The scale of the recruitment crisis facing councils has been laid bare at the Solace Summit.

Appearing at the event, Local Government Association (LGA) chief executive Mark Lloyd said a recent survey had found 94% had recruitment difficulties and half of councils rated recruitment and retention as a ‘moderate’ or ‘large’ concern.

Planning, legal and IT were the top three areas of concern.

The most common measures used to try and tackle the problem were offering flexible working, targeted recruitment, apprenticeships, and providing market supplements.

Lloyd said increasing rates of pay was ‘not a silver bullet’, but suggested ‘senior managers need to be more willing to recruit from outside the sector’.

Bradford City Council chief executive Kersten England confirmed the picture, saying she was losing staff to the private sector, where they could increase their salaries by £30,000, and to the health sector due to NHS terms and conditions.

She said councils were ‘at the mercy of the agency networks’.

England said a lack of diversity in the workforce was also an issue, adding: ‘None of us is doing well enough on it.’

It was ‘pretty scary’ that 30% of the council’s workforce was aged over 55 in one of the youngest cities in Europe demographically, she added.

Solace president and Manchester City Council chief executive Joanne Roney was also speaking as part of the panel.

She said Solace was beginning work to improve the sector’s reputation, to ‘not let ourselves be defined by a few failures when there are millions of people changing lives every day’.

Roney said she was seeing staff passionate about public service resigning due to frustration.

‘We need to stop people leaving the sector for those reasons - I would like to see more fluidity between sectors. We don’t need to lose people from the place and public service.’

This article was originally published by The MJ (£).