Labour seek survey answers

Labour councillors will be challenging senior officers and council leaders after half of Oldham’s staff told their bosses they felt the council was worse than a year ago.

The Ipsos MORI survey published this week also reveals that four out of five staff have no confidence in senior managers to lead Oldham Council and four out of five believe that senior managers will fail to act on the results of this survey.

Councillor Jean Stretton, Labour’s shadow spokesperson for Corporate Services, said: “Urgent questions need to be asked.

“Surely the whole point of the exercise was to establish staff perceptions and the stark reality is that over half of the council’s staff believe that Oldham Council now is a worse employer than it was a year ago.”

“Whilst just over half of employees feel informed by Oldham Council as an employer, very few feel that they are listened to.”

She added: “In this survey staff have told Councillor Brian Lord (Cabinet member for Corporate Services) and the council’s senior management loud and clear that they think they are going wrong.

“I will be challenging senior officers and the Lib Dem-Tory controlled council to listen and to react in a meaningful way to the concerns that employees have raised.

Otherwise, what was the point of spending £12,000 asking staff what they thought in the first place?”