Traditional approaches to improved efficiency are not enough, it is time for local authorities to take a more radical approach to the future, says David Henshaw.

Local government leaders and chief executives gathering in Birmingham for this month’s LGA conference will have a lot to talk about. The organisers have set this year’s conference in the context of a ‘fundamental rethinking of the way local government works.’

It is easy to dismiss this as the hyperbole deployed by marketing executives the world over – was there ever an invitation to delegates to attend an annual gathering to ‘reflect on the stable and secure position in which we find ourselves’?

David Henshaw: Councils are recognising that the traditional approaches of efficiency and improvement aren’t enough

But, just this once, the sense of drama might be justified. Local government does indeed find itself at a defining point in its history. Will we look back in ten years’ time on this as the beginning of the end or the start of something new?

It has become a cliché to say that local services face unprecedented challenges. But clichés are sometimes true.

For most councils the past year has been dominated by balancing the books in the face of the sharpest budget reductions in living memory. The best have managed it with aplomb, foreseeing the likely scale of the challenge and putting in place plans to bridge the gap. Not an easy task and certainly one involving tough decisions with real human consequences for people who rely on services and the staff that deliver them.

And let’s not forget that these changes are being implemented by a generation of managers that learnt their craft in the years of plenty with probably an over focus on getting marks for process, and who are now having to rapidly equip themselves with the skills to manage rapidly shrinking budgets. The same is true for local politicians, some of whom at least have been caught off-guard by the demands of taking their political groups and communities with them.

And yet the immediate financial challenge is only one part of a much bigger interconnected picture. In the face of more complex and rising demands, there is a growing recognition that we need transformational new approaches. Issues like the ageing population, more people living with long-term health conditions, climate change and seemingly intractable problems like poverty and the cycle of re-offending, highlight the failures inherent in how we currently organise public services.

From my conversations with leaders and chief executives across the country, I know that the best are already looking beyond the immediate budget challenge to the future, recognising that the traditional approaches of efficiency and improvement aren’t enough. As Charlie Leadbeater has said, too often we have been hitting the targets, but missing the point.

The most ambitious councils are the ones that are prepared to ask fundamentally different questions. For example: ‘How can we support older people to live well?’ instead of: ‘How can we deliver better services to older people at lower cost?’ It is what one chief executive has described as a Copernican-shift in our thinking.

Are local authorities capable of leading that change? Many people will argue that big, monolithic institutions can’t spark the kind of disruptive innovation that is needed, that this can only come from outside the system. But whilst we need to be much more open to ideas wherever they come from, and much better at creating value from new configurations of private, public and civic resources, it is inarguable that local government has both the responsibility and capability to create the conditions in which innovation can flourish.

It’s for this reason that NESTA and the Local Government Group have launched Creative Councils. This programme is designed to support councils to develop and implement radical changes that have a potentially transformational effect.

Our approach is to keep the initial call for ideas very open – all our experience tells us that you stifle innovation by being too prescriptive in the early stages. But what we are stipulating is that the ideas must have the potential to bring about transformation and early indications are that we have hit upon a rich stream of ideas.

Councils up and down the country have responded positively and the message from the people responsible for making change happen is consistent – we need a much more concerted, systematic search for scalable innovations that can benefit lots of communities.

Invention won’t be enough. We also need to get better at replicating, adapting and spreading proven innovations between areas facing similar challenges. Sharing the risks and costs of innovation and widely distributing the benefits.

At the end of three days in Birmingham, as they travel back to their town halls up and down the country, perhaps the biggest challenge facing those leaders and chief executives will be how they can help re-imagine the role of local government and then make it happen.

Due to unprecedented demand, the deadline for applications to Creative Councils has been extended to June20. To apply visit www.nesta.org.uk/creative_councils

Sir David Henshaw is Chair of NESTA's Public Services Innovation Lab Board. More information on the NESTA website.