Earnings for personnel officers were highest in England, compared to Scotland and Northern Ireland. The pay gap between personnel officers in London and Northern Ireland has increased by 13% since 2002, according to the latest reward survey, of over 6,500 HR professionals, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and DevelopmentPersonnel Officers in London now earn 29,087 pounds, 11% above the national average, whereas their counterparts in Northern Ireland, at 23,838 pounds, are the lowest paid in the UK.

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Meg Munn, Under Secretary of State at the Department for Communities and Local Government, speaking at a Local Government Information Unit conference, said that local authorities are best placed to understand the particular migration challenges their city, town or neighbourhood faces. It is only at a local level that tensions relating to migration can be felt and addressed. Only local authorities have the democratic mandate to co-ordinate differing interests, reconcile diverse views and provide the space for open debate and dialogue.She highlighted principles on which councils have based their success in responding to migration challenges. They include strong leadership and engagement, developing shared values, building understanding and resilience across communities, planning how to respond in a crisis and tackling inequalities.

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More than half of employees working in Local Government have given management jargon, such as ‘think outside the box’ and ‘the helicopter view’, the ‘thumbs down’, saying it is a problem in their workplace. According to the poll conducted byYouGov to mark the 15th anniversary of Investors in People, employees have a low opinion of colleagues who use management jargon. Over a third of those surveyed in the sector think it betrays a lack of confidence and almost one in six think people who use it are untrustworthy or trying to cover something up.The research suggests that jargon can create a barrier between managers and their teams. Demonstrating the potential ‘desk divide’, over half of senior managers in local government think jargon is harmless, whilst four in ten employees think that it creates misunderstanding about roles and responsibilities. Over a third of employees say it results in mistrust in the workplace and makes people feel inadequate.

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In a speech to the New Local Government Network, Yvette Cooper MP, set out the developing relationship between central and local government against the background of the White Paper, Strong and Prosperous Communities.Central government intends to step back and the relationship with local government will be developed through Local Area Agreements. Currently some 500 million pounds of funding streams go through local area agreements. The proposals in the White Paper will take this up to 4.7 billion pounds. Today there are 1200 national targets and indicators in a local area. This will be reduced to 200 indicators with around 35 improvement targets, plus statutory education and child care targets included in the LAA. There is a presumption that in future all area-based funding will go – unringfenced – through the LAA.

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The Society of IT Management, with a membership from local authorities, the police and fire services and housing authorities, has set out a view of the drivers that are influencing the transformation of local government. From the White Paper ‘Strong and Prosperous Communities’ it highlights the commitment to ‘challenge traditional methods of delivery ‘and to ‘increase the pace of change’. It also stresses the importance of sharing assets and systems, with local authorities and other public bodies working together to overcome administrative boundaries.Although the White Paper has become the principal change driver, Socitm sets out a broader picture of issues that are influencing change. The Cabinet Office’s Transformational Government Strategy presents opportunities for local authorities and public services to achieve a step change in service quality, efficiency and cost savings. The Lyons Report on local government finance is expected to propose radical changes. The Varney Report, which will be part of the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review, will report to the Chancellor with advice on the opportunities for transforming the delivery of public services and will play a significant part in shaping the big picture for local government in the coming years. The work of the Identity Forum in examining the evolving technologies used for identity management and considering how public and private sectors can work together to maximise efficiency and effectiveness is also likely to have a wide impact.

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There are more than 55,000 social enterprises in the UK. These are businesses with primarily social or environmental objectives, principally reinvesting surpluses in the business or community. This action plan sets out a vision for creating the conditions for thousands more to thrive.The major challenge for social enterprise businesses is to deliver public services in a different way, using the skills and expertise of users and frontline workers. In meeting this challenge they also contribute by bringing back into the economy people who were previously excluded, or by improving the environment or society. The businesses are diverse, ranging from small, community-owned village shops to large companies winning multimillion pound contracts. They are generating more than 27 billion pounds turnover and contributing more than 8 billion pounds to GDP a year.

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One fifth of UK workers have been bullied over the last 2 years according to a report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. Public sector workers are more likely to experience bullying than their private sector counterparts, 22% compared with 17%.The groups most likely to become victims of bullying and harassment are black and Asian employees, women and disabled individuals. Nearly one third of Asian employees, or those from other ethnic groups, report having experienced some form of bullying or harassment. This compares with 18% of white employees. Employees with disabilities are at least twice as likely to report having experienced one or more forms of bullying and harassment, 37%, compared with non-disabled employees, 18%.

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The research findings from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development show that there is a variety of approaches to talent management and no one blueprint that can be applied to all organizational contexts. Each organisation has different resourcing requirements for its current and future ‘talent pipeline’, as well as different issues to be addressed. A survey of organizations, which included Derby City Council, showed that 94% of respondents believe that well-designed talent management development activities can have a positive impact on the success of an organization.The report expresses concerns about strategies that concentrate exclusively on an elite, high-potential few, rather than taking a more inclusive ‘whole workforce’ approach. The survey found that 67% of respondents believe that developing high-potential individuals is one of the two main objective of talent management, while 62% placed growing future senior managers as one of their two main objectives. The report argues for a more inclusive approach that recognises that there are various key positions to fill in any organization, as well as a future pipeline of the ‘appropriate’ skills to fill all of these positions, whatever the level.

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This programme is now available to view on egovtv.tv, the online television channel for public service modernisation. It provides a senior management guide to The Cabinet Office’s Transformational Government Strategy and the opportunities it presents for local authorities and public services to achieve a step change in service quality, efficiency and cost savings.The programme explains the Strategy and the means of implementation. There is an interview with John Suffolk, HM Government CIO. Expert panels provide advice and experience of leading practitioners – local authority chief executives, IT heads and policy leaders. Case studies demonstrate the different components of the Transformational Government Strategy and the benefits that it is delivering.

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This document summarises the outcome of the campaign to raise awareness and encourage the use of online services provided by local authorities which was launched in May 2006. The campaign was targeted at existing internet users, the group most able to make use of the 16 types of services available online. Advertising was placed in national media for the first month, followed by a month in regional media, before individual councils continued with local campaigns.Pre-and post-campaign research confirmed an increase in awareness of council services in general and in those available online. Respondents also demonstrated a greater intention to make use of these services and a significant number took action as a result of the campaign. At the same time an online advertising campaign on websites and search engines generated 225m page impressions and 860,000 click-through visits into the campaign web. During the national and regional phases of the campaign the mycouncil domain and other local government pages of the Directgov website attracted an estimated 1.3 million visits, 2/3rds of which were generated by the online campaign alone. Traffic volumes into these sites were up markedly, by 32% in May compared to the previous month.

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