From trainee to chief executive: in conversation with the head of Derby City Council

In this interview, Derby City Council Chief Executive Paul Simpson talks about his journey from trainee accountant to his current role, as well as his leadership style and the partnerships that continue to attract major employers to Derby.

After falling into a career in accounting as a trainee at Derby City Council in the 1990s, Paul Simpson has come full circle to take on the role of Chief Executive at the council he once studied at.

“I got A-levels in politics and economics. I had an interest in a role that exposed me to those things, and local government seemed to fit the bill,” he says. While he didn’t consider himself particularly good at maths, and knew nothing about finance, he still applied for and was given the position. His interviewer, the late Ian Fraser, later told him that he was given the job as he was the only applicant who understood the difference between local and central government.

Paul initially studied his Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) qualification, before completing his Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) qualification.

“I quite enjoyed it, and I suppose I was reasonably good at it,” he says. “I didn’t do as well at school as I probably should have done, so I guess I saw myself as being given a chance to make up for that to some extent. I worked really, really hard, particularly at the final year, and that paid off, and I was a prize winner in my final year, which I still look back on now very fondly. It’s one of the proudest moments in my early career.”

Paul left Derby City Council in 1998 after around seven years to join PwC’s Audit Commission business, before taking on roles at various local authorities and central government bodies such as the Ministry of Defence and Department for Education. During this time he landed his first Finance Director position, before moving on to become Finance Director at Stoke-on-Trent City Council and then Nottinghamshire County Council, and then joining the NHS. “I’ve worked across the big three, if you like,” he says.

He then moved to Milton Keynes City Council, first as Corporate Director – Resources and then as Deputy Chief Executive. When the Chief Executive of Milton Keynes City Council moved to Derby City Council, she eventually brought Paul along as Strategic Director of Resources and then Deputy Chief Executive.

She then surprised Paul by announcing her retirement. “I was made acting Chief Executive within a few months of me being back here and got the job on a permanent basis three days before the first [Covid] lockdown,” he says.

Paul says the organisation feels very different to the one he joined as a trainee in the 90s. The old-fashioned building with individual offices and creaky wooden floors was gutted and replaced with an open plan office area.

While being Chief Executive of your hometown can bring some challenges, it is also an advantage, Paul says.

“I think particularly from the members perspective, being somebody from Derby carries with it a lot of weight, a lot of kudos. There are times when I’ve been quite challenging and critical, and I guess you’ve got a little bit more credibility that you can say those things with. People are probably a little bit more forgiving when they know you’re from Derby or when you’re from your hometown.

“The big downside to it, of course, is people coming up to you and saying, ‘oh you’re from Derby, all right, what are you going to do about my council tax?’”

Finance as a career

Paul says there have been several moments that shaped his career along the road to becoming Chief Executive.

“When I came into the council initially, I had no intention of becoming an accountant. I think something clicked in the second year that I was doing my AAT qualification that I just thought ‘this is what I want to do, I enjoy it’. And that’s what spurred me on to go on and do CIPFA,” he says.

The second moment came during his time at PwC, when he was offered the opportunity to stay and become a consultant, or to leave and become a practitioner.

“I very quickly came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to be a consultant,” he says. “It didn’t appeal to me, didn’t appeal to my values, and I think at that point, that’s when I made my mind up that I wanted to become a Finance Director.”

That desire was finally cemented during his time as a Head of Finance at Walsall Council. “There’s that gap between wanting something and recognising that you’re capable of getting it, dream versus reality,” he says. “That was the first time I saw myself as actually being capable of taking that step to become a Finance Director.”

However, Paul says he never saw himself as an “archetypal” Finance Director. “I would like to think that as a Finance Director I was somebody that people could talk to, somebody that’s an enabler, somebody that doesn’t talk in that technical way that we sometimes do.”

Moving from finance to the Chief Executive role, with its expanded responsibilities across the full breadth of the council’s work, was a challenging step up. “If you think about it for too long and too hard, you’ll frighten yourself to death,” Paul jokes. But having a good team around him has been crucial, and the role has given him an opportunity to get involved in many of the issues across Derby.

“I don’t know there’s another job like it anywhere where one day I’m talking about climate change or the rewilding of a park, the next day I’m talking about nuclear submarines or jet engines or the next time talking about planning and housing and social care, the diversity of the role is staggering,” he says. “But that’s what makes it such a great job.”

Paul describes his leadership style as “high support, high challenge,” and encourages his teams to also adopt this mantra.

“Honesty is the most important thing to me as a Chief Executive,” he says. “I can forgive most things actually. We’re all human, we make mistakes, I know I’ve made plenty of them in my career, and you can forgive those things, but honesty is something that’s kind of a core value.

“If I know that I’ve got honesty and integrity in my team, they’re telling me the truth, then we’ll be fine. Trust and respect, all those things are really, really important, but you know that honesty piece is writ large for me, and that plays out in the conversations that we have as a senior team.

“So I can be very, very challenging, but at the heart of that is that desire to get to the place where we’re being absolutely honest with ourselves and about the situation that we’re in, whatever that might be.”

Recruitment

Reflecting on his own varied path through local and central government and the private sector, Paul says he ranks recruitment as the biggest challenge currently facing the sector, alongside finance.

“I think people have got the sense that local government perhaps isn’t the place to work, particularly for the young,” he says. “And yet, actually, when you engage young people in the work that we do, they find it fascinating. We had three interns from Derby University over the summer last year, and at the end of it they were just blown away by the scale of the work that we do and how interesting the work is.

“So there’s something for me about not just promoting a career in local government, but promoting local government itself as a thing for people, young people in particular, to be interested in.”

Even more important is finding those willing and interested in taking on the top job, which can be particularly difficult considering the risks and responsibilities that come with the Chief Executive role. “You carry a lot of weight and expectation on your shoulders and so I can understand why some people may may find that just a little bit too uncomfortable perhaps,” Paul says.

But Paul encourages those considering a career in local government to take the opportunity.

“If people can have half as much fun and enjoyment and challenge and learning and the experience and the great people I’ve worked with throughout my career, then it’s worth doing,” he says. “It’s a brilliant, brilliant job.”

Ongoing challenges

Housing and homelessness also remain a key challenge for Derby City Council, with a major overspend on Bed and Breakfast accommodation. “Because it’s unregulated, we can’t claim the housing benefit back,” Paul says. “So that’s become over the last 18 months as big a pressure proportionally as adult social carers.”

Derby City Council have taken innovative steps to combat this, including purchasing an old student accommodation block in the city centre to provide temporary accommodation for homeless families, adding an additional 90 units to the council’s stock.

“We’ve been really brave in doing that, and I guess it’s those major interventions that are going to be needed across some of these policy areas,” Paul says.

Adult social care also continues to be an issue, with both the quality of care and dignity of care requiring improvements. Paul says better targeted care and the use of technology could reduce the need for things like double handed care, but a multifaceted approach is required. But the council is already seeing improvements in its children’s social care, with both the number of children in care and the money spent on care reduced.

“We still have a problem with some high-cost placements outside the area, but our prevention strategy has been really, really helpful in driving down the costs of children’s social care,” Paul says. “So finding a mechanism of translating that for adults, I think has to be the right thing. As ever, it’s about keeping people fit and well in their own homes as long as possible.”

Partnerships

Derby is home to a number of large employers, including Rolls-Royce’s civil and nuclear branches, Toyota, and Alstom, along with a strong supply chain. The city was chosen as the location for the new headquarters of Great British Railways following a national competition and public vote, and will also be home to the first SmartParc, a collection of world-class, cutting-edge food production facilities based around a campus-style park that reimagines food production for the 21^st Century.

Paul says developing and maintaining good partnerships with the city’s big businesses, university, health partners and community voluntary sector has been crucial in attracting these businesses.

“I said earlier that I’m only as good as the people around me, and the city council is only as good as and effective as the partners it has,” he says.

This includes working with Marketing Derby, a public-private partnership working to attract major employers to the city. This partnership was crucial in attracting SmartParc, which will create 5000 jobs in a new economic sector for the city.

The council has also explored ways of growing the workforce for its existing companies, and in September 2022 Rolls-Royce opened the Nuclear Skills Academy in a council-owned building. In partnership with Derby University, the academy will train 200 students a year over 10 years, providing a pipeline of talent to Rolls-Royce, which is providing the reactors that will power both UK and Australian future attack submarines under the AUKUS agreement.

Key in building and maintaining these partnerships has been the cultivation of a culture of openness and honesty. “It’s about sharing the good, the bad and the ugly,” Paul says. “We’re a compact city, so we know each other.”

Paul says a factor he hadn’t fully appreciated before moving back to Derby was the pride people have in their city. The council even coined the slogan ‘Team Derby to encapsulate this sense of belonging, a term that has since taken off.

That pride and support was important in securing Great British Railways’ headquarters. “We wouldn’t have been successful in bringing it to Derby had it not been for the partnerships that we have got here, because we were able to garner the support of local businesses and the community, which meant not only was our submission the strongest in terms of a business case, but Derby won the public vote,” he says.

Matching its city’s reputation for advanced development, Derby City Council is leading the way in the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was the first council in Britain to replace its Customer Contact Centre with an AI chatbot more than a year ago.

“We’re now taking that a step further and using the new ChatGPT 4 so that the capability of the technology will be significantly enhanced, so the customer experience will be significantly enhanced,” Paul says. “The latest version of this thing is so sophisticated that you can have a conversation with it. You think about the wealth of possibilities that opens up in terms of the kind of bureaucracy that all local authorities have to work with, in terms of decision making and form filling and all those things, it could potentially save huge swathes of time and effort and obviously cost.”

The first iteration of the chatbot was designed to divert 20% of calls, but is now handling more than 40%. “I think it’s handled over a million contacts since it came in, and we’ve only had about 30 complaints,” Paul says.

It hasn’t all been plain sailing through, and the city has had to come together to face its challenges together, whether that be the Covid pandemic or the threat of the city’s football club being wound up. When Alstom’s Derby facility faced closure earlier this year due to a lack of government orders, the city came together to pressure the government to ensure that new contracts were put in place.

“There’s been a lot for Derby to be proud of. We’re on a journey, and we are getting there, but there’s still so much to be done. And of course, the financial landscape just restricts your ability to do the things that you know would make a difference. Notwithstanding that, we are confident that the City will continue to make positive strive forwards, and to be a place where people will want to live, work and enjoy, and businesses will want to invest and grow.”