SOLACE Chair Des Murray: Next steps and the future of North Lanarkshire Council

Biography

Des Murray is Chief Executive of North Lanarkshire Council. Des Murray carved out a career in local government after starting a Youth Training Scheme (YTS) as a school leaver in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire. Starting with Strathclyde Region within the Finance service and then Building Works, he then joined the newly-formed South Lanarkshire Council for several years, before joining ADLO and then APSE, working throughout Scotland and Northern Ireland across frontline services, before eventually making it home to Scotland’s fourth largest local authority and the one in which he has always lived in 2011, as a senior manager in housing property. As Scotland’s largest local authority landlord and as then Head of Housing Property, he was responsible for a portfolio of 36,500 properties which included 48 tower blocks.

After a subsequent period as Assistant Chief Executive of Enterprise and Housing Resources between 2016 to 2018, he was named Chief Executive of North Lanarkshire Council. He implemented the Plan for North Lanarkshire in 2019 which set the direction for the council and its partners, with a whole place / whole system focus from the outset on people and communities, from economic regeneration and growth through to education, health and employability at all ages and stages. Already, under his leadership, significant progress has been made to positively impact social and economic conditions from record investment in infrastructure and growth in pay to improvements in education, employability, housing and family services. The next phase of The Plan has recently been agreed and will see a further £1.7 bn of capital investment across North Lanarkshire over the next five years on programmes and projects that will make an enormous difference to towns, communities and people for many years. Des is also chair of the Scottish branch of the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (SOLACE) where he has a key role in discussing the current and future central role of local councils to deliver vital services to communities across the country.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and career in local government?

The public sector has been good to me throughout my life at various points. School wasn’t a fit for me; I didn’t thrive. So, I went on a youth trainee scheme and started in what was then Strathclyde Regional Council. I had no idea what any of that meant at the time and what I was meant to be doing but I spent six years there learning my trade – basically those social skills of how you work with people from different backgrounds and experiences, primarily from a financial background. But I absolutely hated it. I was just fresh out of school and into work with no break. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be, but then I didn’t really know, to be honest.

By the early 90s, I almost joined the Navy as a submariner and subsequently ended up in a place called Strathclyde Building and Works, which was primarily to do with the construction and property side of commercial, police stations, schools, and all sorts of things like that. There, I absolutely found my home. I found a culture that I liked, a group of people that I could relate to that spoke to my working class roots. I must have made an impression. In 1995, the year before reorganisation. I formed a good relationship with one of the senior directors in terms of looking after the apprenticeship programme which had around 350 apprentices at the time. He secured one of the top jobs in South Lanarkshire Council and I was asked if I would come over voluntarily for the shadow year because I was one of the few who could use a computer at the time. So over I went and I spent a long time there learning how to reorganise complex organisations. I later went into policy, then strategy, travelled the UK, worked in Northern Ireland, and picked up a lot of life experience.

By 2006, while in Northern Ireland, I said to myself, “I need to come home and be with my family”. It’s probably at that point I decided I wanted to become a chief executive. I was still working in the public sector, and my wife and I had just had a baby. It was purely material at that point, but I thought, “I want to get to the top of the tree to be able to provide the best possible life that I can for my family”. Wishing it and making it happen are two different things.

Around mid-2013/14, after having joined North Lanarkshire Council, I started to get a sense that I could do that – and not only could I get there, I was now working in a place where I had lived all my life, North Lanarkshire was where I was born, where my daughter was being raised and where my wife lived and I genuinely remember saying to myself, “If I was in charge of this, could I make it better?” Not only for all the people out there, but for my own wife, my own family, all those people that I’ve been raised with and I live with, friends and family through all those ages and stages of life, and that was the motivation.

I became chief executive nearly eight years ago, and it has been an absolute rollercoaster. It’s an incredibly rewarding and frustrating job, almost in equal measure every day. But if you do it well, and you do it smart, you can make a difference. Eventually, I became chair of SOLACE, and they don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for, but they gave me that role as well! I care as passionately about it today as I’ve ever done. I’m not somebody who sits back and hides behind success. There are lots of things you can do as a council chief executive, it’s a vast organisation with lots of people, lots of activities and lots of good outcomes. But there’s also lots of deep harm out there. I’m not criticising anybody, but I think from time to time you see those individuals who celebrate success as a way of almost hiding the failure. I’m somebody who wants to do both in equal balance. I want to celebrate success but also say, “That’s brilliant, but what about this?” and circle back to the problems that haunt us at times.

Where do you see North Lanarkshire Council in two to three years time? What are your key deliverables and projects?

So I’m only half joking here: It’s the centre of the universe. Every Chief Executive should feel like that for their area. I’ve always believed North Lanarkshire is a really important part of Scotland. The people of Lanarkshire don’t associate with the council, instead they associate with the town they’re born in, their culture and so on. Those council north and south divides were created in a political map tied to reorganisation. But the area has historically seen great wealth, with huge historical growth around iron and steelwork, with a lot of heavy industry as the mainstay of its economy. That all ended quite rapidly during the eighties and early nineties and damaged not only the physical environment of the place, but also the psyche of the people. The feeling as if we were the poorer relatives to the other parts of Scotland and indeed the UK. But the economic importance in its location, how resilient its people are, how talented its people are have always been its greatest strength and what we’ve seen over the last now 8-9 years which I’ve been part of – and there’s been so many others as it’s not one person who makes this happen – has been a massive resurgence.

I’ll throw some stats at you to show you that North Lanarkshire is genuinely becoming the centre of the universe in terms of Scotland’s economy. Last month we got the latest data from the Scottish Government, and our economy has grown over 14%. The Scottish average is just over 3.5%, 3.8%. So we’re seeing four times the growth rate as the rest of Scotland.

And for the first time in our history, our average pay for male and female employees is now above the Scottish average. So you can imagine the thousands of jobs that have been brought in through our investment and others in infrastructure and in education, that’s allowed companies to locate in North Lanarkshire and see it as a place where they want to build and grow.

We have seen dramatic improvements in equalities. The gap between male and female average hourly rates has narrowed hugely in North Lanarkshire, and it’s now lower than the Scottish average. The types of jobs we are bringing are bringing greater equality to the system. At the same time we have been focusing upon some of our hardest to reach challenges: Those areas of deep poverty and deprivation. So care-experienced young people and children, historically, would have found themselves in North Lanarkshire excluded from schools at times due to challenging behaviour. Over the last eight years the exclusion of care-experienced people has reduced by 91.6%. We have all but erased any young people being moved out of their school environment because of factors that are usually out of their control and in a traumatic environment. We have a kind of mantra that these are children, these are our young people, these are their businesses, these are their communities and we don’t make it somebody else’s problem. It’s our problem and we’re going to deal with that. We don’t take a child moving somewhere else in Scotland and say well, can you sort this out for us? We’ll deal with that. We’ll keep them home. We’ll keep them with their families as closely as possible. We’ll keep them with our communities. And it’s making a difference. So it’s a mindset and a culture, but it’s leading to significant improvements around the economy and jobs and its meaning North Lanarkshire’s a place where people want to live and thrive again.

So we’ll see massive influxes, but with migration it’s managed migration, we’re throttling it so it doesn’t overwhelm the area. We’re investing wisely in new schools, campuses, hubs, roads, and digital. Basically, building that future community where people and their family would want to live.

North Lanarkshire, centre of the universe. Love that. Are there specific drivers and sectors driving those impressive stats?

Very much so, it’s not by chance. Go back to 2018, go back nearly seven years ago, and you look at your economy. And you look at what makes up your economy, those SMEs, construction, logistics, distribution, STEM, all those various sectors. You ask: Where are the areas of risk, what will the generation of tech-driven change most likely impact? What sectors are likely to see growth and what sectors are more resilient to that change? What does this mean for employment, and what aligns with the skill set of the people that live in North Lanarkshire? Through asking that, you start to create a road map and understanding of where you want to get to. Because without that thriving economy, people wouldn’t move into your area. They won’t bring their families. They won’t bring their skills, their knowledge, their tax base.

And you need that to sustain your communities and to tackle poverty and deprivation. Those new jobs, those new offers are going after people who are living out there in deep poverty and deprivation. So it’s disruptive. And then what you do is you relentlessly pursue it. That is the beauty of being chief executive. You get the ability to help shape what happens with education services. You get 50,000 plus children, young people, and you ask what can we do in that space to ensure the skills they’re learning and developing are more aligned to the future economy. It’s more likely that future economy will locate to our area because those employers know there’s a skills pipeline there, so they can work with us and help us develop, and that will help them grow their business, through resilient people, productive people making a difference. The same applies to investment in things like digital, health and social care. You try and do disruptive things around digital, like digital supports at home. In fact, we’re doing a thing next week: We’ll be first the local authority in Scotland to put in free fibre broadband in 37,000 social homes. Meaning, it wouldn’t matter whether you have material wealth or not. It wouldn’t matter whether you can afford the credit for phone bill that month or not. You’ll have a digital connection free of charge if you’re a tenant in North Lanarkshire.

The vast majority of those tenants live in or near areas of deep poverty and deprivation so actually need the biggest helping hand, so let’s give them it, but not in any way that stigmatises. Instead, this measure means a person born in that household will be as connected as any of their peers. It means they can access education, training, learning, and sometimes that’s difficult if there’s a lack of public transport or connectivity issues in terms of new public infrastructure. It means that when they’re going to FE or HE, they better tune into skills and training development that helps them not only with jobs and opportunity, but also in that global economy, that gig economy that’s out there in that digital world. And that’s just another strand of the resilience that we’re building across North Lanarkshire and it’s working.

As SOLACE Scotland chair, what are your aspirations for SOLACE and the local government sector this year?

I’m trying to bring an acceleration to the decision around the future focus and function of public services. Not local government. I don’t want people looking at councils through the lens of local government or looking at health through the lens of any change, because ultimately, all of these services, police, fire, local government, health, they are all parts of a single system. If you look at how people live their lives, how we interface with those services will change and evolve through life. But at some point in your life, you may interface with all of those services in various ways, and some in critical ways. Some people need those services to sustain their lives or have a quality of life in what they do and how they live.

So we know the challenges around resources and finance and economy and in future place. So it seems kind of alien to me that we’d have conversations in pockets about these things, with all these things actually impact upon the same people, the same families, same communities and the same services that all these people rely upon for that support. So let’s bring all that together. Let’s be the umbrella. Let’s accelerate that honest conversation. Let’s get the senior politicians into the room. Let’s look at the data. Let’s be honest with what that data tells us, and let’s make some really hard, tough decisions.

Fundamentally, it’s the ambition at the heart about what the future could look like and how that could improve people’s lives, but we need to be clear that that’s going to mean sacrifice because we can’t do everything we’re currently doing and sustain it for not even the short to medium term. So that’s what I’m trying to move forward in that year that I have, at the same time I’ve been trying to move forward as a chief executive in my own area, I’m just trying to mirror that at a national level.

Local councils tend to act as conveners, bringing together key stakeholders. Can you tell us more about that?

Absolutely. A no-wrong-door approach, right? If you see through the lens of a family that’s got a lot of support needs, be it around employment or health, you’ll see a fragmented public sector landscape, where people need to go here for that and go over there for this. And those two stakeholders don’t necessarily talk to each other, they may not even have a data sharing agreement between them. So people are having to repeat over and over again that these are the needs they have. Does that sound like a system that works for them? Absolutely not. So understanding that, why do we continue to operate our services in that fashion, when these are the very people that we’re all seeing as a priority? These are the people who are saying we need help most of all and deserve the most intensive support. So why don’t we reorganise, rather than expect them to basically conform to us? So that’s when public sector reform comes in, and the scale and technology allows us to do this in a completely different way in the past. So why haven’t we? Why haven’t we taken the best that’s out there and made it the norm?

Can you tell us about the Ravenscraig regeneration project? How important is building public transport to the success of projects like Ravenscraig?

Ravenscraig was one of those large industrial sites, its name was synonymous with heavy industry in Scotland; you’d think British steelworks and Ravenscraig. But that ended in the late 80s through government policy and the direction of global markets, before eventually, it was largely demolished in 1992, leaving behind very little legacy other than a kind of deserted brownfield site with significant contamination. It’s now a site that some of our planning people people refer to as twice the size of Monaco, one of the largest regeneration sites in Europe still to this day.

It sits right within the heart of what are a really well developed set of communities, Motherwell, Wishaw, close to Airdrie, close to Hamilton. And as it was a big employer back in the day, it was almost like a scar not just on the landscape but on the mindset of the people. So the job of the council with partners was to try and bring it back to life and transform it into a place of purpose and value where people wanted to live, work and play. And could you get rid of that scar, that Brownfield site. And the answer is yes you can, but it takes a lot of money and a lot of effort. But that’s what we’ve been doing for the last eight years, working our way systematically through the problems, remediating the site, seeing nature return and thrive. The on site access, the help and support for families to move homes there, people that live their lives there. Plus, building regional sports centres, hotels, restaurants and soon education establishments. They’re all now coming too.

And it’s genuinely exciting to see it now gather a head of steam because you know what it’s going to be in 5-10 years and it’s an exciting place. But it’s not all resolved. There’s still significant challenges, yet you can also see it lift the area and the people. Now, this isn’t statistically valid, but there was a piece in the Herald last month based on Zoopla stats, looking at a study across the UK of the 10 most in demand destinations in the UK.

Guess what was #1?

Motherwell, where Ravenscraig is located. So that caught us by surprise, but we haven’t just focused on Ravenscraig, we’ve made improvements to Motherwell town hub, the rail station. You can now get from Motherwell to Manchester in about two or 2 1/2 hours so it’s a great kind of hub spot in terms of where you want to locate, it’s easy to get to Glasgow, to Edinburgh and so forth. So it’s a good place to live in terms of accessibility. There’s also some beautiful parks and surrounding areas. It’s also got a lot of history and tradition. It can be a hugely warm community, as indeed all of our towns can be.

So the core question you asked me was about how important is public transport, well if you build and build out the site in the way that it’s got that balance of how people live and what they need to support that living e.g. campuses for education, I mentioned FE, I mentioned their leisure, retail, sport and activity, and you can build all that in close proximity to where they live, then arguably public transport becomes less of a factor because you can also build in employment land. You can also build in employment offers and you’ve got that amazing connectivity in the surrounding rail networks, now increasingly decarbonised. And you do want people to be more active, walking and cycling more. So one of the big investments that’s been going on for years is around active travel. So there’s another 3,000 homes that will be built on the site through time. There’s 1,000+ on it just now and that’s 4,000 plus families. It’s a huge amount of people. And it’s lovely to see those houses in high demand.

Whether it’s because of RightMove or Zoopla or whether it’s just because of people who are local, they want to live in the place that was once Ravenscraig. Not to sound too poetic, but it’s almost a kind of phoenix from the flames.

We’re actually hoping to focus on Ravenscraig later this year in a documentary on active travel as we think it’ll make for a great case study.

Absolutely. So another thing we’re doing in North Lanarkshire is the Tower Reprovision programme. North Lanarkshire historically had 48 towers. Pre-Grenfell, and certainly pre-COVID, we thought we’ve got land and we’ve got aspiration, so let’s build better homes for our people. So we have a target that we can do 5,000 new homes. It’s just recently been increased to 6,000 new homes and that 20% has been added to it under the same time frame. So we’re accelerating and we’re doing more.

And part of that is some of those towers coming down. So there’s three high rise towers that sit on the periphery over Ravenscraig. And they’re always synonymous with that history, that kind of working class type aspect, and those towers will get blown down later this year round about the autumn. And that’s also to create an active travel route into another point into the park so that people can easily travel from Ravenscraig into the Motherwell town centre so it’s that symbiotic relationship you get when you build a new community; you don’t forget the existing communities, you think how do you blend them into one new community?

The Ravenscraig Reclamation Project aims to be a self-sufficient neighbourhood. How important is sustainability to the Ravenscraig project?

I think it’s critical. If you can take a place like Ravenscraig and you can make it this green, vibrant, attractive place to live, then you can do it anywhere. And if you can do it with technologies and housing standards and active travel where you’re bringing down your carbon footprint, you’re improving your net zero contribution, you’re showing how people can live differently moving forward. That’s a powerful thing, but it also talks to your ambition, doesn’t it? It also talks to what you’re about as an area. And then employers and other stakeholders take note of these things. These things are important in terms of your overall economic profile. And if you’re doing that there, you can be doing it elsewhere. And we’ve been doing it across all our towns. So that has contributed to some of those earlier percentages on the scaling of economic growth. I mean we had more foreign investment in North Lanarkshire, it was the highest value inward investment we had seen, it actually recently outstripped Glasgow and Edinburgh.

So again, how important is North Lanarkshire? It’s the centre of the universe. If North Lanarkshire can really perform at a high standard, it can make a meaningful contribution to the Scottish economy, which helps people get a better quality of service as there’s more money to go around to help them in their lives, and if you can do it in North Lanarkshire, why can’t you do it in every area up and down the totality of Scotland? If we could get Scotland firing on all cylinders, imagine the difference that would make to people’s futures.

It’s quite a strong image, that derelict space being revitalised, with quality homes for people and sustainable active travel options.

It’s huge. One of the problems we had to fix with Ravenscraig was basically roads access, which sounds simple, but it’s incredibly complex as we had to get across the West Coast mainline, and the West Coast mainline is by far the busiest train route between Scotland and England. All heavy goods providers, other than what comes up in HGVs, go up and down that rail line. So pausing it, disrupting it to allow us to build an access route into Ravenscraig because that line runs below the bottom of Ravenscraig was no small feat. In fact, it was officially the largest civil engineering project in Europe last March. There’s some great footage online where you’ll see some tremendously talented people at work, experts in the field using robots to build an underbridge and move that underbridge in over a weekend and have the rail line up and operating again on the Monday.

And we now have a new access route into Ravenscraig and that actually, if anything, solves most of the connectivity issues around the ability to build more homes at pace without obviously gumming up the entire transport system in the surrounding area. So it’s painful in terms of the build process, but when you see the back end of it, what you get is massively improved connectivity, accessibility and freedom of movement that creates a range of new employment vehicles. It creates for businesses an opportunity to bring their wealth into the area and indeed, move their goods and products around in a much more effective and efficient way, including again developments such as containerised hydrogen railway ambitions in nearby locations, all of which are part of that future economy.

If things are to be better in the local government sector, what would be needed to change it? And are there any other projects you’d like to mention?

So I’ve mentioned housing. I’ve mentioned economy, we are doing massive investment in our campuses, which contain schools, but they’re not schools themselves. This is a key message. A lot of people will talk about building hubs and campuses, but really they’re building a new school with various tenants and they give it a different name. We’re genuinely trying to integrate the services within around whole family support and intervention. So again, speaking to that fragmentation out there.

This isn’t just a place where you drop your child off. This is a place where you’ll access employment, or health and well-being support. This is the place that will help you get back on your feet if you’re struggling, that will provide support out into your community, so you might never have to touch it but it’s there helping you to live your life well, we’ll be there for you.

We’ve been investing heavily in those types of campus facilities. We have accelerated that programme and we’ve done it mostly under our own steam. Our elected members have been fantastic in terms of unifying support. We call it the Community Investment Fund, and it’s basically been ring fencing council tax for capital injection. But part of that capital injection is tied to the housing development and improved tax base that follows. So there’s a whole financial model that’s behind it. And we’ve been doing the same with housing and HRA and housing capital and housing investment around new build stock.

The value of those two capital funds together will make such a difference to North Lanarkshire’s people. They’re currently valued at £1.7 billion over the next five years, most of it coming from the good people of North Lanarkshire and through their tax, their income base. All that money will be spent in North Lanarkshire for North Lanarkshire, improving their homes, communities, and the future for their children. That’s what good government can do. Local government has the power and the ability if it thinks out the box to fundamentally change people’s lives. It does so in partnership with many others. It’s absolutely the kind of lynchpin as you said earlier.

All it takes sometimes is somebody sitting, nudging others to align and then amazing things start to happen. So what we’re seeing in this is the transformative impact of all of that. Those investments in housing, those investments in hubs, those investments in infrastructure, the change that’s brought to our economy, the change that’s brought to the people’s quality of life, the opportunity that presents for the future and North Lanarkshire is on the up and long may that continue.