When John Henderson arrived at Staffordshire CC as chief executive in 2015 after an army career of 33 years, he realised it needed to be a more agile and confident organisation. ‘There was a mismatch between amazing capacity, knowledge and capability, and my colleagues’ level of confidence – which was well below that.’
The council quickly went down an agile working route that is ensuring the workforce is as ready as it can be for the scale of the challenge posed by an enemy like COVID-19.
John, whose army roles included commanding the NATO forces as a Colonel in Northern Afghanistan from 2004 onwards and another tour to Afghanistan as a Brigadier in Kandahar and Helmand, prioritised taking the council ‘down this smart working avenue’.
That means the council is well-prepared for these most unprecedented times. Speaking at the end of last week, he told The MJ: ‘Normally there are about 1,600 people working in this building. Today there are probably about 40. Basically we are running the operations team out of here on the ground floor. Everyone else is operating perfectly from home. Because we went down this agile working route we are working pretty much at full capacity. It’s worked really well for us.’
His experiences - including commanding a battalion during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 - give him a better ability that most to see that events such as the pandemic change lives – and ways of delivering services - permanently. ‘What I’m saying to my team is that in many ways things will probably not be the same again.’
One of the things he’s asking his team to do is identify approaches that are working better. For him, that includes the fact that the NHS have begun sharing data with the council on the most vulnerable. This is happening now that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) has moved to a full emergency response, with hubs being set up at speed to get food, medicines and other vital supplies to the most vulnerable and the shielded group.
‘The NHS are usually very picky about sharing patient data with us. We don’t actually need to know what their conditions are’, he said. ‘We just need to know where they live and what sort of care they need and how we can support them.
‘That for me is a really good example. If we can prove that works for the super-vulnerable, then that’s something we ought to when this is over say to the NHS “look that worked really well, and we didn’t screw up, we can work on this better”.’
The council fully expects the demand for social care workers to rise in the weeks ahead, as will the absence rate – ‘so the aim is to backfill’.
In anticipation, his organisation has launched its I Count campaign to mobilise the local authority workforce to switch roles and volunteer for social care home visits - ‘it’s about people making use of skills to flex into new roles in a crisis’– with the first one-day training package taking place last Friday. The campaign’s aim is ‘about bending an organization out of shape to actually make it suit the purposes of what we need for the response to COVID-19’.
In addition to the 660 staff who have come forward, the county is also offering about 80 students from Keele and Staffordshire universities and some local unemployed people temporary care worker contracts through its in-house care agency Nexxus Care.
The council is also in discussions with a number of large local employers whose workers are furloughed on 80% of their wages because of coronavirus to see if they can join the social care workforce at this time of need. ‘What we are going back to the employers and saying is that if you give us an undertaking that you will not hold your employees in breach of contract, we could go ahead and at that point we have some options in terms of giving them a 20% uplift or whatever that looks like to incentivise people to come into the care workforce.’
Last week The MJ reported that senior figures were expressing frustration at the lack of pace in getting key supplies to the vulnerable and the shielded group – with a Whitehall source acknowledging there would be ‘glitches’. There have been issues, according to Henderson – but he is confident the situation will improve. ‘It has been a bit scatty over the last couple of weeks. Strangely enough I commanded my battalion during the war in Iraq in 2003 and there are quite a lot of similarities with the confusion. We all piled out into the desert and spent our time asking ‘who are you, what do you do?’
‘It was like multinational soup in there. Within a couple of weeks we had all worked out who we were, who we were working for, and any gaps and overlaps were sorted out really quickly. I’m already seeing that happening here.’ What he is saying to his staff is ‘don’t get ratty about this, and build relationships. People all want to do the right thing. What we need to do is work out who is doing what so that we don’t overlap or leave gaps.’
He agrees there is some tension concerning the response between the tiers in two-tier areas. While Staffordshire CC has ‘been immune from that’, he said that hasn’t been by chance. ‘We have taken a very careful view about remaining in contact with each other,‘ he explains.
‘For my staff, the instruction to them was I want you to be as accommodating as you possibly can when working with the boroughs and districts when it comes specifically around dealing with volunteers. This is because the boroughs and districts know their patch better than we do.
If the borough or district has a really good way of co-ordinating with their voluntary sector, the county council needs to work round that as opposed to imposing systems from above, he added.
He believes some changes to the way the response is being coordinated are coming, adding: ‘I don’t think the centrally controlled support to the super-vulnerable can be operationalised at a central level.’
This weekend the news came that the first food boxes have been delivered to vulnerable people being shielded from coronavirus, with councils leading the efforts to support communities. Staff are going to have to be ‘really flexible in the coming weeks as the situation changes’, he concluded.
He’d like to see the whole perception of local government emerge from the crisis much enhanced. ‘We do some amazing things in local government. People will see that your county, district or city council is actually an organization that does a really vital and brilliant job.’