The position of the s151 officer is an insecure one in current times. Agent 151 asks whether the stresses and strains of managing a dwindling budget is getting in the way of doing a good job.
Nobody likes the man who brings bad news, says the Sentry in the Greek tragedy Antigone, by Sophocles, and how right he is.
We local authority finance directors are often the nicest and most charming of folk, but in tough times we can achieve historically low approval ratings that would rival Donald Trump — just by doing our job properly. To make matters worse, having delivered the bad news and made ourselves unpopular, we are then all too often on the receiving end of some pretty dysfunctional behaviour.
In the best councils the relationship between the chief executive and the finance director provides a firm axis around which the operations of the organisation can turn. But not all authorities enjoy such a blessing. The chief can sometimes react very badly to being told the hideous truth, and when that happens it can be dangerous for all concerned.
The chief that refuses to accept your (perfectly correct) numbers and openly challenges or ridicules them seriously undermines your credibility and ultimately their own. The chief that insists upon basing the medium term budget on an unevidenced transformation plan is not your friend. The chief that instructs you to change the numbers to suit the narrative they have been developing with the leader is playing a very dangerous game, and you should quite rightly tell them where to go. And any chief that gets rid of their finance director for telling the truth is quite simply steering the Titanic directly into the iceberg.
And yet we observe these things happening in local authorities, and they happen most frequently when the times are toughest and the bad news is really bad.
Behaving badly
Board colleagues can also behave badly. Affecting deafness and/or amnesia is one way of avoiding the implications of bad news. Coming up with a rival set of numbers is another. Hiding underspends (or overspends) away is far from helpful at the best of times. Rattling skeletons is a time-honoured response from social care colleagues. Focusing on process and slowing things down instead of dealing with the substantive issue is another diversionary tactic. Lobbying members — for example, for protection in advance of a savings round — is also frequently seen.
Members too can sometimes fail to see the upside of being told the unvarnished truth. In the run up to an election they are focused upon spending, not saving, and any bad news about finances that derails their election campaign is going to receive a rough landing. If the bad news involves the loss of any political capital (e.g. accusations of being unable to manage the council, unable to control officers, or having to abandon council tax promises) then the impulse to find an officer scapegoat can sometimes be hard to control.
The main cause of bad news is government funding cuts, and this has been the case for some time. You’d think people would have got the hang of it by now, but, human nature being what it is, optimism always seems to creep in and people plan for budget growth even when it is patently not on the menu. As a result, funding cuts are always painful.
Unexpected growth in costs is another cause of bad news that has recently manifested itself in the shape of a national social care crisis, and of course it was the finance directors who had to break the news, just before a round of local elections. Consequently, trying to explain why the finance crystal ball did not predict the crisis has been a challenge many of us have had to face.
So what can you do? Build the relationships and store up a lot of political capital you can burn when things get difficult. Condition your colleagues to expect accurate and helpful numbers that enable discussions about what action to take. Manage expectations by planning a long way ahead and being pessimistic. Come armed with solutions. Hope they don’t shoot the messenger. And above all, don’t take it personally. You are still the same old charming you, after all.
Agent151 is a senior local authority finance director.
