Local authorities likely to take a patchwork approach to services
Author: Jane Dudman, The Guardian |
More than a third of council leaders and chief executives think that there are no local services that could not delivered by a third-party provider.
These findings come from a report published on 13 September by local government thinktank Localis, which says that councils are set to change radically.
The new report, Catalyst Councils, says “traditional” councils that do everything themselves will be replaced by a more diverse approach, with local authorities working with a patchwork of organisations from across the public, private and voluntary sectors to deliver local services such as waste collection, road maintenance, social care, planning, housing and environmental health. Some councils are making significant headway in changing the way they provide services, says the report, and few are now “monolithic, top-down providers of remote, unresponsive” services.
But barriers still exist to greater change in local government, including ideological opposition to new ways of providing services, staff reluctance to move out of local council employment and set up their own, employee-owned spin-offs, and muted appetite for enterprise and risk among councillors and officers. Complex EU rules also come under fire in the report for hampering commissioning from third-sector providers and mutuals.
The need to improve commissioning skills and expertise is also highlighted in the report. Localis wants the government and the Local Government Association to set up a committee on better commissioning to assess how councils can close the skills gap.
According to research used in the report, two thirds of council chiefs claimed the opportunity to use external expertise and skills was a major reason for working with outside partners. The report also found despite being more experienced than the rest of the public sector with commissioning, many councils said they wanted to have greater skills in order to successfully commission external poviders.
Alex Thomson, chief executive of Localis, said the financial situation faced by local government was serious and the status quo was not a viable option. He said that if the public sector could become more receptive to new ideas, the voluntary sector more open to working in collaborative alliances and the private sector more of a risk-sharing partner, then local authorities would have “a decent shot” at continuing to provide high-quality public services in the coming years.