People and places, not organisations, will be features of the council of 2020
Author: Gwilym Tudor Jones, in the Guardian |
There are stormy seas ahead for local government: business as usual is not an option. The cost of adult social care is predicted to consume over half of council budgets by 2020, so to stay afloat local authorities will have to navigate perilously close to rocky shores.
With this outlook in mind, at one of our roundtable discussions at the 2013 LGA Conference, council leaders and chief executives looked into their crystal balls to see what we could expect from the council of 2020.
In spite of it all, they discovered a spirit of cautious optimism. Those present agreed that the next spending review is likely to be no less gloomy. However, even with further significant budget reductions on the horizon, in absolute terms there is still a fair amount of cash whirling around the public sector.
The issue, then, is how the state can do more with the money it has across the system.
Place-based budgeting ? the idea of pooling all public resources in a given area and rethinking how they might be used to better effect ? was high up the agenda. To ignore the financial gains from the government’s community budget pilot programme would be folly. As one chief executive pointed out, hundreds of millions of pounds of savings in a single county cannot be sniffed at.
But the issue goes beyond a knee-jerk response to the austerity agenda and hits right to the heart of the future of public services. Rewiring public services around people and places, rather than organisations, harnessing the knowledge and experience of local leaders, will be a vital part of how the public sector, not just local government, will operate in 2020.
This begs a further question: will the boundaries between local authorities and government departments exist in 2020? One council leader envisioned a public service family in which the silos separating local and central government departments are utterly shattered.
But in all this, strong local, democratically accountable leadership will be key. Local government leaders can become ? and indeed, in some areas, are becoming ? the stewards of local public services. But for this to take root, said one council leader, visibility and transparency in expenditure throughout the public sector is key.
Despite ? or perhaps because of ? the difficult economic conditions those in charge of the councils represented were ready to take on the challenge. The one certainty, we heard, is that the council of 2020 will look radically different to that of today.
Far from complete, they say, the great transformation of local public services is only just underway.
Gwilym Tudor Jones is a Research Fellow at Localis ? the localism and local government think tank.