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

It's a start

By January 2011 every council will have to publish details of invoices over £500.

Kent County Council have started by publishing details of invoices over £500 that have been paid by their Environment, Highways and Waste services.  In the months ahead they plan to publish all expenditure over £500.

They  will be publishing the data each month in two formats - Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF to make the data as useful as possible to as many people as possible.

Making sense of the invoice information

This is what the data looks like:

The files contain details of all invoices paid in the reporting month that have a value of £500 or more (excluding VAT). We will not be publishing details of payments that are of a personal nature, such as those to foster carers.

The data is split into six columns containing:

• the reference number for the payment being made
• the name of the supplier/organisation receiving the payment
• the date the payment was processed by our payments system
• the value of the payment on the invoice in pounds excluding VAT
• the part of the council (we call them directorates) that made the payment
• the cost type which shows how we categorise the payment (we use more than 700 different cost types to help us identify and manage our spending).

For accounting purposes, the council is organised into five areas:

• Adult Social Services
• Chief Executive's Department
• Children, Families and Education
• Communities
• Environment, Highways and Waste

Invoice details

Details of the invoices they  pay are available  in two formats - Microsoft Excel and Adobe PDF.

Full details here http://kent.gov.uk/your_council/council_spending/invoices_over_500_pounds.aspx

KCC Wasting Taxpayers money again

Council officials have spent thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money on staff away days to teach them the secrets behind becoming a successful team.

Activities ranging from two days at a hotel at Brands Hatch to outdoor pursuits at Paddock Wood have been laid on, with a total of £30,086 being spent in two-and-a-half years.

The figures cover events organised by the corporate personnel team for County Hall staff. 

Kent County Council admitted it was not a complete list of events, and said it would take too long and be too expensive to provide a comprehensive breakdown for the Freedom of Information request submitted by KOS Media.

This means the true cost of days out could be substantially higher. 

Of the details available through FoI, it was revealed that in one case £4,613 was spent on two days at a hotel at Brands Hatch for 25 County Hall workers to show them what made a successful team.

A spokeswoman from KCC, however, said one of the days was a Saturday and no excursions were taken anywhere else, for example, to the racing circuit nearby.

On another day, 54 staff were treated to a day of outdoor pursuits at Treejumpers in Paddock Wood at a cost of £6,404 to the taxpayer. 

The reason stated for the Treejumpers away day – which was repeated just nine days later for a smaller number of workers at a cost of £2,891 – was that it was a ‘team event’. 

Training days also racked up high bills, with £6,189 being spent to equip 23 staff from the Information Services Group at KCC with a ‘toolkit’ of skills for high performance.

The event, held at the four-star Eastwell Manor in Ashford, aimed to increase levels of self-awareness to allow the team to understand the motivation behind their own and others’ behaviour.

And on another team development day, this time for Kent Extended Services, which works on activities for school children, families and communities, £1,080 was spent on learning to understand each other better.

Six members of staff were also treated to a day at Buckmore Park, a karting circuit in Chatham, at a cost of £1,149.

Reasons stated for the trip were to enable them to improve communication, forge positive links with each other, adopt a ‘joined-up’ approach and work together positively. 

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, said Kent residents would be outraged their council tax is funding tree-jumping under the guise of training.

He said: “It is worrying that this is not even the full picture of how much departments are spending on these jollies, as there are cases that are not documented.”

Details obtained from KCC outlined the number of delegates involved for each away day, with numbers as high as 184 for one event. Of the 27 set out, some 671 staff took part. 

Although in many cases this would have been the same workers involved on different away days, Mr Elliott questioned the amount of working time lost.

“These spending totals do not reflect the cost of the lost time of those staff members attending days out,” he said.

“Taxpayers will wonder why senior staff at KCC are being paid such huge sums if they aren’t up to the job and need all this extra training. 

It is perfectly possible to hold team building events in-house at no extra cost to taxpayers, which is really important, especially in a time of fiscal crisis.”

Of the details obtained from KCC, the most recent team days, in June and July, were held in-house for free.

Amanda Beer, director of personnel and development at County Hall, said the council was committed to delivering the highest standard of services to residents.

“We see successful team-working as equally important as individual skills and it is entirely appropriate that team-building events form part of our staff development,” she said.

“All such events must have clearly stated purposes and outcomes and we encourage teams to organise volunteering days that help local communities at the same time.”