The local authority’s strategic director of council management talks to Mike Thatcher about the challenges of the section 151 role, turning round a failing finance function and helping to fund the Commonwealth Games.
[This article is part of a series of interviews with section 151 officers in partnership with CCLA Investment Management]
The slogan for the recent hugely successful Commonwealth Games was “Be Bold, Be Birmingham”. It’s a motto that could equally apply to the career path of the host council’s section 151 officer, Becky Hellard.
Hellard joined Birmingham City Council as the interim director for finance and governance in October 2019 and was appointed to the permanent role of strategic director of council management in September 2021. She previously held interim finance roles at Wiltshire County Council and the London Borough of Redbridge, plus permanent roles at Liverpool City Council and Bradford Metropolitan District Council.
Each of these positions brought significant challenges requiring a bold approach. When Hellard joined Birmingham in 2019, it followed warnings from a government-appointed improvement panel that the council’s financial position was “immensely serious”. A review by CIPFA awarded the authority one star based on the institute’s five-star financial management model.
Hellard began to turn things around, working with her deputy, Sara Pitt, to introduce a focus on continuous improvement, create business partner roles and implement exception and risk-based reporting. Two years later, the authority was awarded three stars by CIPFA and lauded as an “exemplar in the transformation of financial management capability”.
It was at this point that Hellard took on the permanent position and the council adopted a new structure under the “Investing in our future” strategy. The strategic director of council management was given a huge empire – with responsibility for the council’s “engine room” (including finance, HR, procurement, legal and IT), as well as front-line services, such as revenues and benefits and customer services. In total, the directorate employs 3,000 people.
Untraditional approach
‘It’s the ‘beating heart’ of the organisation. We are forming an offer to all those front-line services. You haven’t got one offer from finance, one from legal and one from procurement, which is very much how traditional local authorities work,” she says.
Hellard believes that this model – based on the business partner concept – could work in other, particularly large, authorities.
“I’ve been in this business over 30 years, and I’m absolutely convinced this is one of the best models I’ve come across. My finance business partners are my eyes and ears, with my section 151 hat on, and the fact that they are joined up with all the procurement issues, the performance issues, IT issues, gives a much more rounded picture coming back into the centre.”
Birmingham City Council has continued to work with CIPFA, and a recent interim assessment suggested the finance function was “well on its way to four stars”. The authority has now targeted the attainment of four stars by April 2023 in its business plan.
Progress is clearly being made, but the statutory responsibility of being a section 151 officer always brings particular pressures. Hellard will be discussing the changing and challenging role of the section 151 officer in a session at Room151’s Local Authority Treasurers Investment Forum and FDs’ Summit in London on 13 September.
She highlights the uncertainty faced by all s151s. “You can have all the frameworks in place, the guidelines and regulations, everything that you would expect a good organisation and a good section 151 officer to do. But ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’.”
The uncertainty is coupled with severe financial pressures, caused by ongoing funding cuts, soaring inflation, a social care crisis and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) financial black holes created by significant increases in demand. In Birmingham, the impact of the “fair cost of care” could be anywhere between £30m and £70m, while SEND is likely to cost somewhere in the region of £12m.
These are pressures felt by all local authorities, but the scale in Birmingham magnifies the issues.
You can have all the frameworks in place, the guidelines and regulations, everything that you would expect a good organisation and a good section 151 officer to do. But ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’.
Balancing the budget
“As the pressure ratchets up, section 151s are going to be put under even more pressure to sign off a balanced budget that may not be as deliverable as we would like. There’s a personal pressure in the market. And I believe that that is making a lot of people think twice about going for these roles.”
Hellard believes there has also been a “dip in the talent pool” caused by the cutting of training budgets during the austerity years from 2010 to 2012. Things are now starting to improve – partly thanks to the government’s apprenticeship levy – but there remain recruitment gaps in strategic finance roles.
And there are always new priorities to deal with. For Birmingham, of course, the recent focus has been on the Commonwealth Games. The games were universally regarded as a great success with plaudits for the way they were organised, the number of tickets sold, the friendliness of the volunteers, the quality of the facilities and the sporting spectacle. Not to mention the hugely popular 10-metre high “Raging Bull” statue.
“The games have taken up a lot of my time, I’d probably say it averaged out at 15% of my time each week over the last three years. Birmingham City Council and the DCMS [the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport] were funding partners, split 25/75, with the public funding totalling £778m. Not only is it a lot of money, it’s extremely high profile.”
With more than 1.5 million tickets sold, the Birmingham games are said to be on track to be one of the most successful in history. The main games may have finished, but the finance work goes on – with Hellard’s team working on reconciliations and estimating what the impact has been, and continues to be, on Birmingham as a whole.
“We need to reconcile where we are with the financial position, which we know will be well within budget. And then what happens with those monies that weren’t required? Of course, I’m going to be saying, as I’m sure my chief exec will be, they need to stay in the city. Clearly, we need to put a coherent plan to Treasury and there’s still a lot of work to be done on that.
“Legacy is vital for the city. These games were always for all – it is vital that this legacy is open to all.”
And while all this is going on, there’s a climate emergency to respond to, with Birmingham committing to reducing CO2 emissions by 60% by 2027 and being net zero by 2030. It’s a very ambitious target, I suggest.
‘It’s incredibly ambitious,” she says. “But that is Birmingham – we are bold and we are ambitious.”
Becky Hellard will be speaking at LATIF and the FDs’ Summit on 13 September at the etc venues St Paul’s conference centre in central London. Attendance is free for local government treasurers and section 151 officers.
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