Memorandum by Gloucestershire County Council
(RG 72)
"THE EFFECTIVENESS
OF THE
CURRENT ARRANGEMENTS
FOR MANAGING
SERVICES AT
THE VARIOUS
LEVELS AND
THEIR INTER
RELATIONSHIPS"
Gloucestershire County Council is committed
to partnership working across a multitude of service areas, and
in particular the areas now identified under Local Area Agreements
ie economy, young people, safer and stronger communities, healthy
living and older people.
Our pattern and successes in partnership working
have been reliant upon partners serving the same population base,
usually just Gloucestershire.
We would not pretend that the current arrangements
are simple, or even make sense to the community, but we have made
them work. We are particularly concerned by the trend towards
quasi regionalisation of the services of our major partners. This
situation is occurring in the following areas:
— Merger of Police forces.
— Merger of Ambulance Trusts.
— Regionalisation of Fire Control.
— Regionalisation of Learning and Skills
Councils.
— Regional control of Business Links.
In contrast, we believe the current proposals
to create a single Primary Care Trust for Gloucestershire, coincident
with our Children's Service and Adults Social Care responsibilities,
will create better opportunities for co-ordinated service delivery.
For many of our services to make sense to our
customers require co-ordination across partners. Successful multi-sector
working often requires the pooling of budgets. This is often seen
as a brave step, but is realistic where we share the same customer
base, and money cannot leak out. The chances of such working with
regional partners is dramatically reduced, particularly where
we cannot yet even identify the governance arrangements for such
bodies. If just one partner was subject to change, the impact
may well be manageable, but with the wholesale change that we
are witnessing, as listed above, we face a serious setback in
the challenge of providing and leading joined-up public services
for Gloucestershire.
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