Increased efficiency, the OCC way

There is lots of nonsense coming from Keith Mitchell with the old chestnut that adult social care has to be cut harder to save the libraries, he blames the "lefties" for this. For this argument to hold water, every single bit of spending that isn't necessary or ring fenced has to have been cut within the council. I would love him to be able to prove this, obviously it isn't actually possible. That's why the choice isn't binary and simplistic as Keith argues. The Conservative part of the government are urging public bodies to resist making front line cuts and to make efficiencies in the back office and on expensive salaries. Numerous quotes from Pickles and the Cameron support this position.

Below is the basic salaries of the head of the civil service in the United Kingdom, Prime minister and the executive team at Oxfordshire county council:

The head of the civil service is in charge of every single public sector employee in the country, I think the figure is 6-7 million depending on whose figures you trust. The prime minister is politically accountable for all those civil servants and the population of the UK which is 61 million. The head of OCC is responsible for 22 thousand employees and 680 thousand members of the public in Oxfordshire. For fairness I will include Keith in this, he gets 31k allowance which to his credit is quite competitive compared to some council leaders I have looked at. One of the arguments when executive salaries are questioned is they are running a company with a big budget, they are the equivilent to a FTSE 250 company and the you pay peanuts you get monkey's line. 

Its another false argument. The FTSE 250 companies are there because they are the biggest 250 companies on the stock exchange outside the FTSE 100. Their executives get paid lots of money because their companies are performing well, if they stop performing and drop out of the 250 they would be held accountable, I.E they would get the sack. Just because the figures involved financially may be similar, it doesn't make them worthy of comparison. Not only are chief execs not accountable for performance in the same way as the private sector, they don't actually take the big decisions, councillors do this and they are held responsible by the electoriate. The officers don't have to give quotes to the media on bed blocking issues, cogges link road, or the school failures in the county. The cabinet councillor responsible for the department has to do that. For these reasons I have used the average chief exec salary that comes from the Office for National Statistics figures, I believe this is a fairer benchmark to measure the salaries against.

I understand there are legal reasons why the pay for executives cannot be cut, but if they were subjected to a 25% pay cut in line with what the front line services are having to take then OCC would save 170k which could be plowed into adult social care, youth centres or dare I say it libraries. This is based just on their basic salary, there is also pension contributions and other perks that I don't have exact figures for. Other councils in the UK are getting rid of senior execs or actually sharing them with other councils. I don't know how well this works but I think people would rather see the money spent better.

One of the other things I am concerned about is the tier further down. By law councils have to release the numbers of staff on over 50k. They make it difficult of course by not giving job titles or the actual salaries. Below is the non-school numbers:

Because we only have the banding's we cannot do exact figures. We can do maximum, minimum or average. What is clear that from the financial year 2009-2010 the numbers on over 50k basic salary actually went up by five. They lost a couple of the 100k people, I would imagine through natural wastage but the numbers went up. On the actual salary spend, despite loosing the two 100k people the salary spend on this group actually increased. Not a massive increase but it still went up. This is in the context of the leader telling us they can only cut libraries or adult social care, the county is broke and all the rest of the stuff he comes out with. A increased headcount and a increase salary spend on the over 50k staff isn't "savage cuts" or efficiencies in the back office, it is quite the opposite.

Another area I had a another look at was the spending data. Between November 2010 and July 2011 OCC has spent £3,064,941.66 on consultants. That's a average of £340,549.07 a month or approximately 4 million a year. Again I'm not stupid enough to say this isn't all legitimate spending but when the leader argues its one thing or another I get angry. 

Even within the library service itself they spend far more on back office that other shire counties. One of my previous posts goes into detail on this:

http://questioneverythingtheytellyou.blogspot.com/2011/09/where-oxfordshirecc-should-be-looking.html

Looking at all this I see why Keith resorts to childish insults and nonsense binary arguments that have no basis in reality, he cannot argue on facts because he doesn't have any. He has failed to make OCC more efficient or to save the front line as he is instructed to by his own parties position. He has poisoned debate in Oxfordshire to cover for his own failings and I think he should be cut.

The Phony War

Leader of Oxfordshire County Council Keith Mitchell (pictured) has come out in the Guardian of all papers to blame the social care cuts on the "well heeled lefties" in the county. Its interesting that he has chosen the lefty paper to make this assertion, its almost as if he wants to wind up the "lefties" in Oxford.

There is a great phrase used by Bill Clinton in his auto-biography on a tactic used by right wing politicians. The phrase is called "reverse plastic surgery". What it means is to misrepresent the stance and/or argument of your opponent(s) and keep repeating the lie until people believe it. The modern tea party use this quite a lot. What I think Keith is doing here is actually quite cunning. The people protesting against the current library proposals are largely voters in Tory villages where all of the library cuts are happening under this proposal. His plan I believe then is:

A. Muddy the argument and make it about something else
B. Wind the lefties up so his own side closes ranks against them and votes through the proposal, regardless of any evidence that it won't work.

I hope the Conservative group in Oxfordshire see through his little gambit, he clearly thinks they are easily convinced if they are told the lefties win if they vote against his proposals. The people against the current proposals are the people in your divisions who vote in the main Conservative, not the people in "lefty" Oxford that Keith has gone to great pains to wind up, their library users are not being forced to volunteer.

The reality of the situation is the proposal will lead to library closures, won't save any money and will create a massive bureaucratic burden on the council trying to manage the training for all the volunteers. All the other options that the other libraries are doing in the future libraries program are being ignored, back office shares, supply chain efficiencies etc. It is a very un-tory proposal on the table. I doubt Keith's hero Maggie would like it and I if it does get pushed through Keith's legacy when he leaves in the next 12 months (his division is disappearing) will be to greatly diminish the tory vote in Oxfordshire.

Update 06/10/11 22:13

Even the Torygraph thinks Keith's latest outburst is "astonishing". I think Keith may be leaving sooner than he thinks if the telegraph thinks he has gone bat-shit crazy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8811701/Philip-Pullmans-library-campaign-blamed-for-social-service-cuts.html


p.s I'm not a "lefty"



Keith's original article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/social-care-network/2011/oct/05/libraries-social-care-keith-mitchell-oxfordshire

The excellent response by Patrick Butler:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/patrick-butler-cuts-blog/2011/oct/05/philip-pullman-blamed-for-social-care-cuts?commentpage=all#start-of-comments

For Keith and Dave

Here is the full costings for the volunteers and the numbers. It isn't precise because OCC cannot confirm who has to pay for the CRB, or if the cuts are on the opening hours or the staffing hours. But I think to use their jargon "the numbers are robust". Other groups did their own calculations separately and got very similar numbers to what I came up with. Also worth noting the hours for volunteers we have used matched what the draft volunteer job specification says on 2-3 hours per volunteer. Even if these projections are 50% wrong, to proceed with this is madness.

The costings:

OCC has also indicated that they would pay for volunteer travel to training courses (although not day to day expenses) and this would also increase the costs, eating further into the already minus number "savings".

The model was devised after consultation with volunteering organisations and those who regularly use volunteers.  Based upon two hours per week (as per volunteer job description) x the number of hours to be covered in the two thirds model x 2 for volunteers to work together when no council employee on duty.

 This was calculated for Wychwood and then the required volunteers per opening hours mapped onto the other libraries based upon their unfunded opening hours.

Over 1000! Other library groups have independently done their own calculations and some were slightly higher, some slightly lower but all ended up with roughly the same figures.

These are pasted in as pictures but unlike OCC who only release PDF's of spreadsheets I will put links at the end for the xls. 

One easy suggestion would be to have big society cleaners in every library, this means the cleaning contract would not be required and OCC would save £247,277.68. Not only that the expensive costs above on CRB and Health and Safety wouldn't be required because the cleaning could be done when the libraries are closed. It means everyone wins (apart from the cleaning company) and you can say they big society has won too. You can still look at the back office sharing, introducing Costa coffee for extra revenue, look for more efficiences in the 3.1 million internal recharge and still save all the front line libraries, just think you would be heroes!

Otherwise this proposal as it stands is so ill-conceived and the consultation so badly managed I doubt OCC would be up to managing a thousand volunteers without hiring dozens more staff in the corporate core. Even the logistics of providing training for all these volunteers would create such a bureaucracy that it makes me think this whole scheme was dreamt up by Sir Humphrey himself.

This has the cleaning costs, they are just for cleaning as I have seen the actual figures for Wychwood.

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6dU0yhpP-MUNmY5NjQyYjItZWFlNS00OWVkLTkzZDEtMWVhMTMwZGI3ZGYw&hl=en_US

Here is the full volunteer costings and numbers:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6dU0yhpP-MUNjQ5MDY3OTEtY2QxOC00NWQ1LTgyOTEtZDFmZTRmY2RlNjRj&hl=en_US

The Big Society isn't about cuts, or is it?

The Oxfordshire libraries consultation is due to close on Friday (30/09/11) and apart from one library group who I haven't been able to get hold of yet to confirm, all of the affected libraries contacted either don't have a friends group setup or the friends group are saying no to the current proposal put forward by OCC:

I think its fair to say most of the groups want to work with OCC on this but the current proposal won't work.

Oxfordshire County Council have tried to use the "Big Society" as a front for their cuts. Indeed the first proposal was to close libraries unless big society volunteers stepped in to save them. Clearly words had been said in the Conservative party as David Cameron doesn't want to associate his centrepiece policy with the cuts. The press release for the proposal has since been taken down and any reference to the "Big Society" has been purged from the current proposal. Thanks to the magic of google cache the page and press release is still available:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4k8QzA5d2TMJ:www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/plink/publicsite/news/W/internet/press%2Breleases/press%2Breleases%2Barchive/2010/november/pr%2B-%2Bbig%2Bsociety%2Bproposals%2Bfor%2Bthe%2Bfuture%2Bof%2Boxfordshires%2Blibraries+oxfordshire+libraries+big+society&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk

One of the relevant quotes:

"In line with the Government's Big Society agenda, we are very keen to hear from local communities and organisations who may wish to take on the running of local libraries and we believe there will be enthusiasm from people who wish to get involved."


The library groups in Oxfordshire are clearly not happy with Oxfordshire County Councils take on the big society. The annoying thing is the friends groups are doing what the big society is actually supposed to be anyway, making existing services better.

We have also updated our estimated volunteer costs based on the in house training courses that OCC use for their own staff. The director for social care and community services confirmed to Burford that the training costs would be met by OCC and use their own internal training, the costs are sourced from their own site:

The other issue with using volunteers is that its against their own guidance, this is what OCC staff use when assessing if a role is suitable for a volunteer:

This clearly shows using volunteers as freebie professional librarians is against their own guidance. 

Also they have said the volunteers are not allowed to claim back expenses, again against their own policy:

“Expenses are extremely important to volunteers, and are also important in attracting a diverse volunteer ‘workforce’.”

ref OCC Valuing our volunteer’s policy doc

Yet for library volunteers we get this:

“The Library Service seeks to provide the best possible service to the public at a time when its budgets are being reduced. It is not therefore normally able to refund expenses to volunteers working in their local library. However, certain expenses may be payable, for example to attend training activities”

Ref OCC Volunteers in Proposed Community libraries

On the issue of what is expected of the volunteers, even at the end of the consultation process we still don't have a completed job specification for the volunteers. Their draft version is here:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=1mlUxkCHeBx-4VGfjcnHpBrbMlUnw165iLDevxH1kJj5501CCFYFz6j5eMM34&hl=en

It still hasn't been finalised. The well meaning residents who ticked yes (me included) to volunteering many months ago were not given any information on what was required of them. The "volunteer" job specification is longer than any job description I have ever had. In fact I would imagine it reads almost exactly the same as a professional librarian's job description.




Update 29/Sep/2011


Keith Mitchell responded to this blog with a couple of tweets which shows the mindset we are up against. He also suggested that I am displaying "glee" about this whole thing. How exactly that is I don't know, I would rather not be fighting to save our local library, if the volunteer proposals made sense I would volunteer and try to make them work. Sadly they don't, here are Keith's tweets:

So we can sum up Keith's (and presumibly OCC's, since he leads it) position in three bullet points.

1. If the library groups win and the volunteer proposals are chucked out, old people will suffer
2. If the library groups cannot make the volunteer proposals work, some libraries will be cut
3. There are no other options, its a take it or leave it deal, the consultation is purely for show, no ideas put up by the friends groups will be considered.

At no point have any library groups to my knowledge said they won't work with OCC, its quite the opposite. We want to work with OCC but their proposal is the only game in town as shown above.


I personally believe the plan all along is cuts by the back door. Put up a volunteer proposal that cannot work and then when the libraries close they can blame the communities for not supporting them. Again this is worth stating, the "savings" are somewhere in the region of 350k. OCC have a billion pound budget. Getting volunteers to clean the libraries rather than a expensive contractor would save more money than the current proposals but OCC aren't listening it seems.

Here is Cameron's quote on the big society again:

"This is not about trying to save money, it is about trying to have a bigger, better society."   


Volunteers are already making the library service better Keith, the proposals want to destroy that.

Here is the link to the Oxfordshire Save Our Libraries statement:

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=1KkUDzaPDr58HFd6pbw3VqDUQIgO6da8cnScHMT7zs3wI3gi3SNDgK0xvYk_X&hl=en

Something OCC are doing well on

I freely admit I looked into this to try and find ammunition for the save libraries campaign. But the facts are the facts and I thought I should at least post it anyway to be fair. I am really, really glad I don't live in Kent. I would be very unhappy about the expenses levels there, clearly OCC does well and is just below the average on allowances for councillors. I haven't looked into how these things are set but obviously there quite large differences across the county.

Looking briefly at the top and the bottom totals, what explains this in part is the basic allowances for the councillors:

Basic for Kent £12999.96
Basic for OCC is £8295

And at the top:

Leader of Kent £57,300.00
Leader of OCC £31,784.47

There are other payments included in the headline figure but I don't have the time to look at the differences between them, the special allowances for example. There could also be slight skewing if certain councils have more scrutiny committees but looking at the average and basic for the top and bottom I think it is pretty reasonable to conclude that Kent are getting well above the average of the seven I looked at.

Well done OCC <chokes>

What would you cut?

While the youth services and libraries take the brunt of the cuts in Oxfordshire I have been chasing the release of the >£500 spending data from Oxfordshire County Council. Up until yesterday (21/09/11) they had only released up to March 2011. Now they have finally released the data up to and including July.

While running a few sql queries and looking at the data I have found some areas of spending where I don't think OCC have looked hard enough for savings.

For example OCC have under the pay narrative "expenses" between November 2010 and July 2011 spent 5,2 million, this is a average of 580k a month. It has gone down a bit as a monthly figure in the last few months, July was 289k for example, but without the preceding years data we don't know if this is a real trend. And to be honest, 289k is still too high. To pick a single supplier from within this:

Witney Lakes Resort: £6802, this appears to be for conferences and training. OCC have buildings all over the county with conference rooms, why Witney Lakes?

And incidentally, where the pay narrative is "conference" they spent 73k over the period. Again Oxfordshire is full of OCC property with conference rooms, why they have to hire expensive venues is puzzling. They can book our village hall for £6 an hour!

Similarly on non-school taxis over the same period (November 2010 and July 2011) OCC have spend £176,525.73 thousand. An average of 19k a month, peaking in December to 26k and the lowest point being 10k in May.

On payments to Vodafone, there are only a few councillors that have blackberries and some of their numbers are on the OCC site. I don't see any other mobile numbers on there. They have 22 thousand employees and are spending on average 59k a month.

I'm on Orange payg, I have a smart phone (Orange San Francisco Android, its very good!) and I pay ten pounds a month. If every single employee had a phone, it would break down to £3.7 a month. Clearly they all don't have phones and I would imagine the monthly spend for each handset being probably a more than my tenner, why do they all need mobiles anyway. I suspect they are given out as a perk rather than a legitimate business case.

Within the library budget itself, in their CIPFA submissions the other expenditure was 3.2 million and they have estimated it only going down to 3.1 million.

This isn't the direct spend on libraries, this is the internal recharging on HR, admin, payroll etc. The rural libraries are facing 66% cuts, the other expenditure only 3.1%. The actual library budget itself is on 7.9 million, the 3.1 million doesn't sound like it has been subject to savage cuts to me.

3.1 million to run a 7.9 million pound library service.

This is some of the pivoted data I picked out by month:

I think there is also too much redacted spending, yes there is data protection issues but there isn't really any detail to make any judgement.

For example under "Other Agency and Contracted Services" spending area "SCS and Pooled Budget" there is 6.1 million of spending that has has "redacted person data."

We get no further information at all on this, nothing. I am not in anyway implying anything dodgy, but if there was there is zero visibility on this spending for taxpayers.

I don't for one minute say all of the above spending isn't legitimate, but don't forget this isn't everything they spend on taxis, expenses and mobile phones etc, this is just the stuff they have paid a bill for over £500 pounds during the period. Where they have claimed back on receipts, company credit cards or the bill was less that £500 it won't appear here.


The point I am trying to make is, whenever we argue that front line services should't be cut, we are given a binary emotive argument like "if it isn't libraries then it has to be social care".

The small  amount they are saving by cutting the rural libraries (370k) is literally peanuts in the billion pound budget. Their new website went live the other day (still lots of dead links btw!) clearly other spending is going on that I believe the taxpayers would rather see cut than libraries and youth centres.



Here is the link to the 500 pound spending data:

http://www.oxfordshire.gov.uk/cms/content/council-spending-over-500-pounds

And if you are feeling brave the full combined dataset, go on its your money after all!


https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B6dU0yhpP-MUMGY5YjVhN2QtNWMwMC00OTU2LWJkYTYtMGJmMGNmZjNhZmI2&hl=en_US


And a previous blog post where I put some of these kinds of arguments to Keith Mitchell, leader of Oxfordshire County Council. The man likes to travel in comfort :D

http://questioneverythingtheytellyou.blogspot.com/2011/08/keith-answers-some-questions.html

How very courageous Minister. Oh dear ... is it, why?

Oxfordshire is a county of two different political outlooks. The rural areas are undoubtably Conservative, the City a mix of Liberals, Labour and Greens. This is why I found the proposals for the library cuts very courageous from a political point of view.

We already know the premise is flawed, the volunteer model won't save money and now we know it is also political suicide for the Tories in their rural Oxfordshire divisions.

Here is the cut libraries that have Tory councillors, and calculations based on their majority , the active users and the registered users.

When the councillors are on the doorstep in 2013 and the library users are volunteering and are to busy to vote or more likely having to travel great distances because some of the libraries will have closed by then, it is unlikely they are going to want to pop to the polling both and support the party who took their library away.

The other factors are the other cuts in Oxfordshire, Keith Mitchell's charming weekly letters in the Oxford mail and the fact that the party in power always get a kicking come the local elections.

If the Tory councillors who have a greater number of registered library users than their majority were to lose their seats here is how the political landscape could change:

Clearly the Tories would hold the council, just. But is this risk worth the supposed 370k savings they think they are going to make? All the other factors locally will come into play, not a day goes by without a negative OCC story in the paper. I think any councillor who ignores the wishes of the people they represent will be "very courageous".

Its worth reiterating again where the cuts are falling too:

The cut proposed cuts and the percentage of cuts that area is getting.

The cuts purely on percentages, the complete opposite of Tory policy and ideology.


If anyone can point to why the Tories in Oxfordshire don't want power anymore can they please let me know? I think the Lib Dems and Labour know which seats to target in 2013.

They can save 370k easily from a one billion pound budget, it doesn't have to come out of social services as they keep claiming. Their new website went live last night, at great expense no doubt. Clearly they still have spare cash that isn't going to social care.

Here is a couple of quotes from Cameron on cuts and the big society:

 "Any cabinet minister, if we win the election, who comes to me and says 'here are my plans' and they involve front-line reductions, they'll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again."

"This is not about trying to save money, it is about trying to have a bigger, better society."  




Here is a link to the data:


https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqdU0yhpP-MUdHdGSU94VzZpUFNUNVFGOHpCaGFaYlE&hl=en_US