From the council house repairs desk to leading light at big city

BY HER own admission, Joanne Roney’s career route to the top of local government is “not the most common”.

Taking over the reins at one of the biggest councils in the country looks set to be the culmination of a career which started on the council house repairs desk.

And that less-than-glamorous first rung on the ladder was not part of the graduate fast-track schemes so common today.

“I loved school but nobody in my family has ever been to university so I guess that was never in the DNA of next steps. What was in the DNA was I wanted a coat. I wanted to buy a new coat, I’d only ever had handme-downs,” she says.

“So I knew I needed some money. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, shall we say, I had only ever had hand me down coats and when I got to 16 my biggest ambition was to earn some money and buy myself a coat.

“My dad was on a three-dayweek, he was an electrician, My mum wasn’t working at the time. I thought ‘I’ve got to get a job’.”

Her apprenticeship at Birmingham City Council paid for the much coveted new coat, and set her on a path that would lead all the way to the top.

And the driving force behind her career has switched from coats to an unswerving belief in the power of councils to benefit communities.

“If I’m honest I think my life could have taken some different paths. I have an amazing family, they are all brilliant, but I didn’t grow up in the greatest of areas, there were lots of other influences shall we say.

“Birmingham City Council putting me on an apprenticeship, sending me to college paying for me to do further education, that led me down a path that makes me always believe that when local government’s good, when people do the right things for residents, you transform lives.”

Via spells at Kirklees and Sheffield councils, Ms Roney arrived at Wakefield in 2008 to take up her first chief executive role. A change of government in Westminster two years later would see the arrival of austerity and a very different challenge for councils as budgets were, and continue to be, squeezed, forcing severe cutbacks and job losses.

She says: “There have been some really tough things, telling people you are making them redundant. The first wave when it’s voluntary redundancies and people want to retire early, you’re reconfiguring, fine. This last budget round, we’ve pretty much got a plan now for 2020, and that’s been

really tough.

“Now you’re cutting away and stopping services, we’ve gone as far as we can with transformation. We are now about genuinely saying we need to stop doing some stuff, and that’s hard.” The squeeze on council budgets continues as the Government withdraws its support as part of a plan for local authorities to become self-sufficient by the end of the decade. At the same time, councils face growing pressures on services, particularly care of the elderly.

“I am an optimist in my heart because I’m driven by the passion of local government being so important to transforming people’s lives. We are the best people to do it, we are the closest people to communities, we are the only people with a democratic mandate to do what we do, we’ve got to get it right,” Ms Roney says. “My mum had alzheimers and dementia. That was a really tough time in the family until she died. When you’re in that system and you’re trying to get the right services for your beloved family, you realise the complexities and frustrations of the system.

“There has to be a better way to configure services locally. Will that drive out millions and solve the budget deficit crisis in the NHS? I don’t think it will. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.” Ms Roney was speaking to

as she prepared to begin her new job as chief executive at Manchester City Council. Not only one of the biggest council jobs, she also takes over from Sir Howard Bernstein, one of the most respected figures in local government who is credited in his 19 years in charge with playing a leading role in transforming the city.

“I guess one of the attractions of Manchester is that they are at the forefront of the public sector reform agenda, the devolution agenda, so if we’re entering a new era of local government, the excitement of Manchester is find a way to make that work for the rest of local government.”