The Local Government White Paper was launched yesterday around the bridges and buildings of Gateshead. As the Prime Minister and Ruth Kelly shook hands and met the public, we were trying to make sense of it. Was it the damp squib many feared, a holding operation till Lyons delivers the real policy about money? Or has the world changed and are we to find ourselves knee deep in Giuliani-style mayors and the government giving power away left, right and centre?
In the North East the view was cautiously positive. In fact, at the CBI North East’s annual dinner last night, the chair of the organisation was only a little short of gushing in his assessment – and that was after Blair had left the room! Key local government leaders were similarly onside. So now we have had time to digest it a little, what is the prognosis?
The main points seem good and there is much that will appeal to those with a progressive disposition. There are clear moves to strengthen citizen and community input into local decision making. Further steps have been made towards decentralisation and trying to capture what it is that matters to people where they live. There is a welcome acknowledgement that making ideas work requires good relationships and a shared sense of direction as much as targets.
It is these two ideas, of really shifting the balance of power from central to local and working in partnership, that deserve further scrutiny. With much of the details of actual powers and functions depending on various forthcoming Treasury reviews, these two features become a centrepiece of the white paper. They can be a force for change, though much rests on local government led partnerships being able to deliver and central government giving them the space to do so. If this arrangement is not seen to be working, it will inevitably become a focus for criticism by the government’s political opponents.
Partnership often sounds easy – just bring everyone together, agree some priorities and then we’ll all pursue them. Experience should have taught us by now that it is not that straightforward, and relying on partnership could be a high risk strategy.
There is no doubt that partnerships can bring benefits, as seen across the border in Scotland. Much of what is in the white paper bares a great deal of resemblance to Community Planning, which was introduced in Scotland in 2003. A recent Audit Scotland report found that the community planning process is working well in a number of areas, creating a culture of trust and cooperation. However the process is still hampered by continued administrative confusion, with funding fragmented and therefore inefficiently targeted.
Closer to home, an evaluation of Local Strategic Partnerships found wide disparities in how well partnerships are functioning in different parts of the country. Well over half of LSPs evaluated considered a “lack of partner commitment” an important or very important factor in the lack of progress on this. How effectively will the proposals in the white paper – to place a duty on public sector partners to engage with and sign up to local priority setting – deal with this, and what sanctions await those who fail to deliver?
The two examples point to the knotty issue of power, which is rather glossed over in the white paper. The white paper is riddled with the phrase ‘pay regard to’. Is public sector bodies having to ‘pay regard to’ locally set priorities really going to be sufficient to herald the shift of power to the local level? A very different local landscape is clearly the intention, but unless we change our whole discourse and approach to partnerships it could simply become a more cluttered one.
Perhaps the most incisive recent review of partnership in action was found in the OECD territorial review of Newcastle and the North East. Its cautionary words need to be answered:
“…given that many [partnerships] are contracts between partners with short term objectives or to deliver services, there is very often no long term commitment to general goals for the area.”
They attribute this to “an environment of fragmentation and strong central control, with limited regional resources and little room to manoeuvre” making engagement an unattractive proposition.
So as we all digest the detail it is this next phase in the policy making cycle that is critical. The institute of public policy research north does more than reside outside London, it is a recognition that good policy requires good implementation. It is probably not by chance that the white paper was launched in Gateshead. It is a local authority that has successfully combined a strategic and ambitious vision for change with policies that are rooted in local communities. The real test will be whether the white paper allows local authorities like Gateshead to achieve even more.