“Anything that impacts negatively on Medway I feel quite personally”

What Steven asked Richard Hicks, the Chief Executive of Medway Council.

Richard Hicks is the Chief Executive of Medway Council, having been promoted to the role last year. He is infectiously positive, both about life generally and Medway specifically. Steven met with him at Medway’s new Cozenton Park Sports Centre to discuss how he came to work at Medway Council, his role as a returning officer during elections and if there will be a City of Medway.

Richard Hicks

Where were you born?
Medway.

What brought your parents to the Medway towns?
My family, on both sides actually, have always been in Medway.

What job did your parents do growing up?
My mum was a school secretary. Her mum was head teacher at a local school. Her dad was a shopkeeper. My grandma on that side came from Wales but then moved into Medway. On my dad's side, my dad worked in the dockyard on the nuclear subs. His dad worked in Gillingham bus station, and his mum worked in Brompton barracks.

Did you enjoy school?
I loved school. I went to school in Medway all the way through. I went to Byron Road School. I went to Hillyfields. I went to Wakeley Road School and then Howard School and really enjoyed that. Howard School was quite a big school, but I really enjoyed my time there. I did A-levels in Latin, French and Economics. I had some great teachers, particularly my Latin and French teachers. I wasn't great at Economics, but I really like economics.

What did you study at university?
University was one of these kinds of modular degrees. I did lots of different subjects. I did French art, I did French, I did law, I did industrial relations, industrial psychology, comparative organisational studies. It was all about the study of organisations. I loved university as well.

Where did you study?
Lancaster. Having grown up in Medway, I wanted to do something where I was really establishing my own independence. I wanted to go a long way away, so I wasn't doing the thing about coming home at weekends to get your washing done.

What was your first full-time job?
My first job was in Kent County Council back in September 1990. I left university, took a year out, went travelling around South America, and then came back and wanted to get a job. I wanted to apply for the Foreign Office, and that's a very long, drawn-out, convoluted process. I remember sitting in a hall with about 200 people doing this entrance exam, and they whittled it down to 100, and then it was a smaller handful of us being interviewed in London. It took a long time, and I thought I need to get a job while I'm doing that. I applied for a job at Kent County Council and started off as an Emergency Planning Officer in Kent County Council. That role meant that I needed to understand exactly what a County Council does, what all its functions are, how it works, what all of the different departments do. I was at Kent County Council but I was employed in Canterbury City Council and Gillingham Borough Council. Then as the Emergency Planning Officer for Gillingham Borough Council, I had to understand exactly what the District Councils did, what Borough Councils did, and that was where I really fell in love with local government, the role that local government plays in shaping a place and delivering services for its community. I didn't get through in the Foreign Office and that was probably one of the best things that could have happened.

What first led you to work for Medway Council?
My last job at Kent County Council, the last 18 months I was there, I was on the local government reorganisation team. It was announced that there would be a new unitary authority in Kent that was going to be Medway. That was a bit like loss of empire for Kent County Council because it did run all the upper-tier services at the time. I was on the small local government reorganisation team. That was about disaggregating all of those county council services in the Medway area. I was working from Kent County Council on the establishment of Medway together with Gillingham Borough Council and Rochester City Council. We had these tripartite meetings. We were establishing a whole new organisation. I spent about 18 months working on that from a Kent County Council perspective. I saw the opportunity there was to have a unitary authority, a single authority that provides all local government services. It's open, it's transparent. You're able to pull together all the different levers at your disposal to do the right thing for your local area. I was absolutely convinced that I would want to work at the unitary. Then Medway's first Chief Executive, Judith Armitt, asked me whether I'd be interested in being her head of chief exec's office. So I went through the process to apply for that and then got that job. I worked directly to her as a kind of right-hand person. I remember the first day of Medway going live when we took on responsibility for delivering all of those services. It was fantastic.

Were you part of that team that lost Rochester city status?
I've been quite involved with bids for city status for Medway over time. Just before Medway Council went live and decision 11-92, I think, is of Rochester City Council. One of their committees made the decision not to renew the patent for their city status as Rochester. I think that was actually the right decision, because they said they wanted Medway to have the opportunity to apply for city status itself. Rochester City Council knowingly took that decision not to renew the patent for city status and that was why it was lost. I think maybe that's the misunderstanding that people have. When people see the word ‘lost’, they think it was some administrative blunder, but it wasn't. It was a conscious decision.