By Liam Young, Senior Consultant at Tile Hill.
For much of the past year, councils have been recruiting with one eye on reorganisation.
Some permanent appointments were put on hold and vacancies were left open. Interim leaders were brought in because it seemed unwise to make a long-term appointment when the shape of an organisation might soon change.
Those decisions made sense at the time. The problem is that the context they were based on has changed.
The Government has withdrawn its decisions for four areas and opened a review of the wider Local Government Reorganisation programme, with plans elsewhere paused. Councils that had been working towards a reasonably defined destination are now dealing with a much less certain one.
There will be a temptation to wait again. I think that would be a mistake.
People have already made career decisions based on the previous timetable, and councils still have services to run. The recruitment decisions made for LGR now need to be looked at again.
Our research gives some sense of how much has already happened. Tile Hill surveyed 170 senior officers across unitary, county and district councils in June and July. Three quarters said LGR had affected their career plans, up from 61% the previous year. Almost a third had explored or applied for another role in the previous three months, while 44% had started informal conversations about their career outside their organisation.
Those findings came before the latest announcement.
We don’t yet know how people will respond to the review. We do know that some decisions can’t be undone. If somebody has already left a council, the change in direction doesn’t bring them back. If recruitment has been delayed for months, the vacancy is still there. If somebody has been acting up while an authority waits for clarity, they are still carrying that extra responsibility.
The figures on recruitment are particularly telling. A quarter of the officers we surveyed reported delays to permanent recruitment. More than half said reliance on interim leadership had increased and 47% reported higher staff turnover as a result of LGR. Where councils were losing people, director-level posts and specialist roles were among the hardest hit.
So the question for councils now is fairly practical: which staffing decisions still make sense?
A permanent recruitment campaign that was stopped because a role might disappear could now need to restart. An interim appointment may still be the right answer where the organisation genuinely needs flexibility. In other cases, an interim brief written six months ago may bear little resemblance to the work that needs doing today.
Someone brought in to prepare a service for transition, for example, may now be needed to restore management capacity or get a savings programme back on track.
Councils should be going through these appointments one by one rather than assuming the previous plan can simply remain in place until the Government provides another answer.
There is a wider issue here too. Uncertainty has already affected the way some leadership teams are working.
In our survey, 41% of senior leaders said they had seen more short-term decision-making in their immediate leadership team. A third had seen greater risk aversion or decisions being deferred.
It isn’t hard to understand why. If you expect the organisation to look very different in a year’s time, there is an obvious incentive to postpone decisions that somebody else may soon inherit.
But councils can’t stay in that position indefinitely.
The work hasn’t stopped. Budgets still need to balance and services still need leadership. Devolution is continuing, as are reforms across social care, education, housing and planning. Meanwhile, 73% of the people we surveyed said the time they were spending on LGR-related activity had increased over the previous year. More than a third said they had made direct trade-offs between that work and core service delivery.
There is also a very human side to this which can get lost in discussion about structures and timetables.
People will be reassessing their options.
An officer who had been thinking about leaving because their council was expected to disappear may now decide to stay. Someone who was interested in a bigger job in a new unitary authority could feel differently. A chief officer who had agreed to see an organisation through to a known transition date may be less comfortable committing to a process with no clear end point.
Our survey found that 35% of respondents were considering interim or consultancy work. Some 28% said LGR had made them more likely to leave local government, while 18% were considering retiring earlier.
For councils with live recruitment campaigns, that makes it worth picking up the phone again.
Candidates who previously said no may have changed their minds. Those already in a process may want to know whether the job they applied for is still the same job. Councils need to be clear about what they can offer and equally clear about what they don’t yet know.
Trying to offer certainty where there isn’t any won’t help. Experienced candidates will see through it.
The review also comes as the Government develops its wider devolution plans through Rewiring the State. If stronger strategic authorities take on more responsibility and resources, the senior local government jobs market may develop differently from the one many of us expected a year ago.
Much of the conversation around LGR has centred on the creation of larger councils and what that would mean for senior roles. A stronger mayoral or strategic tier creates a different set of possibilities.
Councils may need leaders who are comfortable working across those boundaries and representing their place within a more powerful regional structure. Strategic authorities will need people with the experience to take on devolved responsibilities and turn investment into delivery.
That may change where employers look for candidates as well. Secondments and movement between central and local government could bring people into the market who would not previously have appeared on the usual shortlist.
None of this means councils should try to predict exactly what the review will produce. They can’t.
What they can do is stop treating recruitment decisions made under the old timetable as fixed.
Look again at the vacancies being carried because of LGR. Check whether interim appointments still have the right brief. Speak to people whose plans were shaped by reorganisation and find out whether those plans have changed.
The structure of local government may still be unsettled for some time. The workforce can’t be left waiting with it.
For the full survey findings behind this piece (including how senior leaders are approaching retention, resourcing and career planning through reorganisation), download LGR & Devolution: From Anticipation to Opportunity.
