John’s Idea

Attended a really interesting meeting of the Local Government Delivery Council (LGDC) yesterday.  The LGDC was set up by the LGA three years ago to provide the interface to “Transformational Government” and central government’s Delivery Council.

Central government’s arrangements for transformational government has been, and still is, in a constant state of flux (we were briefed yesterday on a new role for the Contact Council) but dispite the lack of clarity at the centre the LGDC has continued to develop as the channel for central/local service transformation discussions.  Brilliantly chaired by Janet Callender and supported by the IDeA (Siobhan Coughlan was unfortunately missing as a victim of swine flu yesterday) the LGDC influence and workprogramme continues to grow (see the annual report for details).

Several things came out of yesterday’s meeting which I found particularly interesting. 

Firstly, and dispite the doom and gloom of the spending prognosis, the members of the council remain ambitious.   In particular there is a real desire to move from a portfolio of interesting projects to more fundamental service transformation.  The vision of the LGDC, which was always about building services around customers, has perhaps been lost in the detail of the projects and there is now a real desire to restate the vision and use it to pull things together.

Secondly, and in the context of initiatives such as Total Place, there was a recognition that the central importance the LGDC had placed on data management and data sharing was right and that now is the time to exploit the developments that have been made in this area, particularly Gov Connect. 

Thirdly there was a recognition that we need to do more on transferring practice, learning from each other, and indeed learning internationally.  I’ll try and make sure that the next meeting of the LGDC provides some challenge to the IDeA work in this area.

Finally the meeting demonstrated the enormous demand from central government for a joined up voice in local government around some of the more detailed, often technical, service transformation issues.  The number of central government requests at the meeting for a “local government voice” on various projects was almost overwelming for the resource which the LGDC has at its disposal. 

Really successful workshop at the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives (Solace) conference last week where a number of the chief executives who have pioneered running two councils with one CEX shared their experience.  Given that the number of CEXs at the conference, and the growing public and political interest in their pay, it was not surprising that the workshop was packed.

The context for the workshop was the publication of the IDeA report “Shared Chief Executives and Joint Management Teams - A Model for the Future?”.   For me the report was interesting both in terms of how it was produced and what it said.

The approach to the work was genuinely one of co-production.  Although not actually writing it, all the pioneering chief execs were closely involved.  This guaranteed a really rich report with fresh insights into the benefits of the approach and the issues involved in implementation.  More importantly it put the chief execs,  rather than mediators (like the IDeA), on the podium as advocates.

Secondly the report has generated for me some fresh insight in terms how shared services can be made to work.  Its a simple point but its clear that things really start to move when change starts from the top and moves downwards.  By sharing a chief executive, and than a management team, the really big obstacles to shared services seem to melt away.

Given the pressing need to reduce administrative costs the savings already generated by the councils involved are significant.  These are small councils and with some of the partnerships projecting savings of up to £3million per year you don’t need to be a mathematical genious to project the savings nationally.  If you want another more public take on this from me please go to Guardian Public.