Olympian task: Stepping up at Newham

Last year, Conrad Hall moved from his role as chief finance officer at London Borough of Brent to take on a wider remit as director of resources at the London Borough of Newham. Hall talks about the journey and the challenges he has faced.

“What is the price of experience?  Do men buy it for a song or wisdom for a dance in the street?”

Well, I have certainly had a fantastic experience since joining the London Borough of Newham last summer.

I have learned a lot and any price in terms of the long hours you have to put into any new job has been well worth it.

Newham, for those who don’t know it, is in east London, most famous recently of course for including the site of the London 2012 Olympic stadium.

However, the money that came from that never really flowed down to enough of our residents.

Far too many of them are still in poverty, with wages well below London averages, high housing costs and deeply rooted inequalities in the labour market being just some of the challenges that we are starting to address through our Inclusive Economy and Community Wealth strategies.

Internally, there is a lot to put right too and I’ve had to make lots of changes to my personal style and approach in stepping up from a CFO role to the wider corporate director of resources position I now fill.

“It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer’s sun.  And in the vintage and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn.”

It’s also easy to criticise those who did your job before you and I’ve no intention of doing so here.

I don’t know what the circumstances were at the time but, with the advantage of hindsight, you could argue that Newham’s financial history might almost be a text book case of initiative overload.

It does sometimes feel as though Newham had its share of every passing trend in local government finance over the last decade or two:

• Lots of Lender Option Borrower Option (LOBO) loans, check;
• Exotic LOBOs, check;
• Over a dozen subsidiary companies, check;
• Several complex PFI deals, check;
• Joint venture arrangements with multiple partners, check;
• Public inquiries into deals with the owners of local sports stadiums, check; and
• An ambitious shared arrangement, OneSource, for all of our back office services.

I could go on.  Each of these in isolation will have its proponents and those who argue against it.

Stepping back, as a dispassionate intellectual exercise, I could make a persuasive argument for each of them, perhaps with the exception of some of the complex LOBOs.

However, when you add them all together you can begin to understand why the audit opinion on the 2018/19 accounts wasn’t received until the start of 2020.

It would be hard to find other ways of making our accounts even more complex.

Even then I didn’t know whether to celebrate getting the audit opinion two whole months earlier than the year before, or to remind myself we need to take another five months off the timetable just to meet the 31 July target, let alone reach the “first in class” standards I aspire to.

There is a real lesson here about organisational design.

There’s nothing wrong with trying complex and challenging things in order to get more and better for residents.

I think they would be disappointed if we didn’t try.  But how much complexity can you cope with at any one time? 

Can you recruit enough capacity and expertise to deal with the complexity going forward, or will you permanently leave yourself needing expensive consultancy services? 

And, critically, can you retain not just the people and the expertise but the experience and organisational memory? 

The other experience I have gained is about shared services.  OneSource has delivered savings over the years and parts of it, like transactional services, work really well.

But it’s much harder to share advice.  The theoretical benefits of shared expertise can all too easily get lost because of the distance it places between support services and operational managers. 

On top of that, there’s no easy way around the obvious problem of peaks and troughs, as all of the partner boroughs tend to need the same sort of expertise at the same time.

That’s why we have taken the important decision to bring some of the key financial advisory services back in house, as well as centralising the department teams that had been created to fill the gaps between what managers needed and what OneSource could provide.

“It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity.  Thus could I sing and thus rejoice: but it is not so with me.”

Dealing with challenges is what working at Newham is all about.  Setting up the new finance service is going to be a key focus for the coming months, starting now with the recruitment of a deputy S151 officer who can really drive the improvements at pace, with professionalism and a focus on our people.

They’ll be joining a great council with a great opportunity to reshape a key service in their own image, making the most of the many talented people in the service.

The support throughout the organisation is strong, as the mayor and chief executive have recruited a really strong top team and placed a very welcome emphasis on the highest possible standards of governance.

Of course, I’ll always retain a really strong interest in finance.

Taking on the wider director of resources role has certainly reminded me of the need to emphasise, above all else, recruiting the best people to the team.

Once this role is filled, I can turn my attention more to property, IT, HR and all of the other support functions I now lead.

Conrad Hall is director of resources at London Borough of Newham