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The community is the all-new element of Modern Councillor, and it’s something we are particularly proud of.

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    • Kevin O’Keefe posted an update:   3 weeks, 3 days ago · View

      Elected Member Development Seminars
      DIVERSITY, EQUALITY & RESPECT
      A lively and highly interactive 2.5 hour Seminar based around exciting action-learning-sets and several engaging workshops, which combine to produce a uniquely rich environment for learning. Elected Members will gain a full appreciation of:

      • Their role as community leaders

      • Multiculturalism and the other strands of the diversity agenda

      • “Protected Characteristics”

      • Why diversity makes good community sense and good business sense

      • Legal obligations

      • The Equality Duty

      • Code of Conduct issues

      Over 95% of elected members attending our seminars rate them as either Excellent of Very Good, just see what they say about us….

      “Probably the best presentation we have ever had”
      Councillor – Blaenau Gwent Council

      “I can’t think of any part to improve. The course was very good. A very enjoyable, informative & witty speaker”
      Councillor – Lancaster City Council

      “An excellent seminar, delivered to a high professional standard…”
      Councillor – Forest of Dean District Council

      ELECTED MEMBER TRAINING – DELIVERED IN HOUSE – BY PROFESSIONALS
      http://www.excela.co.uk/id66.html


    • Kevin O’Keefe posted an update:   3 weeks, 4 days ago · View

      LOCAL GOVERNMENT “INTRAPRENEURS” HAVE LOST THE PLOT

      Let me describe a scenario – at local Authority near you.

      A desire to ‘drive out efficiencies’. An imperative to become more ‘customer centric’ and let’s add in ‘focus’ for good measure.
      Very many local authorities are exceptionally good at devising spiffing new ways to manage themselves after writing endless reports, numerous desktop studies, service restructures and other internal activities, which lose sight of the bigger picture.

      With the aim of trying to get their services-areas to have more of a commercial edge, many authorities fell into the trap of getting departments to “sell” their wares to each other, so that for example, their IT departments “negotiate” service level agreements with everyone else in the Council and “sell” IT services to them. They were all forced to become “intrapreneurs”.

      With the benefit of hindsight, the false logic of this policy is all too apparent. It fails on every rational analysis as:

      • Each service unit “selling” its wares needs only to cover its revenue costs and simply apportions those costs to directorates in a way which often equates to nothing more commercial or sophisticated than the number of staff in those other directorates.

      • There is no demonstrable year-on-year saving associated with the practice. If service unit budgets are cut, the ‘saving’ is associated with planned budget reduction rather than intrapreneurial activity. Were the practice truly commercial, some services simply wouldn’t be able to afford their support requirement.

      • Endless hours of officer time are wasted by playing shop and “negotiating” with each other. It’s rather like pet hamsters running in their wheels – maximum visible activity with zero return.

      • The intrapreneurial activity usually operates in the vacuum of a monopoly of supply. There is no true choice for internal customers and so the money-go-round goes on and on.

      Bizarrely, there remain a large number of old-fashioned authorities who still cling to operating on this widely debunked and counter-productive system.

      The solution of course is to encourage service areas to work collectively for the Corporate good. For example, Excela has worked with several Authorities who each year spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on instructing external barristers in private practice to deal with advocacy in their Planning, Child Care and other legal cases. Each of those Authorities’ legal teams simply re-charged those external costs to their client directorates. The outcome was that true legal spend for the Authorities concerned amounted to not just the running on-costs of the in-house legal team, but the also the ‘hidden’ external legal costs that ultimately showed up as expenditure in the budgets of other directorates. Actual legal spend for the Authorities was the aggregate of the yearly cost of running their Legal Services department, plus all those barrister’s fees paid directly by the other Directorates. How much easier it is to recommend that the budget of Legal Services is simply be increased by a ring-fenced sum of around £60k per annum so that they could hire their own in-house barrister.

      Yes, the Legal Services salary budget did increase by sixty thousand pounds. But the overall to the Authority as a whole, derived by relying less on external barristers, produces immediate cashable Corporate savings of at least £100k / £200 per annum.

      Forward-looking Councils encourage their intrapreneurs to think outside the silo of their own service areas, to ascertain how proper invest-to-save projects can derive cashable Corporate savings.

      Kevin O’Keefe is a Solicitor and Director of Excela Interim Management & Consultancy Ltd, providing strategic service reviews, standards investigations , interim Legal & Democratic Services management and elected member training throughout the UK.
      http://www.excela.co.uk


    • Frederick Wood and Kate Haigh are now friends   10 months ago · View


    • Frederick Wood posted an update:   10 months ago · View

      Planning to attend the Kingsway Residents Meeting tomorrow evening. This well attended gathering is an excellent means of engaging the electorate.


    • Kate Haigh and Mary Smith are now friends   10 months, 3 weeks ago · View


    • Chris Chatterton and Mary Smith are now friends   11 months, 1 week ago · View


    • Jonathan Mills posted an update in the group Member Development Officers:   11 months, 3 weeks ago · View

      I’m currently putting together a self assessment performance tool for elected members. Does anyone have any information or existing tools that they use and would be willing to share?


    • Lucy Pasfield joined the group Member Development Officers   1 year, 2 months ago · View


    • Paula Westwood posted an update in the group Member Development Officers:   1 year, 3 months ago · View

      Looking for ideas on keeping Members interested and active users of Modern Councillor. Any suggestions gratefully received!


    • Paula Westwood joined the group Member Development Officers   1 year, 3 months ago · View


    • Michael Weinhonig and Chris Wakefield are now friends   1 year, 4 months ago · View


    • Jonathan Mills joined the group Member Development Officers   1 year, 8 months ago · View


    • Amanda Taylor posted an update in the group Member Development Officers:   1 year, 8 months ago · View

      Has anyone got any tips about rolling Modern Councillor out to members?


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        Paula Westwood · 1 year, 3 months ago

        We carried out a ’guided trial’ of Modern Councillor before we subscribed to it. This involved Members registering to attend one of many sessions. The sessions were approx one hour long and involved a maximum of 6 Members attending a session. The session provided a brief overview of Modern Councillor and then Members were shown how to access and login to the area and then left to navigate the site themselves with the presence of myself in the room to be on hand for those Members who were not that confident using IT.

    • Amanda Taylor joined the group Member Development Officers   1 year, 8 months ago · View


    • Rhiannon Rees joined the group Member Development Officers   1 year, 9 months ago · View


    • Dave Briggs wrote a new blog post: Councillors and Social Media Part 2 – Blogging   1 year, 9 months ago · View

      ThumbnailOne of the first things any councillor should do to engage online with residents is to get a website of some sort. This will help people to find you, know what you are up to and to get in touch. One of the simplest, quickest, cheapest and most useful ways to set up a simple website is [...]


    • Stewart Harris posted an update in the group e-learning content:   1 year, 9 months ago · View

      We’ve had some interest expressed in e-learning on understanding local authority finance and budgets from a member perspective. Is this something that anyone else is looking at or wanting?


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        LP Staff · 1 year, 9 months ago

        Hi Stewart – we are currently working with a company called LG Futures (who provide finance training across the public sector including to members and officers) to develop a suite of e-learning addressing public sector finance. We will be producing an introductory module for councillors which we will be repurposing for members – this is likely to be in October. Drop me a line (deborah@learningpool.com) if you would like more details.

    • Stewart Harris joined the group e-learning content   1 year, 9 months ago · View


    • Netta Glover and Tim Mills are now friends   1 year, 9 months ago · View


    • Dave Briggs wrote a new blog post: Why are Localism Bill can help Councillors   1 year, 10 months ago · View

      One of our new modules in the Modern Councillor catalogue is on the topic of the Localism Bill , which undertook to change the law to shift power away from central government and towards local people. The bill is still going through Parliament, but it will be an important piece of legislation, especially for local authorities and the [...]