This week I attended the annual local government association conference in Bournemouth with colleagues and politicians. As you can imagine, in a post Brexit referendum world there was much talk about what next for the country, local government and financial and social policy generally. There is much hysteria around the subject which I think we need to cut through and focus on doing the right things for our county and its communities. Hers’s my view on what we should focus on over the next 4-5 years. I would be very grateful for your feedback and thoughts on this.
These “thought starters” seek to kick start discussions around our approach to a wider programme of change and improvement across all aspects of the council. They seek to addresses the wider issues of the major challenges we face in Local Government, the outcomes we seek to achieve in the county, how we might address these and organise ourselves effectively to meet the challenges ahead.
All councils face similar challenges over the next 5 years or so. These are widely accepted to be focused around the following areas:
a) Demand management (adults, children, waste) including prevention.
b) Devolution (to us, from us) and linked to this associated economic and housing growth (the premise being that we can grow our economy and housing market faster with increased powers).
c) Health and social care integration; and other public service integration; these being in the context of resource reductions affecting all partners directly, so they face heavier pressure to withdraw services and have fewer resources to design and develop integrated services.
d) Continued significant reductions in finance (grant income, particularly removal of RSG and move to increased business rate retention). This may accelerate post-BREXIT.
These four challenges should shape not only our next Business Plan, but also the manifestos of the parties standing in the 2017 election. These are the “wicked issues” which politicians, at least at the local level, need to address and have a plan for. Additionally, all of these problems exceed the ability of any one organisation to resolve them – they can only be addressed effectively by acting jointly with other partner organisations in our system.
Previously, this organisation has been ahead of the game in identifying the challenges it faces and bold and innovative in terms of how it meets these challenges. Examples at the organisation level would be the move to a unitary council, in-sourcing ICT, asset utilisation and disposal (now over £90m), integration of Public Health and leisure, our organisation-wide response to CSE, and at the service level there are multiple examples including Help-to-Live-at-Home, our Ofsted improvement programme, and the planning transformation programme. Peer review and external inspection evidence for all of these interventions is strong with a positive direction of travel.
As an organisation, we should consider the need to design, develop and launch an integrated programme of continuous improvement and change to specifically address the areas identified above. I specifically don’t use the term “transformation” which fails to acknowledge that every service and every manager is currently involved in some form of transformation. We need to see this programme of work as organisation-wide, involving everybody.
As leaders in the Wiltshire system, part of our role is to enable the development of the strongest system possible within the constraints we face. Some guidelines that could lead to this would be as follows:
· We, as system partners, would do less service delivery while enabling others to do more, overall increasing prevention and early intervention. That is, we should do only the right things for the right people, agreed with citizens and with our system partners. This would mean a new citizen-provider “agreement” that re-balances citizen and state roles while also reaching agreement with partners about which people receive what help from the system.
· We as partners together with the VCS are the providers of the citizens’ system – it is their system for their purpose, not ours. (We derive our purpose from Wiltshire’s citizens, in any case.) We should be acting jointly as normal service delivery rather than focusing our collaboration primarily on “rub points”.
· We, as partners, are stewards of system assets rather than organisation assets. Increasingly we view property in this way, but could (should) extend this to people and process assets?
In return for citizens and communities doing more and the system partners refocusing our services, the system partners would act much more collectively, reshaping our activities (and staff roles) to maximize the assets put to the service of citizens, for direct service delivery. The return on investment in integration should result in a smaller net system workforce with minimal duplication between partners.
These changes would have to be done with full appreciation of the legal constraints and mandated changes required of each partner, and also with the creativity and determination to minimize their impact on collective service delivery. The same applies to the very significant cultural differences between the partners: health, for example has a markedly higher professional and cost management mentality, when compared with the council’s relatively higher client focus. Informed collective risk management will be an essential element.
Delivering this would be a major enterprise and hugely challenging. It would require exceptional political and executive leadership and the hearts and minds of our staff, who would have to think and operate in a very different way to the present, both during and after the changes. I believe that this would be a natural progression for many of our staff, who have shown outstanding change resilience and engagement over the last ten years.
Delivering these changes would, over time, evolve the Wiltshire system into something very different to its current state.
This agenda to accelerate and focus change on the four areas above needs an external and internal perspective; driven with pace, visibility and an identifiable brand so that all staff and partners can align with the programme, its objectives, and more importantly the outcomes. It should be the very DNA of the organisation moving forward both internally and externally. Just like our One Council programme 2006-2009.
It should be focused on Wiltshire’s people (its citizens, residents, customers, clients and businesses), Wiltshire the place (economic growth, jobs, housing enabled through long term spatial planning but acknowledging and protecting the special place that is Wiltshire) and Wiltshire Council and our partners, the organisation in terms of improved efficiency, productivity, higher performance with less money and people.
Outcomes need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound) and aligned to the national and local political priorities, 2017 manifesto commitments and emerging Business Plan 2017-21. They should be few in number and focused around the following:
· Customer, client, citizen, business satisfaction
· Improved, robust and reliable service performance on an appropriate business infrastructure
· Collective ‘organisation-blind’ operations/delivery with our partners, especially at a local level
· A more effective and efficient organisation: services designed round customer purpose with people doing the right thing more of the time; more automation of delivery, lower cost, increased productivity
· A reshaped workforce: (i) lower numbers across the system with a different mix and skills; (ii) management with a more outward/outcome focus than the current inward/reduction focus
· Demand which is jointly predicted, modelled and controlled
· Commissioning which creates a stronger system for citizens, rather than individual elements within the system
· Growth across the county (new business, existing business, jobs, housing)
· Strong communities; who can look after themselves wherever possible
· Devolution (to us from Whitehall and from us to Town and Parish Councils)
· Innovation (what do we want to be the best at and stand out for?)
· Leadership at all levels, both political and organisational
This is about systems leadership and I would welcome your thoughts on this thinking and approach as we develop it together over the summer.
Speak again soon. For daily updates, discussion, personal opinion, comment or just to connect or keep in touch you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/drcarltonbrand.
Carlton
