LG 23 - Dr Tom Entwistle

Evidence Submitted to the Proposed Local Government Measure Committee - Saesneg yn unig

17 November 2008

Dr Tom Entwistle
Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management
Cardiff Business School
Cardiff University
Cardiff
CF10 3EU
029 2087 5503

1.0 Introduction

I am grateful for the invitation to submit evidence to the Local Government Measure Committee. Although I do not have a direct stake in the measure as such (in that I work neither for central nor local government), I spent five years of my life working on the official evaluation of the Best Value regime in England and continue to conduct research on service improvement and collaboration. Amongst other things I am currently working on the Assembly Government commissioned evaluation of local government policy.

2.0 Background

The memorandum accompanying the proposed local government measure implies in a number of places that it is intended as something of a tidying up of the Welsh application of the Local Government Acts of 1999 and 2000. An exercise made necessary by the increasing divergence of Welsh local government policy from England.

As such the measure does not represent a radical departure from existing practice rather it proposes the codification and tweaking of current arrangements. The proposed measure does not of course give the complete story, it is a framework. The meaning of many of these arrangements will only become apparent through additional guidance from Welsh Assembly Government and then through the practices of local authorities and regulators who have to make the system work. Indeed as a framework, the arrangements sometimes seem unnecessarily precise. The original 1999 Local Government Act is considerably vaguer in its description of the various regimes that have operated under its authority. Members of the committee may wish to consider whether it really is necessary to cover arrangements so precisely.    

While bearing in mind all these reservations, the proposed measure does nonetheless, offer an opportunity to consider the direction of the Assembly Government’s approach to improvement. It is to that purpose that this short note is addressed.

It would be nice to think that that the public services would deliver continuous improvement without the need for any kind of intervention from the Welsh Assembly Government. Unfortunately, for a batch of reasons that need not detain us at this stage, most people would recognise the need for additional prompts and checks on the delivery of improvement.

So what levers are there?

Like the 1999 Local Government Act before it the proposed measure touches on a number of candidates:

- Planning
- Citizen engagement
- Regulation
- Collaboration

Each one raises the question first: is this a lever likely to assist improvement and second whether the detailed suggestion contained in the proposed measure reflect our best understanding of these instruments. The first question is relatively easily answered. There is at least some evidence to support the effectiveness of all four levers. The second question is much more difficult. But before looking at each of the instruments in turn it is worth considering the definition of improvement.

3.0 Definition of Improvement

The Measure marks an understandable desire to broaden the definition of improvement from the relatively narrow terms contained in the 1999 Local Government Act and associated guidance. However, Part 1 S3 gives local authorities 6 categories of improvement – some of which are pretty vague (strategic effectiveness, sustainability, social well-being) and a seventh which amounts to any change which is ‘reasonably likely’ to bring about any of the other 6.

If I was a corporate officer struggling with improvement objectives I’d go for number 7 – the innovation option – because it’s vague multiplied by vague.  I think it might mean, for example, committing to ‘alter’ a function or service ‘in a manner which is reasonably likely’ to improve ‘strategic effectiveness’ which in turn means exercising a function ‘which is reasonably likely to lead to the achievement of, or assist in achieving, any of its strategic objectives.’ As a citizen I’m not sure I’d be too impressed by an improvement objective that sounded like that!

In short while some of the ‘new’ perspectives on improvement are helpful – access and equity of service provision for example – I do not think there is much merit in broadening out the definition of improvement to the extent proposed in section 3. More detailed advice on the content of improvement can surely be covered in subsequent guidance.

4.0 Planning

There is good evidence in private management and some from public management that planning (setting targets and agreeing strategies to deliver them) can deliver improvement and engage service user interest. The difficulty here is one that ran through the working of the original Best Value regime. The planning processes required by the 1999 Local Government Act very quickly became divorced from the realities of day to day service delivery. Detached corporate officers had the job of producing plans which were never really owned by service managers. Clearly it is difficult to ensure ownership and commitment to locally set targets even when these are nationally reported, inspected and published.

The question then is how do you make these planning processes more real? The obvious solution would be to use the service planning arrangements which already exist in the vast majority of local authorities. Perhaps the LGM should restrict itself to

establishing a duty to plan for improvement and then subsequent guidance could explain how the obligation should be fulfilled at service level.

5.0 Citizen Engagement

We know of course that citizen engagement can help deliver service improvement and a host of other desirable outcomes. We know also however that citizens engage most enthusiastically in issues that are of immediate relevance to them – like school closures, local planning decisions and so forth – but that it is much more difficult to engage citizens in formal and strategic processes. The difficulty with the Best Value regime, the WPI and as far as can be judged at this stage, the proposed LGM is that engagement is envisaged as happening in exactly these formal and strategic circumstances. That is not to say however that opportunities for engagement are a bad thing – clearly there is an unarguable case for engagement in community planning – it is just to point out that one shouldn’t expect much of it. Citizen engagement was not a significant driver of improvement in the original Best Value regime, has been hard to realise in the development of community strategies and is unlikely, one would guess, to work particularly well in the way described in the proposed LGM.

Service users do however care about their services and would like to be involved in key decisions about them. Again one wonders whether a duty to engage in improvement planning could be combined with existing service planning arrangements.   

6.0 Regulation

The evaluation of the Best Value regime provided good evidence of the effectiveness of service inspections as a driver of improvement. The dilemma, laid bare in the recent banking crisis, is how to strike a balance between the cost of regulation and the cost of failing to identify greater risks to society. The difficulty in the proposals contained in the measure is that regulation seems to be focussed on the inspection of the improvement plan rather than a real service. While these proposals offer the benefit of light touch regulation, again there is a danger that they become divorced from the realities of service provision. The first risk of such formal regulatory processes is that they do not engage the citizens who should be the beneficiaries of them. A second risk is more profound still. It is all too easy for regulators to get tied up in formal processes which say nothing about the real practices they should be regulating.

There are a number of things in the measure that promise to bring things down to earth – arrangements for special inspections under section 22, proposals for performance standards contained in section 8 – and so forth. But there are other elements of the LGM which seem likely to make regulation more difficult – the broad definition of improvement and the paucity of reliable indicators – for example. We want the regulators to give us advance warning of services which are in trouble but the arrangements as proposed seem a circuitous way of achieving this.

7.0 Collaboration

Inter-organizational collaboration, has assumed a central place in the international toolkit of public management reform. The combination of relatively small public service providers and a reluctance to consider mergers (in local government at least) mean, as Beecham explained, that collaboration has greater salience in Wales then England. If we assume that Welsh authorities are collaborating less than they should, and I don’t know whether that is a safe assumption or not,  then it is right to ask how can the Welsh Assembly Government foster greater levels of  collaboration or at least remove barriers to it?

While there is some evidence that establishing duties and powers can help – I’d guess, but again it’s only a guess – that the main barriers to further collaboration are political (in that there is a reluctance on the part of some managers, members and indeed service users to lose control of services), performance oriented (other organisations are focussed on other missions as dictated by other departments within government) and procedural (in that strategic alliances need to go through onerous procurement processes). Requiring collaboration when these problems are still in place, may just lead to reluctant collaborations which would waste rather than save resources.

8.0 Conclusion

As suggested in the introduction it is not really clear how the arrangements detailed in the LGM will work in practice, indeed, given its status, I think my main criticism is that it provides too much detail and may therefore require unnecessarily regular amendment.

Focussing on the key themes – as they will be taken forward in further guidance and practice – there are however questions in my mind about whether the detailed arrangements described in the measure will have their intended effects: will citizens really engage, will improvement plans be used by service managers, will the WAO be monitoring actual performance and will organizations feel free to collaborate? Given that all of these things are likely to be work in progress I’d consider whether there is merit in stepping back a little from some of these very detailed arrangements in favour of a slightly broader more flexible framework.