PluggedIN – Alex Thomson
Author: Alex Thomson, in the MJ |
Localis has had a busy month, running events at all three of the party conferences.
While many aspects of conference season remain painfully constant – the long days and nights, the underwhelming food and wine, the overwhelming sense of being in a disconnected bubble where politics really matters to everyone you meet – the theme that came across to me most strongly this year was change and, more specifically, the pace of change.
Benjamin Disraeli, a man who I like to imagine was in his element at 3am in the bar of the Midland, once said: ‘Change is inevitable in a progressive country. Change is constant’.
I think that is probably true for local government as well.
What is so striking about the times we live in is the unstoppable tide of change that has engulfed councils in the last few years. For decades, the environment in which local government operated altered in a gradual, step-by-step, semi-predictable fashion; now all is flux.
Plenty of this change has not been good news for local government. Back in 2007, only the preternaturally gloomy could have predicted the trajectory that grant funding has taken since then.
I suspect that even the most Panglossian in the sector could not have foreseen that 2013 would see councils taking control of the majority of public health funding, let alone having a major role in overseeing the commissioning of local health services.
While there has long been talk about better integration between health and social care, progress has been limited. The key message of the speakers (Dan Poulter, Stephen Dorrell, Paul Carter) at our fringe event on this subject was that genuine integration was no longer desirable but essential, and urgently.
If local government (and partners) can pull it off, it really will be a change for the better.
Perhaps the biggest change was the full-throated support for a quantum shift towards real localism that came through from the panels at our other fringes at both Labour (John Healey, Chris Williamson, Claire Kober) and Conservative conferences (Greg Clark, Sir Merrick Cockell, Richard Cornelius).
Could we be on the brink of genuine, even irrevocable, change in the relationship between central and local government, regardless of who wins the next election? Let’s hope so.
Alex Thomson is chief executive of Localis