Its been a while since I visited my website and a lot has happened.
My last article was in 2021 and we were still in the throws of COVID. Work for me had dried up as it was no longer possible to go in to offices and provide the kind of hands on work I had been doing. There was also a more pressing need to support my two teenage children with home schooling. (The impacts of that are another story).
In a year where everything that moved got painted and groundhog day became a reality I was happy to receive a phone call from Chisa at Eden Brown asking me if I was interested in an Interim Head of service role (Something I had said I didn’t want to do!). Intrigued I asked for more details and when I found out it was Walsall Council I jumped at the opportunity. My home Town, where my working career started and where much of my family still reside!!
How the world changed so quickly. My job interview took place via teams with Mark Fearn. He was at home and I was in an hotel lobby in Porlock, taking a break from a South West Coast Path walk with my pal. I started my new role in July 2021 with my first major task being to model and implement a new Local Council Tax Support Scheme with effect from April 2022 at the same time as picking up many of the day to day management responsibilities.
Having already completed the successful transition to a banded income scheme solution for CTR in Bath I was fully aware of the process and the pit falls. It was a good way to introduce myself to partners and getting to know the Walsall way of working. I had a great team in both Revenues and Benefits which made things easier but I was conscious that this needed to be owned by the team and not something an outsider came in and imposed upon them (Not easy when everyone is busy doing the day job).
Modelling was the first task, which was helped by my relationship with the experts at NEC and helpful support from neighbouring LA’s, Sandwell, Wolverhampton, Dudley and Birmingham. I had support from our training officer, a systems officer and a senior benefits officer and we worked on a number of options. We engaged with senior management, comms and marketing and key partners and I was able to produce the relevant report for Cabinet and set about the formal consultation process.
Good relations with the Portfolio Member meant that things progressed smoothly and we quickly agreed the preferred scheme for which we consulted upon. Lots of testing and lots of questioning the model helped to thrash out the detail and regular conversations on the legal bits with my friend David Airey helped with the understanding.
Taxbase was calculated and set, then we got around to annual billing and the moment of truth. The outcome was within our estimates and we breathed a sigh of relief. It was unfortunate that the Council could not afford to increase maximum awards and therefore the move to a banded scheme was always going to produce winners and losers and this was a key concern to Members so I also worked with the team to introduce a Hardship scheme for the biggest losers using the Ascendant system to capture additional information from those that sought extra help. It was this group we wanted to engage with. The scheme identified that they had reasonable levels of income but that they were going to be losers under the new calculation, we wanted to know how we might be able to help and Ascendant gave us that opportunity.
As I mentioned this was going on alongside the day to day management of the teams in Revenue & Benefits. Most of the staff were working at home and there were one or two staffing problems that needed sorting (long term sickness and performance issues). This meant getting to grips with HR systems and supporting team managers in how to handle these situations. During my time at the Council we progressed two cases through to Disciplinary Panel Hearings, both resulting in the termination of contracts for the unfortunate individuals concerned.
Having completed the LCTR scheme change I was then handed the task of managing the conversion of our Civica document management system W2 to the new D360 version.
I have to say this is one of the biggest challenges I have faced, from the day I picked up this project it was clear we were nowhere near ready and neither were Civica, we had an impossible deadline to go live before Christmas and only a small window in which we could extend the project due to Civica resource availability and our own ICT demands.
Walsall was the first local authority in the country to embark on this change and it had already decided to do the change with its own resources, these were team leaders in Revenue & Benefits, Systems team, and our Welfare Team. The system was to convert all Revs and Bens documents plus Welfare Support and Blue Badge documents to a completely new workflow module, this wasn’t just a simple upgrade it was a complete new way of working.
The team were pretty demoralised at the prospect and they didn’t feel they were getting the product they thought they were, they didn’t feel they had the skills required and they definitely didn’t have the time. They were required to build new workflows for the variety of tasks that are performed in the service and pull these together technically. They were doing all this remotely due to Covid restrictions and there was limited support to build these and get them tested.
My first ambition was to get everyone around the table and to get a clear plan of action, we were now able to go back in the offices and this would be the first such meeting since Covid had intervened.
The meeting was a success and a reality check, we needed to free up time and we needed to share our thoughts and learning, we could copy some of the work and replicate it, we certainly had to extend the date for go live as it was impossible. All of these things were done.
I cant say it was an easy ride from there on in, we had a number of wobbles and we certainly taught Civica a thing or two about our needs and requirements, we went live in January 2022 and it took nearly 12 months for us to get it where it was acceptable. We had to manage a lot of unhappy staff and a bumpy relationship with our supplier but we got there.
The D360 project took up a lot of my time but I was still managing day to day issues as well, things like the organisation of a Single Person Discount Review, looking at scanning and indexing and possible mail services, supporting our IRRV bid for a Performance award through our partnership with Ascendant, attending and supporting legal services in a difficult Valuation Tribunal case, Managing our approach in line with corporate requirements for Customer Services, Partnership relations with Walsall Housing Group and other key players where I often chaired joint meetings.
I thoroughly enjoyed my return to Walsall Council and feel a lot was achieved in my 18 month spell. We won two IRRV Performance Awards, we implemented a new document management system, we dealt with some difficult issues and not forgetting we implemented a successful banded LCTR scheme.
In January 2023 I made the switch up North to Bury Council, initially a short interim post to help them get through a difficult period whilst they sought a permanent Revs & Bens Manager.
To be continued…..