Local politicians will have to do the ‘heavy lifting’, if councils are to establish a convincing narrative for changing the way public services are delivered, contends Simon Parker

It’s always worth listening when the CBI’s director general, John Cridland, speaks, and his recent speech on public service reform (The MJ, 24 March) was characteristically bracing.

Mr Cridland is impatient for change. He thinks local government needs to up the pace and transform his services – and plenty of people in the sector would agree with him.

So far, so good, but Mr Cridland stops before he gets to the punchline. His call to ‘re-engineer’ services is fine as far as it goes, but it recalls images of grand machines and production lines being tinkered with by expert engineers. That’s fine if your aim is to standardise back-office processes, but the real challenge for service-providers is not about transforming the structures and processes of the supply side, urgent though that is. The key to the next stage of public service reform is not to re-engineer, but to re-imagine services through a new relationship with citizens themselves.

There are three emerging factors which promise to play a big role in restructuring public services over the coming decade. The first is social media. Once we work out how to use it effectively, we can harness the power of the Internet to drive collaboration among citizens.

The second is behavioural economics – or ‘nudge’ theory. If we can realise the potential of behaviour change techniques, we will have a powerful way to manage down the demand for public services.

And finally, we need to find new ways to develop and draw on social capital, enlisting citizens themselves in the expensive task of delivering services.

Taken together, these three factors might allow local government to reduce the long-term demand for public services, and to renegotiate the division of labour between government and communities, so that citizens take on more of the heavy lifting.

Councils are already showing the kind of leadership which is going to be needed over coming years. In Sutton, a recently-announced pilot scheme to increase the sharing of privately-owned books via an online database and ‘swap-shop’ will soften the impact of library service reductions.

This is a simple, innovative and potentially hugely-beneficial restructuring of how the community looks at its library service. 

A recent conversation with Ealing LBC revealed the exciting new ways in which open source software is increasingly being used to put technology at the forefront of how citizens consume public services.

Similarly, community websites put together by organisations such as ‘Talk about local’ in places including Haringey are developing new ways for citizens to talk about planning.

As a new report published by the New Local Government Network highlights, Coventry City Council is emerging as a leader in behaviour change, finding creative ways to persuade the parents of SEN children to move over to personalised budgets for school transport.

The end result is that parents are now more involved in transport, and that costs are being reduced by more than 15%.

There are many, many more examples of this kind of innovation throughout the country.

The will and skill to change and adapt are there. But individual schemes do not yet add up to a vision for a new public service settlement. These reforms need to become less scattergun and more co-ordinated.

As I heard at a recent seminar with the Association of County Chief Executives, the challenge here is not about changing processes and structures, but about political leadership.

Our public services are not just managerial collections of structures, people and budgets. They are an expression of our national values, and they meet some of our most pressing and personal needs.

Politicians at all levels need to be more honest about the fact that our current public service settlement is broken, and then open up the debate about what comes next.

That starts in central government. Ministers like to pretend that sharing back-office services and cutting senior pay can avoid the need for changes in the way services are delivered. Not only is that untrue, it isn’t even what the Government wants.

The coalition seeks a very different kind of state, delivering fewer services in a different way, with the slack taken up by voluntary activism.

Ministers should be honest about that, and they should recognise greater freedom to raise local revenue and a radical extension of community-budget type initiatives can only promote reform. But the heavy lifting will have to be done by local politicians.

Executive councillors need to start making a values-driven case for change – whatever you think of Lambeth’s ‘co-operative council’ model, it has certainly provided a compelling political narrative for change in the way services are delivered.

There is also an important shift here for Mr Cridland’s members in the public services industry. As many councils move down the commissioning route, they will be looking to their private sector partners for much more innovation.

Business has an opportunity to become one of the driving forces of the next phase of public service reform, but the industry will have to speculate on risky new models of service delivery, if it wants to accumulate.

Through NLGN’s ‘Commission on next localism’ we are bringing together the most innovative and forward-thinking councils and businesses to get to grips with the

dramatic challenges the local government sector faces. Mr Cridland is right to argue that change is both urgent and desirable, but this has to go well beyond re-engineering to the development of a new division of labour between citizen and state. And it needs to happen fast.

As Mr Cridland rightly points out: ‘Time isn’t on our side’.

Simon Parker is director of the New Local Government Network