Sunderland City Council: A switch in time

These days, councils are caught between a rock and a hard place. The rock is having to implement the brutal spending cuts imposed by central government. The hard place is being blamed for deteriorating services. Many people in local government are trying to reframe thinking by invoking the idea of “transformation”. This is the aspiration that services, rather than just being cut, can be reconfigured in imaginative ways that usually involve greater user involvement, and/or staff autonomy, and are cheaper to run. But trying to transform anything is doubly difficult when staff are fearful and demotivated, as is often the case when change programmes are introduced against a background of compulsory redundancies and redeployment.