And here’s another one… On the one hand Croydon Council is cutting front-line services across the board and using the recession as the excuse, while on the other it is spending £20 million a year on expensive consultants, some paid nearly £800 per day. And the council is out recruiting again, this time offering a £52,000 per year salary for “emergency planning”.

It is understood that this is not a new post, so Croydon placing the job ad suggests that someone is moving on or being replaced. Could this possibly be a belated response to the council’s abject failures of emergency planning last August?

This job ad does also seem to suggest that our council has been ill-managed and disorganised for many years, unable to fulfil requirements of Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

Maybe whoever gets this job will make sure that one the first things they do is to insist that the council leader and chief executive make sure that they get their sorry arses along to an emergency security Gold Meeting when required.

So, in case you think you can do the job, here’s the council-placed ad:

Resilience Manager
About the Role
We are looking for a dynamic and experienced professional with excellent communication and leadership skills to lead emergency planning for the Borough together with business continuity and security planning for the Council. The service aims to ensure that the Council remains resilient in its service provision and is able to support the Borough through robust pan London and local emergency planning arrangements. As such this is a key role within the authority with a high profile and leads a multi-disciplinary team with a dynamic and challenging brief.

The Post holder will be responsible for leading a multi disciplinary team delivering Emergency Planning, Business Continuity and Security Management as outlined below.

Emergency Planning
The post holder will oversee preparation corporate emergency plans and policy, ensuring that the local authority complies with its legal obligations under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and all other legislation requiring an emergency response from the Council. In addition to preparing plans, the team’s role extends to risk assessment, training, and validation of plans, performance monitoring and audit, information sharing and warning and informing the public. Risk assessment will include assessing risks within the Borough and also preparation of plans with other category 1 and category 2 responders, where appropriate. The successful candidate will chair the local resilience forum to further these aims.

Business Continuity
The post holder will be fully conversant with British Standards relating to business continuity planning and ensure that those standards are reflected in the continuity plans produced by departments, leading to compliance with the Civil Contingency Act 2004 backed up by an extensive training and exercise programme delivered by the team.

Security
The post holder and team will manage available resources and ensure best practice from contractors in delivering a robust approach to the security of Council staff and assets. The post holder will also oversee a comprehensive response to security issues or incidents. As well as being able to demonstrate the ability to lead the team to deliver these services, the successful candidate will be instrumental in blending operational security processes and practice together as the council moves into its new headquarters in 2013.

“… will be instrumental in blending operational security…”? Doesn’t the use of “will be” somewhat suggest that such matters were not “blended” already?

A couple of other points worth noting, especially as, as Croydon’s poetry-writing deputy CEO Nathan Elvery once infamously suggested, “efficiency is in our DNA”.

This post was advertised as being in the Performance department. That particular department has not existed for more than a year. Efficiency, eh, Nathan?

In fact, this position will fall under the Strategy, Commissioning, Procurement and Performance “function” that is run by the Elvery ally Sarah Ireland – a department that the people in Taberner House refer to in councilspeak as SCPP. And what those who work in Taberner House call “CRAPP” when not in the hearing range of their bosses.

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