In the pursuit of new service delivery models, councils and their partners should not lose sight of what citizens want done, says John Atkinson.

My local government friends tell me I’ve moved to the dark side. After five years at the Leadership Centre I am now back in the private sector working in KPMG’s local government practice.

The irony of these comments coming at a time when so many are telling us that a closer relationship between the public and private sectors is not lost on me. I’d never make a good Darth Vader anyhow; black’s not my colour.

What I have observed is that on both sides of the fence there are people passionate about delivering better results for local people and who wish to see our public bodies accelerating their improvement in the face of harsh financial circumstances. Given the range of radical ideas this has prompted, it is worth considering not simply 'how' we might do things better but also 'what' is it that really must be done.

John Atkinson: Community-based budgets feel a more constricted approach than their predecessor 

Finances have inevitably shaped people’s thinking. After months of star chambers, pressure on service areas to find savings, and budgets being taken through stormy council meetings, most places now have a plan for where the savings must fall if they are to balance the books.

The challenge now is to deliver on that. ‘Optimism Bias’ means that many local authorities are likely to be over-hopeful about achieving the plans set. Depending on the nature of the challenge, savings returned can be as low as 35% of budget predictions and only in a few areas is the whole 100% accomplished. Managing to get as close to budget as possible and coping with the shortfall will be a critical focus for local government this year.

But any shortfall at this stage adds to the problems for the next three financial years. With many budgets a little vague on how savings will really be delivered in this period, most are looking to more radical solutions to achieve this.

Following on from Total Place, some are pursuing an approach built on community-based budgets (CBBs). It feels as if this has become a more constricted approach than its locally-led predecessor. There remains, however, the sense that better utilisation of the wider public spend in a place, both local and national, is a critical component in aiming to deliver better with less. The coalition’s plan for CBBs to be available to all areas by 2013 necessitates the sort of groundswell of belief in ‘parallel places’ that typified Total Place if it is to become a reality.

That means councils ignoring the strictures of the current approach, determining how they will deliver altogether better results for less through widening their influence and beginning to just do it. You cannot make this work from a standing start.

Many are looking to grow alternate forms of delivery. With increasing pressures on budgets, particularly in adult social care, they seek different organisations to deliver services. Mislabelling this as the ‘Big Society’, the focus too often is on how others might deliver the same but cheaper.

Perhaps those others are currently employed by councils and are to be spun-out into a social enterprise, mutual society or joint venture. All of these models have great success in the right setting. None of them are likely to work where they remain a slave organisation to their original host, tied into one contract typified by service level agreements and managed through an increasing not decreasing burden of bureaucracy. If such forms are really to work then they probably pre-exist outside the council or will grow because local people want them, not because procurement managers have found them a suitable contract.

The problem with all of this is it focuses on the ‘how’; how we will deliver the things that we do. It offers no answer to the ‘what’; what is it that people want done and what is it that the state should do to support that.

The founding fathers of local government did not come together to deliver services. They assembled, perhaps through ‘enlightened self-interest’ to do those things that required them to act together. They addressed the things that none of them could fix alone, be that gas supply, sewers or, as one county chief executive reminds me, the provision of mating bulls!

And the risk is that this sense of purpose, the ‘what’, has been lost in the technicality of service delivery, the ‘how’. If we are to find a reinvigorated form of local governance in England at the end of this period of tight fiscal control then it will be because there is a newfound certainty as to its value. In all the rhetoric this is missing.

In its simplest form, local government grew because it was ‘organising’ effective activities, not an ‘organisation’ that delivered services.

Local government needs to find once more its place as the organiser of activity that delivers good local results, from wherever those need to come, be they public, private or civil organisations. Then it will be relevant, vital and at the heart of a big society.

John Atkinson, Director, KPMG’s Local Government practice