Roles that are modified in the final new structure will need job descriptions updating so they reflect the new accountability and responsibility within the role.

These revised job descriptions will be benchmarked against existing evaluated job descriptions. If this benchmarking activity identifies that a re-evaluation is needed, the role will be taken to an evaluation panel for review.

The job evaluation process involves looking at a range of factors including working conditions, budget responsibility and responsibility for staff, to give an overall score for the role that correlates with one of our pay bands.

Additional responsibility in one of the factors will not always increase the band of the role, but this will be considered when consultation closes, and job descriptions are finalised.

If you have a concern about a particular role, please do highlight this through the consultation feedback route.

If you are in a team or role that is affected by the proposals and you are interested in exploring voluntary redundancy, please do make this clear by feeding this into the consultation feedback route.

Whilst we cannot guarantee we will accept a request for voluntary redundancy, if by accepting this we are able to mitigate the need for a compulsory redundancy situation, it may be something that we can consider.

How can be assured all individual feedback is fully considered based on process timelines? Will we get individual responses to our consultation feedback or does this depend on amount of what you get back?

All formal responses regardless of how we receive them will be read, discussed, and fully considered by the Group Director, Group Design Programme and Project teams, HR, and Finance.  

We will look for themes that span across the organisation and within each group.  The Feedback report will provide our response to these themes. Where appropriate or required we will undertake to go back to an individuals response to the consultation paper.

Your formal responses will inform what is included in the implementation papers.

It is entirely up to you as the person sending your formal response on what to include and how long it should be!  

We have included some optional sections providing guidance on the MS Form.  They include:

• Positive Aspects:  Highlight what you think would work well in the proposed design plan.
• Concerns and Challenges:  Clearly outline any concerns or challenges you foresee with the proposed design and please provide specific examples or scenarios where these issues might arise.
• Suggestions for Improvement:  Offer constructive suggestions on how to address the concerns you’ve raised and please be specific and practical in your recommendations.
• Impact on Your Role/Team:  Explain how the proposed design might impact your role or your team’s performance.  Discuss any potential benefits or drawbacks.
• General Comments and Feedback on the Ringfencing and Assimilation Proposals:  We invite general comments and feedback on the ringfencing and assimilation proposals here. Please note that if you disagree with a ringfencing or assimilation decision that personally affects you, we ask that you raise this separately by emailing the relevant group email address.

If you think it would be useful feel free to use these in your submission to us via email, Trade Unions, and HR.

If you are not much of a writer, there are tools where you can use to verbally dictate your response and it will turn it into a written document. You would need to check the document before sending, but might be an option for you to consider. MS Office (Word document) has this feature.

You can read the public budget consultation questions here.  

The proposed job descriptions can be found on the Group Design Programme page. You can provide feedback on them as part of your formal response to the consultation paper.

Based on your feedback we will finalise the new job descriptions in the implementation papers.

Finalised job descriptions and person specifications will be made available in the implementation papers.

The process, criteria, and details for applications will be made available at the same time.

Feedback Report - w/c 9 December

• We will be reviewing questions and feedback during the course of the consultation period and where questions are asked about errors / omissions or points of clarity, we will respond to these rather than wait until the end of the consultation period.  
• All feedback will be carefully reviewed, themed and summarised in the Feedback Report. If your feedback is not related to assimilation or ringfencing of roles and meets the criteria set out above you can expect a reply within 5 working days.
• All feedback received during the consultation period will be reviewed and will inform the Feedback Report which will be published during the week commencing 9 December.  

Implementation Papers - December, February, and March

• The Feedback Report will inform the Implementation Papers that are due to be published in December, February, and March. 
• The Implementation Papers will take these responses to provide the finalised structures as well as the process in order to make the structures a reality.

The consultation was launched on Monday 14 October 2024 and will close on 15 November 2024.

Once the consultation has finished all of the submissions will be reviewed. Responses to submissions will be provided the week responding 9 December 2024.

There are multiple ways that you can ask questions about the proposal or your role including;

• MS Form - which can be anonymous or you can provide your name and email address
• Email. Each Group Design Project has an email address.
  • City Ops 2.0 (City Services); CityOpsProgramme@cambridge.gov.uk
  • Communities; communitiesproject@cambridge.gov.uk
  • Corporate Hub; CorporateHub@cambridge.gov.uk
  • Economy and Place; economyandplacegroup@cambridge.gov.uk 
• Meet with Group Director or manager
• Ask an HR Business Partner HRbusinesspartners@cambridge.gov.uk 

Full details can be found on the Group Design Programme homepage. 

Questions

All questions sent from your union representative will be made anonymously, and you do not have to be a member to submit a response through a union representative. You can also talk to trade union representatives individually or collectively. The Trade Unions contact details are on the Group Design page.

Alternatively, you could also;

• Ask your line manager or HR to raise a question on your behalf.
• Use the MS Form that is available.

Submissions

To send us your submission anonymously you can do this via the Trade Unions, HR, MS Form or via your line manager.

All submissions are responded to by the project team with support from HR where specific questions may arise. 

Yes, anyone can ask questions and send submissions about any of the Group Designs. 

This is entirely up to you. However, you may find it useful to look at the MS Form, which has labelled sections you could make use of if you are sending us a submission via email and/or a Word document. 

It is intended that in the implementation paper there will be a summary of the feedback that was received throughout the consultation period and the responses, considerations and or changes that have been made as a result. All feedback will be anonymised with any reference to personal circumstances or identity removed. 

You will find in the consultation paper that there is a visual of the current and proposed future structures of each Group.

The job descriptions can be found below relating to each group:

• City Services - job descriptions [PDF, 0.8MB]
• Communities - job descriptions [PDF, 2MB]
• Corporate Hub - job descriptions [PDF, 1MB]
• Economy and Place - job descriptions [PDF, 0.3MB]

The priority throughout this consultation process is to ensure that everyone feels supported. 

Please speak to your manager in the first instance to discuss what support is available. 

The SMR achieved its objectives to:

• Kick of the process of change and provide strategic direction for the Council building
• Arranged the management of council teams into groups to create a flatter more resilient structure, improve collaboration, and increase efficiency.
• Reduced the cost of senior management by 20 per cent achieving around £0.3m net savings per annum

Feedback for staff gave strong endorsement for the new leadership behaviours, the emphasis on collaboration across teams and with partners, and on creating a more empowering culture for staff. 

At the time the proposals were endorsed by the Council in March 2023, the Chief Executive advised members that the Group structure would be kept under review and would need to adapt to the wider operational and financial context.”

To ensure the knowledge and stakeholder relationships where retained extended handover periods were arranged with colleagues affected by redundancy.

Reducing managerial hierarchy was one of the key objectives of the SMR and one of the key issues raised by staff during ‘making it real’ conversations.

A Corporate Management Team has been established involving head of teams and senior managers across the council. A leadership and development programme is in train to support and build CMTs leadership and management capabilities.    

More detail about the SMR is available here -https://democracy.cambridge.gov.uk/documents/s61948/Senior%20Management%20Review%2030%20Jan%202023.pdf

As we continue to work on the Group Design Programme we will be working with HR and across of all CMT to ensure that any staff who are on secondment or long-term leave are being kept up to date with any impacts to their substantiative post, and where possible to include them in all phases of the programme. 

If to date you have feel you have not been kept up to date or being provided with an opportunity to engage in the design phase which is currently underway, please send the programme team a message using the MS Form HERE and the relevant project team will get back to you. 

The team is currently working with each GDP sponsor on the roles which will stay and move within and across groups, aligned with the group value statements. This process also takes into account the purpose of each of the functions. Once this process is finalised, directors will work with their management teams to share the proposed changes with both individuals and teams, ahead of the consultation which is due to start in mid-October.

When consultation opens, the proposals being put forward for comment will be based on diligent work that has been conducted with managers in the groups and with the sponsor’s support. The paper being put forward for members to consider at the end of September marks the start of the council-wide engagement process which is extremely important in terms of changing anything that will fundamentally not work. It is highly unlikely that every possible impact of the proposal will have been identified, despite best efforts, and that is where the views of all staff are important. It is not a done deal, and it is absolutely for staff to make us aware of anything we might have overlooked. 

The governance for the group design work is via the Transformation Board, which is made up of the Leadership Team, plus the Head of Transformation and the Head of People. It is this group who will determine the contents of the S&R paper for members to debate and consider. Ultimately, it is the Chief Executive, as their role as Head of Paid Service, who has the final say in matters relating to group designs. 

We have set up the ‘programme within a programme’ to achieve exactly this, with group design Project Manager’s working closely together to ensure alignment across each. This is further supported by the leadership at Transformation Board, with directors/sponsors supporting and facilitating steps to move the group design forward. 

There are going to be certain areas of the Council that either stop or change what they have been doing to date; this is something that we all have a responsibility to manage, and that we all need to provide support for. Changes are hard to deal with, for us as individuals and as a Council, and they can be hard for our customers and partners too.

As part of the planning for changes, there are resources that the Council has in place to support teams who are being asked to deliver something different than what they did before. For some, this will be a very personal level of support, and PAM Assist is a resource available to all who are looking for help with managing the transition to their specific day-to-day, as well as our People team and your line managers; for others, it will be more about the process changes and operational activities, and there will be help for this from the Transformation Team for that transition.

There will be some people who find themselves in a different team entirely; and this will be supported by having line management transition processes in place to support the move, and recognition that for all of us, change takes time to adjust to and bed into, and that’s very much a normal thing. The most important element of all, is to keep having the conversation, with your colleagues, at home with your family and with your line manager. There is so much truth to the saying that we are greater than the sum of our parts, no more evident than when a team pulls together to work through uncertainty.

Given the nature of the work and services all of the Groups do, it was inevitable that it would take time to document the various functions and team activities across the groups.  Work has included gathering data, insights, and financials, working with Group Management Teams, HR, Finance, and the Project Teams.  Engagement with staff in each of the groups has included various activities, workshops, presentations, Q&A sessions, and survey's.  

The outcome of all of the work that has been undertaken across each of the Group Design Projects is to take a single paper to the S&R Committe, ahead of staff consultation in October.

Council’s all over the country have been going through the exact same process; looking at ways in which they can provide an acceptable level of service within budget. There are different approaches to take and it starts with understanding what we do right now and how we can do this most efficiently. Consultation with the public is a way of managing expectations and setting the tone about doing things differently in future which is why we have built this into the Group Design timeline. We can ask questions like “what would the public be prepared to accept in terms of service delivery?” and we need to work through what political decisions need to happen in order to approve these changes. These are all questions we will be answering over the coming weeks and months in order to address the financial challenges the Council is facing. Doing things differently now will potentially mean we can make different choices in the future.

Not all savings will be seen on the ‘bottom line’ straight away.  Some savings will not become evident for 1-3 years.  Savings will come from across the Council as a whole and could come through vacancy management, reducing operational expenditure, and changing the services we provide.

Additionally, revenue growth is also being explored, and these opportunities may not become apparent for some time.

his is being supported in a number of ways, including;

• We have developed an overarching Programme Plan
• The project teams are working collaboratively with finance
• The Project Sponsors, LT, Programme Managers are not only looking within each Group Design, but are looking across the Group Designs, to ensure the three designs will support delivering operational savings and increased revenue opportunities.

Whether you have moved (or will move) within your current Group or moved (or will move) into a new Group you will be supported to make this transition. Think of this as onboarding. You will be supported in various ways including through your line manager, group manager, and with wrap around support from HR.

We will consider our approach to voluntary redundancy as we progress with design proposals. The approach we take to this will depend on the nature and drivers for the need to make people related savings - asking for volunteers is not always appropriate. However, we will consider voluntary redundancy as an option as we develop proposals and will add our approach to this into the consultation document.

It is about having the ‘right people, right place, right time, and right reason’!  This is one of the reasons for each Group Design Project to be brought into a Programme of work. The new Group Design Programme supports Project Teams and Project Sponsors to be looking across all the Group Designs and develop new ways of being and doing that support each Group’s purpose and objectives.

It’s not all about size! There will be a need to review current systems and processes, look at the current capabilities of staff at all levels, and look at other opportunities for improvement across all the Groups, that will support the Council to operate efficiently and effectively.

The Corporate Hub is here to support, enable, and co-ordinate activity across the Council as a whole, working alongside a group, a team or an individual including the Chief Executive, the leadership team, corporate managers and their teams, and staff at any level within the organisation.

Economy and Place is a newly created Group at the Council.  It is still in its infancy, but the Project Team is working with the Project Sponsor, Robert Pollock, to define its purpose and objectives.  More details will become available over the coming months.

Summarisation of Jane Wilson (Chief Operating Officer) and Sam Scharf's (Communities Director) response at the Town Hall:

Doesn’t affect the existing implementation paper, there is no change to that and it is being implemented as per the timeline outlined in the implementation paper.

We are accelerating the work that would have gone into the next stage.  This event is one part of a process to engage and communicate with Corporate Hub Managers and more widely to all Corporate Hub staff.

Communities Group Design has not been framed as a 1.0 and 2.0 and it is being aligned with the other Group Design Projects happening across all the Groups.  The Communities Group Design is working hard to do as much as possible now to fulfil the principles which have been outlined, but it does not mean that further transformations will not happen, but for the purpose of the current exercise, there is not a 1.0 and 2.0 as part of the current project.

Summarisation of Jody Etherington’s (Chief Finance Officer) response at Town Hall:

In terms of net expenditure on services we are around £24-25million, we are talking about just over 1/3, that is net service expenditure, we are not going to achieve the required savings by cutting costs, we are going to need to look at income as well and look at other opportunities and look at how we can generate more income.  Net spend on services is £25million.

Summarisation of Rachel and Robert’s response.

Economy and Place is still very much in its infancy. The Economy and Place Group Design Project team is working closely with Robert, who is the Project Sponsor.  More details will be communicated over the coming months as we define the scope and the purpose statements.  This will be shared via CityNet as and when we are ready to do so.

Members of the Employment Senior Officer Committee did sign off the process to recruit a Director for Economy and Place, which stemmed from Jane’s paper on the Corporate Hub Group Design Project.  The role is going go live next week, with a micro-site job description, which does explain in some detail the team’s we believe will be in that Group.  Its primarily the;

• Housing Development Agency (Development team), who are taking on some big projects such as the Civic Quarter,
• the Corporate Property Team or our Corporate Investment Portfolio,
• elements of climate change, which we are working through the Group Design process looking at whether we can nest together the different teams across the council that work on climate change, and
• economic development leads and owing a lot of the relationships with our economic partners such as the combined authority GCP Oxford to Cambridge Partnership.

It will be quite a small group, but a strategic group.  Members liked the name Economy and Place, partly because of the importance of the Cambridge City region economy and partly because there’s a huge amount of the development teams programme to not only build new council homes and new neighbourhoods, but also if you think of Hartree in the north of Cambridge we are building a new district, which will be sustainable and net-zero, so we are making new places.

The role of Economy and Place Group Director will be advertised in the Guardian and MJ, and details of a recruitment microsite will be shared via CityNet.

Summarisation of Robert’s response.

A really good steer on this can be found in Labour’s Manifesto, which is published every year.  It outlines 5 key areas, that are also outlined in our Corporate Plan.  The areas of commitment include home building and addressing inequality in the City. 

They have lots of priorities, the challenge is we probably do not have enough money to do all of them and this was a clear message I gave when I was hired.  It is the same message that Officer Leadership of councils is giving across the country and its more about having to make trade-offs. 

Everything we do is important; it will be for members to determine what is more or less important.  We obviously have statutory commitments which we must do, but we also have other areas that are important because they prevent escalation into poverty or homelessness. 

By putting everything on the table we can look at it in the round we can deliver a better outcome than the ‘salami cut’ approach that is being taken by other councils.  We decided a couple of years ago that wouldn’t be a good approach for Cambridge.

Summarisation of James’ response:

All front-line services, operational delivery staff, and the back-office functions that support them are in scope of City Ops 2.0 (City Services Group Design Project).  There is very little in City Services that will remain unchanged in some shape or form.

It’s possible the question is relating to the HRA element, and we have identified and realised that the HRA housing support functions that we deliver in City Services are under pressure and are struggling to deliver and I think you will find that is one area we will be looking at strengthening.