Strategic thinking and the local state

Today's Public Administration Select Committee report on 'Strategic Thinking in Government' has received considerable coverage precisely because its critique is that Government in the UK lacks such thinking in any properly developed sense. The Committee has over a number of reports argued the case for 'national strategy' which it distinguishes from policy and from operational strategy and which is characterised as being about the long term and by definition bigger than any single Department. 

Intriguingly the Committee have also fastened on to the idea of 'emergent strategy' which requires a 'directing mind' to steer a process which means that the emergence of strategy moves from being chaotic (its description) to being positive generating effective policies and positive outcomes which reflect the public values that in turn informed and inspired that leadership.

Whilst there is passing reference to issues such as child poverty as being ones that exemplify failings arising from a lack of coherent and relevant strategic aims, the focus is very much on what might broadly be seen as national level questions. 

It is striking that there is no discussion (aside from a general point about national strategy needing to reflect 'all parts of the UK and the devolved policy agendas') about the impact of the lack of strategic thinking on the way that Government deals with what might be described as the local state - the set of organisations including local government that make things happen in places up and down the country. Yet arguably the lack of strategic thinking when it comes to the local state is actually a massive failing on the part of Government. 

The report identifies some of the long standing problems of dealing with issues coherently:

- Departmental silos which place the primary accountability on Secretaries of State to Parliament and which lock Departments in as the 'key unit'

- the commensurate lack of strength at the centre of Government with the means and the influence to act as an effective centre of gravity for national strategy

- the lack of alignment of financial resources with strategic thinking and the lack of longer term thinking about  budgeting linked to where society is going

- the opportunities for a change in the role of Parliament in helping to promote and challenge national strategy (the contrast is drawn with the approach in Canada which includes a review of financial commitments, pressures, priorities etc at the start of the spending round).

All of these issues figure prominently when one analyses the systemic problems that hamper the development of a more coherent approach to the local state. Indeed, work that I have been doing with a colleague suggests that without some rethinking of Parliamentary and local accountability arrangements current Government moves to decentralise and devolve powers to communities are doomed to fail, the Coalition’s objective of promoting ‘localism’ will continue to be more rhetoric than reality and it will be harder to avoid a deepening crisis in public services. 

Major changes are happening including in the form of Police and Crime Commissioners, further directly elected mayors, new plans for ‘City Growth’, and ‘open’ public services.   But these will leave key aspects of our present constitutional arrangements, and a set of critical dysfunctions at the heart of English governance, largely untouched.

The new landscape for local public services currently emerging from Government reforms on health, policing, education, and local government is highly complex.  Accountability arrangements, and the citizen’s question of ‘who decides’ on the allocation of resources, have become virtually unanswerable even to the expert.  

On the financial front, achievement of large-scale public service savings through preventative measures, early intervention, and joined-up delivery remains a distant goal – rarely achieved in practice.  Many valiant efforts have been made, over many years.  Traditional arrangements for accountability to Government and Parliament, and our silo-based systems for delegation of authority, stand in the way.   

There needs to be a rethink of the present national arrangements for financial accountability and devolved decision-making, from Parliament downwards including changes in machinery of government terms. 

There are opportunities to do so but they would be greatly enhanced by a collective will to rise to the challenge set by the Committee to do strategy differently and better.

Payment by results: ends, means and need

Blog piece for New Start on recent evidence about payment by results regimes:

http://www.cles.org.uk/yourblogs/payment-by-results-ends-means-and-need/#&panel1-1

How New is Your Agora?

A piece for New Start on the Portas review of high streets and town centres and specifically the 'town team' pilots which suggests some reasons to be positive.

http://www.cles.org.uk/yourblogs/how-new-is-your-agora/ 

Local Spending Reports: value rather than price

Yesterday we had announcements about new annual tax statements purportedly designed to increase transparency about how tax is used to support public services. There have been some rapid critiques of that initiative: it is partial in terms of income source (only focused on direct taxation not on indirect taxes); it is partial in terms of focusing only on what is spent and not what is achieved; it makes public services akin to shopping as if this is down to individual decision rather than a collective investment.

In short, to misuse Wilde, it is all about price rather than value. 

There is a strong sense that the purpose of these reports is not about spending money better. Just about spending less. 

Local authorities already provide an account to council tax payers of how their money is used but it focuses on what is being done with the money and to some extent why. But it is partial - inevitably it only focuses on the responsibilities of the local authority.

What we have never had is a proper account of what is being spent in an area by the variety of bodies involved in delivering public services. We have had numerous initiatives from LAAs to Total Place and now Community Budgets which were intended to try to get a proper handle on this. None of these has ever managed to come to fruition, partly because its difficult stuff and partly one has to say because the will has never quite been there to push on the surmount the final hurdles. Sadly, I'm not exactly holding my breath on the whole budget Community Budget pilots either. But we'll see.

But there is actually a requirement for Government to be providing a much more holistic account of what is spent in particular areas.

Anyone still recall local spending reports?

These were part of the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 provisions which ended up as a hard fought compromise between a cross party lobby in Parliament and an Executive worried about a potentially unmanageable set of provisions. 

Section 6 of the SCA requires the Government to make arrangements for the development of LSRs. There was even a consultation on a second set of reports in 2010 about which absolutely nothing seems to have been heard.

Now that we have a Government with an apparently strong desire to push transparency wouldn't it be a good time to dust off local spending reports?

The purpose of LSRs in my view is that it might allow for some better understanding of the totality of public spending in an area but would also be the basis for improving value from how it is used. We say that we are genuinely interested in preventative action. Many councils and other organisations would say that this is one of the most creative ways of securing improved effectiveness from public spending. But the spend is fractured at the moment. The public have no clue that the majority of spend goes on the consequence rather dealing with the upstream causes or with interventions that might be more effective and a great deal cheaper.

But its all bedevilled by organisational boundaries and the ability to make progress is hardly being improved by some of the consequences of guided localism which is splitting things up rather than bringing them together.

So why not a push now from local authorities on really using transparency about full spend in local areas to make the case for more integration between budgets and more emphasis on prevention. To show taxpayers that their various contributions could secure better value. To engage in a discussion about making improvements in responsibilities and systems rather than moaning on about price. That would be challenging for councils and others: we know that there is very high spend on a small number of clients in some cases (indeed the 'troubled families' initiative promoted by the Government reflects this very point). 

But surely it has to be better than what we have now which on the one hand allows the local press and the famous armchair auditors to run often mischievous stories about minute bits of spending and on the other a narrative focused entirely on national direct taxation and spending.

Is the Government up for shining a light on how to improve the collective use of public spending at local level as well as every £500 spent by a local authority? 

Mixed Communities and Right to Buy: Bang to Rights?

Just written my first piece for New Start magazine which can be found here http://www.cles.org.uk/yourblogs/mixed-communities-and-right-to-buy/.

More evidence

Further to a recent post about evidence, a very interesting piece in The Guardian today -  http://tinyurl.com/6ovqnz2 - about significant new interest by Labour in upping the role of evidence in relation to education. Just how far this would have put a serious dent in recent political initiatives which have been highly selective in their use of evidence in terms of school organisation, the approach to teaching and the curriculum is of course moot.

Much would depend on how far such an Office for Educational Improvement would have teeth to stop or seriously embarrass Ministers; whether reports would be public as a matter of course and prior to decisions being reached; how independent it would be in terms of initiating research as opposed to testing proposals; how well funded it would be; what the terms of reference would be in relation to the tests to be applied particularly in terms of gauging effectiveness and how its relationship with Parliamentary scrutiny would be structured. 

At the level of teachers and schools there would also be a significant dynamic about the approach from such an Office in terms of initiating and promoting good practice or in hobbling innovation. Some fleet footwork would be required to ensure that the Office is seen as advancing discussion and change, not hobbling it.

But leaving all such questions to one side, it is surely significant that there is interest in greater transparency about evidence. Amidst all the sound and nonsense about various forms of transparency in recent years, putting an emphasis on how it could apply to the basis for policies rather than simply on how much is being spent on penny packets of services can only be a good thing.

Incidentally ..

The recent ruling in relation to the legality of saying prayers as part of a formal council meeting has generated a great deal of heat and rather less light. The judge simply found that the council did not have the necessary powers either directly or indirectly (in a refrain familiar to those working in or with councils it was not possible to find support for the prayers as 'incidental to the incidental').  There is a suitably droll passage in the judgement which says that:

'it is not for a Court to rule upon the likelihood of divine, and presumptively beneficial, guidance being available or the effectiveness of Christian public prayer in obtaining it'.

Indeed. 

Now the Government has stepped in to apparently provide a 'power to pray' through the general power of competence in the Localism Act.

If nothing else this will mean that many more people are aware of the new power than would otherwise have been the case.

Two further observations are, however, worth making:

- firstly, it is not absolutely certain that the power of general competence will necessarily provide this apparently much sought after deliverance. The new power is subject to public law constraints and simply asserting that an individual has the ability to decide to pray may not provide complete justification for a council deciding to do so. Indeed there should be a strong case in terms of maintaining the secular approach of neutrality in the public sphere to say that operating in a civic capacity is indeed quite distinct from operating in an individual one;

- secondly, it is as a minimum rather amusing that the Government trumpets the new power as allowing for the saying of prayers at the start of formal council business whilst explicitly denying on the face of the Act the ability for councils to organise their own decision making procedures in ways other than those that are prescribed by legislation or secure the approval of the Secretary of State. 

One doesn't entirely anticipate that changing any time soon or indeed there being anything like the amount of sound and fury about it as there has been about saying prayers in a formal meeting rather than outside it.