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It's an unenviable job being a human resources manager for a local authority. Those at the top, the corporate management team and the chief executive, regard him or her (increasingly her) as the keeper of the payroll and rations who lives in a cubbyhole somewhere along the corridor past the assistant head of environmental services. Those on the frontline see the HR manager as the wielder of the P45 whose task is to slash the workforce as cheaply as possible and avoid the cost of expensive compulsory redundancies. As if this is not enough, the cabinet and leader have their own agendas which quite often run contrary to all that the HR manager is trying to achieve in pursuit of an efficient, transformed, flexible workforce. Take the recent move towards introducing the living wage for low-paid council employees. This is a commendable policy which even injects more money into the local economy. But it is not very helpful when it comes to reducing the council wage bill. As one chief executive said to me: ‘I told the administration that if it wants to bring in a living wage then that's up to them but they'll have to find the £100m cost somewhere else in the budget.' At a recent HR seminar I attended one manager commented in frustration at her politicians: ‘I'm implementing a living wage policy for all low paid staff. ‘It makes no sense economically. ‘I don't have a problem recruiting manual staff on minimum wage. ‘We pay more than the private sector.' The same argument applies, say, to reforming terms and conditions for firefighters or, indeed longer-term, changing pensions. The question is how to strike a balance between the aims of local politicians, for whom protecting their own council workforce may be the first stage in protecting their local economy, and the needs of the council management facing huge cutbacks in spending and trying to avoid cuts to frontline services. Transformation is a euphemism for saying the back office and council staff need to be reduced first before the services themselves which is a policy the public certainly supports. But if the cabinet decides there is a limit to implementing a flexible workforce strategy then spending cuts must fall elsewhere, even though the corporate management team and the HR manager believe organisational change must take priority before service cuts. As management prepares for the next Spending Review such a dilemma can only become even more acute. Michael Burton's book, The Politics of Public Sector Reform from Thatcher to the Coalition, is out now, published by Palgrave Macmillan

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Director's chair: Coping with the Living Wage

By Michael Burton | 09 October 2013

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