Districts eye shared chief for five councils

Author: Ruth Keeling, LGC - Sep 1, 2011

A single chief executive could manage as many as five district councils at one time, the leader of Conservatives in local government has claimed.

LGA Conservative group head Gary Porter, who is also leader of South Holland DC and already shares his council’s chief executive with neighbouring Breckland DC, told LGC five councils under one chief executive was “definitely feasible”.

“One chief executive for five authorities is entirely feasible. There are five days in the week so you could have one day a week in each authority,” he said.

“The county council chief executive in Lincolnshire looks after the same geographical area as seven district chiefs and most of the services he delivers have life and death consequences,” he added.

“I know chief executives in counties are more remote from the coalface, but so should district chief executives be.”

South Holland and Breckland DCs began sharing a management team a year ago and are now looking for a third partner to enter their shared arrangement.

They are one of at least three pairs of councils already sharing a chief executive and talking to neighbouring, and non-neighbouring local authorities about splitting their management costs between more tax payers. So far they are the only ones prepared to go on the record about their plans.

But Cllr Porter’s Breckland counterpart, William Nunn (Con), warned five councils could prove a step too far. “I don’t know what the optimum size would be: two works very well, I am pretty confident three will work well and four should work,” he said.

However, he warned too large a collection of local authorities could be counterproductive if extra management needed to be drafted in for day-to-day management.

“With any business there is obviously an optimum size after which the economies of scale start to fall away,” he said.

“Some of our shared services have got four authorities and that is proving incredibly efficient. There is the concept of five, but you might start to lose a lot of the savings.”

Cllr Nunn said councils needed to let go of the traditional view of running local government, with “managers in the localities”.

“You have to accept that the way the management works is almost a virtual management team. You don’t want officers spending three hours driving from one place to another,” he said.

“Some councillors are quite fearful about losing that personal contact with an individual officer. But I would rather keep my frontline officers than worry about having a director or chief executive in the building. I don’t need the expertise of a chief executive all day, every day,” he added

Terry Huggins, left, chief executive of both Breckland and South Holland DCs, said the financial situation meant having to “get the most” out of senior management but he warned shared management required new models of political leadership and administration.

“It requires local authorities to work in different ways, really embrace the strong executive leader model and work differently with senior management structures,” Mr Huggins said.

“I am delighted to be working with two forward-looking local authorities who are sharing chief executives and management structures and want to push the boundaries of what can work effectively. Where that ultimately will lead us - four, five or even nine - you can’t tell.”

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