John’s Idea

The Local Government Association Group Development Strategy is forcing everyone in the LGA Group to think hard about how we help Councils.  One Strategy concept which is central to our thinking at the IDeA is “experience to advocacy”.  Advocacy is fundamentally about getting a better deal from the stakeholders, in particular Government, who impact local government’s ability to operate.  Advocacy is more powerful if it is informed directly by the experience of Councils.

How do make the experience advocacy transmission belt work?

A couple of key things have emerged from our thinking.  Firstly we need a tighter understanding across the LGA family of what local government’s policy priorities are. Secondly we need a more coherent approach to how we engage with practitioners in the enabling sector experience to be articulated.

On the policy priorities a number of things have happened that help.  The new performance framework between central and local government involves a set of agreed outcomes (Local Area Agreements) and these outcomes can be used to identify policy priorities.  Of course it is not completely straightforward but the LGA “family” is now moving towards agreeing a shared set of priorities based on real evidence of what Councils are trying to achieve.

We are also to simplifying the approach to engagement.  From the IDeA’s point of view this has involved boiling down the description of “what we do” to three core activities:

·         Practice development – working with practitioners to develop best and next practice;

·         Practice challenge – getting those practitioners to challenge each others performance using that best and next practice;

·         Practice support – where councils are struggling with practice finding practitioners who are willing to help them.

Perhaps the key unifying theme is the approach to experience or knowledge.  All the work involves working with practitioners (politicians and staff). Building on the IDeA communities of practice approach we can now be much more ambitious about how we engage with practitioners to share experience which can then be used in real time to inform advocacy.

A real example of this, albeit a little esoteric, is the work the IDeA has engaged with around National Indicator 14; the indicator on “avoidable contact”.  In terms of the development of  both the indicator and the associated guidance, the IDeA engaged in a fairly traditional way with officials from across government and practitioners from across local authorities on how the indicator might work.  In July we pushed the boat out and organised an online conference on the CoP engaging directly with some 500 people across local government.  This community (and we know which Council’s are not involved as well as those which are) is now exchanging information on a continuous basis and is real-time resource for the LGA in its advocacy role in all things impacting on Council customer service functions.