The recent regeneration of Birmingham city centre has rightly been praised by many. But fewer people are aware of our long-term agenda for modernising governance in the city. We are engaged in probably the most radical redesign of a local council in the last 50 years – and it is just as vital to a successful city as new buildings.
The changes we are making should receive much more attention as part of the ‘new localism’ debate. At last we have come full circle from the centralism that has dominated since the war. But, as power and accountability are dispersed, local councils – especially in our great cities – must have the confidence to reclaim a leading role.
To do that, councils must change radically. The doctrine of ‘administrative centralism’ goes to the heart of our culture and organisation. It is not good enough simply to call for more devolution from the centre.
We must demonstrate how councils themselves can change to suit a more diverse, rapidly changing world.
Birmingham is a city of one million people. This scale gives us both the need to localise our services and the potential to do that sustainably. A modern city council has two distinct roles. On the one hand, we need the strategic vision and partnership working that can connect the city to the global economy and build the investment and prosperity that underlies success. On the other, we must ensure that local services are more integrated, responsive and accessible to communities.
Our policy has been some years in the making. Back in 2000, the report of our democracy commission called for devolution of services. We issued a ‘green paper’ that invited views on the way forward. The Birmingham Constitutional Convention produced a declaration of intent, later endorsed by the council.
We are devolving executive powers to eleven new constituency committees and establishing constituency organisations to support them. These constituencies are the size of many districts, so they provide a sustainable unit for service planning and delivery and working with our partners. At the same time, we are moving to just five strategic directorates at the centre and shifting the senior management resource from the centre to local areas.
But our aims for devolution do not stop there. The constituencies are seen as enablers, focusing on neighbourhood management and participation. This will not follow a central blueprint: each will develop its own proposals for more local arrangements. Key to this are various forms of local strategic partnership and local community planning.
The approach is incremental and will gather pace as the culture begins to change and the capacity for new ways of working is developed. We are not simply dividing up services into eleven. Instead we have developed several models of organisation, from complete localisation to service-level agreements with a city-wide provider. These arrangements will evolve over time.
The progress made in Birmingham’s schools has taught us that the secret of success (apart from sustained investment) lies in the relationship between central and local. Local managers must have more freedom to innovate and to take responsibility for meeting local needs. The centre needs to put in place a supportive performance management framework.
We will set basic service standards, whilst encouraging constituencies to exceed these. We will set out our policy framework and key targets for the city as a whole, whilst recognising the priorities will differ, so each area will make a different contribution to the whole.
Councils like Birmingham, having faced up to the need for reform, should be at the heart of the debate about the new localism. New forms of local governance should not ignore the potential role of local councillors working in partnership with communities and service providers. Perhaps Birmingham will provide a ‘laboratory’ for developing new localist ideas? I suspect the outcome of such learning could well be better than structures developed purely from the centre.