Public value

Lessons from literature for local government

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Professor Catherine Staite LLB, MBA, FRSA

No man is an island entire of itself: every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,

As well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

John Donne

When every week seems to bring news of yet another major failure of governance in a local authority, some members and officers in other councils will be fearful that the same fate will befall their own council before too long, while others will be confident that all will be well for them.

When we look at the notable governance failures that have occurred in recent years, we see a very complex picture. Causes of failure are many and varied, ranging from the absence of the most basic controls to ambitious but risky money-making schemes. Some patterns are visible in all the complexity, including, failure to listen to officer advice, engaging in commercial activities without the requisite skills and knowledge, weak financial controls and opaque decision-making processes.

Councils need both strong rules, about finance and behaviour and strong public service values. Constant vigilance and honest collective self-reflection are vital to ensure that decision makers are independent, transparent, accountable, behave with integrity, have a sense of shared purpose and focus on outcomes. Ask yourself – are our informal and formal governance arrangements fit-for-purpose? If not, where might the weaknesses lie? Look at your structures. Are your Constitution, Codes of Conduct and Standing Orders up-to-date? Is your organizational structure robust? Are your s151 officer and Monitoring Officer on the senior management team and do they report directly to the Chief Executive? Then look at your systems. Are decision making processes clear? Can projects be started without the right sign-off? Can officers exceed their authority without consequences? Last, but by no means least, take a long hard look at organizational behaviour. How do leading politicians and officers respond to being challenged? Is bad behaviour rife but undiscussable?

It’s important to avoid complacency. Most of the members and officers leading and managing councils that have failed to uphold the best standards of good governance either thought what they were doing was fine, or that they could get away with it. Sometimes those who are part of an organization are the last to notice how the patterns of weak governance and bad behaviour, which have become so familiar that they cease to be noticed, will eventually lead to their downfall. Even when officers can see that their council is not going to able to balance its books or manage its risks, it can be difficult to speak up if members do not want to listen and it can be career limiting when a bullying culture prevails. Although statutory officers have statutory powers and duties, they are will not be protected from retaliation if they are perceived to be raining on the parade of colleagues and members who, because of ambition or political expediency, have lost sight of what good governance looks like. The statutory protections that attach to senior roles are not proof against bullying or actions amounting to constructive dismissal. The power imbalance between members and officers remains significant because while members may lose positions of power, or even their seats, officers risk losing their livelihoods and even their careers.

Those members and officers who consider themselves safe from failure may take some guilty pleasure from the failure of another council, especially if its run by another party. Councils have been encouraged to compete with each other for funding and kudos, so perhaps it’s natural to feel that the standing of better run councils goes up when the reputations of failing councils go right down. That’s a big mistake, for two very strong reasons; failure of one local authority reduces public confidence in local government as whole and it gives central government convincing reasons for not delegating resources and power to a local level. For all that we refer to ‘sovereign’ councils, no council is ‘an island, entire of itself’ and the failure of one diminishes all. When we open the LGC or MJ, to see for ‘whom the bell tolls’ we should hear the message that ‘it tolls for thee’.

Picture credit: Maggie Meng https://www.flickr.com/photos/snowfish2014/

Catherine is a researcher, consultant and coach who specialises in strengthening leadership, improving governance and supporting senior politicians and managers.  She is an independent consultant with Darlingburn, a small consultancy practice and is working with Grant Thornton on local government audit, specializing in governance. She was the Director of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham from 2011 to 2017.

Mission Possible? 

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Jason Lowther

With under 700 days to the next UK general election, political parties are busy developing their manifesto documents.  In February, Labour leader Keir Starmer made a major speech laying out his “five missions for a better Britain”.   How do these five missions relate to local government?  And is the turn to “mission driven” government likely to work?

The five missions vary in their level of specificity and challenge.  Securing “the highest sustained growth in the G7, with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country…” is a little vague but likely to be difficult, especially given we are currently ranked 6 out of 7 in terms of output per worker.  Mission #2, “make Britain a clean energy superpower”, accelerating the move to zero-carbon electricity from 2035 to 2030, is specific but very challenging.  Mission #3, reform of health and social care and reducing health inequalities, will require a re-focus from secondary (hospital) care to social care and addressing the social determinants of health.  Mission #4 is about community safety, and likely to involve more community policing.  Finally, mission #5 is to “break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage” through reform to the childcare and education systems.

Local government potentially has important roles in each of the five missions.  Local education, skills and economic development functions will be critical to improving productivity.  On energy, Net Zero requires at least a doubling of electricity generation by 2050, from decarbonised sources.  Decarbonisation strategies need to be place-based, taking account of the geography, building types, energy infrastructure, energy demand, resources and urban growth plans.   We’ve recently argued here for the key roles of councils in this area. 

Turning to health and care services, local government clearly has leading roles – including ensuring place-based planning to address the social and behavioural causes of health inequalities.  Analysis by the Liverpool and Lancaster Universities Collaboration for Public Health Research in 2021 concluded: “investment across the whole of local government is needed to level up health including investment in housing, children’s, leisure, cultural, environmental, and planning services”.  Similarly community safety, child care and education are areas where local government could be enabled to have much greater positive impact.

Perhaps as important as the specific “missions” is the approach to governing which the party is proposing.   Labour’s document characterises this as a move from top-down, target-led, short-term, siloed approaches, to government which is more “agile, empowering and catalytic”, working across the public and private sectors, and civil society.  This, it argues, requires organising government around a shared vision, focusing on real world outcomes, concentrating on ends with flexibility and innovation concerning means, devolving decision making from Westminster, increasing accountability including central and local data transparency, and adopting long-term preventative approaches including greater financial certainty for local areas. 

In some ways the idea of mission-driven government echoes the 1990s thinking of Ted Gaebler and David Osborne’s book “reinventing government”, which argued for a more entrepreneurial approach to the delivery of government.  Their work pointed to entrepreneurial companies setting overall missions and goals, and then leaving managers to figure out how best to deliver these – for example, by providing an overall budget for a service rather than detailed line-by-line budgets which disappear if not spent by year end.  The focus on managers rather than considering the perspective of politicians is one of the problems identified in subsequent evaluations of the reinventing government model, together with difficulties in sustaining the approach.

Mission-driven policies addressing ‘grand challenges’ of society are increasingly common, for example in the UN Sustainable Development Goals and various EU policies.  Mazzucato et al recently argued that addressing such challenges requires strategic thinking about: the desired direction of travel, the structure and capacity of public sector organisations, the way in which policy is assessed, and the incentive structure for the private, public (and I would add community) sectors. Labour’s paper makes a start (albeit at a very high level) on thinking through these areas. The litmus test, though, will be in developing the detail and how far this engages with local areas.   

Over the next few months, we will be contributing to the debate on the upcoming party manifestos with some research-informed thoughts on a variety of local government related policy areas.  If you would like to be involved in developing these, please get in touch. 

Jason Lowther is the Director of INLOGOV. His research focuses on public service reform and the use of “evidence” by public agencies.  Previously he worked with West Midlands Combined Authority, led Birmingham City Council’s corporate strategy function, worked for the Audit Commission as national value for money lead, for HSBC in credit and risk management, and for the Metropolitan Police as an internal management consultant. He tweets as @jasonlowther

Picture credit: BBC

Is Government Giving Value For Money?

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Jason Lowther

When money is short, how we spend it becomes even more important. As central government reheats its arguments for austerity following the chaos of the last few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on the contents of the 2021 budget (just a year ago).  The 2021 budget set out not just spending plans, but also a souped up approach to measuring outcomes and cost-effectiveness of government spending. How are these playing out, and will they survive the No 10 merry-go-round?

Rishi Sunak, then eight months into the job as Chancellor, noted that government borrowing was relatively high after the pandemic, warned of the public finances’ exposure to rises in interest rates, and outlined how spending was being linked to the delivery of outcomes alongside across the board ‘efficiency savings’:

The fiscal impact of a one percentage point rise in interest rates in the next year would be six times greater than it was just before the financial crisis, and almost twice what it was before the pandemic…

Decisions have been based on how spending will contribute to the delivery of each department’s priority outcomes, underpinned by high-quality evidence. The government has also taken further action to drive out inefficiency; SR21 confirms savings of 5% against day-to-day central departmental budgets in 2024-25. (page 2)

The “priority outcomes” are the latest in a long line of attempts to prod government spending into delivering effectively on political priorities, rather than blindly increasing/decreasing by x % compared to last year.  A 2019 report from the Institute for Government helpfully outlines many of these earlier initiatives (summary from the House of Commons Library) including:

  • “Scrutiny programmes” and the Financial Management Initiative (FMI), introduced under Thatcher.
  • The Cabinet Office and Treasury set up the Financial Management Unit (FMU) in 1982 to help with creating plans under the FMI.
  • The “Next Steps” report, published in 1988, which recommended the establishment of executive agencies to carry out the executive functions of government.
  • Tony Blair’s administration developed a greater focus on performance targets and Public Service Agreements (PSAs) which put these targets on a formal basis.
  • In 2001, Blair’s government also set up the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU), which was intended to coordinate PSAs and bring them under more central control.
  • Under the coalition government in 2010-15, PSAs were abolished and replaced with Departmental Business Plans (DBPs). These shifted the focus from targets to actions – in other words, they listed what each department would do and by when, rather than what they sought to achieve.
  • Under the Conservative government in 2016, DBPs were renamed to Single Departmental Plans (SDPs), which were themselves renamed to Outcome Delivery Plans (ODPs) in 2021. According to the NAO, SDPs (and by extension, ODPs) are supposed to be “comprehensive, costed business plans”.

As well as having to write down what outcomes they want to achieve, and how they will know whether that is happening, under the SDP system departments were also required “to assess progress in delivering their priority outcomes [and] … share regular performance reports with HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office”. 

In the 2021 spending review, the departmental outcomes were spruced up to reflect the (now last-but-one) PM’s five priorities of levelling up; net zero; education, jobs and skills; recovering the NHS; and reducing the volume and harm of crime.  

This blog’s audience may be interested in “Where does local government fit in this compendium of key priorities?”  The answer is a little depressing: on the last line of the last page (page 30 of 33), just before the devolved government departments. The relevant outcome is inspiring enough: “A sustainable and resilient local government sector that delivers priority services and helps build more empowered and integrated communities”, albeit with the reassuringly non-SMART measure that “the department will provide narrative reporting on progress for this outcome”.  Of course I exaggerate, because local government has critical inputs to very many of the earlier outcomes too, but it’s hard not to conclude that local services and communities were not yet at the top of the ministerial attention list.

Will the “priority outcomes” survive the whirlwind of ministerial movements and unforced economic missteps?  After the last seven weeks, I’m not going to make predictions – but we should know in the next month, and alongside the financial figures they could be our best hint yet on where a Sunak government is heading.

Picture credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du_6mRV8Hm8

Jason Lowther is the Director of INLOGOV. His research focuses on public service reform and the use of “evidence” by public agencies.  Previously he worked with West Midlands Combined Authority, led Birmingham City Council’s corporate strategy function, worked for the Audit Commission as national value for money lead, for HSBC in credit and risk management, and for the Metropolitan Police as an internal management consultant. He tweets as @jasonlowther

Schools and local authorities – where next?

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Edwina Grant

Recently, politicians at Lancashire County Council have reflected on the national picture regarding the ambition of the Department for Education, contained in the White Paper on Education and the subsequent Schools Bill.  The Bill aims to move all schools to become academies and to allow councils to open a Local Authority-established Multi Academy Trust (MAT), although some would argue that this was technically possible before.

The government’s aim to ensure that by a notional target of 2030, 90% of pupils meet the expected standard in maths and reading at Key Stage 2, and that the national GCSE average grade in both English language and maths is increased from a 4.5 to 5.  It sets out its strategy of delivery: “ensuring excellent teachers, supporting teachers deliver high standards for all pupils, deploying targeted support for those who need it most, and ensuring a stronger school system”.

Key policies to achieve this include the ambition that there will be a fully Trust led system with a single regulatory approach, through growth of strong multi-academy trusts.  The Bill envisages the establishment of new multi-academy trusts (MATs), encouraging existing and new MATs to expand and allowing trusts to be established by local authorities.  The notional ambition is, that by 2030 all pupils will be taught in a strong MAT, or their school will be planning to join one.

The White Paper was released in March 2022 and subsequent Schools Bill was introduced to Parliament in May 2022.

At Lancashire County Council, we have a good relationship with our local authority-maintained schools, with single academy trusts (SATs) and with multi-academy trusts (MATs).  We have prioritised the core responsibilities for local authorities on promoting the children’s right to education in terms of admissions, challenging exclusions and supporting alternatives and working with our schools collaboratively on behalf of young people with special educational needs.  We became even closer as a result of the challenges of the Covid pandemic.  The Schools Bill, however, is a challenge for us, as at the time of writing, 560 of our 628 schools are local-authority maintained.

There are obviously options for us.  Firstly, to continue the status quo and to let the market take its course.  Secondly, to proactively manage the market by working closely with the new regional Department for Education teams to ensure that our local authority voice is heard as more schools are encouraged to join MATs and indeed, more MATs, as yet unknown to us, are encouraged to join our school landscape.  Thirdly, to express our ambition to establish a local authority maintained multi-academy trust.

After much deliberation, including briefings and discussions with all our councillors, and close consultation with the regional office for the Department for Education, we considered that options 2 and 3 should be explored further.  We are actively strengthening our existing relationships with MATs and trying to understand who the new players might be in our bordering geography of which, given the size of Lancashire, there will be many.  We have also submitted an expression of interest to establish a local authority established multi-academy trust specialising in special education.  We decided on the special education specialism as we have a high level of strength in that sector, and also an existing deep relationship on a pupil level with the children in those schools.

The outcome is yet to be decided but thinking about the next steps has brought us closer to key questions about our existing commercial activity with schools in our authority.  Will the new MATs who take on existing county schools still buy our services, and if they do, in what volume, given the financial pressures ahead?  How do we shape our local elected councillor involvement to ensure the democratic voice is heard, and how do we advise and support the multi-academy trusts so that they fully understand the community context of our local offer for the most vulnerable families and their children?

Time will tell, but this is potentially the most interesting change since the implementation of the 1988 Education Reform Act, which reduced the powers of local authorities over schools.  As I was an education officer in Lancashire at the time, I can attest that it took enormous amount of goodwill from both councillors and officers to realign our systems and our structures so that our schools could get the best of that significant change.  To think back on that time now, that schools previously did not have full control of their budgets, seems strange.  I hope that another 30 years on from now, we will be able to reflect as positively on the changes ahead of us.

References:

Edwina Grant OBE is Director of Education and Children’s Services for Lancashire County Council.

Research to Help Rebuild After Covid-19

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Jason Lowther

Last month Sir Patrick Vallance, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, met (virtually) with over 100 researchers and policy officers to discuss the output of a six-month programme looking at some of the fundamental challenges to our society, economy and ways of living.  Commissioned by the Government Office for Science, the Rebuilding a Resilient Britain programme aims to help government with medium- and long-term challenges relating to the challenges of Covid-19, captured under nine themes including “vulnerable communities”, “supporting services”, and “local and national growth”.


The overall programme was led by Annette Boaz and Kathryn Oliver, two experienced social scientists whose work focusses on the use of evidence.  In their recent LSE article, they explain the background to the programme and how plans were upturned in March with the introduction of Lockdown in the UK.  

I was particularly involved in the “supporting services” theme, convening the work around local government.  It is an exciting initiative to be involved with, not just because of its scope and pace, but also because of the range of people engaged: researchers and academics, government policy and analysis officers, and funders.  What I found particularly interesting was how different Government departments and different academic disciplines were often looking at very similar issues but framing them from distinct perspectives and using diverse language to describe them.  This highlights the need to develop shared definitions of issues and ways to address these – considering “problem-based issues” in the round.

As well as summarising the existing research evidence around each of the identified themes, the work identified several “gaps” in the extant evidence base and opportunities for new research, policy/research dialogue, and knowledge exchange.

Within the Local Government theme, we recognised that LG’s role proved critical in the first stage of the pandemic, for example in supporting vulnerable and shielded people, enabling voluntary community groups, freeing up 30,000 hospital beds, housing over 5,000 homeless people, and sustaining essential services such as public health, waste collection, safeguarding and crematoria.  This role is likely to increase in future stages of the pandemic, with more responsibility for local surveillance testing and tracing, implementing local lockdowns, economic development, contributing to a sustainable social care system, and supporting further community mutual aid.

There is already a good evidence base showing how local government is playing vital roles in responding to and recovering from the pandemic.  We identified four main themes: empowering local communities, delivering and supporting services, devolution and localisation, and funding.
For each issue we considered the key policy and practice implications of existing evidence, the evidence gaps and the ways in which gaps might be filled.  

Around empowering local communities, for example, evidence showed that LAs responded quickly to the pandemic, and well-functioning local systems emerged to tackle the immediate crises in many parts of the UK.  Areas adopted a range of strategies in partnership with local communities. But informal community responses can lack coordination, resources, reach and accountability; and some groups face barriers to involvement.  Further evidence is required on what works in strengthening community support networks, empowering different types of communities, and co-producing public services.  Councils also need to understand better how staff, councillors and the institutions themselves can change to empower communities.

There has already been some important learning from this work, such as recognising the treasure trove of useful knowledge contained in existing evidence and expertise.   We need to get much better at using evidence from, for example, the evaluation of past policy initiatives.  The programme is helping to strengthen relationships across government, including some new and more diverse voices, and will be useful as government departments revisit their Areas of Research Interest post-Covid.  The thematic reports are due to be published in coming weeks.

I will be exploring the findings for other areas of interest to Local Government in future articles.

[This article also appeared in the Local Area Research and Intelligence Association December newsletter]

Jason Lowther is Director of the Institute for Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Councils should make better use of churches to bring communities together

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Dr Madeleine Pennington

As if one were needed, Croydon Council’s issue of a section 114 notice in November offered a further stark reminder of the financial challenges facing local authorities. After a decade of austerity, the pandemic is stretching (and will stretch further) councils already running on a shoestring – and one consequence of reduced public spending is a reliance on faith and community groups to plug the gap.

This phenomenon has already led to a quiet shift in the role of faith in society. Faith-based volunteer hours rose by almost 60% from 2010-2014, and in 2015 this time contribution alone was valued at £3 billion. Between 2006 and 2016, faith-based charities were the fastest growing area of the charity sector. Two thirds of the nation’s growing number of foodbanks are now coordinated by the Trussell Trust – a Christian charity whose most recent figures show an 89% increase in need for emergency food parcels in April 2020 compared to April 2019. As of 2017, 93% of Anglican churches alone were involved in foodbanks in some way.

The result is one of the unspoken paradoxes of modern society: faith is increasingly assumed to be private, and yet is becoming ever more public in some very concrete ways.

However, taking churches as a case study, research published last month by Theos think tank observes that councils’ engagement with faith groups has predominantly been driven by necessity rather than positive embrace. Nervousness around proselytism and the inclusivity of faith-based services mean that local authorities tend to work with a few churches they trust, and the level of engagement varies hugely between areas: while some councils were described as “open and willing” in this research, church-based participants in other areas felt “invisible” or viewed with “suspicion”.

At the same time, while churches are increasingly relied upon to provide necessary services, they are far less often included where the wider health and flourishing of their local communities is concerned.

This is particularly problematic given that many of the challenges facing the country (and our local communities) fundamentally go beyond a financial shortfall. The Leave campaign won on an argument that Brexit was about more than economics. So too, the pandemic is more than a public health crisis: it is an act of solidarity for individuals so profoundly to curtail their freedom to protect the most vulnerable in our communities. Likewise, our response to many other critical issues facing our society – racial injustice, loneliness, our willingness to welcome migrants – rests on investing in the strength of our common relationships.

In other words, these are social cohesion challenges – and churches are uniquely placed to meet this relational need. They provide an unrivalled source of physical capital scattered equally throughout the country, acting as the social capillaries of their communities, protecting a wellspring of formal and informal leadership, convening difficult conversations between groups, motivating individual members of their congregations to give to wider society, and seeing (and enacting) the full potential of their communities where others do not. 

Most churches have also reflected deeply on the appropriate role of faith in their community work; having an open conversation about boundaries and expectations here is far preferable to writing off their contribution altogether. But neither should councils assume the “appropriate” role of faith in the community is no role at all; rather, it is churches’ desire to love and serve their neighbours which makes them so well-equipped to serve their communities in the first place.

As budgets are further slashed in the months (and perhaps years) ahead, churches will undoubtedly be called upon even more to bridge the growing chasm between need and capacity. However, if the context of those relationships can move from a reluctant “needs must” basis to one of open and compassionate collaboration, councils may well find that churches have much more to offer than they currently are. Given the steep climb ahead, that is surely a welcome revelation. 

The Church and Social Cohesion was commissioned by the Free Churches Group, and prepared independently by Theos, and published alongside a ‘how to’ booklet for policymakers and local authorities hoping to engage better with churches. Download them here.

Dr Madeleine Pennington is head of research at the Christian thinktank Theos

This article was published in the Local Government Chronicle on 1st December 2020.