Where the Bodies Are Buried

Last night I sent the following message out on Twitter

I didn't get a reply. Well not via Twitter anyway.

Today the Post reveals that Barker has taken 'voluntary redundancy'. I suspect the race is now on to FoI request how much his pay-off is.

Pugwash has, of course only been back five minutes since his 5 months unpaid leave and, according to his blog was last seen in Albania. They really don't want him talking to the press do they?

Looking at the cuts consultation list it seems that NCC are planning chopping a big chunk out of Communications, £213k next year alone, the loss of the Director post will cover about £90k of that I reckon. Presumably they'll now just be reporting directly to the Deputy Chief Exec/Corp Director of resources, meaning a layer of management is removed. I reckon that'll be popular for a number of reasons.

The Post gives a handy breakdown of the various scandals that Pugwash has found himself embroiled in (well, the ones they can print anyway) so have a look at that or click on the tag at the foot of this article for a longer history.

News just in - Pugwash claims he's only on statutory redundancy

That's almost certainly what an FoI will try and claim too. Seems kind of unlikely though really, doesn't it? How would they stop him blabbing about where the bodies are buried?

Corporate WankSpeak Uber Alles

Back in the good old days, when I used to do something useful for a living, I had what I considered to be a healthy distaste, nay hatred, for jargon. I think it stemmed mainly from the fact that, as a welfare rights adviser, I had to translate preposterously complicated rules into a format that the average Joe/Josephine on the street would understand.

Drafting leaflets was particularly difficult because you have limited space, the person you are trying to help has gone away with their leaflet and can't ask you to clarify a point or tell them what DLA stands for. You also have to balance that with the fact that it is quite possible to simplify information to the point that what you are telling them is not just inadequate but has actually reached the point of being wrong.

On moving into management, I instinctively saw no reason to change this approach. After all you are still trying to get a message across to someone about what they need to do or know about. When I was still at Leicester I went to a meeting which was supposed to be a kind of touchy feely departmental show-and-tell thing. Heads of Service (i.e. managers who were at least a grade or two above me) all did presentations and I've never heard so many three and four word acronyms in my life. I sat there wondering if the people talking were aware that half their audience had no idea what they were going on about or perhaps were doing it deliberately because it made them feel clever.

I then studied for a management qualification (Professional Certificate in Management at the Open Uni seeing as you ask. Oh sorry, you didn't) and the course was refreshingly free of jargon. I found this encouraging and resolved to stick with the jargon free approach. As time went on I not only became more certain that the main reason for most people using jargon was not just about making themselves appear clever (in their minds) but to hide the fact that they were often thick as pigshit and had little or no idea what they were talking about.

Anyway, the purpose of this preamble is to try and give you some idea why this report made me so spitting angry and nearly lose the will to live. That and maybe that my leg is still in plaster and the anti-depressants have run out.

To save you some time it's formal title is -

'Communications and Marketing - Efficiency and Ensuring Value for Money - savings Made in Recent Years and the Introduction of a New Budget and Spend Prioritisation Model'. 

It's written by the Director of Communications Stephen Barker, presumably on a rare moment away from posting videos of his staff on the internet. Note the use of the words 'prioritisation' and 'model'; I'm not claiming to be scientific but in my view these words tend to be reliable indicators that you are about to be drowned in bullshit. If you take one thing home with you from this, that's my tip of the day.

That ear-splitting 'arooga' noise you can hear is the 'NCCLols Translation Service' emergency alarm going off so I'd better quickly pass on the results of putting the above through our patented process. Essentially the report's true title is -

'Why it is Only Right and Proper to Take Money Away From Individual Comms Budgets and Give it to Me - I get to Keep My Empire Intact - Everyone Else Can Fuck Off'.

The BS just gets worse. Check this out from para 2.1 -

"It has not proven practicable to achieve a saving of £100k pa via committees becoming paperless during 2009/10 due to a more elongated new technology adoption profile being required."

I'm sorry, "...a more elongated new technology adoption profile..."?

NCCLols translation service -

"I could just have said that it's taken a bit longer to show councillors where the computer 'on' button is but the word 'elongated' gives me a bit of a shudder."

And get these -

"This model can result in bottom up – rather than priority-driven - spend prioritisation..."

"Pulling all Communications & Marketing budgets currently held by service teams...together and under the control of Communications & Marketing...will enable priority-driven prioritisation of communications spend in line with the Council Plan and The Nottingham Plan..."

What the fuck are you talking about with your 'priority driven prioritisations'?* What other kind of 'prioritisations' are there if not 'priority driven'? We don't need to qualify 'arse scratching' with 'arse driven'.

Remember, this is the Director of Communications here, in other words somebody who should be able to string a sentence together. Don't get me wrong, I don't claim to be the greatest communicator in the world, I like to think I do ok given enough time but 'priority driven prioritisation'? Is it just me?

No doubt the councillors on the 'Overview and Scrutiny Committee' will read the report, nod sagely at the need for further elongation of their new technology profiles and ignore the voices screaming in their heads that it's all bollocks. The report will be 'noted' and everyone will go home secure in the feeling of a job well done.

* Just in case anyone is wondering or perhaps thinking that I'm just being a bit thick, what I think Stephen is trying to tell us here is that individual services are setting their own 'prioritisations' which are not necessarily in line with the big grown up corporate priorities - and so aren't properly 'priority-driven'. Essentially, what I'm saying here is that he could have been a bit clearer about that.

NCC Website Techies in "Bollocks to EU Directive" Shocker

Nottingham City Council has signaled a big 'up yours Delors*' to the EU Services Directive according to a survey of council websites by Socitm, the 'membership association for all ICT professionals working in Local Authorities and the Public and Third Sectors and suppliers to those sectors'.

The Directive, which has been in force in the UK via regulations since 28 December 2009, requires local authorities (and other public bodies) to make it easier for businesses to find out about their responsibilities to trade legally across Europe. The UK regulations require that anybody wanting to provide certain services should be able to find out about and apply for the various regulatory requirements online and Socitm looked at council websites to see how well they complied. It's fascinating stuff believe me.

Now, to put the rest of this post into context, I think it's fair to first point out that, according to Socitm's survey, very few councils did at all well.

But of course, this is 'Nottingham City Council LOLS' so we want to see how well NCC did, point and stare, then LOL at it.

Let's start with the overall assessment**. The survey asks how well NCC is responding to the aims of the Directive and possible answers are 0 - no info found, 1 - poor, 2 - satisfactory and 3 - very good.

The good news is that at least NCC didn't score 0 and believe me several councils did, astonishingly. NCC scored 1 - poor. Mind you, the assessor went on to flesh this rating out with the following comment-

"I saw no sign of the Directive being implemented."

Hmm, that's probably '1' that is pretty close to '0' then.

Specific areas they looked at included the process for applying to erect scaffolding close to a road, information that would be helpful to building contractors but which Socitm could find nothing about on NCC's website. They did better with information about registering a new food business with 5 positives out of 9 and scored 3 out of 7 for info provided on the admittedly somewhat esoteric process requirements for erecting cooling towers.

One area that caught my eye was the registering of Houses of Multiple Occupation, partly because at the last full council meeting there was a public question about areas being 'blighted' by HMOs and 'Councillor Clarke' (presumably actually Cllr Alan Clark who is portfolio holder for neighbourhood regeneration) appeared to claim some credit for NCC for lobbying for increased regulation of HMO 'change of use' planning applications.

Cllr Clark may therefore want to ponder the fact that NCC only scored 2 positives out of a possible 14 for information about how to register an HMO. In addition it was rated as '1 - poor' for ease of finding the information and '0 - not found' in a rating of the provision of service information. The assessor clarified this with -

"The information provided is more about what an HMO is, rather than how to register."

You're not going to persuade landlords to comply with regulatory requirements by making it hard to find out about them are you?

So another resounding success for the NCC communications team here. Let's remember, this isn't a simple matter of best practice, we are talking here about a legal requirement. Perhaps Stephen Barker and chums could spend more of their £1.8m marketing and comms budget on complying with the law rather than producing glossy magazines.

*For the benefit of younger readers, this was a famous Sun headline in 1990 which has since become a symbol of gung ho anti EU sentiment, often with comic or ironic intent.

**In order to see the full report and the tables etc you need to register with Socitm so unfortunately I can't link to them. I'll leave it up to you whether you want to take my word for all the detail.