The UK Experience by Malcolm Morley *
Councils in England are under a statutory duty to adopt Community Strategies. These strategies are produced by Local Strategic Partnerships created through bringing together key representatives from public, private and voluntary sector organisations working within Council areas. Part of the creation of the Community Strategies is consultation with local communities. Consistently this consultation identifies the issues of affordable housing, a clean and safe environment, health and economic development as important, issues that are interconnected and which are fundamental to a good quality of life.
This interconnectedness underpins the importance of different organisations in different sectors working together at the local level. Councils, as the local community leaders, are important players in identifying the needs of their communities and seeking to ensure that those needs are met.
Increasingly though Central Government is looking for regional approaches for the investment of resources. A whole new raft of regional organisations have been created. These organisations now have an important role to play in contributing to improving the quality of life at the local level. Organisations such as Strategic Health Authorities and Primary Care Trusts (health issues), Regional Development Agencies (economic development), English Partnerships (regeneration), Regional Housing Boards (housing) are now allocated significant resources for investment.
These organisations work to Central Government’s agenda and allocate their priorities and resources on a regional basis. Councils increasingly have to put their locally determined priorities in the regional context if they want to access resources or achieve the investment of resources from these new organisations.
Councils also have to increasingly compete for resources. New skills are having to be learned by Councils to enable them to make progress towards their objectives and to respond to locally determined key issues. They are no longer just service providers and enablers but lobbyists, influencers, competitors and partners. This is witnessed by the progress of abbreviations.
In the 1980s Councils were implored to seek the three Es – economy, efficiency and effectiveness. In the 1990s they were told that they must subject themselves to the four Cs – challenge, comparison, consultation and competition. Now they are being told that they must be part of the three Ps – public private partnerships and must see themselves in the context of the three Rs – regeneration, renewal and regional development.
This evolution has led to a fundamental change in the roles of Councils and their ability to achieve real changes in the issues that are consistently identified as important by their communities.
New ways of looking at economic development, housing and so forth have had to be matched by the ability to influence other organisations to agree joint objectives and priorities and to secure regional allocations of funding for specific local projects.
The complexity created by the role of the European Union and its requirements for the consideration of investment proposals adds further to the demands placed on Councils. Smaller Councils often find that they do not have the capacity to deal with all of these requirements. There is then a danger of exclusion from the resource allocation process.
Councils in England need to learn new skills and to play the resource allocation game by new rules. Those that won’t or can’t play by these rules are in danger of not being able to deliver on their community’s priorities.
* Malcolm Morley is a Strategic Director of South Oxfordshire District Council. This is one of a series of articles he is writing covering trends in the United Kingdom. He may be contacted by email at Malcolm.Morley @southoxon.gov.uk
The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of his employer.
