22 October 2009
Denham urges ‘radical reforms’ for councils
Mark Conrad
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Communities secretary, John Denham, this week detailed his ‘radical reform agenda’ for local government, urging an overhaul of management cultures to accompany new powers to scrutinise, fund and deliver a wider range of public services.
But, as delegates gathered at the annual SOLACE conference in Brighton, Mr Denham reiterated his hard-line stance on salaries for senior town hall staff, calling for pay restraint alongside an overhaul of the way officials delivered services.
Asked by The MJ how he hoped to maintain support for his reforms among managers who could be subject to pay restraints, he said: ‘I think this is about fairness. I made it very clear at the Labour Party conference… that I’m not criticising individuals – most of them have dedicated their lives to public service, and we should always realise that.
‘But a lot of people recognise that at the very top, things have got just a bit out of hand, and it’s not always obvious that the highest salaries which are being paid are actually producing the improvements in performance.’
Ahead of his speech to the Royal Society of the Arts on this week, Mr Denham outlined ‘a number of policies that are now in the pipeline, which are going to come together to transform the way we look at local services over the next few years’.
The first, he said, would be the Government’s commitment to the Total Place agenda, which would pool budgets for a range of local public services, allowing groups of council, health and education managers, for example, to decide how to deliver more efficient and effective services.
The second key policy, he said, would be to ‘encourage change in managerial cultures at local level, and in central government, to enable those delivering services to change they way they do that’.
Asked how he would generate such cultural change, he said: ‘Some of that will come back to Whitehall’, and earmarked an overhaul of public inspectorates.
‘Now there are far fewer [central government] targets, I suspect that it’s the inspection regimes that people work to. If your professional competence is measured by an inspectorate that has very clear requirements for services, then it is only natural that you will work to those requirements,’ he said.
‘To get Total Place working, we’re going to have to make further radical changes to the way inspection operates, so that people don’t fear the consequences of innovation and change. Central government will have to learn to let go in some places.’
He stressed ‘local authorities and other local services, such as health, will have to look at other ways of doing things’. In practice, he said, that would mean ‘a strong drive towards sharing staff, joint commissioning and pooling of budgets’.
But while he urged Whitehall to loosen its reins, Mr Denham was equally clear he wanted to retain minimum standards for locally-delivered services, delivered through enhanced local authority scrutiny frameworks and ministerial oversight.
Contrasting Labour’s proposals with Opposition commitments to devolve new powers to localities, he claimed a Conservative Government would ‘abandon any idea of common standards or entitlements’ and added Tory leader David Cameron’s plan was ‘effectively a charter for the worst kind of postcode lottery’.
Mr Denham said he was considering innovative ways to fund new local services and claimed there was ‘more scope for money-earning municipal enterprise’.
A senior Whitehall source said: ‘We are scoping potential new finance mechanisms for local infrastructure – we’re awaiting approval from ministers.’
But, as delegates gathered at the annual SOLACE conference in Brighton, Mr Denham reiterated his hard-line stance on salaries for senior town hall staff, calling for pay restraint alongside an overhaul of the way officials delivered services.
Asked by The MJ how he hoped to maintain support for his reforms among managers who could be subject to pay restraints, he said: ‘I think this is about fairness. I made it very clear at the Labour Party conference… that I’m not criticising individuals – most of them have dedicated their lives to public service, and we should always realise that.
‘But a lot of people recognise that at the very top, things have got just a bit out of hand, and it’s not always obvious that the highest salaries which are being paid are actually producing the improvements in performance.’
Ahead of his speech to the Royal Society of the Arts on this week, Mr Denham outlined ‘a number of policies that are now in the pipeline, which are going to come together to transform the way we look at local services over the next few years’.
The first, he said, would be the Government’s commitment to the Total Place agenda, which would pool budgets for a range of local public services, allowing groups of council, health and education managers, for example, to decide how to deliver more efficient and effective services.
The second key policy, he said, would be to ‘encourage change in managerial cultures at local level, and in central government, to enable those delivering services to change they way they do that’.
Asked how he would generate such cultural change, he said: ‘Some of that will come back to Whitehall’, and earmarked an overhaul of public inspectorates.
‘Now there are far fewer [central government] targets, I suspect that it’s the inspection regimes that people work to. If your professional competence is measured by an inspectorate that has very clear requirements for services, then it is only natural that you will work to those requirements,’ he said.
‘To get Total Place working, we’re going to have to make further radical changes to the way inspection operates, so that people don’t fear the consequences of innovation and change. Central government will have to learn to let go in some places.’
He stressed ‘local authorities and other local services, such as health, will have to look at other ways of doing things’. In practice, he said, that would mean ‘a strong drive towards sharing staff, joint commissioning and pooling of budgets’.
But while he urged Whitehall to loosen its reins, Mr Denham was equally clear he wanted to retain minimum standards for locally-delivered services, delivered through enhanced local authority scrutiny frameworks and ministerial oversight.
Contrasting Labour’s proposals with Opposition commitments to devolve new powers to localities, he claimed a Conservative Government would ‘abandon any idea of common standards or entitlements’ and added Tory leader David Cameron’s plan was ‘effectively a charter for the worst kind of postcode lottery’.
Mr Denham said he was considering innovative ways to fund new local services and claimed there was ‘more scope for money-earning municipal enterprise’.
A senior Whitehall source said: ‘We are scoping potential new finance mechanisms for local infrastructure – we’re awaiting approval from ministers.’
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