Abdul Jabbar on Oldham’s co-operative council

Abdul Jabbar is cabinet member for HR finance and partnerships in Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council, which has been working on turning itself into a ‘co-operative council’.

Room 151: Where did the idea for a co-operative council come from?

Abdul Jabbar: The idea comes from when we were in opposition. We lost control of the council in May 2008 and talked about what new policies we should have in place given the background of reduction in local government resources.

We felt that being a co-operative council would help to engage citizens, partners and staff to work together to improve the borough. In May 2011 when we took power again it was one of the things we focused on and launched our Co-operative Oldham ambition. Since then we’ve been pioneers. Our co-operative council approach is a response to the challenges that the council faces and is about making the most of strengths in the community and helping local people to make more difference to their lives and neighbourhood by choosing to take more responsibility.

Whether that means giving time to support a community group or simply putting litter in the bin instead of dropping it in the street we believe everyone can and should help make Oldham better.

Room 151: What sort of savings are you looking at?

AJ: They will be substantial. To give you an example one of the things we are trying to do is set up a trading arm for our adult social care provision. It is costing around £16m each year but with the trading arm we are hoping that over time it will save £11m over five years. It’s the only way we can sustain the service in-house, if we don’t make that kind of saving it won’t happen.

So there will be some savings but the majority will be income generation through offering services which we don’t currently offer. For example we will provide home help. We don’t do that at the moment, it is provided primarily by the private sector. We’ll provide it and hopefully because of the local authority control and quality it’ll be an impressive service and we will generate income.

It’s using an alternative service delivery model. We know that if we stick to the traditional services delivery method and just try to salami slice expenditure in a very short time we won’t be able to provide the services that we provide now. It needs a complete re-think and the cooperative mindset will help us to do that. We’re working on mutuals and co-productions and they will take some time to embed before they generate savings but they will generate savings.

Room 151: How does the cooperative concept fit in to the new way of providing adult social care?

AJ: The trading arm will be a wholly-owned council company, it will recruit people locally and the minimum wage will be a living wage, so as an employer we’ll provide people with enough to live on rather than just the minimum wage. That’s being responsible and cooperative, we’ll train local people and give jobs to local people and work with service users to develop services that meet their needs. It’s a co-production thing to work with the community and find what works best.

Room 151: Are there targets built into the medium term financial plan around the cooperative concept?

AJ: Not specifically for this no, but for everything that we do as a council we will have this approach, to examine the cooperative principle and develop things accordingly. For next year, 13-14 we have a savings target of £19m and for 14-15 it’ll be £20-25m. So when a service looks at achieving that saving they have to look at how they’re working within the cooperative principle.

Room 151: You are devolving power to six district partnerships, how does that work?

AJ: Once the decision has been made to give budget to the district partnerships the district partnership committees then make the decisions. So to give a real example, the cabinet decides what budget is delegated to the partnership, say £300,000, then each partnership makes its decisions locally and if they need to reference it to cabinet they will.

We encourage stakeholders to take part in the partnership by asking questions, asking for reports. We’re on our way with it because these things take time, it is important for people to understand the key issues to their area and we work with the areas to identify issues and come up with solutions, you often find that local people have the best solutions to problems.

At the moment the district partnerships have limited responsibility for highways and we are thinking about whether they need to have more authority delegated to them to be able to do that themselves. We have a clear idea of how we want the co-operative thing to work but we’re also learning as we go along. We’ve heard from Lambeth council who are doing a similar thing in terms of ‘cooperative-ness’;they’ve been here to talk to us about their experience.

Room 151: Do you have many or more than usual public service co-operatives? What areas are they in?

AJ: It is more about extending the role of local democracy so that residents are more able to control what matters to them. It’s more about talking to the community and asking what they can do to influence their area.

That said, we have mutuals. Our leisure service is a mutual for example and we have some in social care.