The Audit Commission has criticised local authorities for ‘rarely planning their workforce recruitment and development strategically’. While a ‘minority of councils are thinking strategically about building a workforce which can meet future challenges, most have a long way to go,’ according to the public services watchdog. Its report, Tomorrow’s people, said despite the fact that local government spent £55bn a year on staffing, councils tended to view recruitment as ‘an operational responsibility’. Local authorities needed to instead adopt proactive strategies, entailing gathering data on labour markets and then planning for future skills needs, rather than ‘fire-fighting’ or ‘unsustainable approaches such as relying on temporary staff’. The Audit Commission welcomed the increasing adoption of workforce strategies – plans to actively address skills shortages councils face – but claimed that their ‘quality is variable’. Its analysis of a representative sample of 71 corporate assessment reports ‘shows that only 22% of councils have adequate or effective workforce strategies’. Twenty-nine per cent had ‘limited, patchy or not fully effective strategies’. Seventeen per cent of the approaches to workforce issues were simply branded as ‘ineffective,’ while the remaining 31% were in the process of adopting strategies. The commission recommended that councils understood the issues facing its workforce in five to 10 years, and to prioritise the steps that must be taken, such as making recruitment more competitive and to develop their workforces internally. Brian Smith, the County Surveyors’ Society president, said that planning for workforce needs ‘has become a vital issue for many local authorities’. ‘Additional challenges, such as delivering on the growth agenda and major infrastructure projects, are making it ever more difficult to keep appropriately qualified staff,’ he said. But he said some authorities, including his council, Cambridgeshire, had ‘returned to a culture of developing staff in-house through tailored in-house training’. He urged other local authorities to adopt this ‘adapt to survive’ approach. : www.audit-commission.gov.uk