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Local Government
Rochford District Council
Rochford District Council
Cllr C G Seagers
2 Wedds Way
Great Wakering
Southend-
SS3 0DN
01702 216 111
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Getting to Know Colin Seagers, Executive member & County Council candidate
(January 18th 2013)
Colin is a District Councillor, one of the Conservative Councillors who will be put forward for Rochford District for the County Council elections later this year. Not having interviewed Colin before, it seemed a wise thing to get to know this member of the present executive and possible future County Councillor. In the course of this quite long interview (we have cut quite a lot) Colin shares on his past, the role of being a portfolio holder in the Council Executive, and economic aspects of both central and local government, as well as the possibility and reasons for becoming a County Councillor. As we often do with longer interviews, we have provided subheadings to make overall understanding easier. We hope you enjoy and find helpful the insights found here.
Past Experience
Rochford Life: Colin, would you like to introduce yourself?
Colin: I’m Colin Seagers, I’m a District Councillor for Rochford District Council and my portfolio is Finance and Resources. I’ve been a councillor for over ten years, that’s since May 2002. I retired from work in June 2011. I had begun as a junior bank clerk in the city when I was sixteen and I worked my way up through the bank to become an investment analyst. I then transferred to Royal Insurance, as it then was, to become a Fund Manager and I managed US stocks and shares for, I think it was, eleven years there. I was finally made redundant when we merged with Sun Alliance. I spent just short of 49 years in the City.
RL: So you may not be an accountant but you have a strong financial background don’t you.
Colin: Yes, but I don’t say I was as clued up as many investment managers or analysts would be, because I was always much more interested in the product and the people and the management of firms and, to a certain extent, the psychology of my competing investors, if you like. I was never one of these ‘in for five days and then out’ types; I was always looking at the eighteen months to two years average investment time. To this day I’m still more interested in the income that they generate rather than the capital which would probably come with that. A share is only a store of future income basically, and if there is no income there is no value.
RL: Does that sort of job make you very much aware of ‘the market’ and does that help in your present role?
Colin: I always picture myself as a jack of all trades and master of none, in the sense that you do need to be rounded. After you become a Fund Manager you’ve got to be able to cope one minute with top men in say computing, and then the next day, say, talking to someone at Boeing about planes, and then someone else in a bank somewhere. I was much more interested in seeing how people in a firm worked and what the setup was. That was far more important to me than finding out whether someone’s margins were going up or down by a fraction of a percent.
RL: You said you were made redundant?
Colin: Well yes. It was in early 1997 that I took redundancy and got into what was the Investment Management Regulatory Organisation, initially in early ’97, and that then became the FSA. After that I was recruited by one of my old broker contacts to actually sort out some of their compliance problems and I ended up working a few years in the Gherkin which was quite pleasant , and I became a Councillor in 2002 when council leaders were looking for new recruits.
Moving into the role in the Council
RL: Now you are portfolio holder for Finance and Resources, what does that actually involve?
Colin: Essentially my role is to be a sounding board to a very able head of finance in Yvonne Woodward, who I think has done an astonishingly good job over recent years when she took over from the previous head of finance. It is really setting policy to an extent but that, of course, operates under the cabinet principle because there is joint responsibility in the Executive. If the rest of the Executive voted not to do something that I thought was a good idea, then I would have to go along with that. I think what I have to offer to the officers, whether they be in the finance or other areas, is really the experience of nearly half a century in the City, and with a general background, and at the same time an awareness of the economic effect of anything that is going on. The finance team is exceptionally good and we’ve done well and picked up on some things that other authorities might have missed. Having a wide spread of interests comes in handy at times
RL: And all of that past experience helps you in the present role as portfolio holder for Finance and Resources?
Colin: Yes, some of the things I’ve seen over the years make you rather pessimistic about people’s reactions but it’s never quite as bad as it’s sometimes made out. On the other hand I do have concerns going forward in our current circumstances, that it’s all very well to keep feeding money into the system with quantitive easing, or printing money if you want it in layman’s terms, but sooner or later that’s going to come through in inflation and once inflation starts it tends to accelerate quite quickly and is quite hard to stop then, and all the benefits of doing it are rapidly unwound if interest rates rise.
National Finances impacting Rochford
RL: And this affects us in Rochford how?
Colin: The double whammy is that for a lot of things that affect our bottom line in Rochford, they will be linked to inflation and interest rates. I’ve always been known for my pensions’ interest and the two things you don’t want are low interest rates and high inflation, because that then comes through in the form of increasing the pension funds deficits, and that would have to be made good in the end by all of our residents. The other part of it, in addition, is the fact that we as a council have outsourced our services a lot more than many other councils, so if inflation comes through in a big way then many of those service contracts are linked to inflation and so we have to watch what we contract for in a big way.
RL: But we have saved money by them?
Colin: Well yes, but it almost seems that efficiencies we’ve made have worked against us because a lot of what I would call broadly comparable councils seem to get far more per capita than we do, from central funding. So when I took it on, if I can use that figure, for 2010-11, Brentwood Council for instance was getting about £8 a head more than we were getting, and so with about 83,000 people in the district, that’s quite a lot of money. If we considered Council Tax, that is a huge percentage that we would not have, and thus need to either cut or raise Council Tax by, if we received even half that sort of sum.
RL: So what are the criteria that Central Government use to decide these figures?
Colin: Ah, good question! I‘ve heard it said that there are only about three people in the whole country who truly understand how that works; these are civil servants in the Department of Communities and Local Government. My intention was to try and model what was being done and seeing how, with various options, that works on the spread-sheet, so we could justify what these differences were in the end result, but I haven’t succeeded in that yet, and I probably won’t because we’ve kept having additional changes, so, for example, there are different ways of money coming into us, like the new homes bonus. We get additional money for new houses that are completed or where there are old empty homes that are brought back into use. We get a sum of money for several years.
RL: That sounds good, surely?
Colin: Yes. This comes in as a replacement for some of the money that was taken away from us in the general handout that was given in the past. In Rochford, I think the sums we get are minuscule in comparison to say if you went to Harlow and places like that. I think their central funding is at least double ours, and probably more. OK, they may have particular problems that they may need to address, but it never seems quite logical, because it shouldn’t cost them any more to empty people’s bins, say, than us. We’ve actually made money with the recycling contracts that we’ve made, because they came at just the right time when commodity prices were on the up, and high already, and so what had been a kind of loss to us in terms of the costing has become a small earner for us.
RL: From what you’ve been saying, your role in the council is not only to work out how to spend our money but, crudely speaking, learn how to ‘play the system’ with the Government to get as much out of them as possible?
Colin: Yes, that’s what I’d like to be able to do, but until I can see a stable system that is difficult, because it is constantly changing, and it does concern me that we are constantly told, oh yes, we’ll tell you about this at such and such a time, but what has happened over the few years that I’ve been involved with the finances, is that the decision on central funding from government will get later and later and later, and there are very critical time slots into which we have to set our expectations and decide what we’re likely to get. Then with a provisional figure we go through it a bit more, making various judgments along the way, to work to understand what it should be when it comes to setting the middle stream of council tax – Band D is the yardstick – and also what have we got to cut to achieve that if central funding has gone down and none of the other streams of income have gone up? For instance the new homes bonus only occurs when new houses are actually completed and that is not in our control. We can give permissions – and we’ve done what we need to do on our Core Strategy, where we have allocated housing space around the District - but it is down to the owners of that land, and presumably the developers that they are linked up with, to decide when that is actually built on, and until they actually decide that we don’t get any money – but we’ve had the cut!
Top of Page
Continuation to Part 2 of this article
(January 18th 2013)
Colin is a District Councillor, one of the Conservative Councillors who will be put forward for Rochford District for the County Council elections later this year. Not having interviewed Colin before, it seemed a wise thing to get to know this member of the present executive and possible future County Councillor. In the course of this quite long interview (we have cut quite a lot) Colin shares on his past, the role of being a portfolio holder in the Council Executive, and economic aspects of both central and local government, as well as the possibility and reasons for becoming a County Councillor. As we often do with longer interviews, we have provided subheadings to make overall understanding easier. We hope you enjoy and find helpful the insights found here.
Past Experience
Rochford Life: Colin, would you like to introduce yourself?
Colin: I’m Colin Seagers, I’m a District Councillor for Rochford District Council and my portfolio is Finance and Resources. I’ve been a councillor for over ten years, that’s since May 2002. I retired from work in June 2011. I had begun as a junior bank clerk in the city when I was sixteen and I worked my way up through the bank to become an investment analyst. I then transferred to Royal Insurance, as it then was, to become a Fund Manager and I managed US stocks and shares for, I think it was, eleven years there. I was finally made redundant when we merged with Sun Alliance. I spent just short of 49 years in the City.
RL: So you may not be an accountant but you have a strong financial background don’t you.
Colin: Yes, but I don’t say I was as clued up as many investment managers or analysts would be, because I was always much more interested in the product and the people and the management of firms and, to a certain extent, the psychology of my competing investors, if you like. I was never one of these ‘in for five days and then out’ types; I was always looking at the eighteen months to two years average investment time. To this day I’m still more interested in the income that they generate rather than the capital which would probably come with that. A share is only a store of future income basically, and if there is no income there is no value.
RL: Does that sort of job make you very much aware of ‘the market’ and does that help in your present role?
Colin: I always picture myself as a jack of all trades and master of none, in the sense that you do need to be rounded. After you become a Fund Manager you’ve got to be able to cope one minute with top men in say computing, and then the next day, say, talking to someone at Boeing about planes, and then someone else in a bank somewhere. I was much more interested in seeing how people in a firm worked and what the setup was. That was far more important to me than finding out whether someone’s margins were going up or down by a fraction of a percent.
RL: You said you were made redundant?
Colin: Well yes. It was in early 1997 that I took redundancy and got into what was the Investment Management Regulatory Organisation, initially in early ’97, and that then became the FSA. After that I was recruited by one of my old broker contacts to actually sort out some of their compliance problems and I ended up working a few years in the Gherkin which was quite pleasant , and I became a Councillor in 2002 when council leaders were looking for new recruits.
Moving into the role in the Council
RL: Now you are portfolio holder for Finance and Resources, what does that actually involve?
Colin: Essentially my role is to be a sounding board to a very able head of finance in Yvonne Woodward, who I think has done an astonishingly good job over recent years when she took over from the previous head of finance. It is really setting policy to an extent but that, of course, operates under the cabinet principle because there is joint responsibility in the Executive. If the rest of the Executive voted not to do something that I thought was a good idea, then I would have to go along with that. I think what I have to offer to the officers, whether they be in the finance or other areas, is really the experience of nearly half a century in the City, and with a general background, and at the same time an awareness of the economic effect of anything that is going on. The finance team is exceptionally good and we’ve done well and picked up on some things that other authorities might have missed. Having a wide spread of interests comes in handy at times
RL: And all of that past experience helps you in the present role as portfolio holder for Finance and Resources?
Colin: Yes, some of the things I’ve seen over the years make you rather pessimistic about people’s reactions but it’s never quite as bad as it’s sometimes made out. On the other hand I do have concerns going forward in our current circumstances, that it’s all very well to keep feeding money into the system with quantitive easing, or printing money if you want it in layman’s terms, but sooner or later that’s going to come through in inflation and once inflation starts it tends to accelerate quite quickly and is quite hard to stop then, and all the benefits of doing it are rapidly unwound if interest rates rise.
National Finances impacting Rochford
RL: And this affects us in Rochford how?
Colin: The double whammy is that for a lot of things that affect our bottom line in Rochford, they will be linked to inflation and interest rates. I’ve always been known for my pensions’ interest and the two things you don’t want are low interest rates and high inflation, because that then comes through in the form of increasing the pension funds deficits, and that would have to be made good in the end by all of our residents. The other part of it, in addition, is the fact that we as a council have outsourced our services a lot more than many other councils, so if inflation comes through in a big way then many of those service contracts are linked to inflation and so we have to watch what we contract for in a big way.
RL: But we have saved money by them?
Colin: Well yes, but it almost seems that efficiencies we’ve made have worked against us because a lot of what I would call broadly comparable councils seem to get far more per capita than we do, from central funding. So when I took it on, if I can use that figure, for 2010-
RL: So what are the criteria that Central Government use to decide these figures?
Colin: Ah, good question! I‘ve heard it said that there are only about three people in the whole country who truly understand how that works; these are civil servants in the Department of Communities and Local Government. My intention was to try and model what was being done and seeing how, with various options, that works on the spread-
RL: That sounds good, surely?
Colin: Yes. This comes in as a replacement for some of the money that was taken away from us in the general handout that was given in the past. In Rochford, I think the sums we get are minuscule in comparison to say if you went to Harlow and places like that. I think their central funding is at least double ours, and probably more. OK, they may have particular problems that they may need to address, but it never seems quite logical, because it shouldn’t cost them any more to empty people’s bins, say, than us. We’ve actually made money with the recycling contracts that we’ve made, because they came at just the right time when commodity prices were on the up, and high already, and so what had been a kind of loss to us in terms of the costing has become a small earner for us.
RL: From what you’ve been saying, your role in the council is not only to work out how to spend our money but, crudely speaking, learn how to ‘play the system’ with the Government to get as much out of them as possible?
Colin: Yes, that’s what I’d like to be able to do, but until I can see a stable system that is difficult, because it is constantly changing, and it does concern me that we are constantly told, oh yes, we’ll tell you about this at such and such a time, but what has happened over the few years that I’ve been involved with the finances, is that the decision on central funding from government will get later and later and later, and there are very critical time slots into which we have to set our expectations and decide what we’re likely to get. Then with a provisional figure we go through it a bit more, making various judgments along the way, to work to understand what it should be when it comes to setting the middle stream of council tax – Band D is the yardstick – and also what have we got to cut to achieve that if central funding has gone down and none of the other streams of income have gone up? For instance the new homes bonus only occurs when new houses are actually completed and that is not in our control. We can give permissions – and we’ve done what we need to do on our Core Strategy, where we have allocated housing space around the District -
Top of Page
Continuation to Part 2 of this article
