Interview with Graham Farrant, Former Chief Executive, Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council

In this interview, we spoke to Graham Farrant, Former Chief Executive of Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council. BCP Council was formed in 2019 in what was described at the time as the most complex piece of reorganisation in 40 years, bringing together services from four separate councils. Graham has retired after 47 years working in or for local government and the private sector, including 25 years as chief executive. This is the latest in a series of discussions we’re having about local government reorganisation and we’re talking to people who’ve been at the heart of some recent council shake-ups. We discussed that reorganisation process, the importance of leadership culture and local identity, and his hopes for the future of the sector.

Watch the interview in full here.

00:00 Introduction to Local Government Reorganisation
01:24 Graham Farrant’s Journey into Local Government
05:46 The Formation of BCP Council
09:46 Challenges of Merging Services
14:24 Navigating the Pandemic and Leadership
19:47 Political Complexities in BCP Council
25:19 Leadership Lessons from a Long Career
28:44 Future of Local Government: Optimism and Concerns

A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

How did you get started in local government?

When I was about 15, I had a careers talk with a principal environmental health officer (EHO). They described the job of an EHO, and I thought it sounded really interesting because it’s got a scientific background, yet it’s not just office-based or laboratory-based – it’s multifaceted. After this, I wrote to all 33 London boroughs asking for a student placement. At that time, local government was doing a lot of training. I eventually got a placement with Westminster City Council to be a student EHO on a four-year sandwich course, doing a degree course at the then-Thames Poly (now the University of Greenwich) in environmental health. That course gave me the professional qualification to be an EHO and saw me work and receive training in one of the highest-profile environmental health teams in the country for food hygiene and standards. It was an absolutely excellent grounding for a career in local government. So, it’s a very simple story of a careers talk that inspired me to go and do something.

So a long road from there to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council in 2019. What were some of the places you passed through on the way?

I worked at Westminster for about four years, then spent a nine-month, almost-rural retreat at Kensington and Chelsea Council as a team leader in my first promotion. I then returned to Westminster to work in housing, where I got involved in housing repairs, particularly minor repairs in asbestos and things like that. After that, I went to Birmingham City Council as an assistant director at the age of 30. At Birmingham, I was responsible for all the central services, including contract management for refuse collection, waste disposal, HR, admin, and licensing. I also took over the cemeteries and crematoria and a trading laboratory. I then got interested in regeneration and became chief executive of City Challenge, and ran a Devolution pilot project for the Aston Ward and picked up some Single Regeneration Budget projects. I then became director of housing at Birmingham City Council. Birmingham is the biggest social landlord in the country – it had 93,000 homes at the time – and I was there until the year 2000.

After that, I came down to Barking and Dagenham for my first chief executive role. That was a hugely valuable experience: a relatively small London borough, but a place that needed to shape its identity. I was there for about four and a half years, and then I was given an opportunity to go to the private sector to run a private equity-backed leisure business. I’ve not mentioned leisure as part of my career, but it was an opportunity to run 35 leisure contracts across the country in the private sector, backed by private equity. These contracts included national sports centres, including Bisham Abbey, Lillishore, Holme Pierrepoint, the British World Show Sports Foundation, and some private sector venues.  I took that opportunity, thoroughly enjoying the experience of working in the private equity industry with its strong focus on numbers and performance, and in turn, we got top-line growth and achieved a huge increase in profitability. I actually tried to buy the business three times, but couldn’t get it away. I next moved to a consultancy which did leisure and business consulting. But when the recession hit, I moved back to local government to run Thurrock Council, which was going through difficulties.

It had an improvement board and was really struggling with governance. I think I was the sixth chief executive in five years, with Bob Coomber having been prior to me as interim and setting some strong standards. I worked there for a couple of years, and we then really turned it around, partly through taking over the Development Corporation. But then, the chief executive of Barking and Dagenham left, and I had a conversation with their leader. I ended up running both Thurrock and Barking and Dagenham for a couple of years. That was challenging!

After that, at the invitation of Bob Kerslake, I joined the civil service to run Her Majesty’s Land Registry to turn around another organisation that was struggling with direction. The government had decided not to make a decision on selling it, so it was in quite a difficult position. I found it exciting though, setting a new strategy and digitising a lot of the register. Finally, I moved to Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council to oversee what was then the most complex bit of local reorganisation for 40 years: two unitaries, a district and a part of a county all coming together.

So you arrived at BCP in early 2019 to oversee that reorganisation. What was that like? What were the early days of that like?

It was fascinating because they’d done a lot of program and project management already.

The biggest lesson I learned from that, which I would feed to anybody, is to program manage the hell out of it. We had 70 project or program managers making sure that decisions were made, recorded, and implemented.

A problem for us was the judicial review undertaken by Christchurch Council.

I was appointed in August/September 2018 to start on the 1st of January, three months before the planned launch of the new BCP Council on the 1st of April. But the elections to that council were then going to be held in May, so the shadow authority comprised all the councillors that were on Bournemouth or Poole or Christchurch or that bit of Dorset County that were covered in those councils, meaning they weren’t people who had a long-term interest in running the council. So really, we did that part back to front, ensuring we couldn’t really set the strategy or make key budget decisions, as those councillors were all saying we might not be here soon.

On top of this, politics was moving quite rapidly at that time. There was an expected Conservative majority, but they actually fell short with 36 out of 76, so all the other parties came together and said they would run the council instead. Unexpectedly, we moved into a no overall control Liberal Democrat-led alliance – the ‘Unity Alliance’. A number of the people who had actually campaigned against local government reorganisation found themselves on the council and running the council after the reorganisation, which presented really interesting tensions.

That set-up period was really focused on safety, on ensuring nobody fell through the cracks and that services continued, and we had some real challenges in that. Dorset County Council moved their permanent children’s services social workers out of the Christchurch area, meaning that what we took over was a budget and some agency staff, but no permanent children’s social workers for the Christchurch population. So every child in Christchurch who had any contact with social care we had to move to a new social worker. We had to move to new policies because they had to adopt the Bournemouth or the Poole policies. There were some real intricate difficulties of managing that on the ground, but as a whole, we were absolutely clear across the line safely.

How do you as chief exec stay on top of a really intensive project management process? You’ve got 70 different programs going on. What’s your type of management?

Firstly, create a clear governance structure, covering which decisions go to council members and which go to officers. Then, ensure decisions are properly recorded and implemented. That follow-through is something that we don’t always do particularly well in local government.

But also, because we were merging three versions of every single service, we had to decide how long we would carry on doing three different service levels and how quickly we could get them into a single policy and single service standard. I use the phrase “top, middle or bottom” because when you looked at the three councils, either for county-level services or for district level services, we would have instances which people thought this is a better service than the other two.

However, we couldn’t afford to go for the best of everything, so we had to start making decisions on where to set the bar. This meant that in some circumstances, one or more of those councils saw a deterioration in the policy or in the service standard, as we simply could not afford to push everybody to the top standard.

How did you make the decisions over things you needed to have nailed down on day one and things you could sort out over time?

It is really difficult to balance priorities, and crucially we didn’t have the normal shadow authority time. Most councils elect their council in May, to come into being the following April, giving you 11 months of shadow authority to agree on strategic priorities and budget parameters. We didn’t have that time. Instead, we had to approve continuing to provide three different levels of service on day one.

It then became a question of priority and judging which issues needed to be addressed first. To be critical about judgment, there’s an issue about the terms and conditions of the workforce. We literally only just got agreement on a single set of terms and conditions for the entire workforce six and a half years into the process! Partly that was because it’s really complicated, so it just takes a long time, and partly because the administration at the time decided to delay it for a year and a half, because it was going to cost more money and we couldn’t take it out of the budget proposal so we had to push it back.

I’ve realised that with every single job we talk about across the council, you will find a different job description, job parameters, grading structure, overtime rates, call-out rates, bank holiday working conditions, and so on. You have to harmonise those when you can. Yet on day one, we had three different sets of EHOs on three different terms and conditions doing the same job, presenting an equal pay risk. It’d be much more comfortable if we’d had the proper 11 months and we’d mapped it all out and done most of it before we started.

To what extent was everything happening a lot faster than expected, a blessing in disguise?

The pressures were quite helpful because we had to make those decisions immediately. We had to get a strategy in place quickly; we couldn’t spend two years consulting on it, it was needed within the first six or seven months. We also needed a budget plan, as we were looking at the following year’s budget as soon as we had the council in, and that had some significant savings in it.

So there were some benefits from it, but the problem was just pressure. On day one, there were me and the corporate directors around on Vesting Day, but everyone else just came across doing what they were currently doing, creating a problem where everybody else wasn’t automatically invested in BCP Council. Instead, they came from their preceding councils and were still doing what they used to do in the areas they used to do it. They didn’t see a difference. It also doesn’t help, of course, if you have no councillors on Vesting Day as they’re all in their pre-election period.

What was your guiding philosophy for leading an organisation through the reorganisation process amid external shocks like the pandemic?

We tried to have a clear sense of direction and culture. We set our values early, and integrity was part of that. We also ensured that the whole council was on board with the culture.

But yes, in nine months the whole world changed. I remember going from a debate with civil servants in early March 2020, saying a lockdown might work in China but would not work here, to the end of March, when the UK was in lockdown itself.

Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole is a beautiful place that attracts many visitors, but that summer it attracted many, many more visitors than usual, and behaviours were appalling. The restaurants and pubs were closed, but the off-licence and beach were open, and the mercury hit the high 20s/low 30s ℃. When people came down, that’s when you discover the difficulty of trying to implement change. We had issues with parking behaviours: parking on a double yellow line (or ‘fly parking’ as I like to call it) became common. I suggested we just start towing them away, but my team said we’ve never done tow away, as we don’t have any contracts nor signage, and we’ve never needed it before.

If you pay the fine within 14 days it’s only £35 to park on the double yellow line. We’re charging £22 for a day’s parking normally, and it’s £35 essentially to park on a double yellow even closer to the beach. So that was quite a traumatic time. Of course, my teams, like every local authority up and down the country, put in some fantastic efforts getting volunteers together, looking after vulnerable people and ensuring we were providing all necessary government and local information. And they were doing that locally whilst our population hugely increased. A significant percentage of the country was on furlough, being paid 80% of their salary to come down and join us on a sunny day. So there were some real challenges there and strategic leadership was important. Interestingly, we engaged the leader in our daily and emergency planning updates, and they were very directly engaged which was very helpful. But, only nine months after that, we hit a change of political control.

And it hasn’t stopped there, as you’ve had five leaders in five years. How do you manage that?

It’s complex. You have to be really clear about the overall strategy, the culture and the integrity you want. We’ve had some challenging times during that period. One challenge saw the flexible use of capital receipts rules being rewritten for the whole of local government as a result of what we were proposing doing. You’ve just got to be clear about the direction and lines of integrity and work with politicians as things change. We went: Unity Alliance, Conservative minority, Conservative majority, Conservative minority, and now Three Towns Alliance. We’ve had five leaders, two of whom have been Cllr Vicky Slade, who is now an MP. Two councillors had five different political configurations in their first four years – one was elected as Poole People Party, then independent, joined the Conservatives, went independent, joined Poole Engage and then lost his seat, all across a four-year period. You’ve got to have your wits about you while managing that – your political antennae need to be really strong. The phrase I’ve used for every new appointment is: “BCP Council is not for the faint-hearted”. It’s really a rewarding, engaging and  fantastic place to be, but not for the faint-hearted as its politics is so complex.

To what extent are the complexities of the politics in BCP a legacy of bringing together lots of different councils?

There is still quite a bit of that. For example, there’s an issue regarding the name. Nobody could agree on a common name, so we went for Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council, which constantly reminds people that there’s Bournemouth and there’s Christchurch and there’s Poole. I compare that to my time in London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, which was clearly in Barking and Dagenham. Then there’s the London Borough of Newham, which brought together East Ham, West Ham and Stratford, and became more colloquially known as Newham, or Thurrock with Gray’s and Purfleet and South Ockenden, but known as Thurrock. There’s something about nomenclature that just reminds everybody every day that we are three towns, and the three towns are major on that. They want to respect the towns.

The original case for change for our reorganisation was focused on BCP becoming Britain’s newest city by the sea. It was really focused on the conurbation. But we have to blend the messaging between the local, as nobody’s ever going to say “I live in BCP” – they’ll say they’ll live in Poole, or Christchurch, or Broadstone or wherever else within the area. So locally, we have to ensure we respect the integrity and the value of the towns and the 19 high streets. However, when we’re looking regionally and nationally, I’ve got to articulate the case for a conurbation of 400,000 people in a tightly packed urban area, which may have some fantastic environmental credentials, but it is a single place and a conurbation. I don’t call it a city, because that goes back to the old vesting.

Within a new corporate identity, how do you retain the individual identity of the places people already live and identify with?

We’re having a conversation at the moment after a consultation on a community governance review about whether to set up parish councils. The danger with that conversation is what people actually mean by parish councils. Can we have the old Poole council back? Poole itself is made up of a number of places, be it Broadstone, Parkstone, Poole, Sandbanks, Lilliput, which may, in a traditional parish council sense, consider themselves to be standalone areas. Christchurch already had two parish councils and before LGR established another two, so it’s fully parished now. In the intervening five years, a small part of Bournemouth has come forward with a parish council. So at BCP, we’re having that debate at the moment whilst also talking about devolution to a regional footprint – the Wessex footprint. It’s quite a complex mix.

And Wessex has its own identity, whether it’s Thomas Hardy or an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It has its own set of connotations.

I often get faced with the fact that Bournemouth and Christchurch were both in Hampshire until the 1974 reorganisation, so they’re not really part of Dorset despite looking east.  Poole at one time was the county town of Dorset, so it has always looked west. Giving this conurbation either an eastward or westward facing configuration was a difficult debate for our councillors. We had a very good council meeting discussing whether to go with Hampshire or Wessex, and we went with the latter by majority decision.

You announced this year that you plan to retire after 47 years. What are your key leadership lessons from such a widely experienced career?

Do what you enjoy and enjoy what you do. There’s nothing worse than having a colleague who doesn’t enjoy their job. At an individual level, we all need to find out what it is that we enjoy doing. In terms of leadership, be true to yourself and honest, know where your lines of integrity are and don’t cross them. Be very clear about what you want to do in your role and what you want to achieve. Even though my plan at the beginning was to be a principal EHO in somewhere like Oxford, where I could live in the country and work in the city, where I’ve got the biggest reward has been helping to shape a place and seeing that place change, seeing organisational change, and helping to adopt an open, engaging culture. I’ve got huge rewards out of seeing people struggling in their roles and helping them find what they were really good at. In some cases, that’ll involve putting them down to a job that they’ve realised they enjoy doing before they then get promoted. The Peter principle says you get promoted to your level of incompetence. If that happens, let’s help people get back to their level of maximum competence.

Some of it is just so rewarding. Recently, I went to the graduation for our supported interns – people with education, health and care plans, people with disabilities, and people who have struggled to get into employment. We give them a year’s internship working in our reception, our arcades, cleaning, and so on. They all say they would not have been able to get on a bus to get to work before starting their internship, so to go to their graduation and see them come out is so rewarding. Leadership in this role can be immensely rewarding.

As you reflect on the future of local government, what are things that concern you and what are things that keep you optimistic?

Let’s start with optimism. The Government needs local government; you cannot manage everything from the centre.

Take land registry for instance. A single national land registry is valuable, but we put local searches into the centralised system, as you cannot manage the sort of local services that we provide via the centre. The Government needs us, so let’s be optimistic about that.

Local people need us, because we deliver local services and we change people’s lives everyday by providing them with services or improving their environment. We change people’s lives with most things we do, so local influence on all those services is key. Local decision-making is generally better than centralised decision-making for everything that has some sort of nuance or flexibility within it.

The role of councillors is absolutely vital. Some of us feel sorry for councillors because when they get elected to represent a ward, but on day one, we ask them to start making hard decisions about the whole area, on services they may not be really interested in, and to represent the whole area in regional or national discussions. For councillors, it’s about finding out what they’re most interested in and where they’re heading us.

I think finance is a mixture of optimism and pessimism. Services we’ve had to stop doing have mostly left gaps in our communities, and it leaves a question of who’s going to step in to fill those gaps? community organisations? A group of individuals? Or are we going to let that service wither? I would modernise a lot of  services, like our libraries. I would give us more flexibility to change the libraries’ estate, and more flexibility generally.

The government’s trying to impose new rules. Take the work on standardising waste collection. That really depends on your disposal contracts and what’s available. I lived outside Bishop’s Stortford where we had a green food waste bin service, as they had a licensed facility for composting food material. We don’t have that sort of supplier in Poole, so we can’t offer that service. There needs to be some flexibility within that.

I think the politics at BCP has got more challenging. If BCP is an example of what might happen, then actually decision-making in no overall control councils is more difficult, as it’s slower due to more parties and people involved in decisions. I suppose you could argue a wider consultation leads to better decision-making, but it definitely can be slower.

Another issue for me is the reputation of local government. I’ve seen increased political touchiness, and it is a difficult role. That’s an issue when we have to attract 16 and 17-year-olds to roles like I had so many years ago. Even comments on local news outlets on councillors, people generally have no idea about what they do, how many hours they give to their community and the benefits they bring.

Related content

Devolution and local government reorganisation (LGR): the essentials

Cllr Lorna Fielker: reflections on the past, vision for the future 

Interview with Andrew Seekings, Chief Executive, Cumberland Council

Putting data at the heart of Local Government Reorganisation

Rachel Joyce on reorganising local government for the better

Reorganisation stories: “Local government always rises to the challenge” interview with Sam Plum, CEO of Westmorland and Furness