John’s Idea

Now we are getting down to anticipating the timing of the next election in terms of weeks rather than months its difficult to know how seriously to take the recent Smarter Government White Paper.  It is however interesting, if nothing else, as a measure of where the debate has moved to on a range of key issues and this could be important irrespective of the outcome of the election.  A number of elements of the debate are of particular significance to the IDeA.

The first one is confirmation that despite the terrible forward look on public spending in the PBR the “Tell Us Once” project is going ahead.  This is brilliant news and a credit to all those in central and local government who have worked to get us to this point.  I had a small role on the Steering Group and, as discussed in an earlier blog,  witnessed the problems it faced as it tried to secure spending across tiers of government, across government departments and across spending rounds.  The fact that a commitment has been made reflects the basic strength of the proposition which I’m sure will only be built upon.  The IDeA and the Local Government Delivery Council will I know continue to be activity involved in the implementation of the programme.

The next one relates to opening data.  Again this has been the subject of an earlier blog but the White Paper will add further impetus to the work on a new integrated approach to national addressing which the IDeA and its partners across local government, through the National Land and Property Gazetteer, are central players.

The White Paper also makes a number of helpful references to reduced inspection and reduced top down performance management.  In the context of Freedom to Lead, the discussion about a reduced number of top down priorities in the context of a defined number of entitlements, is helpful and may go someway to addressing the post-code lottery issue. 

The issue of comparative data, benchmarking data, is an interesting one.  The White Paper refers to work Capital Ambition and the IDeA are doing around the London Efficiency Challenge (another earlier blog) and even advocates the wider use of local government’s peer challenge approach to other parts of public sector.  More contentiously, and perhaps less well thought through, is the use of the same data to improve accountability to the public.  This makes sense to a point (and there are echoes of opposition party statements) but councils learning and challenging each other on performance will not necessarily work in the hard glare of public scrutiny.

Total Place (and now Total Capital) sets the tone and direction of the White Paper.  Despite its publication so close to the general election I thought it was an interesting read and significant in terms of a lot of the work the IDeA does.