7.1 Impact on staffing requirements
Where disaggregation of people services takes place through local government reorganisation, additional staffing is highly likely to be required. Even where identical direct staffing ratios are maintained (i.e. where caseloads are consistent before and after), overall numbers of management will almost always increase. The analysis for this programme has sought to model the changes required to senior staffing in the different scenarios. The work has focused solely on modelling the management and senior leadership teams within people-based services required in newly formed authorities, and assumes that caseloads remain constant. This analysis has also excluded the staffing costs for supporting functions such as commissioning, HR, and business intelligence, along with all other staffing required in disaggregation, for example corporate management teams (CEO’s, Finance Directors, directors of other disaggregated services).
As a minimum, as new organisations are created, additional senior statutory leaders will be legally required to manage them. In a scenario where an average 500,000 population is achieved across all county areas and their neighbouring unitaries, this will result in up to nine new local authorities (moving from a baseline of 37 to 46), and the need for up to nine new Directors of Adult Social Care and Directors of Children’s Social Care, as well as roles across the wider leadership and management team. This is before any wider changes to the management team are accounted for. Figure 25 below shows a summary of this analysis, averaging the increased cost of staff in scenarios where two, three, four, and five new unitaries are created. This suggests that depending on the size of the local authority, an additional £1-3m of total senior staffing spend is required per additional unitary created, or approximately an additional 10-35 senior staff across people services.
Figure 25: Average increase in the cost of senior staffing with the number of unitaries, taken as average of modelled scenarios
£7,000k
£6,000k
£5,000k
£4,000k
£3,000k
£2,000k
£1,000k
£0k
2
3
4
5
Number of unitary councils
61
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