Shazia is the Assistant Chief Executive at the London Borough of Brent.

You hold a leadership role in your organisation. What’s the motivation?

Primarily for me it’s about creating a society that is fairer. Councils are there, especially in this day and age, to support the most vulnerable and my motivation is that – making sure that people who need help and support, whichever way that might be, are able to receive that and are treated in a way that is inclusive. That’s my main motivation, if I had to sum it up. It’s about creating a fairer society and councils have a big part to play in that. 

What’s been your direct experience of Covid-19 – both professionally and personally? 

So, personally I haven’t had any member of my family who’s been affected in any way, but I suppose my personal experience of it is that obviously I can’t see my family, and we’ve got quite a close family. 

On a professional level, our Gold meetings take place every single day, which is our emergency planning. So the first 6 weeks – although we’re still doing it – it was full on. We were working flat out. We were just trying to get all of our emergency response up and running and everything was changing on an hourly basis. 

National government gave its directives through the London wide Gold meetings, made up of Chief Executives. This passed through to local authorities, where we have our own Gold meetings, where we take decisions and report back.

We also changed the way the council made decisions. Normally decisions are made through Cabinet, but because Cabinet hasn’t been able to meet, those decisions have been delegated to the Chief Executive. So that’s been interesting and that’s actually meant that decisions have been made differently and to some extent they’ve been made faster. 

We’ve put a lot of our core business to the side and only dealt with emergency planning. We’ve started to deal with recovery now and we’re starting to think about what recovery might look like. And little bits of business as usual are starting to trickle back in as we get a little bit more breathing space. 

What were the main challenges you faced in your role before the pandemic, and what were the causes of those challenges? 

The challenges that we have now are not that different from the ones we had. Social care has been an issue for a long time. This isn’t a new problem and I think what the Covid 19 emergency has done is put a stronger lens over it.  Alongside social care – the issues around the credit crunch, the issues around the most vulnerable people, the climate emergency – all of that was on our radar; we were looking at it but it wasn’t as heightened as it is now.

We think the costs of Covid 19 is something like £30m, just for Brent, and we’re getting something in the region of £18m, and that’s just to date [editor’s note: as of 24/07/20] – that’s before it goes on for, potentially, another 3, 6 or 12 months. 

The other big challenge we’ve had is about food. And getting food aid to those that are shielded, those that are self isolating, those that are suffering from hardship, or those that are just have no access to a network. 

We got the first list in the first week and we had to contact thousands of people. We had to completely set up the food hub from scratch, which is a massive operation. We’ve got something like 500 food parcels a day going out to people. And had to do that while social distancing. It was tricky, but we had a good operation, and the manager responsible has done really well. But even so, we found, thankfully, some really isolated people. 

The Mutual Aid groups that have emerged out of the Covid 19 response have grown from nothing. It’s a mix of old and young, mainly mobilised through social media. And they’ve done an amazing job. They got fliers out, they let people know, they’ve been getting food and emergency relief to people for the whole period and much of that is self organised. 

What do you think has to change? From a political, economic, technological, institutional and behavioural perspective, for example? 

I think that as people start to demand change then institutions will automatically have to respond to that. And the government and the politicians will have to respond to that. And it will work in that way, bottom up rather than top down. 

And I think the longer Covid-19 goes on for, the more change we’re likely to see. I think if we go back to normality in the next 2-3 months, people will go back to old habits. The change hasn’t happened for long enough. I think you need 12 months for people’s habits to change. People are very habit forming. 

What’s interesting is that people can cope with change, people can evolve and actually technologically it’s all there for us. We’ve got all sorts of tools which we have put quite a lot of investment into. 

The way that we brief members – that’s now via a webinar. All the councillors now have an opportunity to ask the corporate management team for an update on the areas we’re responsible for. It’s been really good, it’s been a really good way to keep all the councillors briefed. Many backbenchers don’t get real access to us and don’t get that level of information. It’s been good for decision making and it’s been good for managing the volume of members’ enquiries.

We’ve also adapted our external communications. We started issuing very concise and very informative information on the virus. We’ve had a really high take up in terms of people reading information, tweeting and checking our social media channels. It’s been really effective, and it’s been effective because it’s information that needed to go out to people, rather than it having a promotional nature. 

And we’re looking at our business across the whole council. We’re doing an engagement with members, we’re doing a full staff engagement as well, and we’re trying to use this opportunity to see if we can change things, to do things differently. We can stop doing certain things that we don’t need to do and focus on the opportunities that will create greater benefits and better outcomes.

Thanks Shazia.