Surviving the Year-End Crunch

Tom Sykes on Procurement (and a Bit of Magic)

Procurement doesn't have to be dreadful — and Tom Sykes makes a compelling case that it's actually one of the most important relationship-building exercises a parish or town council ever runs. Tom is the architect and founder of Common Works, a former Head of Design for Transport for London's property team, and an Expert for the Design Council. He's worked both sides of the public-sector tendering table and arrives with one clear thesis: at the heart of every tender document is a relationship, and the procurement exercise itself is where that relationship starts. The episode opens with John's standard preamble — Tom's site visits, the physical foam-board model his team built of the Stroud Town Council retrofit (made by a graduate architect, scaled at 1 mm = 50 mm, used so you can imagine walking the corridor before it's built), and the small detail that Tom paid his way through architecture school doing close-up magic in London restaurants — £150 for a lunchtime residency. The one common mistake Tom flags upfront is proportionality: standing orders that demand three quotes for anything over £500 create huge overhead for clerks and waste suppliers' time on tiny pieces of work. Then Tom's talk. He walks through the fundamentals — the Procurement Act 2023 thresholds (£215k for services, just over £5m for construction), the real cost of running a tender on both sides (clerks underestimating their own time; a small practice like Tom's spending £4–8k preparing a bid for a £40–80k contract; bigger firms spending £10–12k per bid and expecting to win one in ten) — and the big upstream question: do you even need a tender at all? His three sourcing routes get the same honest treatment. Frameworks can be brilliant — the procurement process is mapped out for you, suppliers are pre-vetted — but the people who sell them are sometimes in morally grey territory; on a TfL project Tom worked on, two failed procurement exercises with the wrong panel ate four months. Contracts Finder is the weakest route because you have no idea who'll read your tender, and small practices self-select out assuming the big commercial firms will hoover it up. The curated short-list, Tom's preferred route, rewards the upfront work of meeting local suppliers and treating them as sounding boards. The middle of the talk is a working guide to the tender document itself — the layered brief (core values → project ambitions → outputs → appointments required → policy context), the biggest mistakes to avoid (too many docs, too long, inconsistent deliverables, ambiguous priorities), and a five-tier scoring scale (deliberately not out of 100, because percentages make outstanding feel unachievable). Then the punchiest moment of the episode: don't evaluate cost. Tom argues that scoring by lowest price wrecks everyone else's quality scores — "one mad bastard puts in a really low fee, and suddenly the bulk of bids are scoring in the 60s or 70s" — and that deviation from mean is the right mechanism. His rule of thumb: cost no more than 70% of the weighting on construction contracts, and as low as 5% on consultancy. The outro opens the episode back out. Tom takes a turn back to age 18 — putting on a two-week magic show at the Old Fire Station theatre in Oxford, six months of building props and street magic to drive ticket sales — and offers his younger self the opposite of Julie King's advice on the previous episode: take the world a bit more seriously. Pay-it-forward: Julie left Tom her question about what piece of legislation he'd change if he could, and Tom answers with the case for a land value capture mechanism on all public projects, using the Jubilee Line extension as the worked example — £3 billion build cost, roughly £13 billion of property-value uplift inside a kilometre of each new station, captured entirely by the people who happened to own land there in the first place. Tom's outgoing question for Jamie Charters (CCLA Investment Management, joining on Episode 9): if you could take one word from another language that does heavy lifting in that language and add it to English, what would that word be? Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/getting-positive-outcomes-from-procurement].

Unlock the Power of the Big Yellow Book

This one's different. The episode opens with a heads-up from John: don't listen to this in the car or walking the dog — it's a hands-on workshop, and you'll need the 14th edition of Arnold-Baker on Local Council Administration (the Big Yellow Book, the Local Council Bible, the CAB, whatever you call it) sitting open in front of you. Julie King, Partner at Norfolk Parish Training and Support, walks listeners through the book they've all got on the shelf but maybe never quite figured out how to navigate. Julie starts with what the book actually is — a brief history of Charles Arnold-Baker (MI6 officer turned barrister turned head of what's now NALC), Paul Claydon, and current author Roger Taylor. Then the structure: Part 1 (England & Wales) chapters 1–33, Part 2 (Wales only) chapters 34–36, Appendix 1 (Statutes), Appendix 2 (Statutory Instruments), the Index. Out come the post-it notes to mark up Chapter 1, the start of the 1972 Local Government Act on page 413, and Schedule 12 on page 505 — the bits everyone goes back to. Then four worked examples, the same pattern each time — Index → Chapter (legal interpretation) → Statute (the actual legislation). Quorum (7.9 → Schedule 12 paragraph 12: a third or three, whichever is greater, of total membership — not current sitting members). Register of interests (7.12 → Localism Act 2011, Section 29 — yes, it must go on your council website even if it's on the principal authority's site too). Churchyard grass cutting (25.2 / 33.3–5 → 1972 LGA Section 214 — parish councils are burial authorities for this purpose, so yes you can contribute). And the six-month rule for councillor absence (7.13 → Section 85 — and crucially, it's six months from the last meeting attended, not six missed meetings; if you meet quarterly, that's just one miss). Plus a Q&A pass on whether older editions are still usable (mostly yes; the Procurement Act is where you start to fall foul), how AOB on agendas works (you can list it; you just can't make decisions under it), and a closing reflection on why the proper officer role is impossible without this book. Julie leaves with the message she'd most like listeners to take away: make the Big Yellow Book your friend, not your foe. Pay-it-forward: Julie answers Beckie Whitehouse's "if kindness was a currency, how would you spend £10" question (sweets for everyone in her household sitting exams) and leaves a new question for Tom Sykes — joining the podcast next on procurement: what piece of legislation would you change, if you could, and why? Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/unlock-the-power-of-the-big-yellow-book-your-local-council-bible].

Surviving the Year-End Crunch

Beckie Whitehouse joins the podcast for a deliberately different kind of year-end episode — not the AGAR-and-bank-rec mechanics, but the bit nobody talks about: keeping your head, your boundaries, and your evenings while the auditor's calling, the inbox is on fire, and someone in the parish has a "quick question" about a swing set. Beckie is the founder of Cloudless Sky Coaching, but she's also a Parish Clerk of fourteen years, which is what makes her advice land — every story is from inside the role, not from a productivity guru's TED talk. She works through the musts, shoulds, and coulds (and why "should" comes loaded with too much guilt to be useful); time-blocking with realistic buffer for the day a swing breaks; the three-task rule for an inbox that won't stop; and setting boundaries with members of the public, councillors, and chairs without sounding rude — the "I'll come back to you" reply, what to do when the chair calls on a Sunday, and the conversation to have with HR if the extra hours are running away from you. Then mindset: brains as magnets, the gratitude reset, "today I choose to" rather than "today I have to", the stress cycle, the 60-second exhale, and the small movement habits that actually finish a stress response rather than parking it. It closes with one of the best reframes on the podcast so far — Beckie's 50p story, and the headline she'd like every clerk to take home: you don't have to do everything perfectly to get through year-end well. Plus pay-it-forward: Beckie's answer to Mark Tomkins's hobby question, and a new question for the next guest that John has already pre-warned needs a bit of thinking time. Recorded April 2026. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/surviving-the-year-end-crunch-time-stress-management-for-clerks-rfos].

Your Council Website as a Community Engagement Tool

Mark Tomkins is back on the podcast — this time for a follow-up to his Assertion 10 session. The question now: once the website is compliant, how do you actually use it? Mark strips away the jargon and lays out what works for turning your council's website from a legal tick-box into a genuine community engagement tool. He covers signposting and making the homepage do the heavy lifting (the six-button pattern for the questions you're asked most often); why Word and PDF "forms" create barriers rather than removing them; using Facebook well by going where people are and sending them back to your website for anything you want to measure; the case for turning Facebook comments off and the GDPR traps lurking in WhatsApp groups; and how navigation and "mega menus" can position the council as a genuine community hub — news, local groups, events, consultations, all in one place. At the back half, John reads listener questions on alternatives to SurveyMonkey, balancing multiple channels as Facebook loses the younger generation, and the great comments-on / comments-off debate. Plus Mark's pay-it-forward answer (fighter pilot, colour-blindness notwithstanding) and a hobby-themed question for the next guest. Recorded April 2026. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/improving-community-engagement-using-the-council-website].

Tweens and Teens Love Playgrounds — Designing Outdoor Spaces That Actually Work

In this episode, John talks to Millie Manton from KOMPAN UK about why tweens and teens are the forgotten age group when it comes to playground and outdoor space design — and what councils can do about it. Millie draws on research from KOMPAN's Play Institute to explain how young people aged 8–16 play differently, what motivates them to be active (ball games, climbing, areas away from the main playground, and active participation), and why only 23% of 11–17 year olds currently meet the WHO's minimum activity guidelines. She covers designing for teenage girls through the Make Space for Girls initiative, the role of creative seating, social swings, trim trails, and hangout spaces, and why teens want non-prescriptive, open-ended play rather than structured equipment. Plus: shark cage diving in South Africa, hot pod yoga on the road, and what Millie would tell her 18-year-old self about pasta and Nesquik at uni. Get the video and slides: Watch the full webinar recording and download the speaker's resources [https://resources.scribeaccounts.com/tweens-teens-love-playgrounds-the-basics-of-playground-safety].