Issue - meetings

Councillor Laura Price to Councillor Judith Heathcoat and Councillor Howson to Councillor Lorraine Lindsay-Gale.

Councillor Laura Price had given notice of the following question to Councillor Judith Heathcoat:

“Could the Deputy Leader explain why, at a time when Oxfordshire is considering the implementation of a new operating model with significant implications for staff, the creation of 6 new Deputy Director posts was authorised? Where was the public business case for the appointments and how many other senior positions have been created, or are planned to be created without scrutiny?”

Councillor Heathcoat replied:

“Following Cabinet agreement to the Senior Management Review (SMR) in December 2016, the senior management of Communities (specifically the Environment & Economy areas) was left to be reviewed and adjusted during the restructuring processes underway. This was prior to the initiation of the Transformation programme or Fit for the Future. Following the appointment of the Strategic Director for Communities, his first major task was to review and put in place the senior management teams for the new Department. The first stage of that was to establish new Director posts to reflect the direction of the organisation and align this with other departments to fill out how Communities would engage in cross council work participate in the Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) – again this was prior to Transformation getting under way. The new Directors were then tasked with developing structures which could both meet our MTFP commitments, but also meet the emerging challenges we were facing at the time: unitary council, devolution, property issues arising from Carillion and the development of partnership working.

In the autumn of 2017 an operational decision was taken to add Assistant Director posts into Communities. These new posts would be part of restructuring activity to address the volume and nature of the work in Communities and the need to be prepared to deal with Fit for the Future. This injection of capacity and capability would enable us to address some major issues affecting Communities and indeed the Council. Most significant was how to:

• deal with a failing Carillion contract (prior to their collapse);
• develop and solidify the emerging Growth Deal and Housing Infrastructure Funding proposals;
• develop and deliver a new approach to asset management and investment;
• completely overhaul how we deliver our capital programme; and
• develop and implement the department’s part in developing and implementing the emerging target operating model (TOM).

To wait until we agreed the TOM to change our operational leadership structure was not operationally possible because we would not be able to achieve existing MTFP savings (particularly for Planning & Place directorate) and we would not be in a robust position to begin the implementation of the TOM. Similar decisions had been taken previously in People Directorate (both Adults and Children’s Services). Although we had no absolute clarity on TOM when we started the process to recruit in January 2018, we knew enough about the emerging layers, the major principles of transformation and the workload priorities to enable us to recruit the skills and capacities we would need to see us through.”

Supplementary: “Given the assertion in  ...  view the full minutes text for item 83