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19th July 2010 at 15:30:43 by Civil Service World
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It is a sign of these post-ideological times that, after 13 years of Labour legislation and policy, the new administration has not set about reversing all of its predecessor’s changes, but instead seized on many of them and pressed gleefully down on the accelerator.
The academy schools programme, the development of cross-government security planning, the direction of travel on benefits reform, and the operational and back office efficiency agenda have all been enthusiastically adopted by the coalition, which seems determined to turn Labour’s half-realised plans into reality – and quickly. Another obvious example is Total Place – the local authority-led pilot schemes designed to identify and coordinate all public spending in a locality – which fits neatly with the coalition’s commitment to localism.
At a Civil Service Live session on the subject Dr Brian Hackland, director of the Government Office Network Centre and Services, revealed how keen communities secretary Eric Pickles is to push powers down to the local level: “He recently talked about a revolution, likened himself and Conservative Party local authority leaders to Che Guevara, and ended his speech with ‘Viva la revolution!’,” Hackland recalled. “The local authority chiefs went home saying: ‘I’ve got it now. It’s about a fundamental revolution’.
“The radicals in the government are sweeping away the mechanisms which sustained the old ways of working; which sustained a hyper-centralised Whitehall; which sustained the capacity of Whitehall to impose its will on the counties,” Hackland argued. “We’re moving from an era where local authorities danced to the tunes of Whitehall to an era where municipalities will answer to the demands of their local communities.”
Given greater flexibility and freedom in how they deliver services, the panel felt, local providers will be more able to tailor their work to suit local priorities, making it much easier to move from the first stage of Total Place – identifying how much public money is spent in an area – to the second stage: getting service providers to collaborate in order to improve both service quality and efficiency. “The learning from Total Place will be one of the things that helps us create a new world of public services,” said Helen Bailey, a former Islington council chief executive and now director of public services at HM Treasury. In future, there will be “less telling people how to do things; less reliance on inspection and assurance from the top”.
Of course, letting go always involves an element of danger. “This is a grand experiment,” said Hackland. “It’s seeing what happens if you stop ploughing the field, stop weedkilling anything that isn’t wheat. It has a lot of risk associated with it but it also, perhaps touchingly, has a lot of faith in people determining what it is that they want, what they care about, and doing it themselves locally.”
However, there are also dangers in tightly controlling things from the centre, said Bailey. In Islington, her council had spent years launching new services, and found plenty of demand for them – but “still we weren’t solving the fundamental problems that existed”, she said: “So trying something new is not necessarily going to be worse.” After all, she added, “I haven’t seen any evidence that decisions made by local GPs, for example, are likely to be any worse than decisions made by people like myself in Whitehall.”
If Total Place is to realise its full potential, Hackland argued, it will have to operate across local authority boundaries as well as among service providers within a council area. “Bringing a number of local authorities together with the other public services in that area is what really started to unlock savings, by identifying economies of scale,” he pointed out. And Bailey suggested that the coalition’s plans to encourage city mayors may provide a mechanism to coordinate such work. In London, she said, “There are some proposals to give the mayor more powers. It would be very hard to say to the rest of the country, if we have an interesting settlement in London, that that isn’t something to aspire to in other places. Keep watching this space!”
However, the coalition’s agenda does spell doom for the regional dimension, said Hackland. “The regional layer is being swept away,” he commented. “They will be done away with.” What’s more, he said, this government is altering the direction of travel so that local people are just as important as service providers in reshaping local services. Under Labour, Total Place was “about joining up government-provided services with local authority-provided services”; under the coalition, however, “local authorities and government are both the servant of local communities. [The coalition has] said: ‘Let’s let the users determine what services they want’.”
In identifying current spending and empowering local people, Hackland continued, the use and presentation of geographical data can be really helpful. And Richard Waite, the managing director of geographical data specialist ESRI – which sponsored the session – pointed out that “thanks to things like Google Earth and satnav, people are very used to looking at maps and clicking on them.” Currently, he said, such data is used by local authorities “tactically and operationally – but we need to bring its use up to the strategic level” so that areas of service overlap, duplication and scarcity can be mapped alongside user demand. Meanwhile, he added, providing such data to the public boosts transparency and enables better public consultation.
One drawback of these changes, worried an audience member, is the creation of “postcode lotteries”. But Bailey argued that “it’s an illusion that people currently receive the same services everywhere.” Entitlements may be the same, she said, but “what people care about is their experience as end users: how they’re treated” – and this is “vastly different” in different areas. For his part, Hackland argued that “postcode lotteries will become the norm”; and this is fine, he said, when “people and communities are in the position to make their own choices and priorities”.
Looking ahead, Helen Bailey sounded confident that the local choice and freedom agenda will enable faster progress on service collaboration. But this is an agenda, she suggested, that can’t be pushed forward by central government; only facilitated by it. She has encountered “a huge enthusiasm among our new suite of ministers” for the concepts behind Total Place, she said. Asked how the coalition is likely to rebadge the programme, however, she identified “a huge reluctance to name it and make it one thing – which is fine, because once you say: ‘You can cut a template like this’, it’s no longer about that local place.”
There are clear links between the localism agenda, the Total Place project, and the coalition’s plans to increase choice in, democratic control over and transparency of local services. In future communities will play a growing role in setting local priorities, and the service provider landscape is set to become much more diverse. As Richard Waite pointed out, though, the people running local services – whether they’re civil servants, NHS staff, council officials, or private or voluntary sector managers – must adopt a new mindset if we’re to realise the potential of the coalition’s plans.
“I do think it’s possible to deliver better services for less cost in this country. There’s a lot of inefficiency, a lot of working in silos,” he concluded. “The most deprived parts of society are the biggest consumers of multiple agencies; if we can get those agencies working better together, outcomes will improve and we’ll save money. To do that, they need better information – but they also need a cultural change, so that we break down the barriers between different agencies and services. If we can do that, we can deliver a better service for the most deprived in society and at the same time achieve the savings that have been mandated.”
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The change of government has supercharged efforts to empower local service providers, explained Helen Bailey (above), Richard Waite (top) and Brian Hackland (below)
