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/