Governance, risk and resilience – report and toolkit launch: from 11.00 to 12.00 on Tuesday 9 March 2021
Good governance is important in ensuring good decision making and leadership in local authorities. Weakness in governance can have far reaching implications for individual councils and the people they serve.
It is therefore important for councils to have a way to work through what good governance looks like for them, to understand how the risk of weak governance can be minimised and be fully aware of the attitudes and behaviours that underpin this.
To address this risk, The Centre for Governance and Scrutiny has been working jointly with Localis since the publication in 2018 of “Decline and fall”, to explore issues around failure in local government and central government intervention.
We have produced a set of toolkits to support not only council officers in the “golden triangle’” but also individual officers, elected members and non-specialists on addressing governance, risk and resilience. Based on seven characteristics of good governance, the toolkit provides practical examples of positive and negative behaviours to stimulate internal discussion, assessment and action planning.
The practical tools were developed in association with our project partners, which include the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Local Government Association, the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy, Local Partnerships and the law firm Trowers & Hamlins LLP.
We launched the toolkit on a Zoom webinar at 11.00 a.m. Tuesday 9th March, an event led as moderator Lord Kerslake alongside experts in governance from across the sector including: –
- Helen Bailey, chief executive Sutton LBC
- Siobhan Jones, director of local government and communities at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
- Cllr Marianne Overton, leader of the Local Government Association’s Independent Group
The discussion expanded upon the key findings underpinning the toolkit and debate some of the following strategic issues for practical adoption against the context of local authority resilience as we mark the first full year since the Covid-19 pandemic:
- What can the sector learn and take on board from recent well-publicized governance failures?
- To what extent can our councils take responsibility for improving governance and forestalling potential difficulties by engaging to transform their internal culture and mindset?
- At national level, has the central state factored in the impact of the pandemic on the financial stresses and the service and organisational resilience of our councils? And to what extent might or should this mitigated?
You can watch the launch below:
Project undertaken with:
Project kindly supported by:
