Tag Archives: joint working

‘Think globally, act locally’ – local job creation

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By Heather Cameron

The Local Government Association (LGA) last week called for greater devolution of employment and skills funding to councils and a ‘radical rethink’ of the way Jobcentre Plus works. Chairman of the LGA’s People and Places Board said:

“Job centres need to engage with more unemployed people for a start and then help more claimants move into sustainable employment. This is crucial to boosting local growth. Councils know best how to do this. We know our local economies, we know our local employers and we know our residents and we can bring local services together in a way central government will never be able to.”

Local solutions

Of course, local solutions for job creation and economic growth is not a new idea. Local development and job creation initiatives first emerged in the 1980s, in response to a ‘new phenomenon of high, persistent and concentrated unemployment’ that national policies seemed powerless to reverse on their own. Since then they have continued to spread and develop.

Although unemployment is at an 11-year low in the UK, according to recent research many countries, including the UK, are seeing widening gaps in the geographic distribution of skills and jobs. And the importance of local solutions has again been highlighted.

The OECD’s most recent edition of Job Creation and Local Economic Development argues that local development is a key tool for addressing the problem of such unequal distribution. Similarly, in its submission to last year’s Autumn Statement, the LGA argued that local government is central to the delivery of locally tailored solutions to national public policy challenges.

Boosting productivity growth, while ensuring growth delivers improved living standards and distributes the benefits of increased prosperity equally, are highlighted by the OECD as the twin challenges facing all policymakers. Underlined as a crucial but difficult task, it is argued that ‘actions originating at any single governance level or policy area will not be sufficient’.

Whole-of-government approach

The OECD report, therefore, examines how national and local actors can better work together to support economic development and job creation at the local level. In particular, it outlines what both national and local actors can do to improve the local implementation of vocational education and training (VET) and SME and entrepreneurship policies.

Among the recommendations for national actors include:

  • Design VET frameworks that allow local stakeholders to tailor training to local labour market needs while still maintaining a certain level of national consistency
  • Build the capacities needed to make VET systems more agile locally
  • Develop a strong national apprenticeship framework that builds a high quality system, includes strategically-designed incentives for employer participation, and allows for flexible delivery frameworks
  • Maximise the efficiency of SME and entrepreneurship policy delivery by allowing for local tailoring, co-locating services, using intermediary organisations to deliver programmes, and/or developing formal agreements for the division of competences and financing between governance levels
  • Develop national frameworks and strategies to support disadvantaged young people in entrepreneurship, and clearly assign responsibility for this policy portfolio to a single agency or ministry
  • Embed entrepreneurship into national education frameworks, while also providing integrated packages of entrepreneurship support in other settings to reach young people outside of the education system

Among the recommendations for local actors include:

  • Balance the need to meet pressing local labour market demands with ensuring that VET helps to move local economies to higher skilled and value-added products and services
  • Encourage VET teachers and trainers to maintain contact with local employers and industries to keep their skills and knowledge up-to-date
  • Boost employer engagement in apprenticeships
  • Tailor the delivery of apprenticeship programmes so that they work better for a broader range of employers, including SMEs, and disadvantaged populations
  • Forge connections across administrative borders in developing and co-ordinating entrepreneurship and SME policies
  • Work with organisations that have already established relationships with disadvantaged youth to maximise the reach of entrepreneurship programmes
  • To better reach disadvantaged youth, provide integrated packages of support, use hands-on learning methods, and involve entrepreneurs in programme delivery

Decentralisation?

The report concludes that local actors need both flexibility to tailor delivery of national policies to local conditions and the capacity to use this flexibility to ensure informed decision-making.

It is noted that this doesn’t necessarily mean political decentralisation, but rather ensuring the right tools are used to add local flexibility while maintaining national coherence.

If you found this article interesting, you may also like to read our previous blog on Local Enterprise Partnerships. 

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Place-based approaches to service delivery

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Manchester Town Hall: (Photograph, James Carson)

By Alan Gillies

A recent enquirer to our popular Ask a Researcher service sought our help to identify the available research on the concept of place-based or whole-place working.

Place-based approaches have been promoted through, for example, the previous UK government’s whole place community budgets. And in the Scottish context, the 2011 Christie Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services recommended a place-based, or ‘total place’ approach in order to improve local services and break down institutional silos.

In keeping with its focus on localism, the UK government also piloted a neighbourhood-level version – ‘complementary and integral to the concept of Whole Place community budgets’ – and in April 2014 granted an extra £4.3m of investment to ensuring the model reached 100 new local areas through the Our Place programme.

Principles of place-based or whole-place working

The principles underpinning this model of collaborative place leadership have been identified by the Local Government Association as:

  • building services around people and communities;
  • removing barriers to better outcomes and reduced costs through integrated working across agencies;
  • involving the business and voluntary sectors as equal partners;
  • collaborating to put together a workable whole public sector approach, joint responsibility and shared leadership;
  • local innovation and co-design with central government departments;
  • local delivery and investment mechanisms tailored to local needs and circumstances.

Benefits

The financial savings of such an approach could be significant. In January 2013, a report by Ernst & Young estimated that community budgets in England could deliver a net benefit of between £9.4 and £20.6bn over five years.

In looking at the costs and benefits of the whole place pilots in England in 2013, the NAO warned however that previous attempts such as local-area agreements, multi-area agreements and Total Place “did not lead to widespread or fundamental changes in local public services, or in the relationship between central and local government”.

But as financial pressure on public finances increased, there was even greater incentive than before to assess whether integrated whole-place approaches could help deliver services within increasingly tight budgets. A major driver of the process was therefore to maintain services while making savings.

The potential for place-based or whole-place policies to deliver financial savings does seem to be backed by the available evidence.

However, Localis, as recently as March 2015, has suggested that there is a sense across local government that Whitehall is unwilling to devolve the powers and funds necessary to let whole-place community budgets become a truly successful alternative means of delivering public services. The community budget pilots themselves ‘consistently pointed out that to deliver change on the scale they envisage there has to be change not only at a local level but also in Whitehall.’ (Ernst & Young, 2013)

Current government policy

The current government’s policy of devolution deals with certain areas has been seen as a way of realising the potential of place-based working. The Core Cities Group has called on the government to go further though. It wants the government to undertake a ‘place-based’ comprehensive spending review, looking at the total public resources deployed across a city or city region. It argues that without a similar place-based approach “within Whitehall, Holyrood and Cardiff Bay”, to join up the way different departments work with local agencies and cities, “we will not see the changes people want, need and deserve, in their lives and their cities”.

Local government lessons

In an interesting exercise, the New Local Government Network brought together local government chief executives to explore how place-based, integrated public services could deliver budget reductions and better outcomes for people in a notional ‘Newtown’.

The main learning points identified it its 2014 report were:

  • Working towards outcomes for place requires a different way of thinking and is an incredibly hard thing to do, particularly in relation to prevention, commissioning for outcomes and joining together what different sections of the public sector are doing to deliver outcomes for place.
  • Groups found it tough to move beyond current services and ways of working to develop new approaches to deliver outcomes. Thinking tended to involve ‘less of the same’ or different delivery bodies, rather than whole-scale public service reform.
  • There are a huge number of choices that need to be made and a vast range of stakeholder interactions required, yet few localities have the capacity available to complete this unaided.
  • Few areas have the practical experience to embed customer journey mapping into place based design principles. Perhaps worryingly, the report noted that groups found it difficult to put citizens at the centre of their plans for reform.
  • Despite having ‘red-lines’ of was not possible to change as part of the exercise (e.g. taxation), the groups went outside of these to ask government for additional powers, which suggests that in order to radically change public service in localities, central government reform maybe necessary.

These findings point to some of the challenges that local areas will need to overcome if they want to embrace a place-based approach.

Among the services offered by the Idox Knowledge Exchange, one of the most popular is our Ask a Researcher service.

In the past few months we’ve answered enquiries ranging from older people’s employment to young people’s housing; from rural inequalities to smart cities; and from early intervention to dispute resolution.

The Ask a Researcher service is available on a pay-per-search basis, or access can be included as part of an Information Service subscription. For more information, please contact us.

What technology brings to health and social care: a case study of Calderdale and Idox

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By Steven McGinty

In the second of our articles on health and social care and technology, we‘re going to look at the advantages of using technology, as well as a case study of an innovative partnership between Calderdale Council and Idox.

The ‘Digital working, learning and information sharing’ strategy, developed in partnership with the adult social care sector, identifies three areas where technology would bring a number of benefits:

  • working directly with those who need care and their carers;
  • supporting the learning and professional development of staff;
  • organisational business support and information management systems.

The use of electronic notes, for instance, would be a simple step that would have a significant impact on homecare workers (highlighted in section 5 of the Burstow Commission report on the future of the home care workforce).  At the moment, care workers usually make handwritten notes and leave them in a book in someone’s home.  However, if care workers moved from handwritten notes to electronic notes, information could be shared more easily. This would mean that care managers and families would be able to monitor an individual’s care and conditions remotely.

Organisations have also seen the advantage of incorporating e-learning into staff development.  The Skills for Care ‘Digital capabilities in social care’ report found that 95% of organisations used e-learning courses to support staff development, particularly in administration-related areas, such as health and safety and fire training. For instance, instead of sending staff on full day training sessions, e-learning courses can be completed by staff in an hour, offering greater efficiency and flexibility.

However, the report also highlighted that social care related e-learning courses, which looked at issues such as dignity and respect, were of ‘variable quality’ and not able to compete with the experience of face-to-face and group learning. Therefore, it’s possible that an opportunity is being missed by education and training providers, as technology should be able to provide better solutions than the simple tick box exercises described in the report.

Interestingly, the report also suggests this might not be too far off, as one of the organisations revealed that they were looking at more interactive options and were currently working on a research project with a university in Greece, which focused on the idea of ‘gamification’.

One local authority that’s certainly tried to capitalise on the benefits of technology is Calderdale Council. The council has developed an innovative case management tool to support their day-to-day work, in areas such as child protection, looked after children, and fostering and adopting. Parveen Akhtar, Early Intervention Service Manager, at Calderdale Council explains that:

“The Child Social Care solution was created in partnership with schools, health and police. Providing an intuitive system to meet the requirements of front line social care practitioners, it enhances our ability to provide better services to families within our community.”

The Child Social Care solution creates a single view of a child through combining information from several sources into one record. This means that practitioners are able to create, access and share information easily and securely, supporting informed decisions and putting in place appropriate support for children and their families.

The system has a number of benefits and features, including:

  • improving multi-agency communication and response;
  • reducing the amount of time taken by practitioners to locate another agency involved in a child’s case;
  • enabling practitioners to access information remotely;
  • offering comprehensive performance and reporting tools for providing vital statistics;
  • providing the ability to monitor and track the progress that children and families are making.

Calderdale have teamed up with Idox, a specialist in providing technology, content and funding solutions to government, and are now offering their system to other local authorities. The partnership has already proven to be successful, with Calderdale and Idox providing their solution to councils in the Isles of Scilly and Leeds.

Over the coming years, health and social care will be facing ever greater demands with tighter budgets. For this reason, technology is going to be essential to support better outcomes and more efficient services.  It is therefore important that a strategic approach is taken concerning information technology, and that organisations look at its long term benefits, rather than the short term savings from cuts to investment.

The first article on health and social care and technology, “What’s preventing health and social care from going digital?”, can be found here.

Further reading:

 

Troubled families approach expands … but is the evidence there?

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paper family on handBy Dorothy Laing

Nobody likes the idea of experiencing antisocial behaviour on their doorsteps so further government action to help ‘troubled families’ will almost certainly be welcomed by neighbours and local communities alike.

On 19th August, Communities Secretary Eric Pickles announced an extension of the Troubled Families Programme, as findings from independent research carried out for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) – National Evaluation of the Troubled Families Programme interim report family monitoring data: a report by Ecorys UK and Understanding Troubled Families – revealed the current state of progress. Continue reading →

The Public Bodies (Joint Working) Scotland Act 2014 – should it have gone further?

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Health Cubes_iStock_000022075266Largeby Steven McGinty

Last month, on April 1st, the Public Bodies (Joint Working) Scotland Act 2014 was given its royal assent. According to Alex Neil, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, this new addition to the statute book signifies a ‘landmark’ change for the provision of healthcare in Scotland. The Act will be introduced in stages, with the full integration of health and social care expected by April 2016. The principal aim is to provide better patient outcomes through the integration of health and social care services. There has been broad support for the new legislation, but some say the Act has not gone far enough. Continue reading →