To think Local Government is full of pointless jobs that exist just to justify managers’ roles?

I was going to post something but at the end of another long week of doing my very stressful, degrading and demoralising 'pointless' local government job I just don't have the energy. What's most depressing is the amount of posters who seem to agree with the OP.

Never mind. At least I've got the next two days to pretend my job isn't shit and people don't think I'm an imbecile for doing it, before the hamster wheel starts again on Monday.

Why anybody in local government does what they do I've no idea. We must be gluttons for punishment.

Its ludicrous

So you want social workers and planning officers with no construction training going round fixing potholes.

This is too fucking ridiculous to come with a reply.

Council often spend £££ on consultants to tell them how to improve. They are running so lean now that there is no improvement efficiences to be made so the deckchairs which are fading and sunburnt get rearranged. Meanwhile trolleys full of cash get stuffed into the NHS.

I'm not sure this is true. Our local authority is one continuous carousel of Management of Change processes tearing through department after department, before starting all over again. Adult Social Care, Children's Services and Education are bled dry ‐teams are operating on skeleton staff who are exhausted and unable to ever catch up on their workload. Schools whose pupil numbers are dropping are closing.

BiL worked as a hired consultant, driving these processes in local authorities up and down the country until ten years ago, essentially making thousands of people redundant. He'd go in with a matrix protocol for rolling out cost-cutting measures and restructuring programmes across a council and produce a much leaner, supposedly more cost-effective 'version 2' at the other end. He doesn't think there's much left to 'trim' now without seriously impacting the efficient running of essential services.

Oona

i used to work in retail, and im telling you right now that if we were short staffed in the shop there is no way anyone from an office shop would be sent to help out

when dhs firm is short of auditors they don’t send someone from the tax team to help

so no…it doesn’t happen in the private sector,

Why can't public sectors be multi-skilled?
It seems silly to have people sat around in offices when there are potholes all over the roads and bins aren't being emptied in Birmingham.

This wouldn't be allowed in any private sector business, if there is work to be done, it gets done.

It’s impossible to generalise judging by the experiences recounted in this thread. In my experience working with councils, they are often run quite differently and I am sure there is a lot of variation between areas too.

Some departments are massively stretched, often statutory services such as social care. Others are working on non-statutory stuff that the private sector would do a better job with, with little to no accountability. I think it’s immoral to not sack the useless ones, when people are going without food or heating in order to afford their council tax.

I don’t know enough about local gov to comment, but having worked in central gov I can well imagine you’re right. In my own experience, it didn’t seem to be due to individuals’ work ethic or ability for the most part but to culture and deeply-embedded expectations, standards and ways of working. Unfortunately the only known cure, and I think the only thing that has ever really worked - and even that not in all cases - is to get the consultants in to get the wind up ‘em. AKA even more £bn of public money to the private sector - you know, the ones that also happen to own and run the services that the same inefficient govt contract out to.

Quite.

Obviously none of us can take for every department of every local authority, but my team work with colleagues in bordering LAs fairly regularly, and know for a fact that all of those LAs are stretched to the limit and trying to balance caseloads that are ridiculous.
I'd love to know where this LA is StillSlowly works for as it is clearly the exception to the rule. Any news source will tell you Councils across the Country are either technically bankrupt or close to bankruptcy. None of those LAs are employing staff to twiddle their thumbs.

But LAs have to be careful that in dismantling the systems that sit around social care they’re not inadvertently putting more pressure on the service. Eg - an absolute shit and understaffed HR department causes massive problems when needing to recruit social care staff and results in more pressure on social care managers and staff that then take them away from the core of their job, protecting vulnerable people. A functioning HR department supports social care to recruit, induct, train and manage social care staff. There has to be a balance because social doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Another example is leisure services, parks maintenance etc - lack of investment in those increases social isolation and anti-social behaviour and feeds the cycles that result in people needing social care intervention. LAs are an entire ecosystem (together with local health, businesses, schools etc) that needs to be finely balanced.

Agree, I have clearly been doing the public sector wrong for the last 22 years...

Social care are stretched beyond belief and there is a severe lack of funding but I think other departments could do with looking at. Waste needs cutting back to channel funding into social care imo.

Source? Like actual real source, not the Daily Mail.

I'd be very interested to hear about what directorate you work in and what sort of role you do.

I mean, we can all claim experience of just about anything on an anonymous chat forum.

I have worked in a role that straddles NHS, education and social care and everyone is on heir knees. Working vast numbers of unpaid extra hours, firefighting, ever decreasing resources and ever increasing demands.

In my area the libraries have been closed, waiting lists are horrendous, housing lists run into years and years, there are no special school places. Every service I have contact with is totally overstretched.

In a previous life I was a sales manager with a bank for 5 years, I have also been a teacher before moving into LA roles. It's not as though I have nothing to compare it to.

It's no good people coming on here and saying that this must be the case because their auntie's neighbour's bear friend worked for the council in the 80s and everyone was lazy. That is many generations ago and nothing like today.

Yeah 😀

someone on another thread was talking about team leaders earning 80k

I need to know where these jobs are so i can tell my team leader 😀

or maybe not….she’s really good and i wouldn’t want to lose her 🧐

Well we get them every year, and we have constant targets to meet. If you’re off sick too much, this gets investigated too. I appreciate it doesn’t happen where you work, and that’s shocking, but it does happen where I work. You have to show what you’ve done, it’s expected

pretty much the only thing these threads are showing me is that (as with every place of employment) councils where local or county are all different

we have targets, appraisals and disciplinary procedures, I have to complete a timesheet which shows exactly what I’ve done that day and we are losing staff and having a recruitment freeze.

generalisatIons help nobody

When I left the council, my department had more managers than staff technically . All the staff were part time and managers full time.
When I started we had one manager and dozens of staff and we were a great department.
Over the years individuals came in who created roles for themselves managing people and buildings, but in reality doing very very little. My main manager spent all his time trying to work out how to cut more staff so he could get a pay review for running an ‘efficient department’.

At the end I was part time doing the job 3 full time people had done 10 years before and I got nothing but grief for not managing. I was bullied out and they were then shocked about work not getting done.
They have cut those manager roles now but haven’t repopulated the actual staff still. It’s a shitshow.

They can't use the internet but have nothing to do? What kind of savagery is this? Why not deploy them elsewhere for that time period or just let them stay at home?

Honestly you don’t. It’s soul destroying.

Now I feel like a chump for this, clearly I need a workplace where I can put my feet up all day.

Well we get them every year, and we have constant targets to meet. If you’re off sick too much, this gets investigated too. I appreciate it doesn’t happen where you work, and that’s shocking, but it does happen where I work. You have to show what you’ve done, it’s expected.

I work there too and don’t recognise your experiences. Maybe don’t tar us all with the same brush?

Fair enough - sorry I wasn’t aiming my comment at you specifically. A lot of people are saying things that don’t reflect my experience of the public sector, who presumably don’t work in the public sector but have incorrect perceptions about it, and it frustrates me. No one I know is sitting there twiddling their thumbs. Genuinely, if people have skills to do a better job with public funds, there are roles out there to do just that.

I do work there, my experience is current.