CROYDON IN CRISIS: It has taken external consultants almost six months to discover that the council’s website is ‘jargon-heavy’, ‘corporate’ and ‘difficult’ to use. Those findings have cost the cash-strapped council at least £1m.
EXCLUSIVE by STEVEN DOWNES
‘Transformation’: council CEO Katherine Kerswell, addressing the staff webinar last week
After being paid at least £1million of money that Croydon’s cash-strapped council really doesn’t have, and taking nearly six months to get staff and the public to fill in forms and questionnaires, external consultants have come to the conclusion that… Croydon Council’s website is a bit shit.
That was among some “key findings” revealed to staff in a council-wide webinar held last week, the latest effort by Kerswell and her management team to justify the massive spending on consultants ahead of what seems likely to be the next round of cost-cutting.
Katherine Kerswell, the council’s £192,000 chief executive, earlier this year hired management consultants Newton, Impower and Boston Consulting Group to help her make even more cuts to council services – all with the backing of Tory Mayor Jason Perry.
The consultants’ work is supposed to inform what Kerswell calls “Future Croydon”, as she and her “corporate management team” repeat their mantra of “transformation”. Council staff, many of them fearing that their jobs will be next for the redundancy axe, are calling it “No Future Croydon”.
Newton’s contract alone, according to an official council Freedom of Information response, is costing Croydon’s long-suffering Council Tax-payers at least £1million. Impower and Boston’s deals are not expected to be any cheaper.
According to Kerswell, Boston (or BCG) are “a global firm with an expertise in digital innovation in the public and private sectors…”, who the CEO brought into Croydon “to support the council… to develop a new operating model”.
Kerswell had promised that Boston were to take “a forensic look at how we do things…”, in order to “develop new ways of working”.
Kerswell said: “Our partners will offer fresh eyes, additional expertise and can draw on what they have achieved with other organisations.”
And what have Boston found after months of rigorous reviewing of the council’s “operating model”?
About half an hour into the webinar, a bright young thing from Boston announced to his remote audience of Kerswell and around 700 council employees that it “came across loud and clear” that the council website was in need of fixing. Which sort of wins a Golden NSS* award.
The council’s website, Boston had discovered, is “jargon-heavy”, with “bugs” and broken links, which most people find “hard to navigate”. Who’d have thought, eh?
At another point in the presentation, the council’s website was described as “corporate, unintelligible and difficult”.
Boston had spent their expensively acquired time monitoring 750 calls from the public, and discovered that 65% – two-thirds of them – had been made because residents had found that the council website was “confusing” or “unclear”.
What should be really troubling about all this is that this has been “discovered” more than a decade since the council opted for a “digital-first” strategy of dealing with resident inquiries, with Kerswell’s predecessor, Jo Negrini, hiring in a platoon of specialist staff for a special Croydon Digital department.
In the meantime, the council has cut back on the number of staff working in its contact centre or answering phones on its switchboard, all the time making the council, and its services, evermore remote and more difficult to access. It has almost been as if council directors wanted to reduce the demand from the public for its services.
Clickbait: Kerswell’s consultants found Croydon’s website to be “jargon-heavy”, with “bugs” and broken links. They described it as “corporate, unintelligible and difficult”
The council’s approach to public communications has been a shambolic mess for at least 15 years. Online-only only works if the systems offered are slick and smooth. Croydon Council’s website usually demands a user to take at least four clicks to find their way to the required page. It is an object lesson in deliberate deterrents.
Kerswell has presided over all of this for four years.
But she needed million-pound consultants to tell her that this was wrong.
Boston reached their conclusions, according to one of those death-by-PowerPoint slide presentations of which consultants are so fond, under a heading of “Improving customer service”. Ahhh. If only.
The council website, the consultant presenting this section of the webinar said, is “ripe for reimagination and transformation”. The website, he said, ought to be “a massive lever to direct residents upstream”.
And the solution to all this, according to Boston, is… AI!
They want to add a little ChatBot window, using Microsoft CoPilot, to the council’s website. It is a feature familiar to many bank customers, users of supermarket online ordering sites, and to the residents of dozens of other local authorities around the country.
But given that the Croydon bot’s responses are liable to be based on the very same council website which has so many issues, not least being often out of date, some of those on the receiving end of the webinar last week suggested that this might be “frustrating” and “not very helpful” for residents.
“Is AI what residents want?” one staff member asked, not unreasonably.
Kerswell didn’t answer that one. So AI is probably what residents are going to get…
(* – NSS = No Shit Sherlock, in case you didn’t already know.)
Read more: From The Observer: ‘Scandalous’ £3.4bn UK state spending on private consultants last year
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Prepare yourselves, Croydon council taxpayers, for the Croydon Chatbot. “I’m sorry, could you reword your question?” Unless there is an enormous knowledgebase of accurate information for the bot to refer to, that’s the best response we will get. If Croydon’s usual quality of service is maintained, it will probably just be a green button which does nothing, let alone chat.
“transformation” and “new ways of working” have been bandied around by all Croydon Chief Execs since at least 2010. You wonder how many times it has to transform and just how many different ways of working there are. There is only one obvious different way of working that will have cost £millions over the years – get rid of hundreds of staff and expect those remaining to cope with increasing demand and less resources.
I’ve just raised a complaint through the Croydon Council website because when I tried to find an answer to an issue it either sent me round in circles or provided a brick wall that wouldn’t let me pass unless I ticked one of the options – none of the options related to my question and all of them just led me back round a different circle to get back to the same place.
I despise artificial intelligence because in my experience it always feels artificial and it certainly isn’t intelligent. There is also an old phrase in the IT world “garbage in, garbage out”. In other words, if the information you put into a system is useless then you are not going to get any useful information out of it. Given that lots of the information on the current website is useless, I don’t see how any AI system is going to produce anything worthwhile.
The only people who will benefit from a Council AI system will be the consultants pocketing £millions more of our cash – money that would be better spent on employing people to deal with letters, emails, and phone enquiries.
I’m not sure that using Croydon Council for a benchmark of intelligence is going to get you anywhere. When employed by intelligent institutions artificial intelligence can be pretty good.
The same thing happened to me. I have contacted the relevant Cabinet member with my enquiry. If I can’t find what I need in 20 minutes they deserve to be told their system isn’t working.
They should never have “Welcome to Croydon” on the home page of the council website….it encourages almost anyone to change that to “You’re welcome to Croydon”, and we could also add “, which is still being held hostage by the free-loading Local Government Gravy Train passengers.”
Perhaps the Croydon (AI) Chatbot should have a standard answer, which says “Sorry we are unable to answer your (valid) query, but we no longer have enough staff to provide that service. Try asking again, in a few years’ time, to see if the situation has improved….”
Six months and a million pounds? Kerswell should be sacked. She shows she doesn’t have a clue. Again.
They can’t even get my MP correct. It still says Sarah Jones.
It became Natasha Irons when the constituency boundaries were changed (and she won her seat).
Hmmm. Three months to update a contacts page on a website.
How long to fix a leak in a council flat, I wonder?
Looking at their Corporate Management Structure org chart – there are pages and pages of Directors and Heads Of. They have:
Director of Digital Access
Head of Digital Operations
Head of Digital Services, Access and Reach
Head of Resident Contact
Head of Specialist Systems
What were they doing while consultants were running up a million pound bill over six months? How much are these Directors and Heads of and their teams costing us?
They have a Chief and SIX ‘Heads of’ in HR alone! WTF!
Check out their website – they’re looking for another two Heads of HR. Salary £95296 plus gold-plated pension.
In other news, the Council is bankrupt and closing libraries.
Well that’s a couple of million in salaries, benefits and massive pensions, for Digital and HR heads right there even before you even take into account the rest of their no doubt similarly bloated teams.
Lots of ‘led by donkeys’ comments – fuelled by the wall of silence at the council. If only they would engage with us, and IC of course, they would stand a chance of explaining the need and function of these people. But they don’t. They won’t and so the mistrust and resentment builds up. What an absolute shambles.
This is an issue that could be solved for about £200k by a half-decent digital agency – £100k to rebuild the website to make things easier to find, and another £100k to audit the content and rewrite it in plain English. It’s really not that difficult and something Croydon’s digital team could have commissioned themselves.
Quite
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Very much enjoyed CentralCroydon’s comment, in response to this piece of archly detailed reporting.
https://insidecroydon.com/2021/11/24/chief-digital-officer-quits-council-after-splashing-the-cash/