An exclusive with John van de Laarschot, Chief Exec at Stoke-on-Trent City Council

John: We tried really hard to make cuts where you're not shooting yourself in the foot. There are some that are pretty challenging though; those around education attainment and children and young people's services, where we've got to re-engineer and do things in a different way. With all the changes that are coming through in terms of the way the Government is looking at education, we've got some scary moments to be perfectly honest. It's also pretty frightening the dramatic changes that are happening around the health agenda. I'm not saying that they're good or bad; but the speed that they're being introduced creates a certain amount of challenge.

It's probably different if you're down in Westminster, but when you're sat here in Stoke-on-Trent, it's very easy to come up with the view that a lot of the Government policy is being made on the fly at the moment, because you can't see the end to end solution. It's always pretty nervous when local authorities end up being the bodies that have to implement these changes.

Jonathan: You mentioned that cuts affect different people and that's the reality; every cut is going to affect somebody. Within the Council, apart from the hundreds of people who've had to lose their jobs, have you done a review of the wage structure within the council?

John: Yes, we've had a look at it. In the major restructuring, where at the management level we took out about 30% of the management team, what that inevitably requires is for those managers that are left to take up much greater levels of responsibility. Well we've done that without increasing their salaries. Turning round to someone and saying well your job was that and now you're going to this and by the way your wage doesn't move anywhere, is a tough sell. However in the current market, people are up for that and people are up for supporting the city.

We have had a conversation; again I can be very open with you, with our union colleagues about the whole terms and conditions of all our employment. At the moment we're part of a national agreement on that. I think our sense is that for the time being we'd like to stay within that national agreement. We've got a very good working relationship with our union partners here. We understand the issues that they face, and wherever best we're trying to accommodate the difficulties that they face for their members and for our staff.

Jonathan: People like to know how long it's going to be; how tight should their belt be and how long is it going to be that tight? What would you say to them?

John: This is the first year. It's fairly evident doing our financial projections, looking at next year, we're probably in a scenario where we may have to save up to another twenty million pounds out of service. The year after that it may well be the same again. So we're really being forced by central government to cut our cloth according to what we can afford and to really focus in terms of what are the key priorities and to ensure we've got the most effective means available to deliver those priorities.

That's starting to open up the debate of whether as a local authority we should be doing all these things ourselves or are there better ways of doing things. It could be through social enterprise; it could be through the voluntary sector; it could be through other partner arrangements; it could be through sharing assets with some of the other local authorities, with some of the other public service providers like the police, the PCC and so on.

The consequence of all this spending pressure is that it is forcing us to be much more efficient and much more effective. That's a difficult challenge but that's normal if you're in the private sector; that's what your game is all about. The cynics might say that the public sector's been a little insulated from this in the past. Well now is the time to sort it out to end up with a really lean and mean public sector that can truly support what our communities and our businesses want.

Regeneration

Jonathan: Let's turn to regeneration now because one of the fascinating things about Stoke-on-Trent is, while we're going through cuts like the rest of the country, we've actually got a lot of regeneration taking place. First of all I want to look at something that has just ceased; which was Renew North Staffordshire. Having spent ninety eight million pounds buying 1661 houses, demolishing most and rebuilding about 400, how do you evaluate the Renew contribution?

John: Honestly - pretty detrimental to the city. Having said that, I think the team that worked in it have done a stellar job against the criteria that was set.

The biggest issue with Renew is that the funding was provided against clearance and not against rebuild. In terms of clearance - has the organisation Renew been really successful? - well yes it has. Where it's failed, not through any fault of its own, was in the rebuilding of communities and taking a much more sympathetic way to clearance, i.e. if you have a particular neighbourhood where you've got a problem, perhaps it's much better to rebuild adjacent and then clear so that you don't actually scatter that community from one end of the city to the other. It's really easy to see that with hind sight. It has left us with a legacy of a lot of scorched earth, which we now need to sort out. The up side of it is we've now got a load of brown field sites that are ready and able to be developed, which we didn't have before. I've got a pretty mixed view on it if I'm honest.

Jonathan: Looking at funding, obviously Advantage West Midlands has gone and other public funds. Instead there's the emergence of local Enterprise Zones. We didn't actually get chosen for the first round of the Governments rolling out. How did you feel about that because I know you're really positive about the Local Enterprise Partnerships aren't you?