Let me start this by saying that the vast majority of what Lambeth does or wants to achieve is positive. The vast majority of those who work for the organisation are dedicated hard working public servants who have chosen to be involved because they care. That is a fact.
Lambeth Council therefore has two faces. The face and the persona which comes from those who have dedicated their professional lives to serve a community and the face of internal confusion, chaos and incompetence.
One area where things are clearly not working too well and never have done is the HR department. Now I don't want to be one of those TU guys who always has a go at comrades who work in Personnel and indeed I have many members and friends there but it must be said that this is specifically a section where there are major concerns. I already explained why the constant changes in HR have undermined the confidence of those who work there in my piece yesterday.
The best way to illustrate why things are wrong with say the policy making section of HR is to focus on Lambeth's inability to produce, consult on and agree a policy in a 'reasonable' length of time. An example of this is the issues and procedure concerning the Job Evaluation scheme. I think we are on version 12 of the policy and it still hasn't been agreed or implemented. As a result we don't have a finalised product that can be used to promote and service the objectives of the scheme. So this policy, like many others, is floating in space somewhere or as the Spanish say '.. aperdido en espace..' lost in space!
Another distaster area is the policy around Flexible Retirement. The changes in LGPS mean that Lambeth and other authorities must have a policy to allow them to consider requests for flexible retirement. Lambeth have of course not developed an approach or a policy. The situation with this is so dire now and it means that some people who are eligible for this cannot apply and expect their applications to be treated fairly. One senior HR officer has already told me this won't be a problem as all requests will be rejected. That is of course not right and not fair and it is against the spirit of what the scheme intended. An individual, for example, who is 50 today can apply for flexible retirement but she has until March 2010 to have the application considered and agreed otherwise that same person has to wait until she is 55. So if she was to be made redundant in between (which can happen) then she Will be put in a position where she has been disadvantaged because the Council have not sorted themselves out to have a fair process or policy to deal with this.
I do not think this is an acceptable situation and will be looking at gathering information about how Lambeth have communicated the changes to its staff and what process and procedure (none by the way) they have set in place to deal with applications in a fair way. I will campaign around this as it affects a number of people with long service who will be penalised because of Lambeth's incompetence. They need to be exposed for what they are!
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