RUSHED STAFF STRUCTURE

TDC STAFF STRUCTURE DEBATE (20/01/2011)

Statement by Cllr Clive Hart - Labour Leader of the Opposition - TDC.

The Labour Group at TDC fully understand the need to scale down senior management at TDC and the need for staff restructuring. Indeed, my predecessor Cllr Richard Nicholson and our Labour Group have been warning about growing staffing levels at the council - particularly management roles - for many years now, and long before any financial crisis.

However, as with many of the schemes coming from central government at present, the proposals presented at Thursday's meeting appeared extremely rushed and rushed decisions, in my experience, are usually poor decisions.

We received the main report for Thursday's meeting very late indeed and when it did finally arrive it didn't have vital information for councillors that the District Auditor clearly asked for us all to be provided with. I repeated the request for the redundancy costs information concerned, and the Auditors letter, to be provided to councillors two days before the meeting, but I only received vague replies.

At 7pm and at the very start of Thursday's meeting, we did at last receive some of the information I requested, but once again we were being rushed to come to conclusions and make decisions based on that last minute information. Until we received this information, Labour and Independent councillors had only ever seen details of the benefits of the proposals and the inevitably enormous costs of redundancy payments had remained a very closely guarded secret.

Even then, my perfectly reasonable request for a thirty minute recess so that our councillors could read and discuss this important information was cut to fifteen minutes and the room provided (for that Group discussion) was cramped, unsuitable, and in another part of the building.

At a meeting of the council last year, during equally rushed discussions to reinstate the role of Deputy Chief Executive, Conservative Cabinet Member Cllr Wells clearly said "let's make the decision now and look at the detail later". Well that's not the way we do things in the Labour Group!

The fifteen minutes given to cross the building, discuss such vitally important technical information and then return to the chamber was simply not enough and our Group would not be 'bounced' into making crucial decisions under such circumstances.

When it came to voting the Labour Group therefore abstained.

Note:

1) The Auditors letter I requested was also denied to our Group, apparently on the basis that it was actually an email.
2) Labour councillors asked for the debate to be held in 'open session' but the ruling Conservative Group voted for the press and public to be removed.