Localism

Memorandum from Oxfordshire County Council (LOCO 46)

Introduction

Oxfordshire County Council is the upper tier local authority for Oxfordshire. It is responsible for delivering around 80% of the key public services in the county and it employs over 20,000 people to deliver them. Each year the council manages almost £1bn of public money in the provision of these services on behalf of Oxfordshire's 640,000 people. The services we provide include schools, social services, the fire service, roads, libraries and the museums service, trading standards, land use, transport planning and waste management.

Overall, Oxfordshire County Council supports the principle of decentralising and devolving power to a local level as a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards local people and the elected members they democratically select to represent them. This decentralisation allows a more flexible, local approach to delivering services, moving away from the ‘one size fits all’ model. It also allows local government to meet expectations at local level, for example in the face of cuts to budgets and therefore to services.

1. The extent to which decentralisation leads to more effective public service delivery; and what the limits are, or should be, of localism.

1.1 Oxfordshire County Council strongly believes that, as a local authority, it can make a real difference to people’s lives through the services that we deliver, through the work we do in partnership and through the support that we offer for voluntary, community and faith groups across the county.

1.2 In the current financial climate we are facing significant cuts to our budget. These cuts are expected to be around £200m by 2014/15. This means we will need to make difficult decisions about which services we can deliver with the resources we have and which services we may need to cut back or cease to deliver altogether. The Council will be held accountable by local people for those decisions through the local electoral process. We are also involving local people in the process to decide where cuts may affect services by holding public consultation online and at public meetings.

1.3 Using our local knowledge and influence, we are better placed than central government departments to make decisions about service delivery at a local level. We will work with our partners and with local people and communities to find innovative and effective solutions for alternative provision where cuts to county council services have been made.

1.4 We reject the idea that services should be delivered to a prescriptive national ‘one size fits all’ template in which ‘postcode lotteries’ are inherently bad. We feel that by making decisions about service provision locally we can provide better tailored, better value, more accessible services for people and communities, better reflecting the services that those people and communities need.

1.5 We feel that limits to localism should be set by local government itself, not by central government departments. For this reason, Whitehall needs to allow local government to make decisions and, sometimes, to make mistakes. Only in cases of severe mismanagement and a failure of local democracy or peer-led review systems should central government intervene.

2. The lessons for decentralisation from Total Place, and the potential to build on the work done under that initiative, particularly through place-based budgeting.

2.1 Compared with many other areas, Oxfordshire already has a strong basis in partnership working, much of which fits very well into the Total Place approach. Examples of work streams where we have used a ‘Total Place’ type approach include:

2.2 Budgets for social care: we are a national leader in the field of pooled budgets with the NHS for social care, with over £200m worth of care services, home support, day services and mental health services commissioned from a joint budget with the Primary Care Trust (PCT). This has enabled us to deliver a single, targeted service to users. We are currently implementing a major programme of transforming adult social care which will give personalised budgets to service users across the county to allow them to make choices about their own care needs.

2.3 County-wide work on Breaking the Cycle of Deprivation and reducing the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET): this approach joins up county council, district council, PCT and police work streams to ensure that we have a coordinated approach to early interventions aimed at breaking different ‘cycles of deprivation’. We are targeting areas where deprivation and the problems associated with this are most significant and deep rooted, including south-east Oxford and areas of Banbury.

2.4 Locality working: the Council’s Closer to Communities strategy is an ongoing programme for the council to work more closely at a local level, across services and with elected members. We want to get closer to the communities we serve; understand the key challenges they face and make sure our services are working together as effectively as possible. Six of the fourteen areas across the county have been identified as priority areas that face significant development and/or deprivation issues (these are Abingdon, Banbury, Bicester, Carterton, Didcot and Oxford). Our priority for this year is to focus on these areas and appoint lead members and officers for each area to ensure effective council engagement and agree local priorities. We are also continuing our active engagement with community-led planning groups such as parish plans and we plan to build on this with Big Society.

2.5 Waste management: we have agreed a joint strategy with district partners to set clear and challenging performance targets that provide financial incentives to encourage waste reduction rather than just recycling. The joint arrangements mean that cost sharing, efficiencies and improved performance in waste reduction are achieved through good governance and partnership working, without needing to merge services fully. This means that local areas may have different methods of waste and recycling collection that meet local needs and reflect local geographies.

2.6 We are now seeking to build on the work already carried out to push further the decentralisation and devolution of power to local level. In particular, we are looking to make significant savings at local level by using place based budgeting to address skills and worklessness across the county. Our proposal involves working with a wide range of public and private sector partners to make significant financial savings by reducing duplication and management costs while increasing the economic activity levels of 16 – 18 year olds across the county, getting them off benefits and into full-time education, employment and/or work-based training such as apprenticeships.

3. The role of local government in a decentralised model of local public service delivery, and the extent to which localism can and should extend to other local agents.

3.1 Local Government has a key role to play in advising and enabling local people to act for themselves, taking on responsibility for improving and sustaining their neighbourhoods in line with the principles of the Big Society. We believe that by having powers devolved down to us from central government, we also have a responsibility to devolve powers where appropriate further down to other tiers of local government and to local people and communities. This places on us the onus to work in partnership where we can to reduce duplication, save costs and find the most appropriate methods of service delivery. These are things that we already do successfully and we will continue to build on this success.

3.2 We are committed to building capacity and offering support to the voluntary sector and to communities to help them identify their own priorities and needs, for example through the community led planning process. Communities’ expectations for some services can be difficult to meet, for example on traffic, transport or library provision. We work with communities to provide local funding contributions for local priorities they identify (e.g. for road safety) or used flexible funding such as that available for school travel plans for improvements (e.g. for local footpaths that can be used to walk to school). We anticipate that this local funding from town / parish councils will become ever more important as our transport and other capital funds are reduced and/or no longer ring-fenced. Local fundraising for projects such as improved play and youth facilities is already taking place, at times with advice from the county council or voluntary, community and faith sector organisations we support and we are committed to maintaining this approach as we support volunteering and the Big Society.

3.3 However we appreciate that further decentralisation (below the level of upper-tier local government) is not always appropriate or advantageous. In some cases, services procured centrally can make significant savings in terms of economies of scale, while piecemeal delivery could end up costing more. For example, our Fire and Rescue Service is using collective bargaining power to procure its equipment. Linking up with eight other services in the South East saved £18,000 per year in procuring new uniforms.

3.4 Some services need to be universal regardless of location – safeguarding children and vulnerable people, for example.

3.5 We are currently engaging in a piece of wide ranging public consultation linked to the budget cuts we need to make and to the Big Society. The Big Debate is offering local people the opportunity to engage with the council on-line and at a series of public meetings to offer their views and suggestions about where cuts could be made to services and to red tape. This is a further example of our commitment to involve local people and communities as far as possible in decisions that affect them and their local area.

4. The action which will be necessary on the part of Whitehall departments to achieve effective decentralised public service delivery.

4.1 Oxfordshire County Council is committed to the idea of localised, decentralised service delivery. To do this effectively, we need the same level of commitment from central government, i.e. Whitehall needs to allow this decentralisation to happen by ‘loosening the reins’.

4.2 .Local government and other public services have been held accountable centrally, and were hampered by large amounts of regulation and inspection, including the Comprehensive Area Assessment and the National Indicator Set. If replacement of these onerous regimes is to be considered, for example with sector-led assessment, there needs to be the freedom for local areas to set local priorities. Reluctance from central government to allow local areas to set local priorities and targets needs to end to allow local government and local public services to be held accountable first and foremost by the local electorate.

5. The impact of decentralisation on the achievement of savings in the cost of local public services and the effective targeting of cuts to those services.

5.1 Due to central government’s moves to reduce the national deficit and the consequent reduction of public spending, we expect cuts in central government funding (which makes up around 65% of our income) to lead to around £200 million in cuts to our budget over the next five years to 2014/15. Excluding schools, we expect that the cuts we will need to make will be around 40% of our budget. Inevitably, cuts of this magnitude will have significant impacts on the level of services we can provide directly as well as the support we can give to agencies able to support local communities to take on services and/or facilities.

5.2 However, this financial situation also presents an opportunity to us as an upper tier authority, to the five lower tier authorities in the county, to other public sector providers and to local community, voluntary and faith sector groups to work more closely together to deliver services efficiently and effectively. We are already a national leader in our joint work with the Primary Care Trust and are keen to join up further where we can to make savings. We are also using commissioning in innovative ways.

5.3 For example, our new highways contract with Atkins is transforming the way the council’s Highways and Transport Service works. There is a shared management structure, including Atkins managers managing OCC staff and vice versa which has reduced management costs by a third. The new contract is resulting in a more streamlined, quick and cost-effective way of working on our roads – for example, we are now fixing more potholes at 20% lower cost each time than used to be the case.

5.4 We have also made significant savings with our Shared Services which has combined back-office support for our services and has saved £2.4m a year, representing around 25% savings. We are now making progress towards stage two, increasing the number of back-office functions that are within Shared Services and making further savings.

5.5 We need central government to remove as many legal and administrative barriers to joint working as possible to allow a joined up approach across the public sector and to allow local authorities to develop and share innovative solutions.

5.6 We also need to look outside county boundaries to seek savings by working with neighbouring areas which share the same characteristics (and therefore potentially similar service needs) as we do in Oxfordshire – some of the District councils in the county are already doing this, with West Oxfordshire District working with its Gloucestershire neighbour Cotswold District Council and Cherwell seeking to work with South Northamptonshire.

6. What, if any, arrangements for the oversight of local authority performance will be necessary to ensure effective local public service delivery.

6.1 Over recent years, the local government performance framework has placed far too much emphasis on compliance with inspection frameworks and too little on the achievement of local priorities. Inspection activity has been highly resource-intensive and has diverted energy and resources away from frontline service delivery. Moreover, partnership working at the local level has been hampered by the accountability of public bodies operating locally to a range of different (and at times conflicting) national frameworks.

6.2 We would prefer any future performance management framework to be transparent, simple and resource efficient, removing as many burdens on local government as possible and encouraging success to be judged on progress against local priorities rather than on national indicators.

6.3 Of course, the abolition of Comprehensive Area Assessment and the commitment to make further cuts in local government inspection indicate that the new government is prepared to shift responsibility away from nationally imposed regimes and towards the local government sector itself. Oxfordshire County Council welcomes these post-election changes and believes that sector led improvement approaches such as peer support and challenge and mentoring schemes could be more effective ways to secure improvement, providing possible risks relating to vulnerable groups (e.g. adult social care, children’s safeguarding) are taken into account.

6.4 Development of performance measures could be judged on an area-by-area basis rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. This would act to ensure that ‘postcode lotteries’ are seen as a positive thing where service delivery and performance is targeted according to local need.

6.5 We welcome moves to ensure that local government is transparent and accountable to the public. Local government already makes a great deal of information available to the council tax payer, in addition to its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, however, so we maintain concern that proposals to require upper-tier councils to publish all items of spending over £500 could be onerous in terms of administrative burden.

7. How effective and appropriate accountability can be achieved for expenditure on the delivery of local services, especially for that voted by Parliament rather than raised locally.

7.1 We believe that local authorities, elected democratically by local people, are in a strong position to lead partnerships in local areas. As a county council in a multi-tier area we are already engaging strongly with other public sector partners such as District Councils, the Police and the NHS, local councils, as well as with the private sector and with the voluntary, community and faith sector and will continue to build on these partnerships to achieve best value for local people.

7.2 We believe that as far as possible, money that is spent locally should be held under democratic control locally. The case for placed based budgeting and decision making under the democratic leadership of elected local authorities working in partnership with other public sector bodies at local level is incredibly strong and is the only way to deliver better services in a more effective and efficient way while meeting the needs of local people.

7.3 We believe that achieving full accountability at local level will only be possible if Whitehall devolves its control to local level. Central government needs to allow local authorities to try ideas and to learn lessons from mistakes and successes.

7.4 These fine and theoretical statements lead to a practical question about political accountability. What will any minister do when a journalist calls him about a spending decision made at a local government level and which the journalist brands as evidence of a postcode lottery? If the minister reaches for a telephone to instruct the local council to conform to a national template, localism is lost. Central government and parliament need to find a way for local council leaders to be held publicly to account for their decisions about spending devolved funding.

October 2010