Back in March this year I entered this essay into the Policy Network’s Hardy Award for Excellence in Policy competition. I recently found out that it came in as the runner-up and working on the principle that nothing should go to waste, I thought I’d post it here. The essay argues for a re-invigoration of local policy making, with a shift away from reacting to nationally developed frameworks and more home-grown experimentation and distinctive local political innovation.
Looking for the silver lining...
“The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’” observes Edgar in King Lear as madness and mayhem mounts and the body count on the stage rises. In the current economic climate, forecasters seem to be outdoing one another in their forecasts of doom and in foretelling the worst is yet to come.
Tony Travers of the London School of Economics has predicted hard times ahead for local government – seven years, he anticipates of dis-investment in the public sector as the Government seeks to reduce public borrowing and begin to claw back the vast sums of money spent in recent months to refloat the money markets.
Steve Bundred, chief executive of the Audit Commission, has warned that ‘any managers of a public service who are not planning now on the basis they will have substantially less money to spend in two years time are living in cloud cuckoo land.’
So we could all be forgiven for thinking that this is the worst of times for local government. We face a future where we will have less money and potentially increasing social demands as impacts of the recession such as unemployment and family breakdown, start to bite.
But perhaps the very factors which we think will make our role as place-shapers more difficult actually offer potential for councils to show what that nebulous phrase, place-shaping, means in reality. The challenges posed by the recession could unlock the sector’s policy making potential.
Critics of local government say that we are quick to identify the things that constrain us – central government’s regulatory framework; a centralised funding system – but are less willing to show leadership, to generate our own ideas rather than highlighting the limitations in other people’s.
So we must avoid becoming diverted into a tug of war over the merits of the Comprehensive Area Assessment and slavishly re-configuring ourselves to better match the latest Audit Commission multi-fit model of effectiveness. This is the ideal moment for local government to show how we can develop innovative policies ourselves that address the challenges ahead.
There are a number of ways that councils can do this. Fundamentally, we need to take a leaf out of E F Schumacher’s book and assert ‘small is beautiful’ policy-making – local government as if local people matter. That means moving away from a passive policy role in which we respond to the big ideas emanating from Whitehall, think tanks and academia. Over the last twenty years these big idea solutions have promised first that competition, then targets and now people power, will effect transformational change. To borrow a phrase from Audacity of Hope, they have offered ‘sound-bite solutions to complicated problems’.
Policy making in the NHS is a case in point. The NHS seems to have been in a constant state of upheaval almost since inception, based upon a belief that it is wholesale headline-grabbing changes to structure or commissioning that will result in a better patient experience.
But policy making in local government is qualitatively different. It should be local and authentic to each individual council’s understanding of what will make a practical difference on the ground. At this time of recession, it means tackling the effects of the downturn as they are being felt in local neighbourhoods. And this is a change we can make without investment. It means redirecting existing resources away from responding to regulatory requirements and putting less funding into intermediary organisations so that we grow our own policy capacity.
At the same time, we need to restore ideology to this locally driven policy making. Just as our high streets have become bland because they feature the same chain stores, there’s a sameness often about the vision and policy aspirations that councils articulate. Developing more distinctive policies should make it explicit that at time of recession and reduced resources, decisions based on principle not just pragmatism must be made. And it is local politicians because of their democratic mandate that can legitimately make these tough decisions. Representative democracy is sometimes about, ‘You said, we didn’t’, unpalatable though that may be.
Civil servants would probably shudder at the idea, but allied to this, we need to explore the case for special advisors in local government. While many authorities do have political assistants, a cadre of more senior political advisors who work closely with officers to develop distinctive local policy initiatives could provide a renewed ideological stimulus. This could be part of a more collaborative way of working between councillors and officers which places less emphasis on the mechanics of how we transact business and more emphasis on developing innovative local solutions.
Increasingly the issues that we are dealing with involve behavioural changes. Reducing obesity, encouraging people to walk and cycle instead of using their cars will entail reversing entrenched trends. So a third change is that we need to have the confidence in local government policy making to take a longer-term approach. We need to be willing to develop approaches which seek to bring about changes over five, ten years and beyond. And we must be confident enough to seek to address some of these issues even though we know that measuring the impact of the actions we are taking will be hard.
Improving policy-making means maximising the knowledge and talent amongst council staff and creating a new culture across the sector which makes it much easier for people to work in different areas and contribute to policy making. Here councils can learn from the civil service which designs jobs much more broadly around skill sets and thus is able to deploy people more flexibly. In local government we tend to specify jobs narrowly and at an early stage in their careers people become specialists. Innovative policy making can be inhibited by this static approach. The solution is to redesign jobs in a generic way and for it to become the norm for people to work across different service areas throughout their careers. Linked to this, building upon the success of the national graduate development programme, the local government sector should be exploring the development of a longer-term management development programme. Talent management is something that we have been slow to grasp.
Externally, we could usefully break down the surprisingly persistent barriers which exist between councils, think tanks, academic institutions, Whitehall departments and third sector organisations to create a much more fluid set of arrangements that facilitate local policy-making. At the moment some secondments and job swaps do take place but in an ad hoc way. A formalised exchange programme run by the Improvement & Development Agency to which organisations could subscribe would be a simple low cost way of breaking down historic barriers and establishing a new norm whereby civil servants, third sector colleagues and council officers would spend time working in a different environment. Over time the exchange programme could develop an international dimension.
Much of this is about building capacity in the sector and working differently. One of the positive outcomes of strengthening our capacity in this way is that it will build something which is itself hard to measure and yet crucial to effectiveness, confidence. It is after all a loss of confidence which underpins our current financial crisis.
Noel Coward wrote that the secret of success is the capacity to survive failure. The regulatory framework that has developed over the last fifteen years or so has encouraged councils to become risk-averse, compliant and pragmatic. Of course councils, as political organisations responsible for very large sums of public money are right to be prudent but small is beautiful local policy making must sometimes be allowed to fail, because it is through those failures that the learning comes. Out of the worst, sometimes comes the best.
