Interview with Andrew Seekings, Chief Executive, Cumberland Council

In this interview, we spoke with Andrew Seekings, Chief Executive of Cumberland Council. We spoke to Andrew about his experiences in local government, his role in Cumberland’s unitarisation process, and the advantages and lessons of moving to a unitary.

This is the latest in a series of conversations about local government reorganisation where we’re talking to the people who’ve been at the heart of recent council shakeups, people who have been there and done it. Cumberland Council was formed in April 2023 under a very recent round of reorganisation. Andrew was Chief Executive at Allerdale Borough Council, one of the councils that was replaced by the new unitary, and he was part of the team that led all the way through the reorganisation.

Watch the full conversation here.

A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and about your journey into local government?

I started working directly after university, where I did an economics degree and a postgraduate diploma in IT, and then started working in Sunderland for community business. I actually loved the idea of working with people to support those often most vulnerable in communities. Particularly, the job I got in the first instance was around supporting those furthest away from work to actually find work. I feel as though I’ve been incredibly lucky in my career because I’ve been surrounded by extremely talented people and extremely talented leaders. And whilst I worked for the community business in Sunderland, I met a woman that most of us will know – Pat Ritchie. Pat and I built up a strong relationship in that community business and we worked together on single regeneration budget programs in Sunderland. I worked with the area-based program in a place called Pennywell in Sunderland, and after that there was a job as the SRB coordinator and Pat encouraged me to apply for that, and that’s how I got into local government.

So I started in area-based regeneration work and went through my career first of all looking at a wider set of regeneration programs, then into the assistant head of regeneration and housing as the senior policy officer for that at the time. I was very lucky around strong leadership in Sunderland, who were very clear that to do proper change management, they wanted to set up a PMO. So I eventually moved into the PMO, and then became the head of transformation under Dave Smith at Sunderland. And then for various reasons I made a decision that we as a family really wanted to do something different and I applied for a new job, first as the corporate director for resources at the former Allerdale Borough Council. I got in, became in charge of resources and regeneration and economic development, and then eventually became the chief exec and went through the process that many people will be thinking about at the minute: LGR.

Actually, I found my experience from Sunderland helped. So working in a unitary council and particularly as a head of transformation you do get the opportunity to work with lots of departments and I felt that actually local government, once I got my head around the idea of local government

I remember a discussion over LGR with my leader when he told me not long into Covid that we were going to write a letter to go for reorganisation. My first instinct was to go: “Why would we want to do that? Why would we want to give away what was really special?” What I felt was a really special district council in Allerdale, to go for this larger organisation. But actually, what we do in local government, we embrace, don’t we? We embrace change. And I thought, yeah, I really want to go for this. And there’s so many benefits of being in the unitary council, whether that’s linking adult services to housing or how we can make sure our statutory duties around domestic abuse are linked into children and family work and early intervention and prevention work. I thought I would rather embrace the change and embrace the opportunity rather than in some way find a way to fight that or stop it or or not get on board with the opportunity that came along. So I decided that I would apply for the chief exec role of the new unitary, and luckily enough I got the job. I actually believe that I’ve got an amazing job because local government reorganisation gives you a chance to rethink how you might want to deliver local government.

It gives you a chance to pause, take a breath, and really think about how you want to combine all the functions of the district and county into something new when you operate under new values.

How did you ensure that you found the space, under immense time pressure, to have that conversation about transformation, about what good looks like, and about what the operating model should be?

I think it’s fair to say that in terms of the time pressure, and lots of people will start to hear this term, it’s incredibly important that you deliver LGR safe and legal. It is a bit of a cliche, but it is incredibly important. We’ve got vulnerable children, vulnerable families, and vulnerable adults who’ve got to make sure that we’re delivering, delivering the bins,  still filling bottles and all the things that are incredibly important from day one. So for us, we did it in a way that I think a lot of people will end up looking at as a bit of a transition rather than a transformation. But whilst you’re doing that transition, you spend the time thinking about what the operating model might look like, what the success factors might look like, and how you engage with staff on that. So alongside us working to safe and legal, I must shout out to a couple of my colleagues here. John Metcalfe, who was the County Council chief exec and Sam Plum, who is now the Westmoreland and Furness chief exec. John asked to see Sam and me one day and said “Look, I’ve got a bit of a proposition for you, why don’t I do all the safe and legal stuff and you do all the transition stuff?”. John had made the decision that he wasn’t going to go for anything post-LGR. And that allows you and Sam to think about what the critical success factors are going to look like, what the operating model is going to look like.

And so John gave Sam and me some space to really think about what that looked like and dedicate some time to working with the management consultants. We had at the time to think about the operating model, about what the future might look like, and how we engage staff in that. And particularly for us, we did a fair bit of work about how we wanted the organisation to look in terms of its future values as well. So it was an operating model that in the end came out to be putting health and wellbeing at the centre of everything that we do. And we should try and do that through a prevention and early intervention model. But also, if we were going to do it that way, we needed to look at what those values might need to be. So for us, compassion is at the centre of what our values are, because for those often most vulnerable in our community, we need to make sure that we’re working with them at an early intervention and prevention stage. And we do that with with compassion and we felt as though that actually if we did it that way, we would have to double track for a couple of years. And in reality we’ve had to introduce early intervention and prevention operating model whilst we’re still having to do some of the old things that we used to do.

But I think we’re starting to see the green shoots of that within the organisation. Because I felt as though the high-cost crisis model that that we’d got ourselves into was unsustainable financially for us. And actually that prevention and early intervention model was the only financially sustainable model for us. So we have had to twin track that. And that has meant that the transition costs have been higher in the first couple of years. But we have worked with government on that, and we have had some EFS to support us on that journey. So I think that given that time to really think about what that operating model and the values that are going to be absolutely critical for anybody else on the journey.

Presumably, there were different political views about what the eventual shape and size and makeup of the new the unitries should be and many people right now are in exactly that position, where those negotiations are still very live. As a borough chief, how did you manage the politics around that?

We found ourselves in a position where I think all of the district councils and all of the district council leaders were in favour of a two-unitary option. So, I probably feel quite lucky looking into some of the debates that I’m seeing at the moment that all the district councils felt that the two-unitary model was the best model.

There were variations of that model and I’ll come back to that in a second. The County Council wanted a one-unitary continuing authority model. History is history now, isn’t it Jonathan? We went for the two-unitary model, but particularly ourselves, Copeland, Carlisle and Eden felt as though that we could put our case for change forward together, although we wanted two different geographical make-ups of those two authorities. So the four of us worked together again with some support to put forward the two unitary case. And although the boundaries were different, the case for change was exactly the same really, other than one or two aspects of what the economic geography might look like. And that was key for us is that we felt as though the economic geography should also drive some of the decisions that were going to go on around LGR. I think. I mean, with reflection and maybe we’ll talk about this a bit later, but I think one of the things that if I had my time again, I probably would have done some more work around the equity and potential fairness of funding because what we’ve found ourselves in in the position here is that as we know council tax and NDR income makes up a significant amount doesn’t it of our income now for local authorities and for us at Cumberland we have more or less the same council tax income as Westmoreland and Furness yet.

We have 50,000 more people within our area. So I think one of the key learning points for us and one of the key things that I would talk to any chief exec or anyone involved in LGR is try and find a way that you can create a fairness of funding post-LGR. Don’t leave one organisation with an immediate deficit or another with immediate surplus if there’s a way that you can negotiate that or look at how the boundaries are set so that you can do that in the fairest way possible.

You talked about working with management consultants, and a lot of people are either doing that right now or are in the process of appointing consultants to help them work through this process. Do you have any top tips for how? What’s the best way to manage that relationship? Should we stand back? Should we lean in? What were your reflections on the best ways to make the most of that?

Definitely leaning in would be my advice, because I think that wherever you get to, whether it’s a case for change or actually moving towards Vesting Day, you’ve got to own whatever it is that they come up with. So we tried to do it really collaboratively, we added a shared PMO, we also worked collaboratively across districts and counties.

We had a number of work streams. Those work streams normally had a chair that was either a district or county and then a vice chair that was the opposite. And I think be very clear with the management consultants about where they can add value because we know and it’s a bit of a cliche, isn’t it? But we know our area and we know our business best. So really work out the bits where you’ve got either gaps in skills or capacity, but also really plan, and I think the management consultants that we worked with added real value in some of the quality conversations that we had. So certainly for me that helped in understanding children’s and adults. So they put some specialists in those areas, but also they were incredibly helpful and useful around our central PMO to make sure that the

We had 200 key deliverables for Vesting Day. We were all in on a plan. Everyone was owned. We were really clear about when they needed to be what the interdependencies were around those and what the critical path were. So that discipline, they really helped us with.

Another one of the anxieties that people are trying to think through is how you disaggregate adults and children’s services from one county to a number of unitries. How did you and your teams go about that? Ensuring that there’s that real pressure on vulnerable people who need to be kept safe and who need to keep receiving services.

Start as early as you can to scope out what deliverables each of the two organisations need. Think about ICT, because we couldn’t quite get to the point on ICT for children’s and adults that we needed to, so we had to do it whilst we were within the new organisations. We went through a process of being very clear about what was required on day one. So that safe and legal bit comes in again. And then the types of capacity that would be needed to deliver that in the two local authorities. So we did some gap analysis. And then what we did was we looked at a staff allocation process and we started that fairly early. But what I would say is that anybody who is going through this process, start absolutely as early as you can so that people are clear which or which organisation they’re going to work for in the future and that staff allocation then allowed us to go right okay we’ve got however many social workers in one area and another we need extra capacity in one area or another. I think the staff allocation process also has some real complexities because you might have people in the county council that are generally sat in one building. For us, lots of people were employed in and around Carlisle. Making sure that it was also fair, not just for Cumberland, but fair for Westmoreland and Furness, was also on Sam’s and my mind all the time, as it was for John. So what I would say is to have that clear understanding of what’s required and DCSs and DASs know that anyway. And work around what the capacity and resource requirement is. So I would say the one lesson I learnt is do the staff allocation process absolutely as soon as you can.

Are there any other things that when you got to the end of the process you thought you’d known about at the beginning, or things that you would have done that you would have done differently having been through it that you didn’t know going into it?

Yeah, absolutely. I would say ICT information and data. We felt as though we couldn’t make lots of decisions basically based on the time that we had to do some of the disaggregation of the ICT data. For example, in children’s and adults, we had a combined system and we had to run with that with some firewalls in place so that everything was safe and legal to make sure that the Cumberland staff had access to their records and the Westmoreland and Furness staff had access to their records as well. So anything that you can do in terms of quality, quality of data, anything that you can do around disaggregation of data, I think is time and effort worth putting in. And one of the things what I would say is that because of the size and scale for us, and it will be the same for others and not quite the same for other people going through this process, is that the majority of the staff that came into the two new unitries were from the County Council because of their big service areas, children’s, adults and place-based services.

And actually, understanding what the basic ICT is going to be like for those individuals and how we connect within to the new authority is really key. So a simple example is that for us, our County Council colleagues remained on one Microsoft domain. We created another one for the Cumberland staff who needed to have at their own domain cost. A number of us were appointed before Vesting Day and then the district stayed on theirs and it was only after we started that we found we worked out that actually some of our exec support around the senior leadership team had all come from county districts, so none of them could see each other’s diaries so people couldn’t see each other. So some of those hygiene factors around ICT, if you can get them sorted, I would do them as soon as you can.

So you go through the process and you’re now chief exec at the new unitary. A lot of people are a bit nervous about that whole transition. Can you tell us what it’s been like? What’s different? You talked very compellingly about some of the advantages of being in the unitary, but what’s different about being chief exec at a unitary rather than a district and what’s exciting about that?

Maybe I’ll say one thing about what I did for my own personal development that might be helpful for both county and district chief execs, but particularly for district chief execs because to apply for a job in a unitary that includes children’s, adults and some of those big place services that they’ve maybe not had lots of exposure to.

So when we started the process and I’d made the decision that I was gonna go for the job, but also in shadow, when we were doing the shadow authority jobs and I was responsible for putting together the structure for the new unitary, and I really needed to understand children’s and adults. So I used my network to talk to Patrick at Sunderland, I spoke to Helen at Northumberland. The LGA gave me a children’s mentor. Philip Simpkins has been helping me on my journey to understand children’s more. I spoke to my old DAS at Sunderland, Neil Reveley. I spent time with people, one, who I respected and two, felt as though I could understand what that role would look like. So I would say to anyone, use your network and talk to people to understand what that role looks like.

One of the themes that’s come through in this conversation is the importance of leadership, mentorship, network. If you could distil one key piece of wisdom or advice for people who are staring at the uncertain end of this, what would you say to them?

Be positive and embrace the change.

Yeah, because the change is coming. You’ve talked about the opportunity to be better. If you had a magic wand, what would you change about local government in England?

I’m not saying what we’re doing is perfect and in no way is it, but I think that the opportunity that we’ve had to really think about that operating model, put health and wellbeing at the centre of everything that we do, to really think about prevention and early intervention and work around a model that is people-centred as much as it can be within the funding envelopes that we’ve got is the thing that I think we’ve all got to think about.

And I think we need to talk to government as a sector about what that looks like. So it might mean that actually we agree with government that we have the dual fund moving from in some cases, and this isn’t the case in all local government, is it? But in some cases, moving away from that potentially crisis management situation that we’ve found ourselves in, into one that is putting prevention and early intervention at the heart of everything that we do.