The "brutally frank" reporton Doncaster yesterday by the Audit Commission identified three, inter-related failings that will have sent a shiver down the spine of many a senior public manager.
This has been a case of severe political dysfunction, which has led, in turn, to organisational dysfunction, amid an atmosphere of bullying and intimidation.
The result has been a council where councillors have set themselves against what an elected mayor and cabinet have sought to do; where there has been a lack of effective leadership by the mayor and the cabinet; and where the lack of leadership by some senior officers has meant that no one has taken a lead and no one has been able to work together effectively.
The reality of this on the ground is clearly laid out in Appendix 2 of the Audit Commission report, which sets out, step by terrible step, the process by which an interim chief executive was appointed at Doncaster in January.
Michael O'Higgins, chair of the Audit Commission, says this is the worst report he has seen on a local authority in his time at the commission - and others believe it is probably the worst report ever published by the organisation about a local council.
An initial political failure has in turn, over time, corroded officers' behaviour, so there has been organisational failure as a consequence
How did things get to this pass? It has been an intertwined political and organisational failure, says O'Higgins. "An initial political failure has in turn, over time, corroded officers' behaviour, so there has been organisational failure as a consequence. If there were in place a chief executive strong enough to back his or her officers when councillors overstep the line, then you could begin to push back behaviour into the right places," he says.
A great deal now rests on the ability of the authority to find a permanent, new chief executive with the skills to pull the authority back from the brink. Finding such a job candidate may be a challenge and it is not yet clear whether this appointment will be made before the general election, although O'Higgins says the process is actively under way.
Still questions to be asked
There are still more questions to be asked about Doncaster. Is this an indictment or endorsement of the inspection process? Not surprisingly, O'Higgins takes the latter view.
"It is an open call whether we should have intervened earlier, but the tenor of the times was against it," he comments. "But this case demonstrates why the Audit Commission needs to exist. We didn't have to ask anybody to intervene here. Our report, while brutal, is straightforward. We are trusted to call it as it is, and we have done so in this case."
Did the Audit Commission act soon enough, given that its own report says Doncaster has been failing for 15 years? O'Higgins says that some councillors in Doncaster have been "very sophisticated" in their actions, suggestion that they are changing while in fact continuing to behave in a dysfunctional way.
There have of course been a number of interventions by central government at the council over a number of years. But it has taken until yesterday to get emergency measures in place. "Until the recent ministerial intervention in children's services, the council had been successful in deflecting all previous attempts to address its problems," acknowledges the Audit Commission report.
The report criticises the behaviour of the controversial elected mayor, the English Democrat Peter Davies. It says he is "not averse to provocative and inflammatory statements" and says he "'does not always act in a way which demonstrates the need for an elected mayor to lead his authority and represent all the people in Doncaster".
Senior councillors are also taken to task. The report says: "Some influential councillors place their antagonism towards the mayor and the mayoral system, and the achievements of their political objectives, above the needs of the people of Doncaster, and their duty to lead the continuous improvement of services."
It says senior officials at the council have struggled to provide leadership. "Some have become used to the dysfunctional politics of the council and no longer seek to maintain proper boundaries between definitions of the respective roles of officers and councillors."
The report concludes: "The people of Doncaster are not well-served by their council." Many, not just those who live in Doncaster, will be asking about the role of an elected mayor, and the role of democratically-elected councillors at this moment, when central government has had to step in to rescue their authority.
From Bubb's Blog
From Whitehall Watch
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