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CSR 2007

What follows are some brief insights on the CSR and some of its implications for our clients:

 

It’s not about the money!
Andrew Carter on the challenges facing RDAs and local authorities.

Policy and strategy are important but implementation is the deciding factor in achieving successful economic development and regeneration.  Whilst the CSR drawing on the SNR lays out the right issues and suggests the right responses, the elephant in the room is whether the RDAs and local authorities, identified by the government as central to delivering the SNR, have the skills, powers and resources to meet the challenge.

All the recent reviews from Lyons through Barker and Leitch to the SNR recognise that:

  • local authorities have the responsibility to represent the needs and views of their area and its people;
  • the governance of services is important, i.e. where and by whom decisions about policy and funding are made, and the respective roles of local, sub-regional and regional bodies needs to be clarified;   
  • economic activity does not respect administrative boundaries which necessitates the need to bring together different services and decisions to get the best overall solution;
  • wider quality of life issues need to be linked into economic strategy making.

It is certainly the case at the moment that local authorities and RDAs have more responsibilities and targets than they have powers and flexibilities to deliver them.  Whilst there are some highlights in the CSR around Supplementary Business Rates (SBR) and the increasing amount of funds that can be delivered through the more flexible Revenue Support Grant this is partially off-set by the reduction in the importance of LABGI, which whilst limited is beginning to bear fruit, and the continued capping on council tax increases.   

In the current context of declining real resources being able to do more with less is the challenge.  This requires local authorities and RDAs to adopt an investment rather than an expenditure perspective.  How can £1 of public money leverage £2 of private money? How can under-used assets (land, buildings, people) in the public sector be ‘sweated’ to produce better returns for local communities? 

This perspective requires public agencies to see economic development and regeneration as commercial activities which demand an entrepreneurial approach, as well as organisational structures to encourage and facilitate this.  Likewise public interventions must be flexible and capable of adaptation to reflect different circumstances.  Finally, public agencies must continuously work with partners to identify and test the merits of new and existing investment opportunities within the economic development and regeneration agenda.

With greater power comes greater responsibility.  But responsibility without accountability leads to poor outcomes.  The challenge for government is to ensure that the winners from the CSR, local authorities and RDAs, have the skills and capacity to meet and deliver their increased responsibilities appropriately.   The skills required to maximise a budget are not the same as those required to spend it.  This significant shift in focus represents the biggest challenge facing RDAs and local authorities, investing in the resources required to meet this focus must be a priority for these agencies.

To find out more on our work around leveraging private sector investment contact andrew.carter@rocketsciencelab.co.uk.


 

Pick and mix performance?
John Griffiths provides an overview of how new PSAs could play out through Local Area Agreements and what local partnerships need to be considering.

Irrespective of the dithering of the Brown government over whether or not to call a snap General Election and seek a fresh mandate, a number of Rocket Science’s contacts in the Civil Service have remarked how the Brown administration is very different from that of Tony Blair.  Ever since Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term Presidency in the 1930s, it is usual for a new government’s first hundred days to come under scrutiny for tell-tale signs of a clean break with the past.  Perhaps one of the strongest indications of the change from Blair to Brown is in the new government’s intention to rationalise the hundreds of Public Service Agreements (PSAs).

Introduced in the first Comprehensive Spending Review, PSAs originally underpinned Whitehall’s desire under New Labour to modernise public services, but in many areas they have fallen into disrepute as central government’s irresistible tendency to micro-manage has belied its intention to empower professionals, service users and local communities.  The health service is just one example where the target-driven culture has created perverse behaviours and inappropriate resource allocations simply to meet externally set national priorities – such as a reduction in patient waiting times – rather than locally identified clinical needs. 

Following commitments stated in last October’s Local Government White Paper, Strong and Prosperous Communities, the CSR 2007 has now confirmed the introduction of a new performance management framework with a streamlined set of 30 over-arching PSAsthat reflect the Government’s priorities for the next 3-year funding period.

At the centre, each government department will be required to publish its set of Departmental Strategic Objectives (DSOs) for the CSR2007 period covering those PSAs that are most relevant in the context of the wider span of departmental business.  At the local level, Local Strategic Partnerships will no longer be required to include mandatory targets in their Local Area Agreements; government will now entrust LSPs to choose from a single set of 198 performance indicators which reflect locally set priorities and communities’ own ambitions for change.  From 2008, the roll out of the new Comprehensive Area Assessment, building on the audit commission’s Comprehensive Performance Assessment model, will also enable local authorities to have more latitude to work with partners on some of the complex cross-cutting issues, such as worklessness, environmental sustainability or community well-being.

Are these simply structural changes of interest to policy wonks? Or could they lead to a genuine increase in joined-up government and more effective partnership working both between the centre and communities, as well as across the public, private and voluntary sectors?  Rocket Science has been working with a number of Local Strategic Partnerships – in both inner and outer London (e.g. Hackney and Ealing); large metropolitan areas (e.g. Liverpool and Newcastle), as well as largely rural communities (e.g. Norfolk and Hertfordshire).  Whilst no one community (or partnership) is ever the same as another, there are clearly some common challenges and opportunities, not least for local authorities, arising from the recently confirmed intentions of the Brown government.  These include: 

  • Enhanced role for the Local Strategic Partnership – local authorities are already under a duty to prepare a Sustainable Community Strategy setting out their vision for the area.  The additional requirement to have in place a Local Area Agreement in effect sets out the delivery plan for the Strategy, including a single set of priorities and targets that the authority needs to achieve by working in collaboration with its partners.
  • Stronger elected member input– reflecting the expectations of local government’s role as a “strategic leader and place shaper”, local authority leaders are expected to play a leading role on LSPs and executive portfolio holders to have a significant input to relevant thematic partnerships.
  • Increased expectation of and obligations on partners– the LAA is required to set out the priorities and targets for the local area as agreed between the Government and the LSP.  Councils will be expected to prepare LAAs in consultation with partners, including the voluntary and community sector and local business community.  There will also be a duty placed on named statutory sector partners (Jobcentre Plus, the Learning and Skills Council and the Primary Care Trust) to cooperate with the LSP and to agree jointly the targets in the LAA.  A corollary of this development is the expectation that these named partners will be subject to scrutiny by elected members of the local authority. 
  • Greater emphasis on (joint) commissioning through the LSP – opportunities exist for local Councils to use the framework provided by the Local Strategic Partnership to move away from a narrowly defined approach to service delivery towards a “commissioning” role – being open to using the best possible ways of securing excellent service outcomes.  This could include:
    • achieving economies of scale through co-locating services (as for example Jobcentre Plus are looking to do at Children’s Centres) or sharing back office functions; 
    • acting locally, where this makes sense – sometimes on a neighbourhood basis – to achieve greater responsiveness, and not necessarily providing a one-size-fits-all service across the whole local authority area;
    • providing greater opportunities for joint commissioning and procurement with other statutory bodies – so contributing to efficiency savings as well as joining up different elements of a supply chain (e.g. the services that comprise a client’s journey from welfare to work);
    • using discrete external funding streams such as the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund or the new Working Neighbourhood Fund to pilot services on behalf of the Partnership, the lessons or results from which then inform or help to reshape the delivery of mainstream services when re-contracting allows;
    • providing a separation of roles between the commissioning and providing of services, enabling the LSP (i.e. the strategic or management board) to champion service quality and improvement on behalf of the user.

For more information on Rocket Science’s work with Local Strategic Partnerships, including our partnership performance-management tools, please contact john.griffiths@rocketsciencelab.co.uk.

 

How are we going to get “employer engagement” in the new skills and employment agenda? 
Here John Griffiths sets out a personal view.

Elsewhere in this newsletter we discuss the government’s objectives, reinforced in the Comprehensive Spending Review, to enable private investment in its enterprise and economic development initiatives.  “Employer engagement” is no less a goal that lies at the heart of the government’s employment and skills programmes – and has been since the very early days of the New Deal. 

Since 1997 structures (and sweeteners) to engage particularly large employers in the public-policy goal of achieving “full employment” have come and gone.  Remember the Large Employers Unit set up by the Employment Service to account manage the big companies’ involvement in New Deal?  The National Employment Panel, a selected group of business champions, operating at arms length from the Department for Work and Pensions, subsequently took up the challenge of enticing fellow employers into supporting the various manifestations of the government’s welfare to work programmes, not least by making them more “demand led.” Hence the sector-specific “Ambition” Programmes (Ambition IT; Ambition Construction; Ambition Retail).   

Nearly ten years on, a former chair of the National Employment Panel, Lord Sandy Leitch, produced what is rapidly becoming a highly influential Review of the UK’s long-term skills needs.  In July of this year, the government published World Class Skills: Implementing the Leitch Review of Skills in Englandand now additional resources have been made available in the Comprehensive Spending Review 2007.

One of Leitch’s recommendations, endorsed by the government, was to strengthen the employer voice through the creation of “a dynamic, employer-led Commission for Employment and Skills.”  The Commission will be a UK-wide body (under the chairmanship of Sir Michael Rake, formerly of KPMG and now Chair of BT) with responsibilities across each of the four nations, and for skills at the regional and local level. 

At this stage, the advent of this new vehicle for “employer engagement” poses more questions than answers.  In replacing the NEP and the Sector Skills Development Agency, how will the Commission relate to the new local employment and skills boards, the LSC (a previous attempt at employer engagement in the design and delivery of local skills investment) and the Sector Skills Councils?  What does the Commission mean for the NEP’s Employer Coalitions which have developed effective city/region vehicles for engaging business leaders in regional skills initiatives? 

What of Local Employer Partnerships, a new initiative by Jobcentreplus to sign up large employers to offer job vacancies to particular unemployed client groups?  How will the Commission relate to the City Strategy Pathfinders – many of which have employer-led boards; not to mention the new employer-dominated London Skills and Employment Board, which is steadily acquiring considerable autonomy and influence for skills investment in the capital?  How will the RDAs influence their Business Link contractors to engage with employers through the proposed Train to Gain arrangements?

Ten years on, the search is still on for the holy grail of securing lasting employer engagement in meeting the UK’s skills and employment challenges.  More importantly we have to appreciate that employer engagement is hard to win, but very easy to lose.

As I was writing this I sketched out the potential interactions that employers could be facing with agencies delivering skills and employment services.  It is feasible that within one week an employer could be contacted by the following organisations, all potentially offering different services and solutions, but funded through government skills and employment related initiatives.  These include:

  • Local Business Links
  • Training Providers
  • FE/HE institutions
  • A Sector Skills Council
  • Jobcentreplus
  • Train to Gain broker
  • Chamber of Commerce
  • Learning and Skills Council
  • Local regeneration partnerships

I am sure others have been missed, but what this shows is that numerous agencies are trying to achieve the same thing through a very complex and disjointed delivery landscape.   As an employer, albeit one of who has some understanding of these arrangements, I can see why engaging employers is difficult, but also how confused, tired and less publicly minded employers could easily become.

Clearly actions are required to avoid this outcome.

Firstly, regional skills partnerships should be developing employer engagement protocols for those programmes and initiatives falling under their jurisdiction, that can be embedded into delivery through effective and joined up commissioning. Rocket Science has conducted similar activities at a local level through our work on local and regional employability frameworks.

Secondly, organisations who wish to engage with employers need to map and understand the extent and level of that engagement, i.e. as a provider of a work-placement, a member of a Local Employment Board or as a customer of Train to Gain.  By understanding these it then becomes easier to develop appropriate pathways to engage with employers. Similar to the way in which traditional stakeholder engagement and analysis is delivered.

Thirdly, it is crucial to understand the real needs of employers and have the right level of interpersonal and communication skills in employer-facing staff, in order to get to the heart of their issues.  This begs the question - are we putting the right people in front of employers in the first place?  First impressions count in business and commissioners of services need to make sure that their contractors have the right level of funding to resource effective front-line service delivery.

At a time of further upheaval in the skills and employment agenda, the public sector needs to be consistent in its messages and service follow-through with employers.  Otherwise, we run the risk of employer disengagement with this agenda at an unprecedented level.

Rocket Science has just completed soime preliminary work for the new employer-led London Skills and Employment Board.  To find out more about our work in this area contact john.griffiths@rocketsciencelab.co.uk.