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Innovate or slash and burn: what now for local government in England?
Following a very thought provoking workshop at the Institute for Government last week, I have begun to crystallize thoughts that have been around since the 2008 financial crisis.
At the time I was especially conscious of the funding timescales of public bodies and it was quite obvious that the financial crisis would hit the public sector some 18-24 months after the banking sector. We are currently in the first, and by no means last, throes of this.
Without being intentionally Leninist, what is to be done?
This question can be split into many strands but here I will concentrate solely on the following (of course I welcome responses on others that I’ve missed here):
- What will public bodies look like in 5-10 years, will there be radical organizational change or simply extreme contraction?
- Unlike the private sector, public sector business does not simply go away if we stop doing it, hence what are the social and financial implications of this?
- Assuming there is a vacuum, how will this be filled?
- To what extent do the suggested policy responses of ‘Big Society’, ‘Localism’, ‘GP Consortia’ and ‘Community Budgets’ hang together in practical terms?
Neither councilors, nor senior executives in public bodies are well prepared for these issues. The current generation have lived through a long period of growth, during which one of the main skills required of directors was to ensure that the budgets were spent by the end of year and were able to demonstrate how they had hit a plethora of (primarily qualitative) performance indicators.
The rules of the game have changed.
What sort of leadership do public bodies require?
What sorts of organizations will they need to be?
Do we know what success looks like and can we measure and demonstrate this?
Nobody really knows yet, herein lays a significant challenge for PASCAL and the academic community more widely.
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Innovation essential, but is there time?
Interesting post, Peter. I think the requirement for change goes far wider than just the approach of, and within public bodies if policies of localism and promoting the role of the third sector and communities are to have a chance. They require a change in mind-set from not just council leaders and senior officials, bu also service providers and community activists too. The fundamental move it seems to me for public bodies is towards enabling rather than direct service provision, embracing social entrepreneurship and building social capital around place in communities. This is a huge process which will take time - more time than the Government is allowing under their auserity measures. But there are all sorts of initiatives out there. Practice needs to be scaled up and shared. PASCAL should be able to help with this.
John,I believe you are
John,
I believe you are correct to focus on the mind-set and behaviour change required. The challenge for this to take place is one that will live on beyond a 5 year electoral term. We are dealing with a great deal of inertia relating largely to the financial good times but also decades of passive behaviours from citizens, community groups and other thrid sector bodies. Social entrepreneurship is one powerful route, but this, again, is not well-embedded in English cultural norms. Soical capital is, in my opinion, a far more difficult area. One hears social capital being referred to as a solution when we neither understand the porblem nor know if it is even possible to create social capital where there has previously been a void.
PASCAL can be more responsive as we are not contrained by political cycles, we have a duty to be so.