Wednesday January 31st 2007
Strong & Prosperous Partnerships ?
One of the potential benefits of the Local Government Bill should be the improvement in partnership working. The Government invited all Local Authorities working in County/District levels to consider how they might improve this aspect by bidding to be considered either new Unitary bodies or pathfinders in providing improved two-tier working. We have with our partners submitted a response which commits us to improved two-tier without being a pathfinder. We will await a response.
There are 26 bids for Unitary – some as direct competition with others geographically. There are 5 County Authorities and partners bidding to be pathfinders. There are an undeclared number of Authorities doing the ‘3rd way’ – including ourselves. That there are already potential geographical conflicts suggests that partnership work could be compromised rather than strengthened. That there are more “bidders” than we have been told would meet the affordability tests could also result in frustrated expectations.
We concentrated on making sure that we had more than just the District Councils and ourselves considering this issue. Improved partnerships go beyond local government bodies but therein lies some other tensions – notably the alignment of elected and non-elected organisations in the public sectors sitting along side each other with an equal say. This has featured already as a potential pinch point in the formation of our Local Area Agreement – which we have tried to link into the improved partnership model.
Another pinch point for partnerships is the question over who decides about budgets and spending them. One way of looking at this is the ability for us all to bring together or pool a significant public service resource - crudely £1.2 billion – which is spent every year in Warwickshire by a range of organisations. Levering in such capacity has its attractions. The other way of looking at this is the threat to independence, self-determination and protecting what each organisation has uniquely for itself. From my way of thinking we are all inexorably driven down the pooling route. We will collectively be challenged by the Treasury to demonstrate that if we retain 5 District Councils a County Council (and relatedly a Warwickshire wide Police Force, Probation Service, Health Service etc) the efficiency we can deliver will be as good as if the 6 Councils become 1. I cannot see us delivering up this as long as we do so individually.
Solutions will also be found in looking beyond Warwickshire to bring together efficiency gains across geographical boundaries. The trick of delivering public services in to the near future offers to be:- Local, accessible joined up services the public value, with a financial, strategic and resource infrastructure which delivers value for money as far as the Treasury and regulators are concerned….. “thinking big while acting small”.
We already have a broad idea how to tackle this but the devil really is in the detail. We also have not got all agencies thinking along the same lines. We will not have absolute unanimity and need to develop flexible solutions which can meet sometimes conflicting sets of expectations whilst having a common core set of principles which acts like a glue.
If you think about what we have been trying to do inside the County Council with our “New Ways of Working” agenda it is simply such an agenda extended to our partnership working. What we now need are some imaginative ideas to flesh out the details and more importantly some examples of making this real for the public so that we can see immediate benefits over the next financial year.
Thursday January 4th 2007
The White Paper
We are in the “response” period to the White Paper – Strong and Prosperous Communities published on 26th October 2006. The main features of this period is to decide – mutually in two-tier areas of Local Government how we will respond to the Government’s invitation to change. Two invitations are in place and at the County Council on 12th December 2006 Members agreed to pursue a third option, i.e. to work with District Councils and other partners in improving the interagency partnerships we already have in place. We will be advising “Communities and Local Government” (Department has been dropped from this title curiously) by 25th January 2007 on the details of these proposals. Currently we are on our third draft of proposals and will be meeting with District Councils again on 5th January to explore this further.
Whilst there are other matters in the White Paper proposals which will also impact on us, it does appear that nationally a focus on the future of Local Government in two-tier areas is the present preoccupation in those areas. What is not clear – regardless of some highly speculative media coverage in the trade press – is just how many positive responses to the two original invitations from Government will emerge. Most of the focus has been on whether significant number of Authorities will explore the invitation to go Unitary. The majority view at the moment appears to be to fix and improve the problems two-tier working poses whilst retaining Districts and Counties.
How will the Government respond? The real work only begins after the 25th January submission date and I suspect the response will be directly related to the number of submissions….. or lack of them. There are also other issues waiting in the wings that will still potentially influence the future post White Paper not least the progress of the Bill through Parliament and undoubted lobbying already underway. More significant is likely to be Sir Michael Lyons delayed (again) findings on the future financial, servicing and functional landscape for Local Authorities combined with the next round of the Government’s Spending Review. Arguably it is the latter we should all be concentrating our minds on, whilst the White paper may yet prove an affair of the heart. It’s the Treasury not Communities and Local Government who are likely to be the final arbiters of these changes.
In the mean time we will keep this commentary going.
If you wish to read a copy of the White Paper this can be found on the Communities & Local Government website at www.communities.gov.uk. Volume II is a better read than Volume I.
|  | Jim Graham
Jim Graham is Chief Executive of Warwickshire County Council
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