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.