Serving up a different delivery
Author: Professors George Jones and John Stewart |
Professors George Jones and John Stewart highlight Localis’ recent Catalyst Councils report as they consider how the responsibilities of local authorities for services can be expressed in new ways of working.
Deep changes are taking place in local government. The era of austerity has imposed difficult choices on local authorities, whose full consequences have yet to be felt.
In response, authorities are seeking new ways of working, including service delivery. The range of possibilities being explored extends beyond the limitations of contracting-out. Partnerships, community control, mutuals, co-operative ownership, service-sharing and pooling resources are being introduced by councils of different political persuasions, as is well set out in the recent Localis publication, Catalyst councils.
These developments reflect the vitality of local government, but a cautionary note must be sounded to ensure problems have been anticipated, considered and resolved.
Our starting point is that services being contracted, commissioned, delegated, devolved or shared in partnerships remain and should remain public services, and the responsibility of local authorities held accountable for those services.
They can exercise their responsibility not always directly through their own staff and organisation but indirectly through others. In the final resort, if there is a breakdown in service arrangements, the local authority has to deal with the failure, even assuming direct control, as has happened in those authorities where in-sourcing has replaced out-sourcing.
This article considers how the responsibilities of local authorities for services can be expressed in the new ways of working.
These responsibilities mean these services remain governed by collective choice, based on representative democracy and expressing local government’s role in community leadership and its concern for community wellbeing.
Local authorities should ensure that organisations delivering services on their behalf respect the values, objectives and conditions of the authority whose responsibilities they are discharging.
The new forms of service delivery are not so much privatisation as publicisation, since the organisations are providing public services on behalf of local government. Publicisation then trumps privatisation.
The article discusses the implications of the nature of public services, of the responsibilities of local government and of its role in community leadership. It sets out the issues to be considered by local authorities as they venture into new modes of working.
Public accountability:
Whatever form is adopted for service delivery, as long as public powers are exercised and public resources used, public accountability is required.
But how is that public accountability to be sustained? How will citizens, and councillors as their representatives, raise issues about the provision of services by external organisations?
What information will be available to the local authority, councillors and citizens on the working of the arrangements and of the organisations providing them? And will the organisation be required to publish the same information as the authority, including details of expenditure of more than £250 – formerly £500?
Such questions have to be considered so that public accountability for public services is sustained.
Sustaining the values of local authorities:
Good management depends on appreciation within organisations of its values and the objectives by which they are expressed. Many organisations devote time and effort to ensure their staff appreciate these values, so they can be expressed in action.
Local authorities should consider how their values and objectives can be understood and realised by organisations charged with service-delivery on their behalf.
Some of these values will be particular to each local authority. Other values are inherent in public services, including justice and fairness, searching for the public good – a more appropriate term than the fashionable ‘public value’, upholding local democracy, sustaining citizenship and community, and public accountability. An authority devising new arrangements should ponder how its values will be sustained and its objectives achieved under the new ways of working.
The challenges of community leadership:
Local authorities provide community leadership, bringing together different public organisations in meeting community problems. This role involves local authorities in working with the complex of different organisations by which localities are governed. Local authorities can provide a much-needed means of integration in the fragmented structure of community governance, enabling the pooling of resources to meet community problems.
Yet many of the new forms of service delivery increase rather than reduce the fragmentation of community governance as a multiplicity of organisations deliver services. As such developments extend, local authorities should ensure excessive fragmentation is contained and necessary integration secured.
Flexibility for responsibility:
A local authority needs flexibility to meet the challenges of the era of austerity and the problems of a changing society and economy, and to respond to the aspirations of its citizens for public action.
If its relationships with those carrying out functions on its behalf are over-specified, and resources are too rigidly allocated, the local authority may find its scope for change is costly and limited, weakening the effective government of local communities.
Their responsibilities mean local authorities need to ensure a capacity for flexibility. They should consider how to ensure that capacity.
Fit for purpose within responsibilities:
As the Localis paper shows, many different modes of service delivery are being developed by local authorities, while maintaining a continuing role for direct delivery. Each of the modes has its strengths and weaknesses which have to be understood.
Requirements can and do vary from service to service, and over time and between authorities. The test is fitness for purpose, and there are significant differences between partnerships, mutuals, community control, and means of contracting and out-sourcing.
Most organisations keep their core activities in-house. Should that be the case for local authorities? Which are their core activities? And what forms retain flexibility without additional costs?
There is no point in new modes of delivery if they are not fit for purpose, and purpose should be determined by local authorities in the light of their responsibilities.
Authority responsibilities in the fall-back position:
Where local-authority services are provided by other organisations, the authority remains responsible for the services.
That responsibly means that if the organisation charged with delivering the service cannot fulfil its obligations, the local authority has to step in. It will happen, as it has happened in the past.
A mutual can become ineffective through internal disputes. Community action may lose its force when key actors leave. Financial scandals can arise with any of organisation. A firm may go bankrupt.
An organisation may not provide an adequate service. Local authorities need to consider what happens when organisations fail. Local authorities have no army they can call in, as the Government had for the London Olympics. Preparation beforehand may prevent service breakdown later.
Collective choice for responsible government:
Local government can and, to an extent does, enable individual choice, but there are limits to individual choice – and even where individual choice is extended, it will be within policies and resources determined by collective choice. Indeed, local authorities are charged with denying individual choice where it harms others or undermines the public interest.
Nobody is given an individual choice as to which side of the road to drive on. Many choices are not individual, but collective choices. Policies are decided, parks planned, buildings designed, planning decisions enforced and budgets adopted by collective choice, although informed by individual citizens’ views. Local authorities need to consider where individual choice is appropriate and where collective choice is required.
A foundation in strong representative democracy Collective choice is made in local government by representative democracy.
Effective representation demands that local authorities develop new modes of interaction between councils and citizens, enabling more learning, explaining, listening and hearing.
The moment of truth, with much learning for councillors, is when they receive feedback from citizens, whether in favour of or against what they have proposed. Participation supports and informs representative democracy. At a time of innovation, local authorities should be considering how to strengthen representative democracy, which becomes of critical importance if the responsibility of local authorities for the services provided is to be maintained.
Conclusion:
The extent of the changes being considered in local authorities gives urgency to the issues raised in this article. These innovations are, to a greater or less extent, transforming the nature of local government.
After such changes, local authorities remain responsible for the public services provided and for giving community leadership. Unless the issues discussed in this article are considered, then the role of local authorities will be undermined, putting in doubt the discharge of their responsibilities and the good government of local areas.
This outcome need not arise as long as the issues raised here are considered and resolved, and not put on one side, until problems arise. ,Our argument is neither for nor against the innovations in service-delivery taking place in local government. It is for focusing on preparation.
The answers to the questions raised should determine the arrangements made, including the nature of the agreement with the organisations involved and the processes for managing these new arrangements. Innovation will then not be reckless, but responsible.
George Jones is emeritus professor at the London School of Economics, and John Stewart is emeritus professor at INLOGOV at Birmingham University.