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I will write about local public service issues especially citizen empowerment, participatory budgeting, partnership working, local democracy and performance management.
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New thinking breaks out!
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The economic crisis is having unexpected effects - the previously impossible may suddenly become probable. The beauty of these rare moments of crisis is that people become liberated from "old thinking" and new ideas can prosper.
Already Essex council has set up its own bank to provide loans to local businesses. Others may follow their lead. Maybe the next thing will be local authorities issuing bonds for people to invest in socially and environmentally responsible projects.
Others are using the provisions of the new Sustainable Communities Act to seek to take over the local fire and rescue service (Windsor & Maidenhead council) or to give the council the powers of an integrated transport authority (Cambridge). How long before a council asks to commission all local services?
New thinking in Government circles too
And now long comes efficiency guru, Michael Bichard, with a report accompanying the Budget which includes a fascinating section called "local incentives and empowerment". This calls for an unprecedented integration of local services and finances, greatly strengthened Local Strategic Partnerships, and proposes to allow one service to invest in the services of another to reduce its own costs over time. It also argues the case for local services to harness the valuable insight of their staff to reconfigure local services. Reports suggest that Conservative councillors favour a new single grant for all local public services to be spent locally as appropriate, free of any Government ring-fencing. All good stuff.
But there is a logic to further strengthening Local Strategic Partnerships and integrating local services. It will inevitably reinforce the calls for greater accountability of all the providers. At present, only local councils are directly accountable at the ballot box. The police, health and other bodies remain largely unaccountable. This is unsustainable.
Greater accountability must follow greater integration
I have argued before on this blog for electing Local Strategic Partnerships to be responsible for running all local services. The Local Government Information Unit has argued for a single commissioning body for all local services. Merging management, finances, buildings and functions across traditionally separate organisations like councils, Primary Care Trusts and police forces - in the name of efficiency ! -is just one stop away from merging accountabilities. Something will have to give !
Already Essex council has set up its own bank to provide loans to local businesses. Others may follow their lead. Maybe the next thing will be local authorities issuing bonds for people to invest in socially and environmentally responsible projects.
Others are using the provisions of the new Sustainable Communities Act to seek to take over the local fire and rescue service (Windsor & Maidenhead council) or to give the council the powers of an integrated transport authority (Cambridge). How long before a council asks to commission all local services?
New thinking in Government circles too
And now long comes efficiency guru, Michael Bichard, with a report accompanying the Budget which includes a fascinating section called "local incentives and empowerment". This calls for an unprecedented integration of local services and finances, greatly strengthened Local Strategic Partnerships, and proposes to allow one service to invest in the services of another to reduce its own costs over time. It also argues the case for local services to harness the valuable insight of their staff to reconfigure local services. Reports suggest that Conservative councillors favour a new single grant for all local public services to be spent locally as appropriate, free of any Government ring-fencing. All good stuff.
But there is a logic to further strengthening Local Strategic Partnerships and integrating local services. It will inevitably reinforce the calls for greater accountability of all the providers. At present, only local councils are directly accountable at the ballot box. The police, health and other bodies remain largely unaccountable. This is unsustainable.
Greater accountability must follow greater integration
I have argued before on this blog for electing Local Strategic Partnerships to be responsible for running all local services. The Local Government Information Unit has argued for a single commissioning body for all local services. Merging management, finances, buildings and functions across traditionally separate organisations like councils, Primary Care Trusts and police forces - in the name of efficiency ! -is just one stop away from merging accountabilities. Something will have to give !
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3 Comments:
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Comment from Gabriel Chanan
Many thanks for drawing attention to the Sir Michael Bichard section, ‘Local incentives and empowerment’ of the government’s Operational Efficiency report lately published. This throws light on what government means – or ought to mean – by the phrase ‘the front line’, which has been wrapped in a degree of mystery since its ambiguous use in the empowerment White Paper of last July (Communities in Control, CLG). The Prime Minister’s foreword to that White Paper spoke of ‘the transfer of power both to front-line professionals and to users’ (my italics). The text of the White Paper, however, announced ‘a new Empowering the Frontline Taskforce’ which would ‘look at the role of the public service workforce in empowering users and residents and how the frontline can respond to a more empowered public’ (1.54); and in the implementation annex this was again ‘to consider the role of the public sector workforce in empowering users and residents’.
Has this ambiguity something to do with the unconscionable time that it seems to be taking government to set up this important taskforce? Bichard focuses on the professional side of the frontline interface, the workers, but goes some way to restoring the dual perspective hinted at in the PM’s preface: he interprets his strand of efficiency as being about ‘involving front line staff and their clients in redesigning public services’. And he recognises that the reason why frontline staff are ‘often the people with the best ideas for service improvement and innovation’ is that they are ‘close to service users’(5.29).
But he doesn’t quite cross the line to recognise that this is often because it is service users themselves who have the ‘best ideas for service improvement’ and that the best frontline staff are encouraging and reflecting this. So although residents are included in many of the examples, the Bichard vision misses the opportunity to bring the government’s community empowerment agenda into the frame and join up with it: the recommendations are only about ‘establishing better ways of engaging with the expertise of those working at the frontline’ (5.30). Finally the dual perspective drops away again and will easily be overlooked in the further condensations of media comment.
So neither Bichard nor the community empowerment agenda deal explicitly with the critical question: how can front line staff who are themselves in the least powerful position in the state bureaucracy both empower service users, as the community empowerment agenda requires them to do, and innovate ‘upwards’ within their agencies, as the efficiency programme wants them to do? It is great to recognise the innovative potential of front line workers but just ‘tapping into’ it (Bichard, 5.29) won’t work: there has to be analysis and training for the complexities of the dual role.
The concept of the frontline needs to change from being seen as the boundary of service delivery to being seen as a site of interaction between providers and users, with mutual empowerment. The language of ‘tapping into’, like that of ‘harnessing’ the energies of the community, misleadingly gives the impression of a commodity just waiting to be accessed whereas it is a potential that has to be consciously developed – on both sides of the fence. Unless this is fully brought into the strategy, there is a danger that some of the other Bichard recommendations could undermine his own intentions: if, for example, in abolishing almost all budget ringfencing and in further slimming down the local government performance indicators the hard-won levers for community empowerment and neighbourhood coordination are once again lost sight of.
A JRF-sponsored study by the Policy Studies Institute last year (Kathryn Ray, Public Officials and Community Involvement in Local Services) gives some clues as to the pressures experienced by front line staff in reflecting users’ perspectives: some see themselves as taking up users’ issues within their own agencies, others understandably are troubled by possible conflicts of interest or role and are anxious about raising expectations they can’t meet. The Homes and Communities Academy will shortly be circulating a consultative report, Empowerment Skills for All which begins to address the question of how front line staff across all professions that deal with local communities can themselves be skilled up to contribute to community empowerment.
These are issues that the Empowering the Frontline Task Force ought to take up. The acid test of that initiative will be whether it takes on properly the question of how to integrate the dual perspective which has eluded both the community empowerment White Paper and the Bichard frontline empowerment report.
Gabriel Chanan
Community involvement, engagement and development
Gabriel.chanan@talktalk.net
I can see an attraction of having elected LSP but there is a danger of creating too large a single body that then fails to deliver the very thing you want to achieve.
My recent experiece has been to create a series of interlinked delivery vehicles that have strong local control,flexibility, freedom to innovate and draw down funds from a variety of sources.
One of the best examples is the Business Improvement District which has directly contributed to issues such as reduced crime, improved economic prosperity, and a better environment.
The BID is represented on the LSP Board and works within the strategic context created by the LSP but is enable to engage private , public and voluntary sector agencies to deliver real improvements in Central Croydon.There is a strong feeling of ownership that leads to a greater level of contributions and pride in what is being achieved.
The BID works in partnership with other organisations on issues of common interest.
If we are not careful we will develop LSPs into a local version of the European Union whereas it needs to be a family of partnerships working together each bringing commitment to improving the quality of life in the area.
Brian Stapleton
Chief Executive
Croydon Business
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