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

As part of our new series of conversations about local government reform, LGIU’s Chief Executive Jonathan Carr-West sat down with Sam Plum, chief executive of Westmorland and Furness Council, to discuss her impressive career, her experience with local government reform, and what it takes to transform local government. 

Watch the full conversation on Youtube here.

00:00 – Introduction
02:12 – Sam Plum’s journey in local government
04:17 – Initial reaction to unitarisation in Cumbria
06:41 – Managing conflicting political prioritises
07:47 – Advice for chief executives
09:59 – Political change and the democratic deficit of unitarisation
12:08 – Key decisions early on for successful reorganisation
15:24 – Motivation for becoming chief executive of the new unitary
17:19 – Focusing on outcomes: Day 2 and beyond
19:34 – Challenges of disaggregating services
22:55 – Leading the team through change
26:43 – The unexpected challenges during reorganisation
28:40 – Key lessons learned from the process
31:36 – Final reflections and thoughts

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

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey into local government?

My journey goes back 33 years. My first council job had nothing to do with my current work. I started as a countryside management officer in the Nene Valley for Northampton County Council in 1992. I fell into more policy areas when I took up a job for Coventry City Council in Local Agenda 21 Days, not soon after the first UN Summit on Agenda 21, and that took me into the partnership world, which led to local strategic partnerships, which led to regeneration policy change and that led me to where I am now really. I’ve probably worked in 8 local authorities up and down the country. I think all, with the exception of where I am now for Westmorland and Furness, have been relatively urban with some significant issues around social challenges, deprivation, cohesion, and worklessness. So everywhere I’ve worked has been one of those councils that’s had the various funding streams over many years from SRB onwards. And so that’s kind of driven my career and my deep commitment really to being a public servant and my want to do the best for the residents that we’re here to serve.

So you end up in Cumbria, and you’d only been there less than a year when then Secretary of State Robert Jenrick invited proposals from Cumbria on unitarisation. What was your first reaction to that?

It was an interesting time. I started in Cumbria in Barrow in May 2019, and 10 months into the post in March 2020, we went into the first COVID lockdown. In September 2020, whilst we were still well into that really intense Covid recovery stage, we were invited to submit proposals. It was a tough time as local government in Cumbria was already working flat out dealing with Covid. The timing felt odd to me, and it felt like it was another thing to layer on top of a really stretched and strained system. But local government always rises to the challenge and always does what’s asked of us no matter what. Cumbria at that time was a county council and six district councils, of which Barrow was one. The invitation came in September, we had to get expressions of interest or outline business cases in by December and we couldn’t agree on a single model. The county council wanted a continuing county authority and the six districts paired up and each came up with a separate proposal. So there were four competing bids for Cumbria. I think the assumption at the time was when we put in those initial December bids that they’d be whittled down and shortlisted in some way, but they weren’t. The secretary of state said that all four met the criteria and therefore, all four needed to be worked into full business cases, which we did by the end of February 2021. And then the final decision came in July 21.

How did you as a borough chief manage those conflicting political priorities on how unitarisation should go? What approach did you take to managing those conversations?

I think we were mature about it. I think we did talk to each other. We worked collectively together. There was a difference between the district councils and the county council, as there is in many places, and it wasn’t always plain sailing. So I think the district chief execs met regularly anyway. So we carried on those networks. And even though we were working on different bids, we did try to support each other in that because one of the things that we were asked to do, if you were putting in a proposal that didn’t cover the whole of the county, you had to say what would happen in the other part of the county that you weren’t focusing on. So we did all work together on that. I think the politicians, again, worked together, the district leaders worked together. So I think there was a split between district and county. I’m sure that’s playing out now in other parts of the country, and that’s the nature of the world unfortunately.

If you were advising people in the equivalent position now, maybe a district chief exec who’s looking at this, what would you say that they needed to sort of hang onto and focus on in those conversations?

I think this is going to happen anyway, if this is the trend that we’re all on. And I think the priority for us as chief execs of place is to really think about what’s best for place and not what’s best for our individual organisations and really put our residents and our businesses at the centre and forefront of our thinking and thinking about what is the best model to deliver the things that we know we need to deliver for our place, regardless of our current organisations because our current organisations were going to go and are going to go, and we need to make sure that they’re replaced with something that makes things better and not worse.

And as you transitioned in Cumbria from county and districts to the new unitary structure, and Westmorland and Furness came into being as a shadow authority, were there changes in political control that went alongside that?

Yeah there were. In Westmorland and Furness, we had a Labour-controlled Barrow Borough Council, a Lib Dem-controlled South Lakes District Council, Lib Dem controlled Eden, although that was a coalition. So there was no overall control and no overall control county council with a Labour-Lib Dem administration and a Labour leader. It was mixed for us. Cumberland, interestingly, all three districts were conservative controlled and then obviously the county council was a Labour-Lib Dem coalition. And we now have a very strong majority Lib Dem Westmorland and Furness and a very strong majority Labour Cumberland.

Do you think the fact that that all changed, did that help or hinder the process from your perspective as an officer, so trying to stack up the kind of technicalities of the new unitries? Did the political change get in the way or was it helpful in that everything’s changing and it kind of underlines that?

I think it is everything’s changing, Jonathan. I think the other thing that I think it takes a while for it to really bubble up is that unitarisation creates a big democratic deficit. So if you add together the number of seats for district councillors and county councillors across Westmorland and Furness, pre-vesting, it was around 160, I can’t remember the exact number. I’ve got 65 councillors now covering the same area, covering all the same services, but with a lot less elected representation. And I do think that’s a real issue for politicians and I think it’s taken a while for our politicians to try and get that balance between wanting to be really local because most of my politicians, not all, but most of the 65 were existing either district or county or both pre-vesting day. So they’re seasoned politicians, but trying to get the balance of wanting to be really local ward councillors, champions of place, getting involved in local issues to some of the bigger strategic services and decisions that we’re now responsible for. That unitary councillor role, I think is really different. So we’ve worked with LGA and we’ve worked with others around that kind of support for our councillors to understand their role and to go through that process and to understand what it means to be responsible for a unitary council where you’ve got all your services in one place. Regardless of the political make-up of the council, we would have had to do that anyway. It has been a big reset.

What decisions you need to make right up top to make that a success? What are the things you look back you think I’m so glad that we did that because that really helped?

Yeah, so I think there’s a few things. I mean, I think we went quite early in appointing an interim head of paid service into the two new authorities. So we did that before the shadow elections, which were in May 22. So the shadow councillors were elected 11 months before vesting day. I was appointed as interim head of paid service by the previous leaders and then that was ratified at the first full council meeting after the election so that I could be returning officer and actually run the elections because that’s quite an important thing to do with all of this! So I was interim head of paid service from April/May time the year before. They went early for the recruitment of the permanent. That was an open competition as it has to be, so it was a full external nationwide advert.

I secured that role in July, but I was chief exec designate until December 31. So for six months, I was doing the role, but not quite doing the role. And I was head of paid service, but I didn’t have a budget and I didn’t have any staff and I didn’t have any services. So it was, it was an interesting place to be. But I, at that point, and Andrew did exactly the same in Cumberland, I freed myself up from Barrow and they brought in a interim chief executive to Barrow to enable Barrow to close well.

So I wasn’t trying to do both jobs together and I fully concentrated with the team around me. Well, a small team around me because everybody else was doing the day one readiness stuff. I concentrated for the best part of a year on setting up the new council and what would happen on day two. So the program that delivered everything that the program needed to deliver was absolutely focused on day one, safe and legal. Will this council have its lights on, empty the bins, fill the bottles, deliver care packages, support children from April 1, no matter what. So almost nobody notices the difference. But my role and my focus was, what happens on day two? Now, we’ve got what we need to keep running.

So what happened? We don’t want to fall over on day two or week two or month two. So the work around the constitution, setting the first year budget, having a council plan that we could get behind, having an operating model so we were clear about how we were going to operate and what our priorities were as a unitary, starting to think about our values and our core messages, our branding. And actually the biggest thing I think that we did that really made a difference was recruiting into the director and assistant director posts so that I had a full senior leadership team from day one and everybody was clear about their role in the new organisation from day one and I think that really helped.

Was it difficult as a decision for you to put yourself forward for the chief of the new unitary authority?

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a very different role being chief executive of a unitary compared to being chief executive of a district and I was relatively new into the chief executive in a district role. So I took that in May 2019 and that was my first chief executive role.

But that might be helpful as well, right? Because you hadn’t got 20 years of embedded experience of this is how I do it, you wouldn’t have the flexibility.

I think what I’d learned, one of the things that struck me at Barrow almost from day one, but definitely for that 18 months, and as we were dealing with COVID, cost of living crisis and other things, I think some of the frustrations I had were around some of the county services. So children’s services, some care services, but there’s some real poverty deprivation issues in Barrow that I felt we weren’t joined up as a system to try and tackle and that was really frustrating me. So what drove me really, and this is my personal journey, I guess, what drove me to go for the chief exec job was being able to have those other levers and those other controls in the system, which I felt would enable me to unlock the real potential of this place and tackle some of those really long embedded problems that we’ve got in places like Arrol.

It sounds to me like you’re really focused on outcomes, on what can this new authority deliver for communities and residents?

Yeah, absolutely. I see myself through and through as a public servant. I am here to serve the people that pay my wages and to ensure that not just the services we deliver, but with our place leadership role and our system leadership role, that we are absolutely doing everything we can to improve our places, improve outcome for our residents. I want all of our children in our schools to come out with the very best attainment levels that they can achieve and go on to lead fulfilling lives and that’s what I want for my place. I want a fantastic environment. I mean I’ve got half the Lake District and a bit of the Yorkshire Dales and a fantastic coastline so it is a good start but you know! But I want that fantastic environment and I really want a strong, thriving, diverse and inclusive community that enables us to grow and enables us to contribute to UK PLC, and I think my whole drive through that process and the constant message I was giving to staff through Q&As and all the rest of it is we’re going through a lot of pain. There has to be gain at the end of this. This has to make things better. If we go through all this process and we don’t shift health inequalities or educational attainment or working activity or all these other things that are all on our to-do list all the time, if this doesn’t enable us to do that better, then what’s the point? It’s just moving furniture.

Can you explain how you bring together services from multiple districts? But also the disaggregation of going from a county with one children’s services to in your case two unitries with two sets of children’s services. What particular challenges arose from that splitting?

The hardest part of the programme for Cumbria was separating a county council in half, into two. It really was. In terms of what we had to do in the timescales that we were given, that is a huge amount of work. Don’t underestimate how complicated that is. I mean, we did make a decision early on. We put a budget together so we didn’t get funding from government. I don’t think the places now on the list are going to get funding from government, but we had to pay for this out of our own budgets. It cost just shy of £19 million and we split that cost between us with the county taking half and the other half being split by the districts. We made an early decision to bring in a strategic partner to walk alongside us, bring additional capacity when we needed it, bring expertise, bring program management support when we needed it to enable us on that journey. We wouldn’t have done it if we hadn’t done that I don’t think.

But separating the county council when you’ve got over 8,000 staff who need to either be tuped into one. It was easy for the district staff because they just tuped into the organisation on the footprint that they were. But for county we had to make a decision and we had to go through a process that took a long time. We had 10,000 contracts that all needed innovating into the two new authorities so that they were safe and legal. We had over 300 ICT systems and applications that needed separating data management. That is absolutely critical. So all of those things all take time.

The county chief executive was interim. He really led that day one readiness program because he knew his role was finishing and he’d come in as an interim knowing that. So he could really grab that and drive that program and me and Andrew acted as kind of core senior responsible officers to support him. But we were focusing on day two and he was focusing on day one and it worked really well in that way. But it is tough and we didn’t do it all by day one. I think that’s the other thing. We made some fairly early decisions that we cannot separate a whole county safely and legally by April 1 2023.

So what are the things that we need to give ourselves more time to do? What are the things where actually it doesn’t make any sense to separate them and we might host them in one or other council long term. And what are the things that we just can’t do it now, but we’ll be able to do it fairly early on. And I think we have 34-ish services that we did that. So Westmorland and Furness has hosted some and provided that service to Cumberland through a kind of service level agreement, inter-agency agreement and vice versa Cumberland did that for us. And then we’ve been going through a process through a joint exec committee and a joint officer board of disaggregating those services over the last two years. And we’re two thirds of the way through that. We’ve still got about 11 or 12 to do next year. So again, real clarity of who does what, who’s responsible for and what timeframes, what needs doing at what point and what you can do.

How painful was it the process for staff? Because these are people’s jobs, their livelihoods, it must have been very stressful for people to deliver this whilst also worrying about their own kind of position. How did you hold that as a leader?

Yeah, it was. I think people were worried. Change, any change is unsettling, isn’t it? And it can make people, know, as well as kind of seeing it as an opportunity and something to embrace. Also, people feel anxious and worried and worried about their future. And we’ve all managed change programs in the past, but this is like wholesale change. Which happens in local government once every 50 years. In the NHS, maybe a little more frequently. But yeah, so I think it’s that constant comms, comms, comms. I mean early on, right from the get-go, we said comms, engagement with staff, regular messaging, regular open Q&A sessions, getting out into buildings, sitting down and listening, has to be absolutely written through everything that we do, and we were really clear about that. And we did put additional resource into that comms right from the start, and it was ongoing. And then once me and Andrew knew that we were going to be the future, we stepped into that leadership role much more clearly. Now with district staff, again, it was easier to do because they knew where they were going to end up.

With county, we did a lot of things together and joined things together. But also I think the other thing was that everybody tuped in to the new organisation on the same terms and conditions and the same job description, doing the same work and there was no change. And for most staff in most roles still two years in, they’re still doing exactly the same thing as they were doing before vesting day. So if you were a planner, if you’re an environmental health officer, if you’re a care worker in one of our care homes, if you’re a social worker, whatever, you’re still doing what you always did. You’re still actually on the same pain gradient and the same terms, because you’ve tuped in. And until we do full restructures you’re still on exactly the same conditions doing exactly the same work. our biggest reassuring message was keep doing what you’ve always done until somebody tells you to stop. And for most people, we haven’t said stop yet.

With so many competing demands on your time, how did you decide as a leader how much of your time to be spending on listening and talking and how much of it in the weeds of the contractual stuff?

I mean, so there was the three staff officers, the head of service, monitoring officer, section 151 officer, that golden triangle, we had to be imposed in interim as well as from day one. I had an interim chief finance officer and monitoring officer alongside, and they did change as we went through the recruitment process, that was really key. And then how we divvied up our time and what we’ve all focused on. So monitoring officer focused on constitution, 151 focused on budget, I focused on council plan, culture and operating model. So that helped us think about where we needed to be and where we needed to be visible. The day one readiness stuff, I did leave that to the district and the county and I had to trust and step away from that because I couldn’t do everything. And then being visible, I think was really, really important.

Were there challenges or obstacles or difficulties that you hadn’t thought about?

Yeah, there probably were, but I’ve probably blocked them out Jonathan! No I mean there were always curve balls and things that we weren’t expecting, I guess. The program management was phenomenal and the work around that, there was a weekly day one readiness board, there was work streams, there was everything going on. I had a weekly work stream looking at the future. I think the there was really random weird stuff like we suddenly realised that as we’d drawn a line on the map and cut Cumbria in half, there were about 21, this is just a little anecdote, there were 21 bridges that bridged a river that was now the boundary between Westmorland and Furness and Cumberland and so which highways department was going to take on the maintenance of that bridge?

And we had to sort it out because if we hadn’t sorted it out later, it would have tripped us up. So there were a lot of things like that, small little things, but they created a lot of noise at the time until we got unsorted. And we’d spend an inordinate amount of time talking about small contracts and things like that that did really need us, me and Andrew, to get in a room and say, okay, which way are we going to cut this and just making the decision. So I think that the ability for me and Andrew and we got on so well and worked together so well, but the ability for us, I think we both had each other on speed dial for 12 months to make quick decisions on things like that, just to get things moving. And so far, I don’t think anything has come back to really bite us, but you never know. It might just not have surfaced yet, Jonathan.

Is there anything that you know now, having gone through that journey, are there things you know now that you wish you’d known at the beginning?

I think, yeah, so I think separating out a county ICT service into two new unitries is incredibly complex, incredibly expensive and difficult and full of risk and we haven’t done it yet. And it’s one of the hosted services programs that’s still working through. And I think if I’d known then what I know now,

I think we would have worked harder at a potentially different solution rather than separating and actually spending some serious money upfront to buy what we needed and implement it in a different way rather than trying to split what we’ve had, what we’ve got rather than replacing. And I think the ICT is a huge issue, and it’s some of the basic stuff that staff talk about, that we haven’t been able to integrate all the systems together. So we’ve got different licenses. So where in old money, you could just talk to team members. Now you’ve got team members who are from three or four different organisations and it doesn’t quite work. And we’ll get there. It’s all fixable. And I think if we’d known two years ago how long it would take to run that programme and add real clarity on the impact that that would have, we might have done something different. We might not have been able to do anything different. I think we would have had different conversations. And I would urge anyone going through this. If you are going to be in a situation where the county is going to be split, our weight split, then some of those big county infrastructure, internal infrastructure systems, payroll, so we’ve still got four payroll and because we tuped everybody and everybody’s on the same terms and conditions, I think we have three, at least three if not four different pay dates in a month and so we’ve had to keep the payroll, so we’ve had to work with HMRC on PAYE and all the legal stuff around that but we are going to have from April 1, I’m touching wood, we are going to have one payroll system for Westmorland and Furness and one payroll system for Cumberland, but it’s taking two years to do. And it’s that back office, enabler, corporate support stuff that we probably don’t pay enough attention to. And it’s probably the bits of all of our organisations, wherever you are in the country, that have been hit hardest by austerity, because every council in the country has done everything that it can politically over the last 15 years to protect frontline services.

And the result of that is that our enabling and corporate enabling services are cut to the bone. And then to ask them to step up and do huge transformational change is a massive, massive, massive ask.

Are there any other words of advice or comfort or warning that you would share with colleagues who want this to work and are committed to making it work but understandably have some trepidation about it?

Yeah, well, it’s worth it. It is worth it. It’s tough. It is really tough. It’s probably the hardest programme that I’ve ever been involved in in my working life. I think personally for the, you know, the chief execs, the senior leadership team, but you know, those three staff officers going through that process, it’s tough. I mean, you do know at the start of it that there’s only going to be one chief exec, one monitoring officer, one s.151 officer. In the new councils and everybody knows how many there are in the system at the moment and you’ve just got to be really honest about that. So there’s a personal jeopardy but I think and but it’s tough the hours were ridiculous for that 12 months but it is worth it. So I’ve already said that one of my drivers going for the job was children’s services and county council had been requires improvement for several years.

We knew that off-state had come in within the first two years because they always do after LGR because they are worried that the big system can have upheaval, can take your eye off the ball in terms of your improvement plans and things can potentially go backwards. They gave us a ring. We got the call the second week in April at the start of year two, which I did think was a little bit mean, but we got good. We got good. And over just over 12 months going through all that upheaval shifting the system dramatically, bringing in a new DCS, was brilliant. We got good and we now know outcomes for our children are better than they were. We’ve just had our send inspection and the report isn’t out yet, but when I went to the informal feedback, the first line that the inspector read out was things have got better since LGR. So that, I’ll take that. I’ll take that every day of the week. And that’s what I did it for.

Yeah, no regrets.

Absolutely no regrets, no regrets.

This interview is part of our new series of conversations about local government reform. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.