Council boss warns Edinburgh is “in for a couple of tough years" as authority works to close £110m budget gap
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Overseeing both the frenzied arrival of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in the capital and a similarly frenzied general election, Paul Lawrence has had a busy diary during his first two months in the top job.
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Hide AdBut it has been a walk in the park compared to what’s next in his in tray.
At the top is a bin workers’ strike later this month as the summer festivals reach their climax, and then the small matter of closing a budget gap of over £100m.
The planned waste and cleansing staff walkout, from August 14 to 22, will see, just as it did two years ago, huge piles of rubbish accumulate in some of the city’s busiest and most historic spots – to the delight of Auld Reekie’s seagull and rat populations.
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Hide AdIt is “frustrating,” Lawrence admitted, and the reputational damage on the international stage is “huge”.
However, the mounting financial pressure the council finds itself under – of which the bin strikes are a symptom – is a far more existential problem, with no easy solutions.
The new chief executive, who has worked in local government for over 30 years and spent the last nine in Edinburgh, has stepped up from the council’s ‘Director of Place’—the second-largest role in the organization, encompassing planning, roads, economic development, and housing. His new position adds responsibility for other key services, such as education and social care, both of which face significant cuts in the ongoing battle to balance the books.
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Hide Ad‘Empowering staff to get the job done’
In an interview with the Local Democracy Reporting Service he described himself as someone who “knows the issues in the city pretty well” and wants to focus on “getting stuff done”.
Will this entail sweeping changes to the running of the organisation and its nearly 20,000 employees? “I would prefer those, if I can, to be more about the culture and day-to-day performance,” he said.
“It might not sound very sexy in terms of huge restructures or all of that, but empowering middle and front-line managers to get the job done quicker; that is very much on my mind.”
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Hide AdHe appears confident this could be key to improving essential, basic services the city’s residents rely on.
“Officers hear that many of our basic services aren’t what they need to be, that we are struggling with the kind of wider environment,” he said.
“You can only focus on the basics if front-line staff are empowered to fix them and I want to do a lot on that.
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Hide Ad“Some things you can’t compromise on. Let’s say cyber security which is a huge issue; if we get attacked there’s serious implications. You have standards, people have to stick to those standards and you can’t play about with those.
“There are other things where you can give a lot more discretion to front-line managers and say, to coin a phrase, just do it.”
‘City is in for tough couple of years’
If staff can expect more empowerment, they should also brace for more cutbacks within their departments.
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Hide Ad“I think it is pretty bad,” Lawrence said of the dire financial situation facing councils up and down the UK. “I hesitate to say the worst they’ve ever been but they’re certainly challenging.
“When you worked in local government probably from the early 90s through until the financial crash there was money around to make stuff happen.
“It is true for the last number of years under governments of every colour that that has been tighter. Basically the position now is that if you’re lucky income remains the same and that costs are going up.
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Hide Ad“Those costs could be related to demand – there is simply greater demand for services; homelessness, social care. You don’t need to be an accountant or a rocket scientist to know that if your income is broadly the same and your costs are shooting up, then there’s a big gap and it’s very, very hard to plug that.
“A lot of the, shall we call them clever strokes, that very able finance directors have been able to pull – there aren’t many of those left I don’t think. So there are going to have to be some pretty tough decisions.”
The city is “in for a couple of tough years,” he admitted. “My colleagues are working now on some pretty tricky reports to go in front of elected members.
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Hide Ad“There’s a lot to happen between now and February [budget meeting] but we are having to look at some pretty unpalatable stuff.
“The promise I can make is what we will do is bring forward reports that don’t sugar the pill, if I can put it that way.”
Closing council buildings to save money
One option to help close the £110m financial black hole over the next five years is to close and sell-off buildings and consolidate the council’s property estate.
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Hide Ad“Everybody says, I think across political parties, that we’re going to have to think about the amount of buildings we operate out of and are responsible for,” Lawrence said. “We as officers haven’t yet got a hard proposition on that, but we’re going to look at that.
“We’re going to say we think it’s possible to save some money, we’re going to describe the detail of that and then where there is an impact on the public.
“Put it another way, do I think the council can be more efficient? Yes, I do.
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Hide Ad“Do I think efficiency savings are going to get us to the sums of money we need to save? No, I don’t.
“Where we are talking about savings, whatever you can’t to call them, savings, cuts etcetera that have a public impact, will we spell out why we’ve gone there and what the impacts will be? Yeah, we will.
“At the end of the day there will be consultations, the public will have their view and then elected members will decide.
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Hide Ad“If our general grant from the government was raised just five per cent year after year or broadly our central grant was raised so that our costs were met by that grant the job would be an awful lot easier.”
Local devolution ‘key’ to a better council
The new CEO, who is understood to earn around £200k a year, added he is a “strong proponent” of giving local authorities more powers to raise income and solve problems.
He said: “I’ve worked in areas of England where that’s worked and where it’s not worked, but I think we need more certainty and more flexibility and devolution is the key route to that.
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Hide Ad“It’s often the case people go abroad to America, to Europe and compare what they see – the cleanliness in the streets, whatever it might be – and go ‘how come it’s so much better there?’ and that is directly related to the powers that city and regional government have, certainly in Europe. Most French cities can raise taxes; what we have compared to North American and European cities is almost no fiscal power whatsoever.”
Tourist tax ‘exciting’
Another project likely to dominate much of his attention is the city’s long-awaited tourist tax, which he describes as “one of the bigger tax freedoms that has come to local government in my lifetime”.
It could be another two years before Edinburgh’s visitor levy – the first in the UK – is introduced, and in that time the debate about how to spend the £20-30m a year it’s estimated could be raised is likely to rage on.
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Hide AdThe public are set to be consulted on detailed plans for the tourist tax later this year after councillors discuss the scheme later this month.
Lawrence said he was not nervous about Edinburgh being the UK’s first city to test the legislation, but rather “really excited” for it.
He said: “Look at it from our point of view; Taylor Swift comes, everybody makes a lot of money out of it – apart from the council who lose money out of it. Because we have to spend money on additional services, additional cleansing and so on, and we have no mechanism – unlike hotels who can put up their prices for the weekend.”
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Hide AdAirbnb crackdown having ‘intended imapct’
On short-term lets and the rise of Airbnb, he said the council’s policy objective to “reduce party flats” has worked, pointing to hundreds of retrospective change of use applications being refused.
“It clearly is having an impact, an intended impact,” he said. “The planning policy said we want to return residential property to residential stock. If that’s the decisions members are by and large making, then that’s the policy in operation. Whether it’s the right policy for those wider concerns is something we really, really encourage people to talk about.
“I’ve not seen many cities go that much further than us. I think our policy which was developed through detailed consultation was broadly about getting to the right balance.
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Hide Ad“Once the government legislated we brought in an STL regime both in planning policy and in licensing policy. Both were challenged judicially and we’ve had to modify on both counts.”
He said the short-term lets crackdown and eagerness to progress the visitor levy at speed are evidence that councillors listen and respond to the complaints which fill up their inboxes, contrary to the view of the council’s many critics.
“I think the council listens, the council responds where it can,” he said. “Does it respond quickly enough? Probably not at times, and councils can be big and lumbering bodies which is why I talk about empowering front-line managers.
“But I do think we hear what people say and where we can we really try to respond.”
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