Written evidence submitted by 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
£1 billion 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 £200 million 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 £200 million 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
(eg for road safety) or used flexible funding such as that available
for school travel plans for improvements (eg 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, ie 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 £2.4 million 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 (eg 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
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