Government commissioners overseeing progress at Liverpool City Council have left the door open to a possible extension of their stay beyond the planned three years.
The team of commissioners arrived in the city in June 2021 shortly after a devastating government inspection lifted the lid on a shocking range of failures at the city council. The initial team of four officials were installed at the Cunard Building for a period of three years to put the city and its council back on course.
Those four became five last year when a finance commissioner was added to the team after fears that the council wasn't making progress at a sufficient pace.
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Now more than two years into the intervention, things are looking much more positive, however, the lead commissioner has told the ECHO that does not necessarily mean they will definitely leave after three years as planned. While the scale of change has been “encouraging,” Mr Cunningham admitted there were still areas where the council needs to improve and his team will not leave until strict “tests” are met.
Liverpool Council leader Cllr Liam Robinson said while he was keen to see an end to the intervention imposed by government, he was open to an extended working relationship with the commissioners to ensure the city was back on a stable footing.
In their third report in March, the five-strong team of commissioners spoke of a “cause of cautious optimism” for the future of Liverpool Council. Their 25-page assessment of the local authority said there had been determination to improve “at pace” from the council leadership and if it can “maintain the focus, energy and commitment” shown of late, they have confidence “required progress will be made.”
Speaking for the first time since May’s landmark all-out elections and the appointment of a permanent chief executive, Andrew Lewis, Mr Cunningham said despite a favourable direction of travel, there is no guarantee that there will not be some form of commissioner presence beyond next June, when the legal intervention ends.
He said: “Directions were initially set for a three year period, which would take us to June 2024.
“What we are considering, and this will be spelled out in a letter to the Secretary of State in September, is do some elements of Liverpool's improvement plan require further support, whether that's the presence of commissioners, whether it's some other form of support? These are conversations that we're having as a commissioner team.
“Crucially and importantly, we're having them very openly with the leader and with the chief executive because we want to make sure that as we progress, that we have got a shared view of what needs to be done. I'm not making any assumptions at this point around what might happen.”
Mr Cunningham, a former HM Inspector of Constabulary, said things were “very positive” at the council and cited a “very constructive” relationship with new council leader Cllr Liam Robinson, Mr Lewis and the commissioners.
He said all parties were “working constructively in a spirit I would describe as a joint enterprise with Liverpool City Council to make the improvements that the public so desperately want to see” and had developed a “trusting” partnership with leadership figures.
The lead commissioner said this reflected the nature of the work still outstanding for the council to do in the months ahead.
He said: “This is serious business. Liverpool City Council needs to improve on behalf of the people who live here, needs to be better, and we will not leave until two tests are met. One is that the council is stable across all areas of the intervention.
“We're not after outstanding. We're not after best in class. We're after stable.
“Good enough is good enough and the second test that needs to be met is that, is the improvement trajectory across all of those areas well set? In other words, if we were to withdraw support, can we give an absolutely cast iron guarantee that those improvements will continue?”
Reflecting on a possible amendment to the timescale, new city leader Cllr Robinson said the council could use the "expertise" of the commissioners while in post. He said: "Like everyone else in the council, in the city, I wish we hadn't had commissioner intervention, but we have had.
"The fact that we've got five senior public sector individuals, let's use their advice, let's use their expertise. That can be to our benefit.
"I think one of the things we really wanted to do that was set out a very clear path towards the end of the intervention. What do we as a council, what we need to have achieved to make sure the commissioners can say to the Secretary of State, that they are happy to conclude the intervention, I think we are fleshing out that detail."
Mr Cunningham said a clear difference in more recent times had been how nearly three quarters of senior management posts had been filled since the officials’ arrival and a “clear determination” on their behalf. He added how his team would keep a close eye on performance before making recommendations to government.
He added: “They need to work with and form that relationship with the new political leadership. That momentum needs to continue and we will make a judgement on what further support, if any, is needed to continue to help them with that improvement.”
Given the scale of the intervention, Mr Cunningham didn’t shy away from the amount of work still left to do to ensure Liverpool Council was out of the woods completely and highlighted how far the assessment of change by his team is reaching. He said: “There's still a lot to do.
“Nobody will claim that Liverpool Council is close to where it needs to be but I think the improvements have been made and I'm confident that improvements will continue to be made. We'll be setting that out in more detail in September.
“What I will say is that it's a complex question because the required improvements are so interrelated. They're across service areas, different service areas, property, finance, highways and transports, housing, all of those things.
“Each commissioner will be making an assessment of where those various areas are, and they're all at different stages, which is why we do not see the conclusion of commissioners in Liverpool as being a cliff edge. We don't think that the conclusion of this intervention will be that everything hits the required mark at the same time."
Among the issues still to be addressed, according to Mr Cunningham, was performance management, with a monthly oversight board set up among key figures including Cllr Robinson and Mr Lewis to address where things are going. He said: “There are areas that we just want to make sure that the necessary progress will be made.
"For example, there has not been a culture of performance management in Liverpool Council in recent memory, so to put that in place requires a big cultural shift. The people are getting used to a way of leading and being led. This is very different to what happened previously.”
While speaking about the positive relationship between the new executive and political leadership, Mr Cunningham said he anticipated areas of disagreement to emerge and would welcome the dialogue. He said: “There will be points of difference and actually I think they are a strength. The ability to disagree honestly and constructively makes for better decision making.
“We are here to hold the council to account and that will at times be difficult and we will continue to have to present some difficult messages, I'm sure, but that's for a shared position of wanting the council to improve that.”
While the bar for the commissioners to clear is a tall enough ask, Mr Cunningham said it was right that the city sets itself lofty goals moving forward beyond the invention. He said: “The council's ambition has to supersede ours. People of Liverpool would expect them to have an ambition to be an outstanding council. That will take a long time.”
Heading up a wide ranging and very visible stint into a major city may have proven a bigger task than some could have anticipated, but the former police boss he had embraced the opportunity to play a part in Liverpool’s journey to a better future.
He said: “I’ve really enjoyed it in the sense that I think it has been very satisfying to see the improvements that have been made and continue to be made. I have seen poorly performing organisations before.
“I've been clear right from the outset that I've got no agenda rather than to make this organisation better, but I do understand you have to build trust. I hope that people can see that myself and my commissioner colleagues have behaved with integrity and do want the best for Liverpool Council, and they'll let other people say what judgments they've formed.”
The cost of bringing in Mr Cunningham and his colleagues has of course not been cheap. The cost to the public purse of the Whitehall officials has led to questions over whether, in the midst of increasing cuts to local authority budgets, the fees commanded for Whitehall mandated officers were justified.
Tax payers currently fork out £1,100 for each day worked by the four other commissioners, with Mr Cunningham receiving £1,200. He said: “There's been a history of misspending public money in recent years in Liverpool Council.
“If at the end of this intervention we can say that better decisions are being made around stewardship of the public purse than were made beforehand, then I hope the public could see that we have provided the value for money. I don't expect everybody to agree with that.”
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