Oct 2008 27

How to lose friends and alienate taxpayers1

They never learn do they?  After we exposed North Lanarkshire council for squandering £73,000+ on a spin doctor to tell residents how good the council is, Southampton City council’s Chief Executive wants to follow up by throwing away £100,000 on an image consultant.  The reason the City council is hiring a new, £100k-a-year, apparatchik is because…and this should really set tempers to ‘AARGHG’…the council believe current media relations staff within the council “have relative inexperience in the area of media relations”.

If there are people working for Southampton City council who are unqualified – sack them and bring in people who can do the job.  More to the point, why does a council need so many media relations lackeys and spivs when the first job of councils should be to lower our taxes and deliver a frontline service!!

As a waste story, this is jaw dropping.  But the wider issue is the role of a chief executive.  How can it be that an unelected chief executive can arbitrarily spend taxpayers’ money willy-nilly?  There surely must be a check on chief executive over-reach within our councils.  Perhaps it’s worth sending an email to the democratically elected leader of the council, Cllr Alec Samuels, asking whether he intends to veto the chief executive’s spending spree!

Related Posts

  • Bob Stott

    How to Lose Friends and Alienate Taxpayers!
    Be scared – be very scared!
    For me the single most important and cross cutting aspect of the work of the Alliance is the way in which it exposes the complete and utter failure of leaders and leadership, across a depressingly wide range of organisations, organisations that are supposed to put the taxpayers interest first, not their own.
    The principle failure of these leaders and their style of leadership is any desire to engage in any ‘construction of reality’ or any degree of ‘self reflection’ the latter being the quality demanded of each and every leader anywhere at anytime. Instead the usual leaders response to feedback provided by the alliance is denial and illusion, perhaps that should read delusion.
    Of course any self respecting 21st century leader knows that ‘World Class’ organisations work back from their customers (and incidentally have very few senior managers and reduced the need for middle managers decades ago) so they could use the Alliance to act as their ‘Voice of The Customer’ to fuel their efforts to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
    So let me introduce the Taxpayers Alliance Leadership Programme, it really is remarkably simple and comprises of three questions:
    Question 1
    What is going on in the big wide world and in my organisation?
    Question 2
    What does the answer to Question 1 mean for us as an organisation, what are the implications and issues that must be addressed?
    Question 3
    What has to change: culturally, technically and commercially?
    The only rule is that the answers to the questions have to be based on truth, and not stories that convince the leaders involved that they have constructed an acceptable (to them) version of truth.
    I look forward to an organisation and its leader demonstrating that it used feedback provided by the Alliance to improve its efficiency and effectiveness and as a result receive the first Alliance award for ‘Excellence in Leadership.’
    Why be scared? For UK plc to have any chance of competing in the 21st century requires a leadership revolution across a ‘wide range of organisations’ the alternative is that we continue to have leaders creating solutions that become part of the problem, by continuing to do the same things and expecting different results. This is as Einstein warned us ‘An Act of Absolute Insanity.’
    If anyone doubts the need for a leadership revolution, just ask how much the ‘regulation of organisations and its leaders’ costs in the UK and then ask how good the leaders of the auditing organisations are? Then think ‘economic meltdown.’ Recent events proving the need for a leadership revolution across the public and private sectors.
    Bob Stott