Bradford Council and Everton - a tale of two failures

In football management is accountable, in public services it isn't

Recently I wrote about how accountability, or rather the lack of accountability, was a big problem in public services. The gist of the article was:

“The result of this complicated set of accountability mechanisms is that objective failures by state agencies do not result in any holding to account, let alone any change in direction or leadership. We have seen plenty of services failings, from the worst such as the Mid-Staffordshire Hospitals scandal or the Croydon tram crash, to repeated failures such as water pollution and social housing conditions. At a local level we see the disasters of local energy companies like Robin Hood Energy and the forced takeover of children’s services in places like Bradford. Despite institutional admissions of failure, there is in all this precious little to suggest that the people responsible, the leaders of these public agencies, are held to account.”

Given that I mentioned the central government takeover of Bradford Council’s children's services function, the recent developments there make for a good case study of the accountability problem. Yesterday (31st January 2023), Ofsted, the UK inspectorate of schools and other children’s services, published its latest report on Bradford Council. It didn’t make for good reading. Here’s the local paper’s report:

“Inspectors found in the most recent inspection of the Council’s Children’s Services that “the experience and progress of many children have declined” since the Council was last judged inadequate in 2018. Poor leadership, a shortage of permanent social workers and increasing pressure on the service are all highlighted in the report…There are widespread and serious failures across all service areas. This leaves children at risk of harm, leaves some children in situations of continued harm, and, for many children in care, unnecessary and prolonged delays in achieving permanence.”

A damning part of the report related to the people in charge of the service;

“Corporate leaders continue to lack understanding of the scale of improvement required and what actions, time and resources are needed to make improvements happen. This has had a negative impact on progress, particularly in relation to recruitment of staff at all levels. The delays to these improvements have led to a lack of confidence in children’s social care by partner agencies, and an inability to provide social workers and managers with an environment where they can practice safely and effectively.”

As  criticisms of leadership go, this is as categorical as you will ever get from an inspection agency. Agencies usually focus on the overall corporate and systemic factors affecting performance with leadership generalised within this overview. Ofsted is not going to say in blunt terms that the leader of Bradford Council, Susan Hinchcliffe, and the Chief Executive, Kirsten England have failed because that isn’t what inspection agencies do. Yet the inspectors are quite clear that poor leadership is one of the main reasons why the council “leaves children at risk of harm, leaves some children in situations of continued harm”. This is plainly not a matter of mere poor performance but rather a failure that risks the health, well-being and conceivably lives of children under the Council’s care and protection.

This is the response from the Chief Executive. It is a masterclass in ‘lessons have been learned’ bureaucratic response:

“There has been a huge commitment and investment in implementing the improvement in children’s social care and Ofsted acknowledges that there have been some small recent improvements under the leadership of the newly appointed Director of Children’s Services.

"We know however that much more is needed. This is why the Council, along with the Government’s Children’s Commissioner and the Department for Education, took the decision to establish a Trust to manage children’s social care services.”

I am reminded again of Kafka’s concept of bureaucratic error - “one of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account.” Ms England talks of the issue as if it is a problem over which she has no direction and, to cap this, presents the decision of the national government to remove children’s services from the council’s direction as a shared decision when the Council literally had no say in the decision beyond details of its implementation.

The leader of Bradford Council echoes the Chief Executive in the denial of error:

“We know that the pace of improvement in children’s social care services has been too slow since 2018 and fully accept Ofsted’s findings. Everyone is focussed on trying to speed up the pace of change…”

Susan Hinchcliffe was leader of the Council in 2018 when a previous report criticised the council’s children’s services, classifying them as ‘inadequate’. After four years of Hinchcliffe and England’s leadership the services are still inadequate. Yet there is no suggestion that these leaders intend to take any responsibility, to be accountable. In theory there is a mechanism to hold them to account - the Council itself (by which I mean the 90 elected councillors). Yet Hinchcliffe is the leader of the Labour group which has a safe majority and the chances of her being sacked are close to zero unless her position is seen by political colleagues as a threat to their jobs and positions.

Let me contrast this with another recent event. On Saturday 21st January West Ham United beat Everton 2-0, leaving Everton at the foot of the table without a win for 10 games. The game was an interesting one because the talk prior to the match was that both managers might be sacked if their team lost. And this came to pass with Everton sacking Frank Lampard, their manager. The statement from the Club’s owners couldn’t be more different from the ‘lessons have been learned’ lack of accountability we see from Bradford Council:

"Everyone at Everton would like to thank Frank and his coaching staff for their service during what has been a challenging 12 months. Frank and his team's commitment and dedication have been exemplary throughout their time at the club, but recent results and the current league position meant this difficult decision had to be taken. We wish Frank and all his backroom team well for their future in the game.”

So the manager and his entire support team get the sack. Not because they hadn’t worked hard but because they had failed to deliver. It is possible to criticise the speed at which football clubs sack managers when, as with Everton, the problem may lie with the outlook and approach of the board or the relationship with fans. But no football manager takes a job unaware of how accountable he is for the results on the pitch - he picks the team and, if they lose, it is his responsibility.

In contrast Bradford Council uses the same language, talking about how hard people have worked and how they all want to succeed, but doesn’t take the next step. It isn’t the social workers who are at fault but the corporate leadership yet the politician now leading on children’s services simply ignores accountability ploughing on with a sort of ‘everything is fine’ language:

“We know that improvement has not been fast enough and that this isn’t good enough for our district’s children. We understand that and will keep working hard to embed and sustain improvements.”

Public service leadership simply isn’t accountable. In Bradford’s case the failure will generate a few bad headlines, perhaps a tricky interview for the leader before it ceases to be a story. If the opposition makes a campaign out of it the political leadership will dismiss it as just playing politics with vulnerable children. And the chief executive, who retires in July, will move on to a comfortable portfolio life of directorships and speaking engagements, probably with a gong of some sort, and will never acknowledge how she failed those vulnerable children in Bradford.

Maybe public administration should be more like football in its willingness to sack failed leaders?