Moving about from 'Deliverology'
As we all know, combined authorities sit at the heart of a complex local public service landscape. The idea is that tying the activity of public services across the board to the Government’s new missions will bring consistency and direction to how those partners work together. At the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny our focus is on decision-making, oversight and accountability – the mechanics and behaviours that sit around public service governance. In the interests of continuing the conversation we wanted to delve into what this might mean for councils, and for combined authorities, from a practical, governance perspective.
At the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny our focus is on decision-making, oversight and accountability – the mechanics and behaviours that sit around public service governance. In the interests of continuing the conversation we wanted to delve into what this might mean for councils, and for combined authorities, from a practical, governance perspective.
Elle’s piece framed the shift as one away from ‘deliverology’, into a very different model of how services are designed and delivered. I want to really highlight the profound change that this will bring to the way that we work – if it comes to pass.While our familiar world of key performance indicators, balanced scorecards, risk registers and the assorted paraphernalia of modern governance is not going to be swept away overnight, what is in prospect is a change of similar significance to that which accompanied the local government modernisation agenda of the late 90s.
The new approach will be about collaboration – but collaboration and partnership of a different depth to that which we have experienced hitherto.What does this mean for governance and decision-making – particularly at combined authority level? It means we will have to find a way of balancing the legal mechanics of authorities’ existing governance arrangements with the needs of a messier, more experimental approach to design and delivery.
Managed poorly, this could be seen to put representative democracy at risk (and even to undermine the hitherto-central role of elected combined authority mayors). Authorities’ freedom to act will be hemmed in by the interests of partners, and the voice of residents given formal voice through innovation in the use of citizens’ assemblies and other forms of participatory policy making.Worse, it is easy to see this as innovation for the sake of innovation, wonkish ideas that will soon dissipate when they come into contact with the reality of services on the ground.But this is to underestimate the scale of the challenges that need to be solved, and the failure of our existing, top-down, systems to resolve those matters.
A similarly top-down approach to missions (Government sets a myriad of mission-themed targets, a huge bureaucracy is created to monitor progress in meeting them) will fail as previous attempts have done. Local leaders will need to be empowered within the overall framing of the missions to create the kinds of interventions at a local level most likely to succeed. Every area will demand a different approach, different tactical priorities, and a deep local knowledge that will be impossible to impose from Whitehall.
While it is difficult to predict the content of the forthcoming English Devolution Bill and the accompanying ‘devolution framework’, we would hope that it would acknowledge this – and that future devolution arrangements reflect the need for significant local discretion.Hence the need for a very different approach to governance – one that will be about experimentation, getting used to a much more candid approach to our work with partners, and understanding what these changes will mean for the traditional ‘democratic space’ within and around both local and combined authorities.
At a local and sub-regional level there will be a space for politicians as curators and custodians of the systems that exist to support people to come together and work in partnership.Those systems are what will frame the change in behaviours that we, and Elle, have talked about as being so necessary – they will need to be light and flexible enough to provide a support to people’s attempts to work together (and to resolve areas of divergence), and to avoid the risk of creating cumbersome bureaucracy that will hinder the kind of experimentation that missions will need in order to succeed.
For those of us working in governance specialisms this is our task – to conceive of and build these systems and frameworks, to explore how they will work with our existing legal obligations, and to use these things together to create an ecosystem at local level where collaboration is a habit, and where roles, responsibilities and accountabilities are understood, and transparent.
We’re pleased to be part of the ongoing conversation about the emergence of these new arrangements – recognising that their promise is exciting, but that making it work will require significant work and effort and significant shifts in mindset (not least on the part of Government itself).
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