After 20 years of being led by the same chief executive, Derby City Council now has a new boss at the helm in Adam Wilkinson. Heather Jameson meets him
Adam Wilkinson started his local government career 27 years ago in Wycombe DC as a trainee building surveyor. ‘I wanted to be an architect or a surveyor,’ he explains, but it was not to happen.Instead, he says: ‘It got me the bug for local government.’
It was to be the first of 11 local authorities he was to work his way through in the intervening 27 years, culminating in his current role as chief executive of Derby City Council.
After Wycombe, Adam was employed in several London boroughs, before heading back to a district career in South Buckinghamshire DC as a building control manager. The service was subject to competition, giving it an extra dimension to much of local government, dealing with internal customers as well as staff.
He claims the experience has always stuck with him. ‘I try to combine a public sector ethos with a private sector ethos in what I do,’ he says.
While he was there, his service achieved awards such as charter marks and Investors in People status, when they were still relatively new in local government.
At that time in the early 1990s, he says: ‘We were thinking quite a lot about unitaries.’
He represented South Buckinghamshire on its reorganisation team, but it was not to be – Milton Keynes was given unitary status and the rest of the county was left alone. Instead, he moved authority to join another unitary, this time Torfaen, in Wales.
Members were keen for change, and Adam brought in a new IT system and processes to help with customer services, saving the council ‘significant’ amounts of cash, before he shifted into the field of regeneration.
‘There were some quite deprived areas which had been very reliant on the coal industry. It gave me a taste and I realised I quite liked regeneration.’
His next role found him at Kirklees in 1996, as head of property. He says: ‘I wanted to work in a different culture with different issues. Kirklees had a good reputation, with very little movement of senior staff.
‘I worked to an executive director who didn’t have a portfolio. It allowed synergies to be created.’
He worked there for four-and-a-half years, getting involved – among other things – in setting up scrutiny committees, and he claims [former Kirklees leader] Sir John Harman was an ‘inspirational’ influence on him.
Adam then moved on to Rotherham, as executive director of economic and development services. ‘The authority had a lot of kickings, and I was part of a new management team brought in.’
Other members of the team included Ged Fitzgerald, now Lancashire CC chief executive, and Dave Smith, the chief executive of Sunderland City Council.
One of the initiatives brought in by Adam was Street Pride, bringing together everything to do with the environment, from graffiti and litter to potholes, in an area-based, holistic approach.
‘We found the top 20 complainers and asked them to be Street Pride champions.’ In his current role at Derby City, the council has just launched its own Street Pride. The other major initiative is a review of assets. The council is on the verge of a radical reorganisation of its properties, which will see an overhaul of the council offices. A building which currently houses 500 staff will eventually accommodate 1,900 – although not all at the same time.
From Rotherham, Adam went on to Kent CC – attracted by the size and scale of the Thames Gateway project. But with four daughters all ‘of a certain age’, he didn’t want to uproot the family. ‘I found the commute very hard’.
As a result, he only stayed 12 months – not what he had been expecting. ‘By then, I knew I wanted to be a chief executive, so I left Kent and did some consultancy work while I waited for the right job.’
He was doing some interim work at York when the Derby chief executive job came up – as did York and Rotherham. But Derby came up first, and was the one he went for. He has been in post for a almost a year now – compared with the 20 years his predecessor held the job.
The council was ready for a fresh start, but the real changes have been provoked by budgetary pressures. With a three-way political split, Adam has worked with all three groups to come up with a list of priorities for the council. The first priority is a structural review, cutting the five directorates to four and losing a deputy chief executive post.
There will be staff cuts, but ‘we would hope to keep redundancies to a minimum’. He acknowledges there will be ‘interesting times’ ahead. ‘Staff see a lot of changes happening in an organisation which has not been used to significant change,’ he says. Between the new government, the new chief executive, and the financial crisis surrounding local government, change is what they are set to get.
