White Paper Seminar: Strong and prosperous communities

Deal or no deal?

David Prout, director of Local Democracy with the department for communities and local government opened APSE’s White Paper Seminar, Strong and Prosperous Communities with promises of a new deal for local government.

Throwing down a challenge to local authorities, police and fire authorities. Mr Prout outlined the ‘offer’ of an enhanced role for local authorities in leading local communities, to be a place shaper for the local area and to bring local public services together with more space for local authorities to focus on their top priorities and be innovative and responsive.

However Mr Prout also warned that like all good deals there are two sides. In exchange for ‘the offer’ the local authority ‘exchange’ was “more bottom up accountability, stronger local authority leadership and better more efficient services with tougher intervention if things go wrong”.

Outlining APSE’s response Chief Executive Paul O’Brien, stated that whilst authorities have made great strides to improve services and have delivered efficiency gains much quicker than they were required to, a further set of reforms needed to be collaborative and win not just the hearts and minds of communities but those of the local authority leaders who had been “victims of well meaning reform that has in the past been so aggressive that it severely hampered the ability of local authorities to deliver on front line services”.

In a clear reference to the reform of best value Paul O’Brien went on to warn that whilst APSE has whole hearted support for better citizen engagement and increased personalisation of services delivered by local authorities “we cannot place individual needs above those of the whole community”. He went on to outline that local authorities, by default, have to ration services and that if local and central government is to acknowledge that all citizens deserve a gold standard of service, available where needed, which is flexible and responsive and cost effective than perhaps “we should recognise that this truly reflects the spirit of genuine municipality. It is this spirit of municipality that has kept local authorities focussed on delivering for the community as whole and is the original modern of public service reform”.

Mr O’Brien, summarising the views of delegates, concluded that if citizen engagement is to be genuinely achieved the collective knowledge and intelligence, gathered by front line service managers and staff, needs to be harnessed in order to shape and deliver truly responsive services.

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