The LG Group has set out an open and comprehensive offer from local government to the new coalition government. The LG Group made its offer as the government announced its own proposals for saving £6.2bn from public expenditure this year.

Local government is ready to work with the new coalition government to reduce spending and reform the state. Councils are ready to strike a deal with central government which will see local government take full responsibility for delivering more with less.

If you or your council would like to write to the Government, and your local MP, supporting the LGA Group's offer (see offer in summary) and asking them to support it too, then please feel free to use our template letters.

Latest

• Place-based budgets - the future governance of local public services

  Public services will have to become more transparent, more effective, and cheaper. This simply will not happen without a significant change to the way funding is allocated and decisions are made. This paper proposes a significant shift in accountability which would make local public services genuinely local both in the way funding is allocated, and decisions about services are made and accounted for.

  Added on: 7 July 2010

  

• Local public services - Speech by Dame Margaret Eaton to the LG Group conference on 6 July 2010

  "The LGA has made a big offer to the new Government. It is not an offer of unconditional support, but it is a way of being at the table when the big decisions affecting us are taken. Our offer is simple: Top down cuts cross the public sector won't work. We are pressing for radical reform to slim down the system, make huge savings and give power back to people on the ground."

  Added on: 8 July 2010

  http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=11328875

   

Place-based budgets - the future governance of local public services

Public services will have to become more transparent, more effective, and cheaper. This simply will not happen without a significant change to the way funding is allocated and decisions are made.

This paper proposes a significant shift in accountability which would make local public services genuinely local both in the way funding is allocated, and decisions about services are made and accounted for.

Building on experience of what works – and what doesn’t – we set out a model for place-based budgeting.

Find out more in our publication 'Place-based budgets - the future governance of local public services'

References/Acknowledgement

LGA/Local Government Group

http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/publications/publication-display.do?id=12294112

Local services are human, receptive, engaging and productive – counter-intuitively, they are also high quality and low cost. John Seddon argues the case against more centralisation of services

If the idea of local services goes against the grain – as it does – it is the grain we have to change. Take, for example, housing benefits.

For Sir Peter Gershon, housing benefits were an obvious choice for shared services, and they were one of the first local authority services to be force-fitted by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) into a rigid front-office/backoffice design.

Yet the evidence shows that this is a "no brainer" in the most literal sense. It is dumb. The smart way to design housing benefits is to provide the expertise required to solve people's problems at the place where they meet the service provider: face to face, at the front end.

Using this principle, East Devon and Stroud councils process claimants' benefits in less than half the official target time. In a period when the number of claimants is increasing, East Devon has serviced 33 per cent more demand and Stroud 50 per cent more, both with less resource. Blaenau Gwent has leapt from the bottom of the Welsh league table to the top; better service has cut the number of calls to its service centre by 50 per cent and face-to-face visits by 57 per cent. These are improvements that put official targets in the shade; and by treating claimants in the round – helping them to solve wider or associated problems rather than just processing benefits claims – they make knock-on savings elsewhere in the system too.

Housing benefits were the first in what has become a tsunami of service industrialisation – a wave of public-sector call centres and back-offices built in the belief that bigger is better and that economy lies in scale. But factory management is only good for mass production. Removing work from front-end service providers to call centres just creates 'failure demand' – demand that goes away, freeing up capacity (see Blaenau Gwent above) when service is designed locally. De-coupling customers from front-end agents – the rationale for the back-office factory – does likewise. By contrast, re- coupling – understanding what citizens want from services and equipping employees to deliver it at the point of transaction, cuts costs as service improves, as so many examples show.

These are counter-intuitive ideas. Current thinking would have it that local must be more costly. But as the leaders of these councils (and many others) know, the real issue is actually the way we think about method and measures. For example, managers assume that standardising work cuts costs, yet when they study their services they find that standardised processes prevent the system from absorbing variety. In simple terms, it makes it hard for customers to get what they want, and the organisation consumes more resources as a consequence. It is a hard lesson. But studying the work obliges managers to confront the evidence of their own eyes: while specialisation and standardisation of work lower transaction costs, overall costs of service go up because the factory design creates more handovers, fragmentation, duplication and errors and hence re-work, and generates massive failure demand. Studying the work, they understand a paradox – managing costs creates costs.

Local services engage directly with citizen needs. Instead of being processed by demoralised and disengaged workers in remote computer-controlled organisations, citizen needs are understood and acted on by happy, helpful people who get a kick out of providing a service that matters.

Economy comes from flow, not scale. Scale-thinking has driven massive costs into the public sector – with no underlying productivity improvement. Arbitrary targets can only be met by huge increases in spending (trebled in the case of healthcare, doubled for local authorities) which is absorbed by the rising costs of the infrastructure of failure.

As people become obsessed with costs, more of the wrong-thinking dominates action. Total Place initiatives that count the cost of activities but say nothing about value will cause people to leap to the wrong conclusion – that economy will follow from scale. By contrast, studying value – the nature of demand from the citizens' point of view – shows how and where resources are wasted, duplicated, or being spent on things that are of little value to the service user.

Managing value entails understanding demands from citizens in their terms and the flow of activity that ensues whenever the demands occur. Studying these things reveals to managers that the targets and specifications with which they are struggling to comply actually make performance worse. They understand that, even if it goes against the grain, scale does not lead to economy; and that to make lasting improvement, we have to change the grain.

Professor John Seddon is an occupational psychologist, researcher and leading authority on change in the public sector

http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=14582