resources.”
Cheshire East has been working “under capacity” in some areas for a while, following a failure to fill some posts to save money.
The need to address this and restructure senior management overall was identified during a review of the council by the Local Government Association (LGA).
The report to next week’s meeting states: “The external review identified that the unsustainable level of vacancies and acting-up arrangements are impacting on the ability for the council to respond to the challenges it faces.
“It also identified that there appears to be an overlap between director and head of service roles in some areas.”
The planned restructure comes at the same time as Cheshire East is looking to embark on a transformation programme to put its finances back on track and address the four-year funding gap of £100m.
The council also has to bring its children’s services up to standard after the Department for Education served it with an improvement notice following its recent inadequate Ofsted rating.
That children’s services improvement plan has been drawn up by officers and was approved at full council last month.
The corporate policy meeting takes place on Wednesday, August 21, at 5.30pm at the council’s Westfields HQ in Sandbach.
No doubt whilst they restructure, they will put temporary staff in place on extortionate daily rates. Seems CEC aimlessly go from one mess to another.
Mr Moorhouse, you raise some very interesting points. Are the public informed of the Liabilities of the Final Salary Pension Scheme within Cheshire East. Final salary pensions in the public sector in total have liabilities of 2.8 trillion pounds according research by Hargreaves Lansdowne.
I would be interested to know the financial status of the Cheshire East Pension Fund based on the last actuarial report. One local authority borrowed 70 million to prop up their pension fund, to my knowledge.
Eric Shaw. It looks like they write verbose meaningless reports with loads of links to other papers to confuse the public. H of S are the engine room that is needed. Also reducing Executive Directors will also save on pension contributions. Let us watch this as it develops without public scrutiny.
How about getting rid of all the Directors and let the Heads of Service do what they are paid for. What exactly do the Directors actually do? As has already been pointed out some of their titles are ludicrous and simply support my view they are not necessary. Let the new Chief Executive earn his money with the Heads of Service reporting directly to him. Will also save shedloads of money in salaries.
Let us hope they also introduce job titles that state the function it is responsible for rather than such titles as Director of Place!!.
The Directors and Executives have been paid to deliver effective, efficient services and spend tax payers money with prudence applying the fundamental principle of skill, care and diligence. They have failed to do this. The citizens of Cheshire East will be expected to pay for this. I doubts any one will face capability disciplinary hearings and dismissal. They would in the private sector.
What is worse, information which the tax payer has a right to know will be with held from the public who pays their salaries.
Is this democracy.
I think not!!!!!