Barking and Dagenham Scoop Council of the Year 2020

The iESE Public Sector Transformation Awards were held this year on 4th March in London. This was their 11th year and saw hundreds of fantastic entries from the public sector across the UK. The awards now include 15 categories, including the overall Council of the Year award.

The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) has been driving change hard since 2016/17 when it kick-started its Ambition 2020 Transformation Programmeto implement a Council fit for the 21st Century with a mission to 'leave no resident behind'. There is strong evidence the strategy is working and we were delighted to name the LBBD iESE Council of the Year 2020.

The challenge faced by LBBD is, by its own admission, an enormous one. It is one of the most deprived communities in the UK with poor outcomes for many of its residents. For years, it has scored low on some of the key outcome measures for its residents in comparison to other London Boroughs.

It is also experiencing huge demographic change. In 2001, 90 per cent of its population was White British, compared with less than half in 2017. Thirty per cent of its population is under the age of 18, and half of these are aged seven or younger, placing huge demand on children's services. As a borough which still has relatively affordable housing and a large private rental market, LBBD faces additional pressure from other boroughs housing deprived families there.

The impact of austerity, legislative change and increasing demand means the council has had a £63m funding gap to close. With few businesses, and large number of residents on benefits, the ability to close this gap through taxation has been limited.

LBBD's transformation journey was first born from a Local Government Association peer review commissioned in spring 2014, the conclusions of which led to the appointment of a new CEO, Chris Naylor. He initiated a wide-scale workforce review and the findings and feedback from staff were clear - the council needed to think differently, be bold, be innovative and stop the incremental year-on-year salami slicing. The Councilneeded to change the relationship it had with its citizens, from paternalistic provider to empowering enabler.

The iESE Council of the Year award was just one of three awarded to the borough . LBBD also won the Community Focus and Intelligent Council categories, adding to a growing awards collection the Council has amassed since completing its transformation agenda two years ago. Publicising this particular win has been overshadowed by the Covid-19 response, but MeenaKishinani, Transformation Director at LBBD says the Council sees great value in award applications. "When we first started applying for awards people were cynical but changed their attitude after we won our first set of awards and realised why it was important. Now when we win an award our Leader takes it around our buildings to show staff what we’ve collectively achieved, and insists on having the awards displayed."

Winning awards is a huge morale boost for staff, none of whom have been left unaffected by the Council's complete transformation process. Kishinanisays winning awards also helps with recruitment. "We have seen that the calibre of applicants for senior roles in the last three years is significantly different. They are aware of our awards and give this as a reason for applying."

While the transformation is complete, LBBD still has huge challenges but has a leadership team that has huge aspirations and a real vision for wanting to change the lives of residents. The borough has been identified as London's Growth Opportunity. It is less than 20 minutes from the centre of London, has space for 60,000 new homes and is proof that economic growth is moving eastwards towards the borough.

The Council is top in London and fourth in the country for replacing homes sold through Right to Buy. Stock in its own housing company, Reside, is providing affordable rents to local people, with numbers set to rise from 300 properties to more than 2,000 in the next three years. The income from this, and the other significant investments the Council has made, will deliver a net return of £5.1m a year.

Kishinani believes the transformation's success has been down to buy-in from the senior leadership team and members and making sure services continued whilst designing the transformed organisation. "You need to have a clear vision, the right capability and capacity around you and buy-in from the Leader and Chief Executive so they are absolutely behind it and owning it. We had 27 strands of the original transformation programme and every single one was sponsored by one of the senior leadership team.

"We went big bang but while we were building the new ship, we kept the old ship sailing. That is important.. You have to keep your services running and at some point bring the two together seamlessly."

A new commercial model is helping close the £63m funding gap through the council's wholly-owned companies channelling profits back, whilst contracted services are increasing revenues through harnessing the capabilities of private sector providers. It has so far closed approximately £40m of its £63m funding gap and is on course to close the rest.

But Kishinani is clear it was never all about money. "We definitely had a burning platform but we made sure this wasn't all about the money. If it had been we would have taken services and slashed them but we didn't do that, we thought about what residents needed to really change their outcomes and what the structure of the council needed to be to deliver that."

The launch of Community Solutions, one of the new services developed as part of the transformation programme, aims to resolve complex needs by tackling root causesrather than just signposting residents towards traditional service blocks to receive a service the usual way. Whilst the Council hasn't marketed the changes it has made to residents, it sees success in the evidence. Complaints have gone down, evictions have reduced, the number of residents in temporary accommodation has reduced, households are being supported with finance plans so they can get themselves out of debt, and residents are receiving quicker responses with a more efficient and informed response. "We don't have a housing department anymore but people don't know that, they just need someone to help with a housing issue, they don't care where it is coming from. We dissolved those hierarchies very deliberately so we didn't have the silos we had before in Adults, Children's, Housing, Environment etc."

The Council has also invested in and revolutionised its social media presence, moving from 133rdin the country to 3rdin just two years (GovRank), communicating with residents in the way they want to communicate, about the things they want to talk about. In addition, the borough’s schools continue to go from strength to strength, with 93 per cent of them now classed as good or outstanding. The council also holds Silver Investors In People status, with a recent assessment finding Council employees had a high degree of understanding and support for the Council's vision, with the Employee Engagement Index score at 74 per cent and rising through a period of massive change.

Whilst LBBD is a borough with a population on the rise, the Council continues to strive to reduce demand on its services and to seek new ways to make an impact on its communities. "One of our big areas now is predictive analytics. We have a small team of data scientists who have made a huge difference in a short period of time. We are now able to really understand where our demand is coming from and target our limited resources in the most effective way,” added Kishinani.

Find out about the Public Sector Transformation Awards at: https://iese.org.uk/project/the-public-sector-transformation-awards/