There's a well-established narrative about council failure: missed savings, poor investments, financial collapse. But look beyond the headlines and a different pattern emerges – less about balance sheets, more about people.
I've read countless Best Value reviews and intervention reports. In almost every one, the same issues surface – dysfunctional leadership, poor cohesion at the top, cultures that avoid challenge and leadership teams misaligned on purpose or performance. These aren't anomalies. They are consistent symptoms of a deeper problem, namely how we structure and support our councils' corporate core.
The ‘golden triangle' of head of paid service, section 151 officer and monitoring officer sits at the heart of every council. These roles are vital, yet our expectations of how they function as a team remain vague. We treat them as individual appointments, not a collective leadership engine. When that engine misfires, the impact is systemic.
Without a strong, aligned corporate core, councils struggle to recover from difficulty. Those who are not in intervention struggle to move beyond adequacy to excellence. Yet our oversight systems don't reflect this reality.
Councils should be required to assess whether their leadership teams are functioning well, aligned in purpose, and equipped for the task ahead. We need clearer accountability for leadership performance.
The current approach waits for financial failure before action. By then, organisational decline is advanced. The early warning signs (staff turnover, disengagement, poor decision-making, cultural drift) are visible but have been ignored for too long.
I am a supporter and advocate of sector-led improvement and those councils who proactively engage in self-evaluation and learning benefit from the wealth of experience and support our sector has on offer. The gap emerges when leadership is either in denial, resistant or incapable of grasping the change their organisations need and therefore unreceptive to the support on offer.
As a sector we must do better at supporting leadership performance if we want to avoid repeating the same failures.
As we reshape local government, now could be the time to apply a different level of rigour to how leadership teams are assessed and supported. We need a performance framework for the corporate core that includes behaviours, leadership, cohesion, and values. These must be of primary concern as they are the non-negotiable foundations of success.
This means elevating the role of HR and OD, demanding higher-level expertise and input from the individuals who hold these roles. People professionals know how to build effective teams and create conditions for high performance, but too often they're brought in afterwards to fix issues they weren't asked to help design. This is a missed opportunity.
I liken this shift to moving from a three-legged stool to a four-legged chair. Alongside finance, law, and operations, we must embed a statutory focus on leadership, organisational development and culture. This will create a more balanced model of corporate leadership and better equip councils to navigate challenges.
Councils should be required to assess whether their leadership teams are functioning well, aligned in purpose, and equipped for the task ahead. We need clearer accountability for leadership performance.
As a sector, we haven't done enough thinking about what good looks like at the top. If current reforms are to deliver more than structural change, that's the work we must prioritise.
Resilience, recovery, good governance and innovation don't come from process alone. They come from people. If we want high-performing, future-fit councils, we need to put leadership and culture where they belong: right at the core.
Pam Parkes is president of the Public Services People Managers' Association
The PPMA Annual Conference is currently under way until 11 April. Find out more at www.ppma.org.uk
