Each year the residents of Sefton pay £191,139,000 to Sefton Council in Council Tax. In addition businesses pay £63,018,000 through Business Rates.
But what do we know about this organisation known as Sefton Council? Who runs it, what do they do, how are they held accountable to the electorate? Can we rely on the data they provide on their website?
Councillors
Sefton Council comprises 66 Councillors, with 3 representing each electoral Ward. On 16th November 2023, the Labour Councillors awarded themselves a 6% increase in their allowances, which will raise the cost of allowances to £963,117.85 In addition, 9 of these Councillors have been selected by their Labour peers to form a Cabinet costing £163,236.88.
We would question why the Labour Councillors have chosen to raise their allowances by 6%?
Any organisation which is facing budgetary constraints would realistically review its “Head Office” structures and look to working more efficiently. Taking this view, does Sefton Council really need 3 Councillors for each Ward?
Are the Labour Ward Councillors truly representatives of the people or are they merely the spokespersons for the 9 Cabinet Members who dictate the local agenda?
Officers
Whilst the Elected Councillors, especially the Cabinet, are intended to deal with the strategic policy-making of the Council, they are supported by salaried Officers to advise on the day-to-day professional and technical work.
We are not told how many staff are currently employed, the services they carry out or the total salary bill.
The most recent “Workforce Management Report” on the website is dated 2020/2021 and shows the total number of employees in August 2021 was 3355, which has increased annually since July 2018 when there were 3311 employees. No reason is given for the increase in employee numbers.
The website also contains a page showing Senior Officer Salaries above £58k but this was last updated on March 2021, when it showed the Chief Executive as D Johnson. It too is out-dated and unreliable.
Why is the Council’s publicly available data not updated?
Organisation Structure
Some years ago the Council produced a chart showing its organisational structure with names and pictures showing the Chief Executive, Executive Directors and Heads of Service. This chart was helpful to understand the responsibilities and services they ran, but this has now been removed from the website.
Titles such as Chief Planning Officer or, Head of Children’s Social Care are self-explanatory but the most senior staff are given titles such as Executive Director Place or Executive Director People which are unintelligible to many residents.
Too much reliance is put on the Contact Centre Staff and senior Officers have become remote from the public they serve. We no longer know the names of the senior Officers who we pay to serve us.
Put simply, who do I contact with a query about roads and potholes, or school places, or a variety of other functions?
Overview and Scrutiny Committees
Overview and scrutiny committees (O & S) were introduced in 2000 as part of new executive governance arrangements to ensure that members of an authority who were not part of the executive (or Cabinet) could hold the executive to account for the decisions and actions that affect their communities.
Overview and scrutiny committees have statutory powers to scrutinise decisions the executive is planning to take, those it plans to implement, and those that have already been taken/implemented. Recommendations following scrutiny enable improvements to be made to policies and how they are implemented. Overview and scrutiny committees can also play a valuable role in developing policy.
Government Statutory Guidance states that:
“Effective overview and scrutiny should:
• Provide constructive ‘critical friend’ challenge;
• Amplify the voices and concerns of the public;
• Be led by independent people who take responsibility for their role; and
• Drive improvement in public services.”
However, in Sefton, there is no evidence that the O & S Committees have sufficient independence to seriously challenge decisions of Cabinet. The majority of members on the O & S Committees are drawn from the majority Labour party, which also controls the Cabinet. As Labour Party Members they will be subject to the Party Whip which will restrict their ability to act independently.
The manner in which Committee meetings are recorded is of no help to the public and makes it impossible to understand the level of debate or agreed actions. Minutes of a recent Regeneration Committee recorded, for example:
“Members of the Committee asked questions/commented on the following issues:
• funding to deliver the Crosby Flood and Coastal Defence Scheme.
• the reasons why Maghull seemed particularly badly affected by flood reports and the continuing work to investigate this problem"
Who asked the questions? What precisely were those questions? What discussion took place? What were the conclusions? Is there any follow-up action?
Frankly, we need to know but are not being informed. This is our community which is being discussed and our money which is being spent.
There has rightfully been concern that the Children’s’ Services Scrutiny Committee does not understand the issues it is debating and that members of the public – the stakeholders – have requested a seat at the Committee.
This request is flatly rejected by the Labour members of the Committee and despite a recent petition from a resident containing 195 signatures the petitioner was allowed to address the Committee for just 5 minutes.
The petitioners have stated:
“It is crucial that those who use these services have an opportunity to voice their concerns and ask questions directly to those responsible for providing them.
Currently, we are not given this opportunity. This lack of transparency and dialogue is concerning as it prevents us from fully understanding how decisions about our children's welfare are made.”
This Council abolished the local Area Committees and now we are kept in the dark about the decisions made in the Scrutiny Committees.
Democracy is failing us in Sefton as a result of Labour’s secretive style of governance.
Area Budgets (2020-2021)
Each year every electoral Ward received a sum of approximately £4,000 to be spent within the Ward at the discretion of the 3 Ward Councillors.
The availability of these Ward Budgets is not publicised and instead the Labour Councillors prefer to use the excuse of “austerity” for the poor condition of their neighbourhood.
The sums available in the Ward Budgets have not been published by the Council on their website since 2020/2021, which showed there was £101,293 unexpended. It is worth noting that in previous years the Ward Councillors failed to spend their allocated budget and over £73,595 had been brought forward from previous years. Any expenditure above £10,000 which is unexpended is lost and snatched back to central funds.
We currently have no idea how much each Ward holds in its budgets or on what the money has been spent. The public are not consulted about the projects where this money should be spent.
Why is Sefton’s Labour Council keeping us in the dark about how much is currently available in our Wards?
Land and Property Assets (Word document updated December 2020)
Sefton, like all Councils, owns a considerable amount of land and buildings, plus other assets such as works of art.
As members of the local community it would be helpful to know what buildings are owned by the Council which would offer the opportunity to report or challenge them if we felt a building was being neglected or in danger. This is especially significant when looking at historic monuments or listed buildings which may be owned by the Council.
The Council is obliged to produce and maintain a Register of Land and Property Assets but, in Sefton’s case, this was last updated on their website in December 2020. Because it is out of date the information is unreliable. For example, the Register shows that the Council owns a large number of vacant houses in the Bootle Area. What it fails to point out that many of these are properties which were demolished to make way for the Housing Market Renewal Initiative some years ago.
This inaccurate recording of property data was highlighted by the Council’s External Auditors but has not yet been corrected.
The Council’s publicly available information is out-of-date and inaccurate.
Parking Income (2015-2018)
Car parking charges are a source of frustration to residents and shoppers and many would argue that the cost of parking has contributed towards the decline of the high street as a retail area.
Tucked away on the Council’s Transparency pages is a table showing that in 2015/16 the Council received £3,782,999 in parking income. By 2017/2018 this had risen to £4,449,350. There has been no further update to this data and we are unable to see how much is raised from this levy or how it is spent.
Again, data on the Transparency page is out of date.
Conclusion
Sefton Council demonstrates little regard for the electorate who are paying over £191m each year for their services.
The pages in the website which are supposed to demonstrate transparency are out-of-date and unreliable, concealed behind the heading of Council Spend & Other Key Documents.
https://www.sefton.gov.uk/your-council/transparency/
There is no “family tree” of services and it is impossible to trace which senior Officer hold responsibility for specific services or indeed the functions of the various Cabinet Members.
There is no independence in the role of the Overview & Scrutiny Committees. There is also an unwillingness to allow interested residents or specialists on a particular subject to participate in the work of Scrutiny Committees.
Considering how much we are all paying to Sefton Council one would have expected they would see us as their loyal customers and keep us informed on the decision-making process.
Instead this Labour Council has no appetite to keep residents informed on key issues and prefers to use its Cabinet in a position of “command and control” rather than “listen and serve”.
Transparency is absent within Sefton’s Labour Council.
