Can Whitehall run local services?
Derren Hayes
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Following Education Secretary Michael Gove's decision not to strip children's services from Doncaster Council, we ask two experts whether central government can be accountable for local delivery.
YES - CRAIG DEARDEN-PHILLIPS, MD, STEPPING OUT
Was the Education Secretary right to pull back from plans for an independent trust and give Doncaster Council the right to make this happen locally? Time will tell, and I hope it turns out to be the right decision.
Watching this unfold, I have been troubled by the fact that what started as a very important discussion about how to address long-term system failure very quickly morphed into one about centralism versus localism.
Indeed, the idea of an independent trust put forward by Professor Julian Le Grand's review came quite quickly to be seen, in the local authority sector at least, as a kind of warning for what might happen to councils if they lose a grip on their own children's services.
With it being perceived as an externally imposed solution, we were distracted from some of the larger issues raised in Le Grand's report about the possible benefit of children's services operating at one remove from the council's own direct operational control. Indeed, a very different view of Le Grand's recommendation would be to reframe his idea of an independent trust not as Whitehall diktat, but instead as a radical act of empowerment of those people leading and delivering services at local level.
I hope local authorities don't forget that an independent trust, however it is set up, represents a golden opportunity to allow a new group of locally based leaders to create the fresh start needed when services have spiralled to a point of near-breakdown.
This requires any new entity not to be operating as an extension of the local authority.
As we have seen time and again in the schools sector, deep-rooted, long-term failure can be turned around. However, this normally requires a decisive and deliberate decision on the part of councils to step back and to trust a new, largely independent leadership group in the school to create a more successful operating culture at one remove from the council's prevailing culture, especially if this wider culture has been holding things back.
Freedom to create a better operating culture is a prerequisite of any successful turnaround, as any proven leader of change will attest. Just as top-down control from Whitehall is no real answer to the most complex local problems, top-down control locally by councils can also have a dampening effect on those key people trying to lead change from the bottom up.
One of the most difficult things about change in public services is that it can require councils to release their grip on the steering wheel and find a better driver.
At its best, this is what an independent trust should be - a better driver - with the local authority stating the intended destination, but, crucially, not then acting as back-seat driver, micro-managing the journey.
NO – MAX WIDE, DIRECTOR, iMPOWER
No one is suggesting that central government does not have a role to play in intervening in local services. Whatever we think of inspectorates, the reality is that without them many services would have got away with poor and, in some cases dangerous, practices.
There is a limit, however, to the usefulness of intervention, and a point at which it becomes so clumsy that it begins to be counter-productive. In Doncaster, the Education Secretary's decision to back a locally commissioned trust was right. The government should be credited for taking the time to reflect on alternative proposals. It saw clearly the problem in not just implementation, but also in accountability and governance. Ultimately, local communities should shape services and say whether providers are getting it right.
Central government cannot be a proxy for local engagement; local services cannot and should not be run from Whitehall. The government's original proposals for a trust were based on the best of intentions, but came woefully short both in terms of analysis and prescription.
Much fuss is made about new delivery models. Sea changes in governance arrangements often mask the fact that the people delivering the "new" service are the same people who delivered the old one - so the challenge remains the development of those people.
There is of course an issue of "brand", and I recognise that a council brand can become damaged. In such circumstances, there may be merit in a rebranding, and perhaps a move to a trust will provide that opportunity, but no one will believe it unless it is true. Permanent social worker posts will not be magically filled when it says "trust" over the door rather than "council". The change has to be real and tangible and based on transformation work, not just a change in label.
To develop a robust and excellent early help offer, you need willing local participants, not only engaged in a dialogue but invested in a process. Can this sort of change be led from Whitehall? Of course not - it needs to be driven locally with strong local accountability. The Department for Education quickly came to the conclusion that local control is what is needed, albeit with a Whitehall hand on the shoulder.
More broadly, it would have set a huge precedent. With Ofsted toughening up inspection regimes, and more councils slipping into the "inadequate" bracket, there would be an expectation from some that central government should step in for all cases.
It becomes easy to see how the DfE could have been drawn into multiple, complex local quagmires and open itself up to all manner of criticism. Ultimately, the department came to the same conclusion that the local government family came to: that sector-led improvement, while not perfect and sometimes not adequate, still offered the best bet to sustainably improve services.