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.

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.

Spoke today at APSE’s packed out Street Cleansing Seminar at Villa Park in Birmingham. The subject of my talk was with budget cuts looming on the horizon, can we really afford to cut streetscene services?

APSE’s view is that whilst local government will require to provide services in an ever more efficient manner due to the state of public finances, this is one area where cuts should be considered carefully. Firstly, the record levels of investment in public services in the decade prior to the recession didn’t always filter down to these particular service areas, secondly these are the very services which the public value the most, thirdly they have the highest local visibility and recognition factor, fourthly they tend to employ high levels of local people whose spend combined with that of local suppliers helps prop up struggling local economies in a time when they desperately need it.

In the evening I catch up with colleagues Jim O’Brien and Muir Wilson at dinner along with members of APSE’s Policy, Performance and Scrutiny Committee.