Spoke today at a conference in Edinburgh on Best Value 2, which is Scotland's new audit process for local authorities. My role was to make a comparison with the English experience of Best Value audit, although I did feel a bit of a phoney as my Motherwell accent hasn't faded that much despite living and working in England for 11 years.

This gave me a chance to reflect on Best Value's origins and I was able to talk about the 12 principles of Best Value that Hilary Armstrong announced at APSE's forerunner ADLO's annual conference in Belfast's Waterfront Hall in June 1997, only one month after the General Election. I then whizzed through the Local Government Act of 1999 which enshrined Best Value in legislation and ultimately brought about the four 'c's for reviews and the 5 'e's. CPA, Gershon and the banker's recession quickly brought me up to date.

I revisited the early CPA arguments around inspection overload, cost, weighting bias and crude labelling - comparing this with local government’s success story in its performance under CPA. And yet there was always that nagging doubt that something wasn't quite right with the framework. This was of course the fact that the framework was set by Government and the audit commission with no regard to what the public cared about and this is what brought about the dilemma of customer satisfaction falling through the floor as local performance soared against the framework.

Some of the unintended consequences of CPA were of course careers being made or broken by the scores, people playing the CPA game with resource allocation, wage inflation and limited political impact with the public.

In terms of lessons learned more corporate assessment is useful rather than service based and this needs to be proportionate to risk. Inspectorates need to be joined up in their approach and more self evaluation is vital. One of the key ingredients is of course good local performance management frameworks.

APSE's view is that independent audit and inspection is a must for public services although any world class programme should work itself to an optimum minimum level. Best Value as a concept is still as relevant today as it’s always been. Council's have made significant progress in improving performance. Self assessment is more beneficial than inspection so long as you have good robust performance data to compare with others. This also allows for the exchange of best practice and to understand best performance.

Spoke today at the Defend Council Housing conference London, ‘A manifesto for council housing.’ My talk was promoting two pieces of research APSE have recently completed the first a joint publication with ARCH, on the holistic benefits of retained council housing, ‘Under one roof'; and the second about the work UNISON commissioned from APSE on ‘A new generation of council housing'.

The session also included contributions from Shelter and the lead member for Housing on Reading Council. A really interesting debate took place with the large audience and general agreement emerged that the prominence of retained council housing as an option has grown and that there is a huge need for councils to be funded properly to build a large number of houses once again.

Spoke today at the City and Financial seminar in London on the topic of ‘Grasping the scale of the medium to long term challenge facing local government.’

Basically my role was to set the context on the scale of the financial cuts facing public services and examine how cuts of up to, and beyond 15% can, be achieved.

Some of the proposals being put forward include shared management structures, a complete 3 year spending freeze on capital and revenue funding, structural reform through reorganisation, the CBI are obviously promoting outsourcing, the total place approach, shared services generally, increasing charging beyond the £11b per annum that local government gathers at present and my own preferred approach of lean or systems thinking combined with good local performance management systems.

It was a good debate and most local authorities will examine what is correct for their own specific local circumstances.

APSE’s annual Highways and Street Lighting seminar took place over the last couple of days at Newcastle Marriot. The seminar incorporated ‘The Great Salt Debate’ which was a chance to look back at the problems with winter gritting this year from all perspectives. A debate between local authorities, grit suppliers and national agencies teased out some of the main issues that hindered services this winter and hopefully lessons have been learned that can be acted upon in order to avoid a repeat in future winters.

Being in the North East of England gave me a chance to catch up with colleagues in the school meals sector in that area. Colin Ranson from Sunderland Council and Anita Brown from Stockton brought me up to date with the latest issues around uptake and cost pressures.

Reading press reports about Kathryn Bigelow’s film ‘The Hurt Locker’ scooping six Oscars at the 82^nd Academy Awards ceremony set me wondering what the term actually means. A quick check on Google gave me the following definition ‘a period of immense, inescapable physical or emotional pain’. What an appropriate analogy then for the next few years in local government.

With Treasury figures suggesting public expenditure is likely to represent a 49% share of gross domestic product by the end of 2010, whoever wins the general election will be faced with some dramatic choices on public finances - ironically in order to help claw back the £176b deficit created by bankers.

Depending on who you listen to, this could mean cuts to local government budgets of up to 30%. But for arguments sake let’s say 15%. How are we going to achieve this? Well again it depends on who you listen to.

The CBI would suggest the answer is in outsourcing more services. Although having sat on the Government’s Strategic Partnership Taskforce for two years, reviewed Deloitte’s 2005 report on why so many American ‘Blue Chip’ companies were insourcing after outsourcing firms failure to deliver their promises and seen compelling evidence in APSE’s own research on why over 50 local authorities had brought services back in-house, I have yet to see tangible evidence to support this strategy.

Some are looking at arm’s length companies, shared services and joint working and certainly the evidence from the ‘Total Place’ pilots suggests 15% savings could be achieved by this approach. I would, however, like to see more detailed evaluation of the findings completed prior to any roll-out en masse.

Others argue that systems and lean thinking are the route to transforming services. This has some merit. But it has to be placed in the context of the need for openness and transparency in local government and therefore has to be evidence-based through robust local performance management frameworks. It has to be part of a wider on-going improvement framework led by elected members, such as that outlined in APSE’s ‘competitiveness continuum’ model.

Local government is also likely to raise more in future through trading and charging than the £11b reported at present in the Audit Commission’s ‘Positively Charged’.

The Government-appointed ‘Frontline First Taskforce’ has called for a combination of most of these approaches and ultimately local politicians will look at their local context and make policy decisions of where to make savings to suit their own local circumstances.

Bringing this back to the ‘Hurt Locker’, the parallels with a story about an explosive ordnance disposal unit are not lost on me.

APSE launched its latest research publication ‘Getting more Bang for the Public Buck, a guide to using procurement to achieve community benefits,’ at the Conservative Councillors Association conference in London today.

The guide looks at how you can maximise the benefit to local economies through the expenditure you make as an authority. Earlier research APSE published on measuring the economic footprint made by a local authority’s spend showed that for every £1 they spent on local services £1.64 circulates in the local economy. This research measured things like employee expenditure, money spent with local sub-contractors and local suppliers.

What ‘Getting more bang for the public buck’ shows is that if a concentrated effort is made to ensure the maximum amount possible of this expenditure is made with local companies then this figure can rise to £2 and beyond.