Francis Maude’s announcement to scrap the code of practice on workforce matters, which protects workers on outsourced public sector contracts from having different pay and conditions to colleagues working alongside them is a regressive step taking us back ten years prior to when the code was negotiated through the social partners forum which I was involved in for APSE.

This is a regressive step in the public services marketplace. One of the greatest problems with outsourcing in the past was the perception that outsourcing contracts was a means to generate profits from public services at the expense of the workforce. The two tier code was designed to address that. By scrapping the code it reinforces a message that the terms and conditions of the workforce are viewed as expendable.

The code has been replaced by a new ‘Statement of principles that reflect good employment practice for Government, Contracting Authorities and Suppliers’ but this statement does not have any statutory effect and will be merely circulated to suppliers as part of good practice literature.

Government has argued that the Two Tier Code was prohibitive to third sector suppliers bidding for contracts but the main  beneficiaries from the scrapping of the code will not be third sector suppliers but the more unscrupulous amongst contracting organisations. There is a danger that less scrupulous contractors will see this as a nod and a wink to return to some of the worst practices of the CCT years. It is likely to create huge tensions amongst the wider public sector workforce and trade unions at a time when local councils are considering a range of new delivery models to cope with cuts of up to 30%. Decent employers had nothing to fear from the two tier code and that included those in the third sector. I would hope that many of the enlightened contractors who provide public services continue to treat all of their staff with equal status.

Contractors should not enter negotiations assuming that savings can be made from the workforce and contractors, and third sector suppliers still needed to vigorously adhere to domestic and European employment rights legislation including the Transfer of  Undertakings Protection of Employment.

A senior central government figure recently asked me what a transformed council should look like in four or five years’ time. Whilst this is a fairly obvious question to ask, then a fairly obvious answer to give is that it depends on what you want it to look like.

The budget cuts of the next few years will be undoubtedly severe, but political leaders of local authorities still have choices about the approach and direction they take. Do they see the council’s role as being a small hub administering funds, which others access to provide services to their communities (akin to Nicholas Ridley’s model circa 1980’s)? Or do they see their role as something more meaningful and active in their local communities and economies?

APSE has been working with De Montfort University on developing a vision for the future around the notion of the ‘ensuring council’. To me, this means: a council that is leaner but not hollowed out; one that retains a strong core of services and the capacity to co-ordinate policy; that has the ability to intervene on behalf of local communities and secure broader strategic goals; that ensures local economies are resilient; and that is innovative and maintains a spirit of municipal entrepreneurship.

However, in order to get there over the next few years local authorities may have to take on different guises. This means being the efficient, entrepreneurial and innovative council, simultaneously.

It means authorities being efficient at a strategic level, in looking at strategic alliances with the wider public sector, at a corporate level, by initiating authority wide programmes and at an operational level by redesigning processes around service users in order to sweat out bureaucracy and waste.

By entrepreneurial I mean in exploiting opportunities to charge for, and trade in, services where appropriate and without being regressive for users who can least afford to contribute.

An innovative council will be one which embraces emerging opportunities that exist around renewable energy and the climate change agenda generally. This is an area that is a bright light at the end of a long dark tunnel of cuts. It’s an opportunity to be expansive, create local employment, deliver on sustainability commitments and do so on a self financing basis because of feed in tariffs funded by central Government.

Local authorities will deploy a range of transformational techniques over the coming years but one thing worth ensuring is that you know where you are going before you set of on the journey. A voyage that is merely about cutting costs and not also about transforming services is, without doubt, the road to nowhere.

It’s APSE’s annual performance networks seminar at Blackpool and despite the horrendous weather most of the delegates appear to have made it.

Helen Sullivan from Birmingham University opened the conference and focused on likely changes to local government services created by austerity and Government policy. She stated that one of the positive impacts of the current fiscal crisis was a reinvigoration of local democracy and political debate. Helen’s view was that this had been denuded by the pursuit of consensus over the past ten years or so.

Michael Hughes, Director of Studies from the Audit Commission stated that the need for accurate, valid, reliable, timely, relevant and complete data will not diminish when the Commission closes down.

At Pannone public sector summit in Manchester today and a healthy turnout despite the weather, have a quick look on the delegate list and there’s more consultants and lawyers than local government people. However the speaker line up is first class.

Dubious about introduction from Pannone speaker who says George Osborne has played a blinder so far in shaping the debate on shifting services from the public to the private sector!

Cllr Richard Kemp then does his usual impressive stuff on behalf of the LGA giving the message that the answer to current financial predicament in public services is found in joining up services across the public sector led of course by the democratically elected bit – local government. He urged the many lawyers in the audience “be bold, be brave, don’t act like lawyers.”

Tony Travers from LSE points out that it is highly unlikely that the private sector will pick up the slack from the cuts in local economies that have the highest dependency on the public sector at present. The cuts are therefore going to leave some public sector dependant local economies devastated in the long term.

Chief Executive of SOLACE, David Clark states that public spending is the tightest since the Second World War with the CLG budget the worst hit of all departments.

Manchester City Council Chief Executive Howard Bernstein argued that national models of service delivery don’t work, if we have learned one lesson over the last ten years or so then it is this. His view is that it is about locally tailored solutions. Ged Fitzgerald currently Chief Executive of Lancashire County Council, but soon to fill the same role at Liverpool, spoke about the ten year partnership deal they have just signed with BT and its potential for expansion. I asked him about the fact that much of the business plan for expansion is built on gathering work to provide services for other local authorities and the wider public sector, at a time when these same organisations will be drastically cutting budgets. Ged pointed out that this is an opportunity for Lancashire but my fear is that we will only be shifting jobs around in a diminishing public sector rather than creating new jobs.