Difficult decisions should have been made before now – commissioner
OTHER AUTHORITIES QUICKER TO TACKLE PROBLEMS WHILE CITY COUNCIL RAN UP ‘ENORMOUS’ DEBT
TACKLING an “enormous” amount of debt has been described as one of Nottingham City Council’s three key challenges over the coming years.
The lead commissioner appointed to turn the authority around says 18p in the pound is now being used to service debt – something he described as “extraordinary” for a council of Nottingham’s size.
Tony Mcardle, Lincolnshire County Council’s former chief executive, says further difficult decisions will be needed in Nottingham after a budget full of brutal cuts was approved at a budget meeting on March 4, which Mr Mcardle attended.
Asked whether more decisions like that would need to be made in future, Mr Mcardle said: “I’m afraid they are. The council’s in a particularly difficult position. It’s very distressed by comparison with most other authorities and there’s a variety of reasons for that. It doesn’t start from a good place.
“I think the fact that it had to make such difficult decisions last week is because it hadn’t made some of those in the years previous, which many other authorities of course have tackled. All of those things about grants and facilities that are causing so much pain, because they’re all happening at the same time, are ones that other councils have dealt with over the last decade and more.
“They have either found a different way of providing [services] or have come to work with other organisations in order to provide them. Here, because that hasn’t happened, as soon as the financial reality of the situation hit, all of those things are having to happen at once and I think that’s very, very challenging.
“It’s very challenging for members in particular because I got a very strong sense from that meeting that they wanted to continue doing those things, and that of course is what they’ve been elected to try to achieve. The trouble is you have to pay for it, and this council has put itself in a financial position where it can’t do that, even though it’s got quite substantial sums of money coming in.”
Since being appointed on February 22, Mr Mcardle says he has so far been meeting key figures at the council and reading past inspections and audits into the authority. The lead commissioner will be supported by a commissioner for finance, Margaret Lee, and a commissioner for transformation who is yet to be appointed.
Initially in place for two years, the commissioners have pledged to keep their costs to a minimum – though each of them will receive a fee of over £1,000 a day. Although stressing that they are still forming their own views, Mr Mcardle says the difficulties at Nottingham City Council fall into three categories.
The lead commissioner, who lives in Lincoln, said the key issue was debt. “There is an enormous amount of debt. The council has run up debt to the point that something like 18 pence in the pound of income is having to be used just to sustain debt. That’s an extraordinarily large amount of money for a council of this size.
“If you’re having to pay 18p in the pound for things that have happened in the past to sustain the debt that’s been incurred, then that’s 18p in the pound that’s not available to run services. All councils have debt, it’s a perfectly normal way of doing business, but an 18-pence-in-the-pound requirement to call on income before you’ve even provided a single service makes it hugely difficult,” Mr Mcardle said.
The other two issues mentioned by the lead commissioner included making the council more efficient and tackling difficult decisions in a timely manner. On the former, Mr Mcardle says the emphasis will be on making the council more cost effective rather than cutting services. Speaking about all the three issues combined, the lead commissioner said: “If those things had been in place in the past, I don’t think we’d have seen anything like the difficulty we saw at the budget meeting. I don’t think there would have been a Section 114 notice.
“I don’t think we’d have been here, but we are, the Section 114 is in place and the council finds itself having to find a lot of money, make a lot more money available, in a very short space of time.
“What we’re hoping to do is to work with the council to help that happen.”
Powers that can be used by the commissioners include the hiring and firing of council officers, but Mr Mcardle says he does not want to use such powers now. He says he wants to work with the council instead, but added: “We will have to be more assertive if the budget savings aren’t coming forward. I think that’s going to be the most difficult arena that we’re going to get involved in because just bringing some of those changes about will take time. I was in Northamptonshire for three years as a lead commissioner and there, we never used our powers once... I know it can be done. Whether it will be possible to do it here, particularly in this timescale, I don’t know.”
They wanted to continue doing those things ... The trouble is you have to pay for it
Tony Mcardle