Bristol East Liberal Democrats

Strategy to Streamline Bristol City Council

If politics was all plain sailing, there would be little need for politicians. We'd all agree on a course of action and just get on with it.

Life is not like that. So along come the politicos offering to sort it out, to get things done, to take the tiller in rough seas and ride out the storm.

Lib Dem Councillor and Bristol East Prospective Member of Parliament, Mike Popham knows more than many about doing that. He has sailed the Atlantic, navigating 60ft waves and holding his course.

Now the 55-year-old company director is hoping to bring some of his sea-faring skills to bear on the council.

Its course has already been set. It is aiming for much greater efficiency, a much more focused approach to serving the public, better, more streamlined communications and services and better value for money.

These are the central planks of the council's business transformation programme, which got under way in Labour's time.

When the party resigned in last month's budget debate, it handed on to the Liberal Democrats a council already focused on change.

Moreover, the Lib Dems were already involved in the project. All three main parties were represented on the transformation strategy board.

All three also worked together on the appointment last year of a new chief executive, Jan Ormondroyd. She soon set the tone for change with a restructuring of the council's most senior officers.

The Lib Dems have taken control, but in many ways the direction has been chosen.

Where Mr Popham - a former Tory who found himself at odds with his then party during an earlier incarnation as a councillor in Woking, Surrey - wants to make a difference, is in the pace of change, particularly in the computer systems the council uses.

As a director of Berkshire-based software company Information Governance, the former Evening Post paper boy knows that getting IT right could be key to the success of business transformation.

"We have some great staff at the city council who are working very hard. But we don't have the right software to allow them to do their jobs as well as they could," Mr Popham said.

It comes down to communications, the left hand knowing what the right hand is doing. Computer systems work well, for instance, for individual departments or sections of the council.

Problems arise when staff in another part of the authority need to know what their colleagues have been up to or are intending to do or what the latest is on services to a particular client or member of the public.

"Accessing information is piecemeal at the moment. That must be a great frustration to council staff," said Mr Popham.

"Departments need to have access to common data, improving integration on payroll issues, for instance."

All Britain's so-called Core Cities - Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield - recognise the need to sort out such problems.

Birmingham, in particular, has spent huge sums on new systems. Some of London's boroughs are making similar progress.

Over the next few weeks Bristol City Council will seek out a "reference" council from which it can learn what changes need to be made and which new systems would be appropriate.

"We're not trying to reinvent the wheel," said Mr Popham, who recognises that relatively cheap and straightforward changes could be enough to make a great difference to the city council's performance.

IT improvements could, however, cost several million pounds.

Either way the aim would be to turn this short-term spending into long-term efficiencies and savings as soon as possible.

Mr Popham said his company has highly specialised software quite different from the needs of Bristol City Council and there would be no conflict of interest.

The changes that could result from new software tools will be the key to speeding up the business transformation programme, in his view.

And the need looks pressing. Late last year PricewaterhouseCoopers published a comparison of the performance of 43 so-called unitary authorities (councils with sole responsibility for their areas). Bristol City Council came 43rd.

"We can't improve that position until we start to take these decisions on software," said Mr Popham.

He will also have to see through other aspects of the transformation programme, such as moving some customer services and other staff to offices Somerfield no longer needs at Whitchurch.

"We are going to transform this council, but we are going to do it by taking our staff with us. This includes giving them the tools to do their job better," he said.