South Beds District Council

After Tower Hamlets I went to work at South Beds District Council as their Community Development Manager just as all the Community Safety legislation was coming in and European Single Regeneration Funding was abundant, especially in Luton. I started with a team of 3 and by the time I left there were 21 people in the team.

I was on a roll. We were incredibly successful with our community safety work, pulling all the different organisations together and running quarterly conferences. On top of that I represented SBDC on the local SRB partnership and on the back of that was able to bring in thousands of pounds of European social funding into two of our most deprived estates bordering with Luton. The People Tower bid looked at training local people to become community development workers on their estates. Where I came unstuck on this was I brought people in to the council who were not ‘council worker’ type people, in fact one person had something of a reputation for being ‘dangerously political’ and this made me enemies within the organisation amongst management and accusations of political naivety. I was going through the process, believing I was recruiting the best person for the job. The fact that I felt I could prove this did not wash.

SBDC was a funny place in the sense that only Directors were allowed to talk to councillors as though they were not normal human beings who lived on the estates we were working on.

Anyway, this guy was passionate about community development work, but no less so than another staff member who went ‘native’ out on one of the estates and refused to toe the council line. A lovely young man, he went off to work with gorillas. The other People Tower trainees were at times flakey because they were trainees, but my credibility suffered because of that. The bid was quite innovative as it actually crossed the Luton/South Beds border. That sort of cross authority working would be seen as a good thing these days, but it was frowned upon then.

They brought in a new management development programme and I remember being terrified that I would score poorly in the tests because I felt this was being used as a tool to discredit me. In the end our boss scored worse than all of her team, but it was a struggle. Job evaluation was also seriously downgrading my role and I felt it was time to go.

Three of the people I managed there have remained my close friends ever since and continue to quote me as being ‘inspirational’ even though one has gone on to great heights within local government.

Looking back, if I had done what I was told, I might have made life easier for myself. My first boss there, who was a warm and sunny woman, well in to NLP, left and it was an unspoken assumption none of her team would apply for her job, because they had already decided who they wanted to give it to. Well, I did and she was furious, probably because it reflected badly on her because she wasn’t controlling me. Needless to say I didn’t get employed, but I made my point.

I was in my 30s at this time, a mother of 3 children, absolutely committed to my work and principled. I wanted life to be fair.