“The need to work together has become the purpose – not just a process”
Bubble — By Carl Sargeant AM on June 19, 2010 7:00 am
The need to look at the bigger picture is more important than ever, says Carl Sargeant AM
All of us in this room have a role to play – as public sector leaders both political and managerial – as we deal with the challenges ahead. So we face a double whammy: greater demand on services from our citizens and communities; coupled with less resources with which to provide the services. We have to face up to this dichotomy. There can be no shying away.
Six weeks ago we had a general election. The political landscape across the United Kingdom has profoundly changed as a result – I’m sure you can guess my views on the result – but it is clear that a profound change has indeed occurred.
We now have two regions of the United Kingdom that are governed by coalitions. We also now have a government in Westminster made up of a different set of coalition partners to us here in Wales. And a majority of our councils here in Wales operate through coalition agreements. Different administrations, different political arrangements. This is unprecedented in the political history of the United Kingdom.
But in some ways this is a sign of the changing times we are in. The need to work together has become the purpose – not just a process. Working together – whether we like it or not – has to become the norm. The public spending outlook will allow nothing else but streamlined services, cutting of bureaucracy and commitment to real change in the way we deliver services if we are to protect our frontline services.
We have a new First Minister who has taken public service reform under his remit. This is the importance that Carwyn attaches to this issue and you will hear later on from our Minster for business and Budgets, Jane Hutt who will tell you about the planning assumptions we are having to make in respect of the Assembly’s budget and the additional cuts that we have already been told that we have to take from the UK Government. It is our priority to protect vital frontline services and I know it is yours. And to do this we will have to work together and you will have to work together.
We all know that there are some excellent examples of local authorities working together and collaborating across Wales. For example the single school improvement service in north Wales, the Heads of the Valley Waste Programme, and Prosiect Gwyrdd, that is happening in the south. But I want to see a step change in progress. And I want to see it quickly.
I want to see the consideration of collaboration as the default position – not the exception. And just so you are not left in any doubt I’ll spell it out. I want to see more shared services. I want to see more shared appointments.
When you consider how to save money – how to deliver a service more efficiently – I want you to investigate the option of joint delivery with other local authorities or other public bodies, or indeed both, as your very first consideration. If a senior officer leaves your authority I want you to actively seek a joint appointment with a neighbouring authority – or another public sector organisation. This should be the default position not just “one possibility.”
This is the only way that we can preserve the front-line services that our citizens and communities need. And their need will be greater in the coming years than it has been for a very long time.
The politics of change is always difficult – but this is about leadership – plain and simple. We simply cannot afford to maintain the status quo. I want to see leadership in both the continual evaluation of collaborative options; and the continual appraisal of how to work across boundaries built into senior leaders thinking, your business planning processes, and into your scrutiny processes. Collaboration and joint working is the direction of travel. It is a journey that I want us to go on together but I will drive us there if necessary.
You also need to take the communities that you lead through this process. Serious and rigorous engagement with citizens and stakeholders, to explain the decisions that you make and your reasons for making them, will be vital. And I don’t need to tell you how important it is to take your staff, trade unions and organisations you lead with you too.
I recognise the significant contribution that you all make as leaders in communities, whether you are a council leader of a back bencher. You are closest to communities and are best placed to engage local people and take them with you. Leadership of communities and leadership of organisations are more important now than ever.
I am pleased that I will be shortly introducing a new Local Government Measure which addresses issue around providing support for you to carry out this vital representational role as well as better enable you to put in place structures that will support the collaborative arrangements that we want you to put in place.
Of course my cabinet colleagues and I have a leadership role to play in all of this. The last few years have seen the Assembly Government ‘clearing the path’ for collaboration. We have established Local Service Boards in each local authority area in Wales. These Boards exist to enable public sector organisations to work together more effectively. I believe it is fundamental to their role to pursue joint working where it leads to better outcomes for citizens.
We have changed the legislation. The 2009 Local Government Measure provides local authorities with new powers to collaborate with any other organisation – be it another local authority – the private sector or the third sector. But with powers come duties and the Measure established a new legal duty on local authorities to consider collaboration when planning the delivery of services. And the Measure also provides me as the Minister for Local Government with the powers to direct that collaboration should happen if it doesn’t.
We have established a new Efficiency and Innovation Board, chaired by our Finance Minister Jane Hutt, to provide national leadership to collaboration and efficiency savings across Wales.
Over the next six months I will be seeking to establish an Outcome Agreement with each local authority in Wales. These Agreements will capture the agreed priorities for an area, in the form of achievable outcomes that matter to citizens. And there are financial incentives for the successful delivery of the outcomes amounting to over thirty-one million pounds. I will be looking for you to include collaborative arrangements in as many areas of the agreements as possible. This will be a clear demonstration of your commitment to the national agenda – as well as showcasing the innovative work that your organisations are already delivering.
All of these initiatives bring together the key actors in the Welsh public sector together with a shared agenda, a shared purpose and a common goal.
You have all witnessed over the past two years a development of the debate away from examinations of structures and the detailed measurement of activity, to one that focuses on the core strategic role for local government as a community leader. This is, I hope, welcomed by you all here today. It’s a shift that needs to continue. Our communities depend upon it given the cuts in funding that are coming our way. All of you in this room are central players in the collaborative agenda.
Since becoming Minister I have meet every Council Leader in Wales and it’s clear you understand the severity of the situation. But we will collectively let people down if the understanding and the analysis don’t translate into action.
The next couple of years are going to be tough – we all know that. But I also know that Wales is a remarkable country. We have remarkable leaders and a world class work force in the Welsh public sector. I know that all of you are committed to facing up to difficult decisions – open to thinking about problems in new ways – finding new solutions that you would not have considered in the past.
I hope that I have outlined the shared problems that we face – and also some of the initiatives that will see us through them. You have my commitment that the Assembly Government will support you through the process as much as we can. But ultimately the achievements will be yours.
Tags: cuts, leadership, local government, public services
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8 Comments
Not to be too picky on Wales Home as this is simply on of the best websites in Wales BUT can you at least get some of the contributors to do a little bit of work on such “pieces” so that they are not merely a speech that have been presented to a different audience.
I am assuming this is the speech Carl gave to the WLGA last week.
It wouldn’t have taken one of his team more than half an hour to contextualise it for Wales Home.
Cutting and pasting from a politician’s speech is simply lazy journalism and I know that this site’s aspirations are, quite rightly, far higher than that.
Hi Dylan
Genrally speaking, we don’t publish speeches as main articles unless they are significant, which we felt this one was.
But your observations, both complimentary and otherwise, are taken.
Best
Adam
Reading this I began to wonder where do you start. Here we have a typical speech written for a politician by probably a civil servant who has never worked in local government. The message is that it is simple. Collaboration is the answer particularly when you have ruled out reorganisation of a system that no one believes is fit for purpose. Throw in a few lines on the usual nonsense that Wales is the ‘unique country’ with ‘remarkable leaders’ and, Bob’s your uncle what’s the problem? I’m surprised that there wasn’t a sentence that we have a huge advantage because 20% of the population already speak ‘the language of heaven’!
Unfortunately, collaboration is not that simple. The example often quoted by many is the joined up service approach of Western Australia. Even there, however, the gains were exaggerated and there were real problems as a report of the State’s Auditor General showed. Collaboration requires not just a real commitment from the partners it also often requires initial funding to introduce the new systems. The Assembly pumped nearly a million pound and was due to give the authorities concerned another £9.5 million into the failed South East Wales Shared Service Project. Over £ 10 million for set up costs on a project that was only concerned with one back of office function HR in just 10 authorities. Even then the consultants argued that it would take at least 7 years before any of the authorities saw any savings from collaboration. This poses the question of where will the pump priming money come from when the Assembly is talking of cutting 37% off its capital funding in the next three years?
Collaboration also takes time. Audit Scotland estimated that that from out line business case to operation in any waste collaboration would be in the region of 6 years. In any case in areas such as waste because the Assembly wants a zero waste society costs even with collaboration are going to rise by billions of pounds by 2025. The simple fact is that unless authorities are already way down the track with collaboration then it will not help protect so called front line services in the next few years. The time scale is too tight except for minor collaborations in certain areas such as legal and planning where the savings are really peanuts compared to what is required.
The idea of shared senior officers is not new and is already happening in England with a number of local authoritites and Primary Care Trusts and amongst some small district councils. But it is a situation that requires a great deal of good will and some exceptional people. It also raises the issue of accountability. The jury is still out on whether this approach to recruiting senior staff can work although concerns have already been raised by the Audit Commission on one such collaboration between two small district councils. In an ideal world and with fewer local authorities the solution would be to abolish the health trusts and return health provision to local government. Just imagine what could be achieved with a health system thta was democratically controlled by the people whom used it instead of by the producer vested interests.
Unfortunately for the people of Wales the local governemnt system we have is not fit for purpose and there are no easy solutions. It creaked along in the age of plenty and it will probably be tested close to destruction in some areas in the age of austerity. Services will be hit by the cuts that the Assembly has to impose because it will have less money in the next Assembly term. The real debate,however, should be around which services should be protected and which services should not. You cannot expect local government to roll over and do your bidding when local authority leaders are told that certain areas controlled by the Assembly will not be touched. Successful cuts exercises in other countries show that nothing should be ruled in or out when it comes to looking at services. No one on the Llynfi valley is going to understand a situation where the local comprehensive is making teachers redundant and just up the valley the local Community First partnership is advertising for another out reach worker to raise the ‘confidence’ of the top half of the valley.
I might come back to the poltical argument of what is wrong with one democratically elected tier of government threatening another tier in a future post.
With Adam on this one, Dylan. We’ve run a couple of speeches before – both Carwyn and Elin Jones during the One Wales, One Year to Go conference in March spring to mind – and when keynote addresses like this are made it makes sense to share them.
In terms of the substance of the piece, the key element is the gear change being proposed for shared appointments. The impression Carl Sargeant gives is of a new context and environment for public service delivery. He is more interested in focusing of service improvement rather than simply patting people on the back at events like this.
I think his references to using legislation to compel action unless people follow the lead are very important.
Things have changed in the relationship between central and local government in Wales: and anyone who doesn’t believe that should look at Ynys Mon and the underlying promise of action in this speech.
I’m very glad we published it. The speech needs to be widely read
Working together!? What a unique idea! Will it work. I am off to Colorado this morning no money, but they do have decent schools with no asbestos!
Adam/Daran
I have no objections to the reporting of the content of the speech at all.
It’s just that it would have been better to have a proper article on this rather than just dumping the speech verbatim onto your site.
Just an opinion from someone who has to write two articles every week for newspapers in Wales and it ain’t easy !
Certainly if you are going to a platform to politicians not matter how ‘worthy’ the speech, let them do a little bit of extra work for it!
Dylan
Point noted. Comments on the argument advanced in the speech most welcome.
Adam
Well here is a piece of writing from one of my columns back in October 2008. I think it explains my thoughts on the matter.
“Last week, the Assembly finance minister revealed councils in Wales had over half a billion pounds in reserves. This, he argued, could be spent to compensate for the lower financial settlement to local authorities from the Assembly.
Of course, council chiefs disputed this, arguing three quarters of the reserves had already been committed for future capital projects with the rest literally being stored for a rainy day to deal with emergencies such as flooding.
They also suggested councils are merely following good financial practice, having been told by the Welsh Audit Office to hold up to five per cent of their revenues in reserve accounts. In contrast, the Assembly currently has only one per cent of its annual budget in its reserves, having been determined to continue with its spending commitments despite the worsening economic climate.
Therefore, there is a stand-off in place where the Assembly Government will not change its budget priorities and has no reserves left to increase the settlement to local authorities. On the other hand, local councils will be breaking their own auditing practice if they raid their reserves and, more critically, could be bankrupted if they were hit by a financial crisis and had no money left to deal with it.
It would seem the only alternative to this dispute will be to cut services or raise council tax bills. As a result, both parties are clearly trying to make sure they do not get the blame for either course of action which will clearly be unpopular with a general public that is already facing other financial hardships.
There is also the question of whether this is a political or financial dispute? For example, there seems to be a growing consensus that we may have too many local authorities in Wales and it is time for another reorganisation, especially as the current number of councils was arrived at in 1994 and did not take into account the creation of a new devolved government in the form of the National Assembly for Wales.
Some would argue that there is a strong case for only two councils in North Wales, as was previously the case under Gwynedd and Clwyd prior to 1996, as this would ensure efficiencies and economies of scale that would save money and, in the long run, cut council taxes.
Given the current economic crisis, I believe this issue is as critical to Welsh public life as the current convention on further powers for the Assembly. The question is whether the Assembly has the powers to do this and, more importantly, the political will?
Recently, Assembly ministers stated that they did not envisage any local government reorganisation prior to the next elections in 2011. However, as far as I am aware, the 2006 Government of Wales Act states it is the Assembly Government, and not the UK parliament, that is responsible for the establishment of councils.
Therefore, with the growing dispute between the two levels of democracy in Wales and growing demand for better use of public funds, it may be time for AMs to bite the bullet and put such an argument to the Welsh electorate. Certainly, it would finally give us a system of government at a local and national level that reflects the new Wales”.