Leafing through the city council’s Corporate Risk Register (pdf) today musing about maybe getting out a bit more proved to be more interesting than planned.
Basically this register is a list of things the council’s doing that could go badly wrong. Although in many cases, in the hands of the time-servers, deadbeats and wannabes that make up the city council’s senior management team, they’re not so much ‘risks’ as dead certs.
Does anyone believe these idiots can protect children? Minimise the impact of the recession? Maintain our privacy through decent data security? Bring capital projects in on budget? Thought not.
Other ‘risks’ listed here are obvious disasters waiting to happen too. For instance, Chief Exec Jan Ormondroyd’s hare-brained ‘Business Transformation‘ mass privatisation plan based on a handout she and her sidekick – that copper from Sheffield who doesn’t know where Easton is – got given at business school has no chance of success.
While concerns over achieving ‘value for money’ are sine qua non in an organisation that pays talentless drone Ormondroyd £180k a year, her copper sidekick £140k a year to do the marketing and which also sees fit to continue paying jobless Stephen Wray, quite possibly the biggest fuckwit in the world, a six figure salary to mismanage more huge sums of public money.
But the most fascinating risk on the register is coyly listed as “Political uncertainty: – risk of failure to take ‘difficult’ and long term decisions to improve services/V[alue]F[or]M[oney] outcomes.”
What on earth do they mean? Luckily all is explained:
Forthcoming ‘difficult’ decisions include waste management, primary review, R[egional]S[pacial]S[trategy]/BDF [eh?], T[ransport]I[nnovation]F[und] if it proceeds, restructuring, budget, adult social care issues.
Does this mean that unelected council officers have already decided what will happen then? And that there’s a ‘risk’ the people we elect might not do what they’re told?
Welcome to Bristol where democracy is now a risk that needs mitigating …
Hardly a surprise coming from the arrogant, high handed, “I will not be accountable” Droyd.
I loved point 10.
Educational Attainment – failure to achieve improvement as a result of inadequate challenge and support from the Council.
DCSF priorities meeting, January 2009, notes no school in OFSTED category (? which one) and increase in number judged to be outstanding.
Continuing rise in good/outstanding Ofsted inspection grades (your repeating yourself, see above)
Further decline in fixed term exclusion
Actions required:
• Implement new management structure (why will that help anything?)
• Determine arrangements for strengthening schools’ strategic engagement in children’s Trust arrangements (what on Earth does that mean?)
If you want a laugh about the state of Bristol schools I recommend the web cast. “Revisiting the Role of Bristol Schools in their Communities” in particular the comments of Lynn Raphael Reed, Professor of Education and Social Change. Every time I think of this I still laugh.
Also 02:35:00 – Ray Priest’s answer on how do you evaluate. He just does not either understand the question or avoids it