Ok – so here we have Suffolk County Council’s Chief Executive, a Suffolk Council Tax Payer, and a Lollipop Lady, all sitting around a table sharing 12 biscuits for tea.
The Chief Executive takes 11 biscuits, and says to the Council Tax Payer…
“...Look out! – that Lollipop Lady is after your biscuit!“
For a more serious take on this, Andrew Grant-Adamson has neatly summarized the dysfunctional connection between Suffolk’s Chief Executive and Suffolk’s spending priorities
It was only couple of weeks back I reminded you of SCC’s extraordinary and unspecified spend on consultants which was decided unilaterally by Suffolk’s Conservatives back in May. £122,000 of public money ( 16p from every single Suffolk resident) was to be spent without oversight on unspecified but terribly, terribly important ‘services’ from three consultancy companies : Fields of Learning, Scintillate and DNA. This decision (to allow Chief Executive Andrea Hill to spend this money without further reference to the Council) was voted through by the Tory majority at full council despite the best endeavours of my party.
We Lib Dems had previously prevented this significant spending decision being slid in via the Cabinet back door without ever reaching the ears of full council (see below*) by ‘calling in’ the Cabinet decision. I will remind you again that deputy leader Jane Storey said at the time that £122,000 ‘ is a tiny proportion of the county council’s budget!” Her implication was that no oversight should be required in the spending of such a itsy bitsy teeny weeny sum of money by such an intelligent and serious bunch as the administration, and that it was damn nice of them even to have mentioned it!
Today the Evening Star reveals that the DNA in ‘DNA’ stands for Davidson Nicklen and Associates . And that the ‘Davidson’ in question is that very selfsame Sol Davidson whose coaching of the Chief Executive Andrea Hill, Council Leader Jeremy Pembroke, and other senior executives apparently cost us people of Suffolk an itsy bitsy teeny weeny £583 per 60 – 90 min session! Or, as was minuted in the original Cabinet papers, a price that was ‘competitive with market rates’.
Competitive? Do me a favour! Do you suppose for a single moment that any one of the beneficiaries would have put their hands in their own pockets and paid out that kind of money themselves?
No wonder the administration – puffed up with delusions of grandeur and selfimportance though they are – were reluctant to specify this expenditure too exactly. We – the people of Suffolk – might have thought more oversight was required than they clearly wished to us to have!
The Conservatives voted to spend the remainder of this money on further equally unspecified services from another couple of consultancy companies (Fields of Learning and Scintillate).
So the next question must be, what exactly have the people of Suffolk been spending that remaining £92,000 on?
*That infamous Cabinet decision in full (from the Minutes of SCC Cabinet Meeting 30 March 2010)
….the Chief Executive invited the Cabinet to agree exemptions from the Council’s Procurement Regulations so that contracts for Organisational Development (OD) services may be let without a competitive process.
Decision: The Cabinet: i) agreed exemptions from the Council’s Procurement Regulations so that contracts for Organisational Development (OD) services may be let without a competitive process; and ii) delegated to the Chief Executive’s authority to agree these contracts.
Reason for Decision: The Cabinet recognised that due to the enormous scale of change which faced the Council, the Council needed to get experienced Organisational Development service providers in post as soon as possible. The Cabinet considered that the day rates proposed were competitive with market rates and that the cost of getting any other provider ‘up to speed’ would be disproportionate.
So there’s the truth bald and unadorned for all to see – the Cabinet really DO consider paying £583 per 60-90 min coaching session is ‘competitive with market rates’. Market rates for what? The Emperor’s tailoring???
Having blogged a couple of weeks back about the extraordinary spending priorities being displayed by the leaders of Suffolk County Council, I wasn’t unduly surprised to find another example hitting national news via the Daily Mail.
Apparently both our Chief Executive and our Council Leader have been benefiting from extraordinarily expensive “coaching for change” (article here) According to a Freedom of Information request the Chief Executive has had 23 sessions from ex-Chemical Engineer turned senior executive coach Sol Davidson each one of which cost the Suffolk taxpayer £525 plus VAT.
We do not (yet) have figures for the amount Suffolk taxpayers have spent on Jeremy Pembroke.
I’d like to mention here our Woodbridge lollipop man, Terry King. Mr King has been paid £35 a week by Suffolk County Council for his valued and life-saving services. Now Suffolk says his services are too expensive. £12,075 would pay for him to continue protecting children in Woodbridge for nearly seven years.
I will not offend your intelligence by pointing out what other equally valuable uses Suffolk residents could put this sum of money to.
The county council line is dismissive. Spending £12,000 on personal coaching is ” in line with training normally provided to senior officers” they say – which suggests that SCC spending priorities are even more skew-whiff than anyone has realised.
I know nothing about Mr Davidson, beyond what is available via Google which is principally profile pages. The more recent profiles read:
He now specialises in coaching leaders and their teams in building strategic and operational capacity in the face of increasingly uncertain and unpredictable circumstance
What is interesting for the residents of Suffolk is that the uncertain and unpredictable circumstances we face are seemingly created by the very people he coached!
What’s all that about?
Update: It was reported in the EADT March 5th, that the total amount paid to Mr Davidson by SCC for his coaching was £27,825 for 53 sessions of between one hour and ninety minutes each. This was to coach the Chief Executive, Andrea Hill, and the corporate management board in ‘teambuilding and working styles’.