KCC being economical with the actualité rather than tax payers money

A £200,000 windfall payment to Kent County Council’s former chief executive actually cost the taxpayer twice as much as originally stated.

Peter Gilroy was given the six-figure sum after agreeing to extend his contract for a year.

It was designed to ensure that his pension was not affected by his decision to stay on.

Now KCC’s auditors have disclosed that agreeing to pay Mr Gilroy actually cost £408,000, taking into account relevant National Insurance and income tax contributions.

The revelation comes in a formal report by the Audit Commission that makes a number of criticisms of the authority over a series of six-figure severance payouts to top officers.

The Auditors have been  critical of how the county council negotiated the settlements, saying it failed to properly set out why they were considered value for money.

In the case of Mr Gilroy, who was paid £214,000 last year, the report says councillors were given too little information to allow them to make an informed decision about the proposed payout.

It criticises the council over its failure to assess whether the agreement with the chief executive was value for money, saying no alternatives were explored.

It also says the finance director was not told.

Reasons to vote Green

Disgraceful KCC Child Protection Failure

Kent County Council leader Paul Carter has admitted being unaware of how poorly run the authority’s child protection service is.

Last week County Hall’s most senior politician was forced to issue an apology after a damning Ofsted report rated the safeguarding and looked-after children services at KCC as "inadequate".

Areas of concern raised after a two-week inspection last month include the management and supervision of services, low educational attainment of looked-after children, high number of cases not receiving quality assessments, and social workers with high case loads.

 Cllr Carter admitted he only now appreciated the full scale of the problem."We’ve got some poor management, which the report highlights," he said. So it will be interesting to see what action will be taken over this "poor management" bonuses all round?

"The service is under pressure, but  the report highlights issues that are more severe than I  have been aware of."We’ve got to make sure members of staff are appropriately managed and tasked because there’s an element of people being overwhelmed here."

This from a council that wants to spend our money funding and running commercial businesses, that has bid and won the rights to the new Local Enterprise Partnership scheme.  Yet they can't successfully organise and manage their core services. When will KCC let go of their vanity empire building and focus their time and resources and our money on core services.

Oh by the way it's also snowing again, please let's see if we can avoid a similar fiasco as we had when it snowed last time.

SOCIALNOMICS 1

Kent.gov.uk – local government incompetence in PPC

‘Austerity’ is a much more familiar word nowadays and the public sector is embarking on a series of cutbacks to help towards saving the £Billions needed.  A few months back I had reason to type ‘things to do in Kent’ and saw a PPC advert that enticed me in …. to a dead page on the www.kent.gov.uk website.     At the time I was annoyed that public money was being used to fund a PPC advert that led to a dead page.

And then I forgot all about it.  Until now, having seen something in the news about cutbacks being too severe and people losing their jobs in council departments.

So I used the tools at my disposal to research what PPC adverts have been used by Kent County Council in the past 12 months.  

The good news is that they’ve stopped using PPC advertising (at least for now).   But what about how they were handling it beforehand?  Has there been wastage on PPC that was unnecessary?   Yes, there certainly has been.

For example, there was a whole campaign focusing on attracting in people who had typed certain phrases into Google.  As an example, if someone typed the phrase ‘management jobs in Dubai’ they would have seen an advert that displayed as:

Environment Graduate Jobs
At Kent County Council
Environment Stream – £23,054

If you’d typed ‘financial services authority jobs’ or numerous other types of phrases (I have them all for anyone interested) then you would have seen the same advert appear.

OK, someone thought they’d be clever by picking up on phrases that people type and then trying to tempt them into clicking on an advert, hoping that they’d be swayed into considering a type of job that was nothing to do with what they’d searched for.   What they demonstrated was a clear lack of knowledge about how PPC actually works, and they would have been penalised for that (by Google).

So what about when someone typed ‘Los Angeles things to do’, ‘where to go Paris’, ‘what do do Miami’ and ‘things to do Hong Kong’?   What do you think appeared in Google?   Try this:

What To Do Fun Day
Free Family Fun Day
Next Saturday In Canterbury

Why on earth would someone interested in Los Angeles or other places be interested in a family fun day in Canterbury?  What possessed the monkey that created that PPC campaign?!

There are numerous such examples I could come up with.  For example, Google searches on ‘Bouncy Castle’ and ‘facepaint’ brought up the Canterbury fun day advert and a search on ‘pyrenees walking holidays’ brought up an advert promoting a walking festival. 

I think that underneath the incompetence there was someone who had the best intentions – attract people to get involved at a local level, having searched for something very vaguely related, or to encourage graduates looking for numerous types of work to instead consider an Environment Graduate job.   But I wonder how well it was all measured?   What did the cost of clicks actually achieve?    And how many people clicked on adverts after the landing pages had disappeared?

The point of all this is to demonstrate that it’s easily possible to identify the PPC and SEO keywords that any organisation is visible under and while such research is generally used by those in business to identify what competitors are doing (ask me how, if wanting to know more), it can also highlight significant weaknesses.

The big question in my mind is this:

“Out of thousands of staff, plus the presence of numerous PPC experts within Kent, how was it possible to make such a mess of something that could have achieved much better results at minimal cost to the public purse?”

So yes, I do feel sorry for some of those who will lose their jobs in the public sector as time goes on but I do have to wonder whether incompetences like the one shown here are replicated in numerous other ways that lead to wastage and ultimately, to job losses when the belts have to be tightened because there’s no money left.   Finally, for an added laugh, look at the strapline on the council website … ‘A council that performs excellently’.

Article by Andy Harris at Custwin   http://tinyurl.com/2vh5572

The Real Scale of the Debt