At Labour party conference this week in Manchester and a strange atmosphere hangs over it. After 13 years of being the party of government there is obviously some disappointment and it’s strange to see former Ministers walking around on their own without the usual entourage of suits with clipboards surrounding them. However, with the election of a new leader there is also a mood of optimism amongst many delegates that the page has been turned on new labour and things have moved on.

On the fringe the main topics are the impact of the recession on local economies, climate change and a weird fixation with all things co-operative and mutual. The economic issues dominate all others and efficiencies retain a key focus. For me the innovative ideas around carbon reduction hold great promise for local government as it is the one area where we can be expansive around employment and activity due to the self financing opportunities created by the feed in tariffs. I quiz former CLG Minister John Denham and Leader of Manchester City Council, Richard Leese about this on a fringe and get strong support for my suggestion that the public sector is key to making this agenda happen and that we should be going after these opportunities much more aggressively.

The one I remain to be convinced about is that cooperatives and mutual’s are the answer to delivering services more efficiently and effectively. I like to see evidence to support ideas and despite claims that cooperatives will solve everything from poverty to disease, famine and plague the evidence doesn’t seem to be overwhelming.

Spoke today at the Supply Conference North West on how the public and private sectors can work together better. It was mainly a private sector audience of suppliers to local government.

After putting the economic context facing public services at present I went on to talk about the interdependency of the public and private sectors upon each other in local economies. I have explained our economic footprint research and the £1.64 concept on this blog many times before.

The Prime Ministers 'We are all in this together' video clip raised a laugh especially because of some problems with the technology.

APSE's 'More Bang for the public buck' research raised a lot of interest.

My conclusions were that in the current climate the public sector are going to be even more focused on getting every penny of value they can from procurement processes in order to maximise the value of their spend for the local community. There will be a much greater emphasis on promoting local economies, along with better supplier management and any supplier who really wants to be successful with local authorities will need to demonstrate how they can bring added value to that area.  

One brave soul suggested that focusing on local economies like Manchester was wrong and that value was all about cost. He was from a business outsourcing services company from Yorkshire! 

Spent today at the Liberal Democrats annual conference in Liverpool and attended a fringe on how to deliver a low carbon future. The speakers were Doug Parr from Greenpeace, Barry Neville from Centrica and more importantly Chris Huhne the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

Doug pushed the case that even with carbon capture and storage coal and oil need to go quickly and that gas doesn't have a long term future either. Barry made an important point that two thirds of the homes in existence today will still be in existence come 2050 and therefore we need to ensure that any action taken today on improvements is sustainable for the future. Chris was impressive in his passion for pursuing an environmental agenda although he did concede that this view may not be universally shared by some colleagues from the party of his coalition partners. He cited the fact that Bernard Ingham has called him the most dangerous man in Britain today; however he suggested that this should be seen as a badge of honour rather than anything else.

When Chris finished I asked the panel whether the public sector had a key role in delivering on low carbon by providing the infrastructure for things like electric fleet whilst also setting an example through retro fitting public property and generating renewables by solar, tidal, wind, geothermal, biomass etc. I mentioned about APSE working with a number of local authorities to assess whether this can be done on a self financing basis by utilising the feed in tariffs for renewable energy and asked if there was likely to be any invest to save funding that local authorities could tap into?

Chris responded that local government had a key role to play in generating renewables sources of energy and that he was keen for them to utilise the funding available through the green deal strategy. Barry's view was that success in this area could only be achieved by working with local authorities to ensure that the work required to rip out 49 million metres and replace them with 25 million smart metres was co-ordinated and occurred only once.

The conference itself appeared really busy and delegates appeared engaged in the responsibility that comes from being in Government for the first time in generations. 

The blows just keep on coming, it seems. A recent report claiming council managers are unproductive is the latest in the drip, drip, drip attack on public servants already facing slashed budgets, frozen pay and pension cuts.

I was pleased to be able to set the record straight on Radio 4 (listen on the attached clip) after the report by management consultants Knox D’Arcy had been sensationalised in the press. While they had surveyed just 176 local government managers and claimed they were 12% less productive than private sector counterparts, I was able to draw upon APSE’s comprehensive performance networks database, which contains eleven years worth of information from more than 200 local authorities across the UK showing productivity gains.

It would be all too easy to critique the methodology used by Knox D’Arcy, but the most worrying thing here is the way in which negative stereotypes were all too readily seized upon to malign local government. One newspaper actually illustrated their story with an image from a photo-library of someone sitting with their feet up on the desk, when the true picture of high performance among millions of staff working to serve the public on a daily basis is repeatedly overlooked.

APSE’s detailed evidence shows, for example, the amount of refuse collected has doubled in the past three years, as has the number of school meals served. Sickness absence has dropped dramatically in services such as cleaning. Our latest series of briefings on efficiencies is also packed with cases of councils delivering millions of pounds of savings.

It was suggested that 500,000 staff could be cut on the basis of the Knox D’Arcy report. But undermining public services upon which millions of citizens, not to mention our national economy, rely is not the solution.

So what is? I have argued previously that councils need to keep cool heads and robustly examine how they can continue to improve from within – rather than make rash decisions they will regret. I also believe more can be done to increase the bang councils get for their procurement buck and ensure their spending benefits local economies. We at APSE are helping councils across the country implement ‘lean systems thinking’ processes to minimise waste and maximise productivity.

No-one is at all complacent. Council have risen to the previous challenges of CCT, Best Value and Gershon Review but now face greater pressure than ever with budget cuts of at least 25%.

As a first step, we need to use the reams of evidence available to fight back against unhelpful stereotypes and speak up for local government. We need ministers to be seen to be working with the sector, not against it.

I am not suggesting there are simple answers and there is certainly further pain to come. What is certain is that rolling over and playing dead is not an option.