Our Chair, Cllr James Lewis, blogs on our forthcoming work around Public Service Reform.
It was great to join friends and colleagues from across Local Government at the Labour Party Conference in the great core city of Liverpool last week.
We had the privilege of meeting with ministers directly to discuss some of the big issues faced by our cities, our central message being the UK's urban areas are key to this Government's growth aims.
We repeatedly made the point that a decently funded state can create economic growth, but also stressed that sometimes the answer is not more funding, we need to reform our state to meet our citizens' differing needs, delivering value while saving and improving lives.
We have worked with colleagues at Metro Dynamics and The Centre for Progressive Policy to come up with some basic principles of Public Sector Reform, creating true place based policy with an emphasis on prevention.
Drawing on a review of lessons from previous government programmes, the work – to be launched at LGA Conference later this month - proposes a ‘Total Place 2.0’ with the focus on interventions that can have the biggest impact on supporting more people into work, improving people’s health, increasing opportunity, and reducing violence and anti-social behaviour.
Among its recommendations are ten year prevention plans, developed in tandem with Local Growth Plans across each Combined Authority area with cities leading on the policy development, supported by colleagues across a region.
Devolving employment support devolution and expanding the place remit of NHS institutions is also key as well as looking at how services can use assets and budgets to expand preventative offer at the ‘front door’ in communities and neighbourhoods.
At the heart of this work is a call for culture change, we need to make our state more joined up, less wasteful and more responsive to the increasingly complex needs of some of our most vulnerable people. We need to put the local at the heart of our policy response and for Whitehall to embrace mission driven government.We look forward to more constructive conversations with ministers over the months ahead.