East Devon District Council leader on management changes

One of the privileges of being district leader in a community of over 140,000 people is that you get to meet loads of them. People forty years younger than me, people thirty years older. Every week this reminds you to take people as you find them. Above all, it teaches you to listen.

A few weeks ago I was speaking at a gathering of local schoolteachers. They were of course very well-behaved, as befits the day-job. But their questions were forensic. From structured career progression, to the damage often done by single-word OFSTED verdicts, a waffle-based reply was found out within seconds. I was later quoted as saying that the panel of local politicians would be better off asking the teachers the questions than the other way round, and I still mean that.

One of the teachers had brought along his eighteen-year-old son. It soon became apparent afterwards that father and son were passionate supporters of West Ham United, and with the Euros then just starting I offered the view that the negative comment around Gareth Southgate was similar to what had forced West Ham manager David Moyes to bow out. Simply, both managers had come into utterly failing organisations, stabilised, restructured, and put them on the road to recovery. Moyes won a minor European trophy for the Hammers, Southgate got England into the last stages of international competitions over and over again. But they had little thanks.

The young West Ham fan listened politely, then turned my defence of both men on its head. Football was expected by his generation not to be played in the shadow of past failure but with the expectation of success. That flair players could be the winners, that game plans should be based on attack not defence. It seemed so easy to this young man. Maybe he’d played too many FIFA computer games where it can seem simple to be brilliant, if only theoretically. Or maybe he was right, and the dismally low bar for hope of my generation just won’t cut it.

I’m not sure to be honest. But the idea of hoping for better not just crisis managing a bad situation is obviously the way to make political progress. At East Devon District Council, it may have been noticed by some readers that we have had significant managerial changes at the top. In essence, I took over in the 2020 pandemic, which disguised some of what was obviously wrong, but I was painfully aware from the sincere research of a new young councillor that the council had problems with its housing stock.

This young councillor tried with increasing desperation to point this out, and for his pains was accused of “bullying” by the now departed management. He was found not guilty of this, but the stress drove him to the edge. With new management in last Autumn, we have brought the whole subject of the toxic legacy from many years of Conservative mismanagement and refusal to spend what was needed out into the light of day.

My administration won’t settle for crisis-managing the “business as usual” approach. We have opened the filing cabinets and are now devising actions to fit the evidence not the political least line

of resistance. I expect a barrage of hypocritical moans from the Conservatives, but it’s tin hats time. Our tenants deserve real vision now.