Conference call

While the credit crunch and collapsing council investments were front-page news, UK chief executives were in the middle of their annual SOLACE conference in Belfast. Michael Burton reports back from the front line.

The floor of the SOLACE conference centre last Thursday morning was like a scene from Gamblers’ Anonymous. ‘Yeah, I lost £15m from the Icelandic Banks collapse. Course that chap over there standing by the coffee stand lost £7m. And that one down there on the mobile just by the gents he’s down for £11m.’

It was questionable how many delegates up until a few hours before had even been aware of their council investments, a normally arcane process left to treasurers.

One London chief executive confessed that in the previous fortnight he had spent more time with his borough treasurer than the previous 15 years.

Oddly the local Belfast media were either uninterested or unaware of the story on their doorstep. Here was UK local government standing to lose £1bn on dodgy Icelandic banks and the chief executives were actually meeting on their patch.

But the local TV stations, camped out just yards from the conference centre outside the law courts, were much more interested in the case of the bank clerk being let off for a  £26.5m robbery or the death of Martin McGuiness’s mother, which meant incidentally that the deputy First Minister had to cry off his conference address.

Earlier in the week i.e. 24 hours before, which shows just how fast-moving the agenda, was, the focus had been on the wider credit crunch and the efficiency agenda, both of which are linked. The Audit Commission report on the next steps for efficiency came out on Wednesday. It suggested that the only way of meeting the target of saving £4.9bn in the next three years was by serious merging of back office functions.

Coincidentally the same argument was put forward by Mr Efficiency himself, Sir Peter Gershon, in an interview with The MJ last week. In a conference workshop organised by The MJ and Vertex, he elaborated on his view that the next steps for efficiency would have to be in business process re-engineering, or transformation, rather than just procurement. And Sir Peter was able to expound still further as one of the panellists in a conference session on the impact of the credit crunch.

What with the turbulent events of the week it would have been unwise, even impossible, for the conference closing speaker, Hazel Blears to have stuck to a pre-written text. To her credit, though she touched on her favourite topics of engagement and LAAs, her speech did attempt to address the issues that were on the day’s front page. It was left to the Q and A session though for the query on everyone’s lips to be tackled – namely would she bail out councils which had lost money in the Iceland banks? The answer was equivocal.

But that was last week…