Annual recruitment freeze at SCC

This time last year Liberal Democrats on Surrey County Council campaigned, with some success, against a sudden and counter-productive freeze of recruitment to the Youth Development Service. Now the county's (Conservative) Executive have imposed a fresh one.

According to a paper tabled at their recent meeting, at the end of October 2008 the Council had underspent its overall budget by £7.5 million. However there is a forecast overspend of £7.5 million by the end of the financial year. (To put this into context, Conservative Surrey lost £20 million in Icelandic banks while saying 'there are no short-term implications for front line services or jobs …'. It also had an underspend of £58 million on its 2007-2008 capital budget.)

So now both current spending and staff recruitment are subject to hasty changes of plan.

The paper, which was agreed by the Executive, argues that 'over the past year the Council has continued to operate effectively without using its core establishment budget. There is no reason why, in principle, the Council cannot continue to operate at this level.'

Vacant posts are therefore not to be filled unless they appear on a 'Red List' which will include posts in Children's Services 'linked directly to achieving the improvement action plan', and posts in Adult Services similarly linked to their improvement action plan. Other posts will be considered one by one on an ad hoc basis. For 2009 -10 'the general principle is that the Council has run effectively in 2009/09 on current staffing levels and therefore can continue to do so in 2009/10?

There are two things seriously wrong with this:

• Surrey County Council only got a score of 2 out of 4 ('adequate') for achievement and performance management in the Audit Commission's Corporate Assessment. It's not just Children's Services and Adult and Community Care that are not run as effectively as they should be. Ask any resident about the state of the roads, and the difficulty of getting anyone to fix them. The complacency involved in saying 'we don't need more staff because the ones we've got are handling everything well' is astounding.
• Even assuming Surrey has enough staff, this is no way to go about using them to the best effect! Teams may continue to function through good will on a short term basis while a position is being filled, but this does not mean it will be the best post to leave unfilled permanently. Whatever happened to deciding what the skill sets needed for the work are, and recruiting to fill them? And what about the problem of making sure expert staff are where they are needed in the County, not spread arbitrarily, according to who has not resigned or retired?

As long ago as June 2007 the Liberal Democrat Leader, Hazel Watson, asked the Council to recognise that the County Council's workforce planning was ineffective. Something should be done about it. Unfortunately the Council decided it's workforce planning was fine, and our motion was overwhelmingly defeated.

Following that came the freeze on the recruitment of Youth Workers noted above, which did real harm before an extra £500,000 was found in the budget for the current year, while the Youth Project has to come up with some sort of solution to the Youth Development Services' perpetual lack of resources.

Now we have this freeze. But we still have no effective workforce planning. It's a shame.