Haringey Council shelters its improvers.
A response has been received from Haringey's Leader, Councillor George Meehan. It has succeeded in raising more questions than it has answered. It says that in 2002 and then again in 2004 the Council ran an advert to attract interest in a number of project related pieces of work. "The recruitment was branded improvers so that we could bring together various roles that were required under a single advert". It goes to say that "this approach was successful in attracting a good response and the Council was able to appoint to a variety of projects and associated support roles."
Now this was getting somewhere until the Councillor said," As a part of our evaluation of the exercise the Council received feedback on the various works and was satisfied that the investment in additional staff represented good value for money against the positive results achieved".
Our concern was not about the recruitment and how it was funded. We were more interested in how the public sector could learn from Haringey's unique approach. How did these improvements impact on CPA? Were there any bottom line improvements in budgets? Was good practice recorded and hopefully emulated elsewhere in the Council? We will never know.
The Council is not planning a repeat of this exercise.
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