LOCAL COUNCILS - BECOMING MORE LOVED?



Local Authority Service Delivery models under the spotlight? -  Copyright of the Economist

An excellent article in this week's Economist discusses the status and performance of local authorities over the last 5 or so years and there are some surprising results. British local authorities have achieved something really remarkable. They have maintained their approval ratings with the public even though they have had to implement cuts of 28% over the immediate period.Therefore they must be doing something right and indeed are reforming services to a larger and better degree than central government is. They have been better at outsourcing services and encouraging volunteers than central government has been and that is a praiseworthy achievement. This has also taken place against a failing agenda of top down localism. In May 2012 nine out of 10 cities decided that they did not want an elected mayor. The reforms covering the introduction of Police, Crime Commissioners (PCC's) are fraught with difficulties about who will have ultimate control over policing and what the political factors connected with this reform might entail.It will be interesting to see what the November turnout figures for the PCC elections will be. I don't think they will be too high.

 

Change in service delivery is coming from the bottom up and not the top down and that is how it should be with change in any environment. People must believe that change is necessary and deliverable. Islington council set up a fairness commission which held a series of dialogues with people on how to engender fairer service delivery when money is tight. It has protected free school meals and cut the ratio between its highest and lowest paid staff. This is in effect involving the electorate in making choices about service priorities and explaining how and why these choices need to be made. Other authorities are interested in this approach. Is this a way forward?

 

In West London three Conservative led councils have come together to share some £300m of services. "Tri-borough" is a joint project between the City of Westminster, the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The project’s vision is to combine services across specific areas in order to improve lives and make public funds go further. In February 2011, the Chief Executives of the three local authorities published a report entitled ‘Bold Ideas for Challenging Times.’ This set out the plan to share services, combine back office and management costs, and save £33.4m in the process. One of the key points in the proposals was the guarantee that each council would retain its sovereignty to shape shared services to local needs. This would be safeguarded through mandates that set out the specific services that shared teams would deliver across each borough. There was a clear concern that although services would be shared they would still need to adopt a local character in their delivery to service users.

 

Since  June 2011, each council’s children’s service, adult social care and library service has been combined to create a single Tri-borough service. Each of these services is headed by a single Executive Director and a shared management team. Councillors from each council retain responsibility for the way the shared service is provided in their local area. One very important point here is that organisations which transact with the Tri-Boroughs will need to be in a position to adapt their charging policies to the radical new environment. They will be less able to charge 3 times the average old borough rate for the services that are delivered to them. As the Tri-Borough was set up to expect to make savings so there will also be pressure on service providers to the Tri-Borough to rationalise their pricing approaches to support this new arrangement. Everything is not always rosy in these approaches and when Suffolk County Council wanted to turn itself into a virtual authority with little or no direct service delivery, it had to back down following a huge local outcry. The local electorate was not ready to embrace such radical change and the potential up and down sides of such change were not properly explained to them.

 

Lambeth Council is seeking to move towards working at a co-operative level as a co-operative arrangement. Both Lambeth and Islington are moving in very interesting directions as regards service delivery -- not being dictated to by central government and indeed showing it where developments might move forward.

 

An excellent example from Lambeth is where a particular lady set up a very successful project to get young people out of gangs and this convinced the council to move further down the co-operative line. There is now a plan for a youth co-operative to to take on responsibility for youth clubs and playgrounds in the Borough.

 

Central government is getting anxious about poor growth and wants local planning laws by passed in the belief that this action will make a difference. Perhaps the better approach might be to let authorities innovate with service models that will be delivered for the benefit of the community in a spirit of constructive co-operation.

 

In conclusion it is a great achievement for local government to maintain its approval rating with the public in such challenging times. I bet Nick Clegg wishes he could do the same

 

Please view:

http://www.economist.com/node/21563324

http://www.westminster.gov.uk/services/councilgovernmentanddemocracy/tri-borough-working/
 

THE ELITE ALWAYS RULES - BUT IN WHOSE BEST INTERESTS?

Plato - Our Elite should be self sacrificing not self serving

The Greek classical philosopher Plato stated that the elite will always rule in a particular society. The elite being defined as a grouping of people who are the choice part of that society, who indeed dominate the remainder of society in a political and social sense. Gaining admittance to that grouping is not easy and often power is passed between generations of members of that elite. Be it the richest in society, The Chinese Communist Party or indeed the ANC in South Africa  -- all the aforementioned groupings can be described as elites in their respective societies. these elites may come from the right or the left of politics but they exhibit remarkably similar characteristics which can work against a free society.

 

Philip Blond the philosopher argues that the future role of elites will have to be different;

 

"The real politics of the future will be anti-oligarchical - it will require a new right and a new left. For increasingly, from the perspectives of those who are shut out, the elites of authoritarian and democratic states will look remarkably similar. The West used to produce self-sacrificing elites; now it has those who are assiduously self-serving. Too many of our institutions are corrupt, and too many of their leaders rest easy in the falsehood that their interests are ours. A revulsion against oligarchy will soon define both eastern and western states, and it will of necessity draw on new and unexpected resources to shape a new political idealism."

 

The statement that, "Too many of our leaders rest easy in the falsehood that their interests are our interests," does ring true in many instances we can quote. Giving groupings access to the power to provide products and services for the benefit of the whole community and still make a return must be the way forward in many respects.   It does not need to be a focus of excess profit but a fair social return. 

 

Plato imagined a society without the weaknesses of rule by inheritance and the weakness of leadership chosen by the multitude. He believed that his ruling elite had to be free from labour so they could specialise in philosophy. Under his ruling elite, Plato invented a second and third class of citizens. The second class were the warriors, who were to be free from ordinary labours so they could train to become as highly skilled in combat as possible. The third class consisted of labourers. Plato wished his ruler-philosophers to be unconcerned with possessions. He wished that they be interested in harmony and justice only. The best men, he believed, serve society out of devotion rather than for pay. Therefore, he believed, the ruling elite should share rather than compete for possessions. If we do have an elite in society and I believe we do, should they adhere to the ideals of Plato and act in the best interests of society as a whole rather than just for their own grouping? I believe that they should do so.

 

Things can go wrong in the sense that one self serving elite can be replaced by another. The prime example of this is South Africa. The ruling white elite were replaced by a black elite embodied within the ANC which took on the mantle of power. This power should have produced a high degree of change for the country in terms of social advance and the alleviation of poverty but unfortunately it has not achieved what was expected of it. Now South Africa has many of the characteristics of a one party state where a black elite benefit whilst the majority of black people are still mired in poverty. Clearly that was not the intention when Nelson Mandela became president.

 

If the elite do rule us, they should serve society as a whole -- and in any shift of power between elites, one hopes such change means that under a new elite  - the support and service given to society will improve for the good of everyone.

 

 

 

 

 

JOBS THAT DEFEAT COMPETENT PEOPLE.

Great in the 80's - Did they ever leave Rio? 

The business environment is changing so quickly that people need to change with it - but that does not always happen and jobs\positions appear in organisations which defeat people who otherwise have been very competent and who have done very well in their previous roles -- this often happens when an organisation is subject to rapid change or rapid growth.

The growth and change of an organisation can render certain jobs\positions outdated and narrow in terms of what they achieved before. An organisation initially had a largely domestic market selling to domestic consumers. Once its international sales took off -- the job\role of the Head of Marketing and Sales became much more complex and challenging. The job title remained but the job itself became very different and required a much broader base of skills and knowledge. The position was overtaken by events\change and the incumbent person didn't have the knowledge or training to cope as well as they should\could have done. That person was best suited to doing the previous job not the new job they had been thrust into.

In terms of our present position of downsizing and redundancy -- individuals are required to take on portions of other roles (frequently those who have left the organisation) and to do their best to cope. Paradoxically the training support and budgets to help them achieve success are often also reduced producing a double whammy effect on the person who is facing this newly expanded role. Mentoring and support is required but again that is often lacking but should nevertheless be insisted upon.

 

Often these changes take place in jobs and the formal HR arrangements of job descriptions and support processes just do not keep pace and the individual feels himself being engulfed by a torrent of change.

We do need to ensure that the capabilities match the change agenda the organisation is experiencing because without that -- many good people are let go. Many of them have served the organisation well but cannot continue doing what they did yesterday without taking account of today's realities.

It is a difficult challenge we will all have to face.