British Council: management still in control

In January this year the “Chief Executive” of the British Council Martin Davidson announced that the British Council was advising other government departments about "outsourcing" (i.e. exporting jobs) to India. The British Council, Davidson crowed, had made itself “significantly more efficient”.  Downtrodden British taxpayers can only hope, albeit against the trend, that the DFID and FCO are not so stupid as to take their advice.

The Chief Financial Officer of the British Council, Bidesh Sarkar, has issued a circular to British Council staff in Manchester informing them that because the British Council senior management thought they would have to pay for only two floors of the building in Bridgwater House when the landlord actually requires them to pay for three, and because they have empty floors in Spring Gardens for which there is no tenant, they “are significantly behind our UK savings targets”. So while the Chief Executive says the British Council is “significantly more efficient”, his financial controller says they are “significantly behind”. Significant or what?

All this has come about because the British Council outsourced 75 finance and IT jobs to India, sent 240 staff away with expensive sweeteners to create “voluntary” redundancies, and have apparently made such a success of this attempt to become more efficient that now “we will have to consider new ways of working and the services we are able to retain in Bridgewater House, such as meeting rooms, the reception and canteen.”

Chillingly for British Council staff in Manchester, the Chief Financial Officer writes “we value the work you do”. Evidently he’s not sharp enough to realise that the “you” in that phrase betrays an intention by “us” to create distance, and make a rather clear distinction between London, where the British Council chiefs are (so no threat to the canteen there), and Manchester where they are evidently so valued that, thanks to the monumental incompetence of London and their failure to even understand their property contracts - much less actually manage them - employees will have to huddle together and find "new ways of working" as they do without their customary and, in London's view, superfluous facilities.

The full text of the letter follows:

o    Dear colleagues,

In July you were informed that the Executive Board (EB) had approved recommendations to retain two floors in Bridgewater House.

Since then, the landlord has required us to pay rent on three floors until September 2012, rather than just two floors, as we had expected. Added to that, the UK property slump has meant that it may take longer than anticipated to secure a subtenant in Spring Gardens. All this means that we will have to pay more for longer and are significantly behind our UK savings targets in this austere Comprehensive Spending Review period to 2015.

The EB have therefore taken the decision to consolidate Manchester operations onto one floor to make important savings.

These changes are due to take place in a years time, September 2012, but I wanted to let you know as soon as possible. I realise this is not the news you would have wanted to hear.

This decision means we will have to consider new ways of working and the services we are able to retain in Bridgewater House, such as meeting rooms, the reception and canteen. We will consult with you and Trade Union Side on our developing options.

Although were having to make these changes, Manchester continues to be an important operation for the Council. We value the work you do and we are renewing the Bridgewater House lease for the next 10 years with a standard option to review after three years.

Alex Chaplin (Director Global Business Services), Eddie Byers (Managing Director Programme and Projects) and Angela Gibbins (Deputy Director Global Estates) will be holding an open staff meeting in the Boardroom this Thursday 24 November at 1500, where you will be able hear more and ask any questions. More details on that to follow.

With kind regards,

Bidesh Sarkar

Chief Financial Officer

Comments

[Greg]

How is such incompetence allowed to happen? I feel sorry for the junior and middle ranking staff who will suffer as a result.

Senior BC staff seem to have no grasp of financial basics. As an example, why is the BC charging $2,100 for a market research report that is 65 pages long? See http://ihe.britishcouncil.org/ihe-exchange/full-report-parts-1-2-and-3. No-one in their right mind would buy a report at that value.

Tighter economic times are going to see senior BC staff finally called to account I think.

[David]

If you are spending someone else's money, Greg, I don't think the price matters that much - and they are targeting publicly funded institutions. You might also wonder why they have the gall to sell a product that a) provides assistance to Britain's competitors in the international education market and b) has been paid for anyway by the British taxpayer. They get away with it because they have always got away with it, because the Establishment won't hear of criticism and as an article of faith supports everything the organisation does, however incompetent, inept or inappropriate.

[WhitSt]

Greg

"Tighter economic times are going to see senior BC staff finally called to account I think."

No, but would it were so. Tighter economic times will result in what has always happened, happening - the top-heavy senior management level will find exciting and challenging ways to get fewer and fewer junior staff to do the stuff that approximates to actual work in the BC. (This consists of an awful lot of filling in forms. It achieves nothing, but there's a hell of a lot of it. Then there's designing new forms for other poor sods in different BC departments to fill in... )

When the BC moved the less glamorous parts of its headquarters to Manchester in 1992, and I first worked for them, they employed 700+ people in a shiny new building on Medlock Street. At the time they trumpeted job creation in the benighted North - but with senior staff knowing full well before the move that then impending ODA cuts would make that level of employment unsustainable. Within five years they were down to 120 staff in grot offices in Bridgewater House. By that time I'd left, but I used to joke that the BC was then operating from "a lock-up above a garage in Cheetham Hill". That joke now sounds like it's coming close to reality.

[pokemon]

Dear David

I read with some amusement your piece above, the problem with the Council & other civil service depts was that from the late 90s they increasingly hired senior staff with little or no management training, intelligence or foresight in how to run a public funded body. They now have chieftains such as CEO, CFO whose only requisite seems to be to hire expensive consultants whose job in such nefarious activities as Business transformation programmes was to get by whilst outsourcing the lower bands of staff to the pursuit of organisational excellence. The CFO is now claiming that due to the collapse in the financial markets his plans for the future of the organisation has come unravelled. I'm sorry, but in 2010 the financial crash was there for all to see; Jeff Randall & Ambrose Pritchard Evans in the Telegraph had been forecasting financial doom & gloom from well before Oct 09. The core problem for the Council was the inability of anybody at the top to put into play on the rent market flyers for the downsizing of both Manchester & London & seeking viable tenants in such an event. The last & most tangible fault of the organisation is to allow the CFOs in Margaret Mayne & Bidesh Sarkar to dominate the future strategy of the Council. Finance should never be the main driver for the business plan at the behest of operational needs, CRM etc. Carry On Up the Khyber here we come - who is playing the Kharsi & Bundit Din, I leave to other enlightened correspondents.