RECRUITMENT FROZEN OVER BUDGET DEFICIT
WEST Yorkshire Combined Authority had to issue a recent freeze on recruitment because of fears about overspending and an impending £4m budget shortfall.
Managing director Ben Still told staff that “a difficult decision” had been taken to temporarily halt recruitment at a time when the authority had been expanding its workforce with a series of well-paid officer appointments.
Writing in October, in an internal blog seen by The Yorkshire
Post, Mr Still said: “Some of you will be aware that we have had a bit of a budget issue in recent weeks.
“In preparing the opening position for the 2018/19 budget setting process, finance reported a revenue budget gap that was c.£4m, but which, more worryingly, grows year on year, due to inflation, concessionary pressures, a rising overall pay bill, and our additional recruitment activity as part of our ‘organisational design’ programme. The revenue sources to plug this gap looked inadequate.
“As a leadership team we took a difficult decision to pause the recruitments while we could be sure that we weren’t going to offer people jobs that we could not then afford to keep going forwards.
“The issue was sufficiently concerning to me that we sounded out combined authority members and the LEP chair and discussed some of the challenges.
“This was particularly difficult as we in WYCA are talking about growth of parts of our organisation against a backdrop of year on year relentless cuts in our partner local authority budgets.”
At one point in August, WYCA had 26 open job advertisements, the majority for senior roles with salaries ranging from £39,000 to £60,000, which represented a significant number of posts for an organisation employing less than 500 people in total.
WYCA’s most recent accounts also showed a wage bill rising from £15.2m in 2015/16 to £17.4m – an increase of more than 14 per cent.
Mr Still, who became WYCA’s first managing director when the post was created last year and has a salary package of £172,000, said “further work about our risk appetite and ability to borrow against future income” had now allowed for the most of the recruitment freeze to be lifted.
But he went on to acknowledge that there were significant questions about the authority’s financial management and said there “now there needs to be much more focus on looking much further ahead over coming years, especially with regard to recruitment and future implications of operational decisions. Serious lessons learnt here.”
Mr Still added that “we need to all collectively be more focused on efficiency and saving money. Our overall budget is our overall responsibility. We can only plan overall budgets and forecasts when looking across the whole organisation and not only thinking about our individual bit of the structure.
“And that is the job of us as leadership team and OMT collectively. And we can all play our part by ensuring we use public funds efficiently and making sure we get value for money when spending WYCA budgets.”
He concluded by referring to comments from WYCA chairman and Bradford Council leader Susan Hinchcliffe who had “reminded us of the budget pressures faced by Bradford and all of the local authorities who co-fund many of our functions. She explained how this drives us to more work with other public, private and third sector partners to create new ways of delivering services which traditionally would have been done by the council. We must also be creative in responding to these budget pressures.”
A WYCA spokesman said: “Like all public bodies, WYCA faces financial pressures, while at the same time managing a substantial expansion in its remit – including delivering the £1bn Growth Deal and £1bn Transport Fund that are set to create 36,000 new jobs over the next 20 years – and supporting the region’s case for an ambitious devolution deal.
“As part of the major changes we have been making to the organisation over the past 18 months, we have reviewed our financial processes and are putting in place measures to improve budget-setting over a longer period than has previously been the case and reviewing borrowing and investment arrangements.
“We are now working on our draft budget for 2018/19, which will be presented to the combined authority board on February 1.”