The time is now to create the very best local government workforce

Dawn Carter-Mcdonald, Chief Executive of Hackney Council, writes of her rewarding experience in local government, while also highlighting the dilemmas facing the sector around creating a workforce fit for the future. Local democracy and public services are facing significant existential challenges, and Dawn pleads for local government to come together and share strategies to recruit and retain the very best workforce possible.

I’m not sure local government is always seen as the most dynamic place to establish your career. I don’t agree with this sentiment, and writing for a local government audience, I doubt there will be many of us who consider our work boring. But local authorities have long faced challenges in recruitment and retention.

Of course, as employers, we face many hurdles that make it difficult to sustain our attractiveness as an employer. Most of us will be able to recall working in far from ideal office conditions, working anti-social hours, and having to deal with stressful and challenging situations. This is the same in many lines of work, but for whatever reason, local government often seems to be presented in this light.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. In England, the Local Government Association (LGA) has long-running campaigns designed to attract candidates into the sector. Most recently, their ‘make a difference, work for your local council’ campaign was used by many to support their recruitment strategies.

These kinds of recruitment campaigns exist to attract people to local government despite – or in response to – the challenges we face. As a sector, I don’t believe we’ve yet completely resolved our ways of working since Covid-19, improved our approaches to governance and the rules regarding our decision making, or settled on the right balance of home or remote and office working.

We face new challenges too, such as more scrutiny, external threats such as cyber attacks, the rise of disinformation, the role of AI, and political and societal upheaval. It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge how Hackney, over the years, has faced many of these challenges, and more, but I am proud of how we have collectively responded to address each challenge we have faced.

In Hackney, we recognise a disconnect between our local population and workforce.  I am a firm believer that local authorities should reflect the boroughs they serve, it is essential for community cohesion and shows the organisations’ strong commitment to the embedding of equalities across every area of our responsibilities. The Society of Local Authority Chief Executives in the UK (SOLACE) has recently done work to better understand and improve Equality, Diversity and Inclusion across the local government workforce.

Hackney is one of the youngest boroughs in the country. Yet our workforce is ageing. Black and Global Majority communities are well represented within our workforce, and women earn more than men on average, but other disparities exist. Whilst I am aware that other local authority areas will have similar disparities, we are working to address them.

The population in Hackney has above-average levels of academic qualification, but our workforce doesn’t yet. This is something we are working to improve with a new workforce strategy and skills programme. Likewise, our overall workforce is well represented along lines of ethnicity, but particular teams and divisions within the Council remain stubbornly unrepresentative.

As an employer, Hackney needs to compete and needs to improve. Many of those living in our borough now work in creative arts, media and technology and earn well above the national average. These well-educated, highly mobile, young people have the skills we need to rise to the challenges we face. Yet, as employers, we probably seem far from desirable when compared to the salaries and perks many private sector employers, particularly in London, offer to their employees.

Of course, that difference between public and private sector wages has always been the case – much has been made of the virtue of senior officers working for less than their private-sector equivalents in the pursuit of serving the public good. But we cannot depend upon the virtuous and need to attract those that may be motivated by other means.

When I joined local government, it was very much seen as a job for life. I didn’t join at the start of my career, but I’ve now spent over 20 years here. Much was made ‘in my day’ of job security and that attracted me at the time. But I’m not sure this is what those joining in their twenties and thirties now look for in the first instance. I think this is even more true in London, where employees have so many more options when it comes to where (and how) they work. Of course, this is also a strength of the sector, as London is served by over thirty boroughs, and layers of regional government, all of which have harmonious terms and conditions when it comes to long service and pensions.

We’re blessed in Hackney to have offices and working environments that genuinely do match the best in the private sector. But our terms, conditions and practices do not. It’s difficult to explain to a 25-year-old, Gen Z, the benefits of the local government pension scheme when the scheme itself seems to be under scrutiny and threat.

We’ve previously run our own ‘find yourself in Hackney’ recruitment campaign to promote the benefits of working in the borough. Now our attention has turned to a new workforce strategy designed with colleagues to improve our whole approach to recruitment, retention and rewards.

This work is vital. So much of what we can offer and do is bound by national terms and conditions, but there is still great variation in those terms and conditions not bound by the infamous blue and green books.

We need to make a virtue of our staff benefits when compared to the private-sector employers that we compete against, and we need to make sure our offer is as competitive as possible. Without wanting to pre-empt the work we plan to do, we want our new strategy, subsequent plans and new changes to be borne of feedback from staff, and we aim to improve our offer in many aspects.

I’m not pretending or suggesting that in Hackney we’ve uniquely identified or solved this problem. But I do think it’s one we need to engage with as a sector, and it is going to require collaboration. I know London Councils, the membership organisation that represents the thirty-two boroughs and City of London, is also looking into this, recognising that collectively we can address the issues and challenges that recruiting and retaining a workforce for the future brings. I’d imagine other organisations, such as Core Cities or new combined authorities, are doing similar. With over 300 local authority employers in England alone, with local government reorganisation something many are grappling with right now, and with the challenges we face looming, now has to be the time we recruit and retain the very best workforce possible.

I must end this article on a positive note, as I remain incredibly proud to work in local government, and I know we are doing work that fundamentally improves lives. Despite the challenges we face, local government will always be a place where those who want to excel in their careers can progress. Working more closely with partners, including health colleagues, local businesses and government, I’m really excited for the future, and I’m confident the readers of LGIU are too!

This essay is part of the Future Local Lab’s Building the workforce of tomorrow essay collection. You can find the entire collection, plus more LGIU-exclusive workforce resources, here.

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This think piece is part of LGIU’s Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere.