Looking ahead to 2020
Author: Alex Thomson, in LGC |
Any indie music fan of my vintage will always have a soft spot for Manchester, so I was always going to enjoy the recent LGA conference in the city of Paris Angels, Inspiral Carpets and Stone Roses.
But I also enjoyed the roundtable event Localis held with Interserve, in which we asked a group of council leaders, chief executives and parliamentary colleagues what the council of 2020 might look like and what the key challenges over the next decade might be.
Unsurprisingly, the number one challenge was universally agreed to be financial where the prediction for the situation in 2020 for local government, and local public services more widely, could be summarised as ?a lot like 2013 but more so?.
Another challenge that came out strongly in the discussion was around the importance and difficulty of collaboration – both within and without the sector. On the former, attendees weren’t just thinking about shared services, though that form of partnership clearly has a substantial contribution to make, but also about how individual councils can support others.
In an increasingly diverse sector, some councils thrive on greater opportunities while others look increasingly vulnerable. How will the sector help those councils that simply don’t have the capacity to reshape themselves in response to the tests they face?
And the intriguing question was posed: do councils have a wider responsibility beyond their own borders? As one contributor suggested, if council jobs are lost in an area of high employment, but others are created in areas of low employment as a result, has the council contributed to a wider public need?
Collaboration across the wider public sector was also the source of much debate. There was a general feeling that the case for formal place-based budgets was proved. But, hearteningly, there was also a clear belief that there was no need to sit around waiting for government permission to act, and that a more organic form of bespoke locally-driven public service reform would be widespread long before the end of the decade, regardless of what ministers decreed.
This optimism was tempered with questions marks about the desire of colleagues in other organisations to engage. Several participants said that they had found the NHS has been the most difficult to get to the table on joining up public services – despite the fairly evident truth that they had the most to gain. There were questions over whether local authorities and partners would be brave enough to make tough decisions through their health and wellbeing boards. And if they did seize the nettle, how would national and local politicians react?
Notwithstanding these qualms, the mood of those around the table was positive and there was a robust confidence that the idea of local government leading reorganised local public services was – to quote a double A side single of my era – not Fools Gold, but rather more What The World Is Waiting For.