Local Government Innovation Taskforce

First Report: The case for change

Commissioned for Labour’s Policy Review March 2014 The Local Government Innovation Taskforce was set up by the Leader of the Labour Party Ed Miliband:

“We can learn how to improve public services in tough times not just from our history but from our present. I am incredibly proud that Labour in local government is making a difference even in tough times. Let us pay tribute to all of those councillors for their work. And I want that work to shape the work of the next Labour government too.

So I’ve asked Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester council, Sharon Taylor, Leader of Stevenage council and Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney to lead a new Taskforce to advise us on how we can make a difference even when there is less money around. These leaders have led the way in their own communities and they will now help shape our plans for public services for the years ahead.”

Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP Speech to Labour’s National Policy Forum 22 June 2013

Local Government Innovation Taskforce members: Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council (co-chair) Mayor Jules Pipe, Hackney London Borough Council (co-chair) Cllr Sharon Taylor, Leader of Stevenage Borough Council (co-chair) Cllr Kate Haigh, Leader of Gloucester City Council Labour Group Cllr Simon Henig, Leader of Durham County Council Sir Steve Houghton, Leader of Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council Cllr Anne Western, Leader of Derbyshire County Council

Secretariat: Jessica Studdert

Designed and typeset by Soapbox, www.soapbox.co.uk Printed by DG3 Contents

Foreword from co-chairs ��2

Executive summary ��4

The context for change ��6

The limits of the current system ��10

The opportunity of place ��13

Towards a different approach ��22

Next steps ��24

APPENDIX I – Case studies ��26

APPENDIX II – Call for Evidence participants ��39

First Report: The case for change 1 Foreword from co-chairs

Ed Miliband has been clear that radical social change to vastly improve the quality of life and life chances for citizens across the country, whilst balancing the books and getting the national debt falling, is not only possible but essential. The Local Government Innovation Taskforce was borne out of his desire to learn from the innovations driven by Labour in local government, who are providing a route-map for exactly how this can be achieved.

Our country faces enormous social, economic and demographic challenges: an ageing population with longer term care needs; continuing unemployment combined with persistent skills shortages; rising inequality; and polarisation between communities with highly variable local economies and opportunities. Labour in local government is experiencing these challenges from a particular vantage point. Councillors, officers and their partners deal with the fallout of these complex and interwoven issues every day, but remain constrained in the ways they can respond and improve living standards. They have been forced to meet ever rising demand within falling budgets, and the Government’s decisions have hit areas that were already poorer the hardest.

The Taskforce has received a wide range of evidence and contributions from Labour councils, the broader local government sector and representatives of the range of partners councils work with including the voluntary sector, trade unions, housing associations, the health sector and the private sector. By examining both how Labour councils have been finding new ways to put enduring values into practice and considering more broadly how the system works from the perspective of the places people live in, the Taskforce has found evidence of the opportunities for, and barriers to, innovation.

‘The Taskforce has Local innovations are demonstrating the greater impact that approaches found evidence of more relevant to the particular needs and circumstances of places can have, the opportunities across a range of service areas addressing employment, skills, health and for, and barriers to, care, support for children and families and more. There is evidence that innovation’ they are more effective in producing better outcomes, demonstrating better value for public money invested, and can be more sustainable in the longer term leading to less demand in the future.

Yet at present these innovations are working against the flawed logic of a system of governance that concentrates power and resource at the centre. This imposes structural limits on the ability of local areas to be creative and pioneer more effective and efficient public services. Separate funding streams and specific policy prescriptions impose constraints on the ability of services to respond to the challenges they face, and there are too few rewards from the investment that innovation requires. In practice this can lead to weaknesses and reduced capacity of some areas to meet their residents’ needs.

The Taskforce’s Inquiry has found that this situation is not sustainable. A traditional, top down approach to public service design and delivery is no longer viable or defensible as costs rise and resources dwindle, as demand increases and capacity is stretched, and as complex and crosscutting

2 Local Government Innovation Taskforce problems require ever more sophisticated responses. Instead, evidence to the Taskforce indicates that a future Labour government will only be able to deliver the ambitious outcomes it seeks by enabling a stronger local dynamic in the design of services, anchoring them in the places they operate to build in responsiveness, relevance and impact for people.

With ongoing pressure on public finances, to meet the challenge of raising living standards across the country, a new strategy for public services is required. This would be built around people and places rather than silo based, input driven programmes: an approach which can enable, not hold back, innovation to meet peoples’ needs. In light of this, the ultimate question the Taskforce will seek to address is how the lessons of local successes could more fundamentally inform a new model of governance, in which innovation is the norm, not the exception.

The challenge will be to build a system in which all local areas have greater capacity to improve living standards and to create a nation in which no community is held back.

Sir Richard Leese, Leader of Manchester City Council Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney London Borough Council Cllr Sharon Taylor, Leader of Stevenage Borough Council

First Report: The case for change 3 Executive summary

The financial context for our public services has changed fundamentally in recent years: all public services are being required to deliver with less resource. There is now a clear choice:

1. To continue to salami-slice Whitehall budgets, squeezing separate public services and tinkering round the edges of traditional modes of delivery. 2. A radical reconfiguration of the system which links public service reform to growth; invests in people to become more productive and equipped to take advantage of future opportunities; and over time reduces demand by shifting from high cost reaction to long term prevention.

The Tory-led Government has pursued the first option: salami-slicing budgets rather than radically reconfiguring the way services are designed and delivered. Despite having promised to push power down, they have not delivered this in practice: power and resource remain concentrated at the centre. In the absence of reform, demand for services is outstripping the resources available to deliver them and the public sector is facing a crunch.

It is clear that the status quo is no longer affordable: carrying on “business as usual” will lead to the steady decline, retrenchment and residualisation of public services. This has now become the riskier option to fundamental reform.

A traditional, largely centralised model of service design has reached the limits of its efficacy. It is failing to deliver in the context of dwindling resources. Standardised approaches are struggling to deal with complexity or difference. Silos are causing inefficient duplication and creating barriers to innovation. And people are not sufficiently engaged and involved in service design.

We need to reconsider at what level public services should be designed and delivered to maximise investment and effectiveness. The starting point for this should be what is working well and why.

Evidence from local government suggests that a strategy for public services based around place provides an opportunity to be more efficient. Evaluation of community budget pilots showed that if all places adopted the approaches on health and social care, troubled families and work and skills, there is the potential for better services and savings of between £9.4 billion and £20.6 billion over five years.

It also has the opportunity to ensure greater fairness for everyone. Evidence from cross national comparisons show correlations between devolved governance and lower levels of inequality overall, and there is evidence that over-centralisation is constraining economic development outside London.

4 Local Government Innovation Taskforce And it charts the way for delivering a new approach to public services based on three core principles:

• Power for people to shape their services in response to their specific needs and those of their communities • Collaboration and co-operation between public services and organisations to stop inefficient duplication • Investment in prevention, early intervention and promoting independence to avoid the costs of failure

Across the country there are examples of Labour councils putting these principles into practice. For example:

• People given more power to shape services: Where the Youth Contract has been devolved, services have been shaped to local circumstances and results have delivered close to double the level of success. Nationally the programme has helped 27 per cent of young people into work or learning, while in Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield 57 per cent, and in Newcastle and Gateshead 47 per cent, have been supported into work or learning. The Young Lambeth Cooperative hands power to commission play and youth services directly to young people, their families and wider communities. • Stronger collaboration and co-operation between services: Greenwich Integrated Care, a partnership between the council, the CCG and the local NHS foundation trust is showing how an integrated whole system response to care needs can improve health and independence, reduce the need for more expensive types of care and support, and save the social care budget £900,000. • Investment in prevention and early intervention to avoid the costs of failure: Oldham Council estimate that as a result of improvements in outcomes for the “troubled” families they have worked with and the reduced need for reactive services such as police call-outs, A&E attendances and school attendance support, there is a potential cost saving across the public sector of £1.1 million if work is scaled up across the borough.

These innovations demonstrate the potential of a reformed approach to public services based around places to overcome the barriers inherent in the current system. They are showing the value of local approaches to ensure more productive places, people equipped to take advantage of opportunity and over time tackle demand pressures by shifting towards prevention.

This is a clear opportunity for Labour nationally to take a radically different approach to meet its ambitions for a stronger, fairer society in which everyone can play their part. Reform will need to alleviate the pinch points identified and devolve power to local areas where national programmes are ineffective.

Radical reform will involve changes for all involved – both for central government and for local government. This will involve a clear framework of national entitlements and outcomes, which should form the basis of a devolved approach and then enable greater scope for local areas to innovate to meet needs, more comprehensively tackle demand pressures and ensure no community is held back.

First Report: The case for change 5 The context for change

The financial context for our national public services has changed fundamentally in recent years. Funding for local government has been cut by 40 per cent over this Parliament: councils will have had to reduce their budgets by a total of £20 billion by 2015/16. But the Tory-led Government’s wider economic failure has meant they are now forecast to borrow almost £200 billion more than planned in 2010 over the Parliament and the deficit will be over £60 million more than expected in 2015–16, even with the further deep cuts to public spending which the Government has announced. This failed approach means that the next Labour Government will have to govern with much less money around. In 1997 Labour was able to plan its manifesto on the basis of rising departmental spending. The next Labour government will have to plan on the basis of falling departmental spending.

All public services are being required to deliver with less resource. In the context of the continued need for spending restraint and rising demand, there is a clear choice for public services:

‘This presents an The Taskforce’s inquiry has found evidence of how the first scenario is opportunity for playing out now: “supply-side” efficiency drives within an unreformed system a future Labour are simply shunting costs around rather than tackling demand pressures Government to and are building up further problems for the future. An understanding of deliver on its this, combined with the evidence of innovations driven by Labour councils ambitious agenda that are improving outcomes for people despite financial constraints, can of radical social inform how the alternative approach might work in practice. This presents change’ an opportunity for a future Labour Government to deliver on its ambitious agenda of radical social change.

The Tory-led Government has pursued the first option, salami- slicing budgets rather than radically reconfiguring the way services are designed and delivered Despite having promised to reform public services by pushing power down, the Government has not done this in practice. Power and resource remain concentrated at the centre,1 dominating the shape of public services in England. Localism has been a convenient rhetorical tool for the government to disguise the impact of their unbalanced approach to deficit reduction, which has disproportionately impacted on councils,2 while departmental boundaries have been kept largely intact. “Localising” measures have

1 The United Kingdom has one of the most centralised systems of government in the developed world, with over 70 per cent of public spending in 2011 decided at a national level compared to the OECD average of around 46 per cent. Figures from Government at a Glance 2013, OECD Publishing. 2 In the first three years of the Spending Review, funding to councils was reduced proportionately three times more than funding to Whitehall: 33 per cent on average compared to a 12 per cent average reduction across departments (LGA).

6 Local Government Innovation Taskforce been contained mostly within the department of Communities and Local Government, which has enabled the Government to pass on financial risk and political responsibility for cuts whilst granting them deniability over the impact of their decisions on local areas. Meanwhile reforms to other departments have been marked by further centralisation: a top-down reorganisation of the NHS; decisions to open new schools now rest solely with the Secretary of State for Education; and the centrally-managed Work Programme prime provider model makes local solutions hard to achieve.

By locating the centre of gravity in Whitehall rather than in the places services are delivered, the current system contains within it significant inefficiencies and barriers that prevent effective delivery of services. Departmental silos are replicated in communities, treating symptoms not root causes of problems and creating disincentives to meet peoples’ needs. A structure that was built in the twentieth century is struggling to meet the challenges of the twenty-first, in which complex modern problems such as the prevalence of long term health conditions, worklessness and anti-social behaviour, are very often intertwined and mutually reinforcing.3 In doing so, scarce public resources are too often wasted, spent on managing problems which services are not designed to solve.

The result is a growing public sector crunch – where demand for services is outstripping the resources available to deliver them Many public services are facing an emerging gap between growing demand for services and the resources required to meet it. This is driven by a number of factors. Firstly, demographic changes mean that demand for services is growing. People are living longer, which is shifting the nature of health and care needs. It is projected that there will be 51 per cent more people aged over 65 in England in 2030 than in 2010, and over 80 per cent more people aged 65 and over with dementia over the same period.4 Medical advances mean people are also living longer with long term conditions: there are an estimated 15 million people in England with one or more long term conditions, a figure which is predicted to rise by a third to 20 million over the next ten years.5

People with long term conditions are the most frequent users of health care services: their treatment and care currently accounts for 70 per cent of in-patient bed days and 70 per cent of the primary and acute budget in England.6 Their care needs are more likely to be complex and multifaceted, for example 30 per cent of people with a long term physical health condition also have a mental health condition.7 Yet at the same time, it is estimated that around 70–80 per cent of people with long-term conditions can be supported to manage their own condition.8 Current models of healthcare cannot sustain high demands for single episode treatment without reform to better manage ongoing care needs, despite relatively protected funding:

3 See Many to Many: How the relational state will transform public services, Muir R and Parker I (2014), ippr. 4 Ready for Ageing? House of Lords Select Committee on Public Services and Demographic Change, March 2013. 5 Transforming our health care system, Kings Fund April 2013. 6 The NHS belongs to the people: A Call to Action, NHS England 2013. 7 ‘Long term conditions and mental health: The cost of co-morbidities’, Naylor et al (2012), King’s Fund, as quoted in Muir R and Parker I, Many to Many, (2014). 8 Transforming our health care system, Kings Fund April 2013.

First Report: The case for change 7 NHS England predicts a health funding shortfall that could reach £30 billion by 2020 unless services are redesigned.9

Secondly, unmet needs are causing reactive demand pressures in the system because traditional modes of delivery are struggling to cope with modern challenges. Large sums of money are spent maintaining and responding to problems rather than preventing them. Unemployment is a specific challenge, but particular aspects of it are more complex and are proving resistant to current interventions. Long-term unemployment has grown since 2010, and there are now over 100,000 more people who have been out of work for two years or more. An estimated £5 billion a year is spent tackling worklessness.10 Youth unemployment reached record levels in 2011 and remains unacceptably high, with over 900,000 young people out of work. ACEVO estimate that the cost to the Exchequer of young people not in employment, education or training will reach £28 billion over the next decade in additional benefits, lost tax and lost economic output.11 The numbers of young people becoming long term disengaged has grown in recent years – long term unemployment among 16–24 year olds doubled from 110,000 in 2008 to around 260,000 in 2012.12 And an estimated £9 billion is spent on 120,000 “troubled” families every year, £8 billion of which is spent reacting to problems and treating symptoms of wider issues, such as police call-outs and A&E admissions.13 The problems created by these unmet needs are already visible, but evidence suggests that they will continue to place pressure on demand for services unless they can be met more effectively and sustainably resolved.

Thirdly, there is evidence that cuts in some services without reform are simply creating additional demand for others. For example while funding cuts to councils reduced social care budgets by £1.8 billion in the first two years of the Tory-led Government, there was a 66 per cent increase in the number of over 90 year olds arriving at A&E in ambulances – an extra 110,00 patients.14 Funding cuts to councils have affected over half of homelessness services; meanwhile homelessness has been rising since 2010, with an increase of 11 per cent in the two years to 2012 of households approaching their local authority as homeless.15 By simply reducing the supply of services, demand has not decreased but has simply been transferred elsewhere in the system.

The funding challenge facing local government exemplifies the wider public sector crunch. This demonstrates the knock-on effect of salami-slicing budgets without the reforms needed to manage demand pressures. Local government faces a funding gap which is growing at around £2.1 billion a year and could reach £14.4 billion by 2020.16 Projections indicate that resource constraints and growing demand for social care and environmental waste spending mean that money available to councils to deliver other local

9 The NHS belongs to the people: A Call to Action, NHS England 2013. 10 Making it Work: Tackling worklessness through innovation, Nesta 2012. 11 Youth Unemployment: The crisis we cannot afford, ACEVO Commission on Youth Unemployment, 2012. 12 Hidden Talents II: Re-engaging young people, the local offer, Local Government Association 2013. 13 Troubled Families Unit. 14 “Elderly people bearing brunt of A&E crisis”, Andy Burnham 11 June 2013. 15 Crisis submission to the Taskforce. 16 Future funding outlook for councils from 2010/11 to 2019/20, Local Government Association July 2013.

8 Local Government Innovation Taskforce services, such as leisure or measures to boost local growth, is predicted to shrink by 46 per cent by 2020.17

Figure 1: Local Authority Income against Expenditure, 2010/11 – 2019/20

£ (billion) 48

2010/11 2011/12 2012/13 2013/14 2014/15 2015/16 2016/17 2017/18 2018/19 2019/20

Source: LGA, FutureNet Funding Expenditure Outlook for CouncilsFunding from 2010/11 to 2019/20, 2013

Put simply, the status quo is no longer affordable. Demand pressures are growing, caused by unmet needs, reactive costs and demographic changes. These pressures in the system cannot be ignored. Carrying on “business as usual” will lead to the steady decline, retrenchment and residualisation of public services, with ever higher thresholds for use and the termination of some altogether. This has now become a riskier option to fundamental reform. The Tory-led Government has largely been prepared to continue down the path of salami-slicing individual budgets and tinkering around the edges of traditional modes of delivery.

To meet the demand challenges that exist will require more than simply tackling them head on. The best innovation in the private sector which genuinely makes a different to people’s lives doesn’t just respond to current demand or customer preferences, it seeks instead to create new avenues of supply and thereby shift demand over time. Henry Ford’s much quoted observation that his customers would have asked for faster horses reveals an important underlying point about the merits of simply aspiring to meet current recognised demand rather than shaping new possibilities for the future that are not yet tangible. For public services, in the context of diminishing resources and growing pressures, the ability to radically innovate to create new avenues of supply and shift demand over time, will be crucial.

If Labour is to meet its goals of improving living standards, tackling disadvantage and spreading opportunity, then a radical change in the relationship between the state, the citizen and places will be needed. At the interface of this, effective and efficient public services that innovate to meet needs, deliver better outcomes and are sustainable in the long term are required.

17 Ibid.

First Report: The case for change 9 The limits of the current system

‘A traditional, A traditional, largely centralised model of service design has reached the largely centralised limits of its efficacy and is failing to manage this public sector crunch of model of service demand outstripping available resources. Standardised approaches are design and delivery struggling to deal with complexity; silos are causing inefficient duplication has reached the and creating barriers to innovation; and the system is not sufficiently limits of its efficacy’ involving people in the design and delivery of services.

Standardised approaches are struggling to deal with complexity or difference An over-reliance on standardised models not sufficiently tailored or adapted to different circumstances in different places means some public services are not always responsive enough to what people need. A one-size-fits-all approach is optimal for transactional services that need to deal at volume with similar cases, for example Jobcentre Plus processing new jobseekers and signposting them to vacancies. It is less effective when more complex and multiple needs require services to be responsive, tailored and anchored into local opportunities.

For example the centrally-managed Work Programme commissioning structure divides the country into ‘contract package areas’ not aligned to local labour markets and circumstances. The prime provider model does not effectively integrate with other services in local areas that could address barriers to work. As a result the approach is not delivering the personalised, specialist support needed for those furthest from the labour market,18 proving rigid and unable to respond to individual needs – too often ‘creaming and parking’ those it cannot help.19 After two years on the Work Programme, people are more likely to return to Jobcentre Plus than find a job, with just over 16 per cent of all individuals and less than five per cent of those claiming a disability benefit finding work.20

Silos are causing inefficient duplication and creating barriers to innovation Government departmental boundaries which shape the allocation of resources aren’t necessarily aligned to the reality of people’s lives. As a result, duplication can emerge which prevents the effective alignment of resources and capacity around the delivery of clear outcomes. For example as many as 35 different national schemes seeking to address youth unemployment have been identified, across 13 different age boundaries, funded by eight different national departments and agencies, costing around £15 billion a year.21 Meanwhile since 2009/10 the number of young people starting nationally-funded employment and skills provision has dropped by 10 per cent.22

18 Crisis submission to the Taskforce. 19 Can the Work Programme work for all user groups?, Work and Pensions Committee First Report, 2013. 20 Work Programme Official Statistics to Sept 2013, published 19 December, Department for Work and Pensions. 21 Hidden Talents II: Re-engaging young people, the local offer, Local Government Association 2013. 22 Hidden Talents: National Programmes for Young People, Local Government Association 2013.

10 Local Government Innovation Taskforce Funding based on silos can also create systemic disincentives to innovate and achieve wider outcomes that would qualitatively improve people’s lives. For example the national skills funding system incentivises the majority of providers to prioritise qualifications as a measure of success, rather than employment outcomes, which is leading to a mismatch between the supply of skills and the demands of local labour markets.23 The national tariff system for hospital care provides funding on the basis of single episode activity rather than longer term patient outcomes, so in the context of continuing pressure on acute services there is little incentive to invest in community- based treatment. Schools currently lack a strong incentive to invest in early years and other support that improves school readiness because a key performance measure is demonstrating the added value of their support to children over the years they are at school.

Where public services are encouraged to think about the ‘bottom line’ within their own silo, this can have significant knock-on effects on other services’ demand and budgets. Where different public services are funded according to different timetables and conditions this creates a structural barrier to aligning resources and pooling efforts around people’s needs. These features of the system prevent services taking a wider “whole system” approach to addressing cross-cutting challenges.

CASE STUDY

The map of youth unemployment support in Islington Islington Council mapped provision for young people in the borough relating to work and skills opportunities. For young people between the ages of 13 and 24 they identified 27 national, regional and local agencies including the council, delivering 55 different schemes and programmes. An 18 year old who is not in education, training or employment, for example, would be able to access any one of over 25 schemes.

People are not sufficiently engaged and involved in service design A model in which decisions over service design and delivery are retained at the centre is not guaranteeing engagement of people over the shape of provision. There is evidence to suggest people would favour more local over central control over decision-making: polling showed that 11 per cent of people trust central government to take decisions over local services, compared to 79 per cent of people who trust local government to take those decisions.24

Vertical accountability silos to Whitehall departments can preclude collaboration between services and prevent them from seeing the whole picture of problems, so they too often end up managing symptoms. Significant issues are lack of data sharing between services which limits broader understanding of individuals’ circumstances and histories, and lack of open data for individuals to give people more power over information and access to services. These barriers to co-operation can be

23 See Hidden Talents: Skills Mismatch Analysis, Gardiner L and Wilson T, Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion, 2012. The analysis found that in one year 94,000 people were trained in hair and beauty for just 18,000 jobs in that sector, whilst 123,000 people were trained for 274,000 available jobs in construction. 24 Ipsos Mori for NLGN, January 2013.

First Report: The case for change 11 seen as manifestations of vertical departmental accountability rather than accountability to people and places.

People with the most complex circumstances can often experience the least control over their lives and the system can be complex for them to navigate through. Evidence from Troubled Families work being led locally is demonstrating the costs and consequences of services being built to their own priorities not those of the people they serve. For example Oldham Council mapped over 200 different local services used by “troubled” families in their area. Across these they estimate that there were over 500,000 contacts with such families and at least 45,000 inter-agency referrals in 2011/12 alone. This shows how disempowered people can be from service responses, and prone to being buffeted around a system not designed to give them the support they need.

CASE STUDY

One “troubled” family in Oldham and the trouble with the service response Over a ten year period to 2012 one family were subject to 410 interventions by 25 different services including police, health, social care, housing, community outreach, voluntary sector and the Family Intervention Project. During this time, Oldham Council identified 18 missed opportunities to achieve change and there were 32 referrals between services. Oldham estimate the cost of responding to this family in 2011/12 alone was £47,235.

Scale, complexity and impact These examples highlight the limits of a top-down system, and point to the need for a stronger spatial dimension to public service design and delivery that can more effectively and efficiently meet people’s needs. A discussion about the merits of a localised approach can be problematic if conducted solely through the prism of the centre. Judgements about success and failure tend to be framed within the parameters of the current, primarily centralised, mode of governance. Failures at the centre occur frequently: be they process failures like the botched rollout of Universal Credit or ongoing delivery failures such as the Work Programme’s poor success rates with people facing complex barriers to work. Yet there is an inbuilt bias in the system whereby these failures are seen as particular rather than raising questions about the more fundamental capability of the centre to deal with complex challenges at such a scale. Given that all levels of public administration can be prone to strengths and weaknesses, a pragmatic strategy would assess risk more objectively and consider what level of governance is appropriate for maximising the impact of investment and ensuring effectiveness.

The starting point for a new approach would be to examine what is working well and why. Local innovations must be more fully explored, understood and their learning embedded before addressing the more fundamental question of how a system can be built that is based on success, one which better enables local innovation to develop, spread and embed. The aim would be a system of constant innovation, which creates and adapts new approaches, builds in lessons from the evidence of impact, concentrating risk but disseminating rewards throughout the system.

12 Local Government Innovation Taskforce The opportunity of place

For Labour to pursue an alternative approach which links public service reform to growth, invests in people to sustainably reduce demand and deliver an agenda of radical social change, the role and opportunity of place needs to be recognised.

‘The evidence base There is an opportunity to be more efficient. The evidence base for more for more efficient efficient use of public money by better aligning budgets to areas is growing. use of public Total Place pilots pursued under the Labour Government identified the money by better problems caused by silos demonstrated the scope to join up services in local aligning budgets to areas, and estimates identified a potential cost saving of £20 billion over ten areas is growing’ years.25 Whole Place Community Budget pilots built on this approach and developed the notion of a place-based budget between services to address cross-cutting challenges such as worklessness, complex dependency and health and social care. Evaluation of the four pilots showed that if all places adopted the approaches on health and social care, troubled families and work and skills, there was potential for better services and savings overall of between £9.4 billion and £20.6 billion over five years.26

This is the most significant evidence of the potential savings that could result from scaling up place-based budgets, but they cannot be realised within an unreformed system. Savings that occurred from the pilots were found to accrue at a ratio of 80:20 to central government agencies and to councils respectively.27 It is not financially sustainable for local government to bear the upfront costs of the programme, whilst the savings and additional revenues from joined up services accrue to separate Whitehall departments.28

There is an opportunity to ensure greater fairness for everyone. The perceived fear of a postcode lottery of provision is often cited as a reason against pursuing a more place-sensitive strategy for public services. But there are downsides to a highly centralised model of governance in relation to fairness. Evidence from a number of cross-national comparisons show correlations between devolved governance and lower levels of inequality overall. A comparative study of 56 countries between 1980 and 2009 demonstrated that in the most developed countries, higher levels of decentralisation lead to lower levels of regional inequality.29 There is a reasonably strong correlation between governmental effectiveness (measured across a range of policy outcomes including social inclusion, healthcare and the quality of democracy) and the proportion of devolved spending.30 This would appear to suggest that there is a “national” lottery to consider, as opposed to just the postcode lottery that is the defensive

25 Total Place: A whole area approach to public services, HM Treasury and Communities and Local Government, March 2010; “Denham targets £20bn in council cost-cutting”, Guardian 21 February 2010. 26 Whole Place Community Budgets: A Review of the Potential for Aggregation, Ernst & Young for LGA 2013. 27 Community Budgets, Third Report of the Session 2013–14, House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee, 2013. 28 ‘Getting the economy growing: Can the government finish the drill?’, Z Wilcox 2013, Centre for Cities Blog, 21 May 2013. 29 Regional Inequality and Decentralisation: An empirical analysis, Christian Lessman, CESifo Working Paper Series no 3568 (2011), cited in ippr submission to the Taskforce. 30 Data from the Bertelsmann foundation (sustainable governance indicators) and the OECD (devolved spending), cited in NLGN submission to the Taskforce.

First Report: The case for change 13 point for those who would resist devolving power down. In addition, a range of evidence suggests that economic development in England’s big cities outside London is being constrained by over-centralisation.31 This increasing evidence base suggests that far from a stronger focus on place undermining social justice, empowering local areas has potential to result in greater fairness overall by rebalancing the national economy and spreading the rewards.

Local innovations provide an opportunity for radical change Evidence gathered by the Taskforce demonstrates the wide range of innovation being driven by Labour in local government. Taken separately, they demonstrate the appetite of Labour locally to deliver for their residents. Taken together, they chart the features of a more sustainable model of public services.

The Taskforce has identified three core principles which would guide a shift towards a new approach:

A new model of public services based on these principles will be more capable of addressing the demand pressures that exist, and will be more sustainable in the longer term. Labour in local government is demonstrating that a more local approach is the key to delivering this.

More power for people to shape services in response to their specific needs and those of their communities Local innovations are providing people with more power over their services in a number of different ways. They are doing this by being more tailored to the circumstances of the places they operate within; by better understanding and responding to local people’s needs; and by involving people more directly in decision-making. As a result, there is evidence of greater impact for investment producing better outcomes and more value for money.

Services responsive to local circumstances are producing more value and impact for people By being more responsive to the specific circumstances of the places they operate within, there is evidence approaches tailored to local circumstances can produce more impact and get better results than national programmes. For example, where the Youth Contract has been devolved to city regions, results have delivered close to double the level of success. The nationally- commissioned Youth Contract helped 27 per cent of 16 and 17 year olds it has worked with into work or learning and despite huge levels of need it is under-spending. In comparison Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield have helped 57 per cent of the young people they have worked with into work or learning and Newcastle and Gateshead have achieved 47 per cent positive

31 See Heseltine (2012); Ippr North/NEFC (2012) and Core Cities Prospectus for Growth (2013) (cited in IPPR submission to the Taskforce).

14 Local Government Innovation Taskforce outcomes.32 New flexibilities enabled the councils to create approaches relevant to their local labour markets and are aligned with support provided by other local services and voluntary sector providers.

Similarly, Newcastle’s Let’s Grow Scheme has a ‘cost per job’ of under a third that of the nationally administered Regional Growth Fund, showing how a locally developed programme sensitive and responsive to local economic conditions can deliver better and quicker results.33 Locally-based fund managers are able to work within business networks, promote finance, monitor and nurture investment, stimulate demand and influence the local business culture – all features which national programmes, far removed from the local market, do not have the scope to incorporate.

Newham’s Workplace scheme demonstrates the potential for locally designed and delivered employment services to build in responsiveness to the specific needs of places.34 This model is based on active links with local employers to understand their specific requirements – for example account managers are frequently embedded within companies for short periods to better understand the challenges they face, what jobs they have available and what skills they need. This means support for jobseekers can then be better focussed on providing relevant preparation and skills rather than generic training offered through national schemes such as the Work Programme. As a result, outcomes are demonstrating greater sustainability than national programmes: 86 per cent of people starting Workplace jobs were still in work six months later. Although they work with different client groups, the DWP benchmark is 52 per cent.

Other areas are developing models which show how by capitalising on local knowledge, understanding and networks, locally devised approaches have the potential to deliver better results. Jobs for Haringey is a locally designed and commissioned employment support scheme which uses providers best placed to engage with and support local communities, underpinned by a strong network of council and non-council partners that can offer complementary and specialist support to participants.35 It is producing job outcomes of 27.6 per cent for people unemployed for over 6 months. The Work Programme’s success rate in the area, working with people unemployed for between three to 12 months is 14.8 per cent.

From their unique position and role in an area, councils are able to see future growth opportunities as they come down the line and ensure local people are in a position to take advantage of them. Camden, like many councils, works closely with local regeneration projects to secure employment and training opportunities for residents – using strong relationships and agreements with developers and employers to create jobs and apprenticeships which local people can access.36 Southampton Council’s bespoke approach to Section 106 Employment and Skills Plans has created 150 new apprenticeships, 500 supported jobs for unemployed people and

32 Appendix I: 1.1. 33 Appendix I: 1.4. 34 Appendix I: 1.2. 35 Appendix I: 1.3. 36 Appendix I: 1.5.

First Report: The case for change 15 supported other activities such as work placements and employer curriculum activities in schools and colleges.37

Locally-led skills strategies are demonstrating that across a place there is more scope to align provision with the demands of the local labour market and ensure a stronger focus on job outcomes. Both the Warrington Skills Commission38 and City of York Council’s Skills Strategy39 demonstrate the strategic role councils can play in their local economy working with partners across the public, private and voluntary sectors to identify current and future demand, and ensure resources are aligned to meet it. Liverpool City Region’s strategy has involved Skills for Growth agreements with identified local growth sectors of advanced manufacturing, the SuperPort and the visitor economy, which set out in detail the skills needs of the sectors and what businesses, schools, colleges, training providers and universities can do to meet these needs.40 These approaches have the potential to boost the quality of apprenticeships and training, whilst also encouraging employers to make more opportunities available.

Better understanding local people’s needs and designing support around them ‘At a local level The ultimate test of personalised services is whether they can respond there is greater to those with the most chaotic circumstances. By definition, people capacity to build in characterised by national policymakers as “hard to reach” are closer to local genuine community councils. Labour councils are pioneering new approaches for people whose engagement needs have so far not been met by national programmes, by testing new ways of better aligning provision around individual, complex needs. Greater and break down Manchester’s Work Programme Leavers will adopt a whole family approach institutional to long term unemployed ESA claimants who have left the Work Programme barriers’ with no employment outcome.41 This will involve better integrated and sequenced support from a range of local public and voluntary sector providers that can address specific barriers to work. The approach will work with individuals and their wider families, based on an understanding that their wider circumstances and social networks are important influencers in any eventual outcome.

Southwark, Lambeth and Lewisham are developing a community budget across their authorities and across service and agency boundaries, exploring how the resources of local authorities, housing associations, Jobcentre Plus, the voluntary sector and skills providers can be brought together in a pathway of integrated support for people from the point of universal credit application through to employment.42 These new schemes are in their early stages, but as outcomes emerge against national benchmarks, the models could unlock a different deal between central and local government on welfare delivery models.

Involving people more directly in decision-making At a local level there is greater capacity to build in genuine community engagement and to break down institutional barriers and create new

37 Appendix I: 1.6. 38 Appendix I: 1.8. 39 Appendix I: 1.9. 40 Appendix I: 1.10. 41 Appendix I: 1.11. 42 Appendix I: 1.12.

16 Local Government Innovation Taskforce relationships between the citizen and the state. Co-operative Councils are pioneering new approaches that look beyond traditional service models to shift power and opportunities for involvement beyond the town hall and closer to people. These new models are based on people not being simply passive recipients or consumers of services, but as partners in shaping outcomes, building more resilient, stronger communities.43 In practice this means finding new ways of ensuring people actively participate in decisions which affect them. For example, the Young Lambeth Cooperative hands over responsibility to young people, their families and wider community to commission play and youth services, creating a genuine stake in provision which is shaped to more effectively meet their needs.44

Oldham’s Co-operative Borough approach is based on clear shared rights and responsibilities between the council and residents.45 By devolving power, resources and supporting staff to six districts within the borough, decision-making has been brought closer to localities. A community “call- in” power means people have the opportunity to challenge decisions made by district executives, which creates a greater degree of efficacy on behalf of residents who know their participation can produce more direct results. A local leaders’ course for councillors equips them with skills in finance, planning and working with communities and once accredited they can use ward budgets for local priorities, so there is a strong focus on building community capacity and engagement with local representatives. Oldham Council is also pioneering new ways of opening up public services to increase people’s ability to make informed decisions: for example by publicly rating their residential care homes and paying premiums to the best they are increasing transparency whilst also driving up quality.46

Other Labour councils are also developing new approaches to devolve power further and closer to people. Sunderland’s Community Leadership programme has also devolved the governance and delivery of local services, to five areas within the city, and this has resulted in improved satisfaction ratings.47 Wirral Council’s four constituency committees are enabling decision-making to take place closer to the people they affect, underpinned by area-based budgets which enable councillors to engage residents more directly in neighbourhood priorities.48 Durham Council’s Area Action Partnerships involve thousands of residents in developing and implementing ideas and participatory budgeting exercises provide opportunities to decide directly on what local projects should be funded.49 Barnsley Council has set up six area councils, identified community representatives to sit alongside members on the bodies.50 This is building community capacity to develop new ways of engaging with residents, support projects which develop a greater sense of efficacy and foster the self-reliance needed to build more resilient communities.

These innovations are demonstrating across a wide range of activity how locally-led approaches can give more power to people to shape services in

43 Co-operative Councils Innovation Network submission to the Taskforce. 44 Appendix I: 5.2. 45 Appendix I: 5.1. 46 Appendix I: 2.4. 47 Appendix I: 5.3. 48 Appendix I: 5.4. 49 Appendix I: 5.5. 50 Appendix I: 5.6.

First Report: The case for change 17 response to their specific needs and those of their communities. This can happen both indirectly whereby locally designed approaches are tailored to local circumstances, responsive to local needs and capable of taking advantage of specific local opportunities, thus producing more impact and better outcomes for people. More power can also be built in directly by creating new possibilities to involve and engage people in decisions which affect them, based on a revitalised role for councillors as community leaders, advocates and activists. These new models are taking power beyond boundaries of the town hall, seeking new ways of more open, collaborative decision-making and building community capacity to become more resilient in the longer-term.

Collaboration and co-operation between public services and organisations to stop inefficient duplication Local innovations are showing the potential for more effective provision if this is anchored “horizontally” around places, overcoming the problems caused by service silos within separate departmental accountabilities, which can preclude effective working beyond boundaries. Where trust and relationships across service boundaries are vital conditions for achieving genuine collaboration, this is most sustainably built at a local level around mutually shared and understood objectives.

In identifying the vast range of capacity in their boroughs dedicated to getting people skills or into work, both Islington and Waltham Forest councils have highlighted how too often the resulting impact can be less than the sum of its parts. With so many different agencies and institutions all working to their own imperatives, this can mean separate, or at worst conflicting, priorities, working against rather than reinforcing each other. The steps Waltham Forest Council have taken to bring together employment, skills and business support provision into one department and co-locate Jobcentre Plus staff at the council is resulting in a greater focus on two clear objectives: increasing the availability of jobs in the borough and increasing residents’ ability to access these opportunities.51 The reduction in unemployment they have achieved demonstrates the potential benefits of better aligning services and available capacity on clear, shared outcomes.

An area in which the need for better collaboration across service boundaries is particularly urgent given rising demand and financial pressures, is health and social care. New models emerging from Labour councils demonstrate that local government has the relationships and the authority to help convene and drive effective collaboration. They show that integrating health and social care services has the best chance of succeeding and sustaining when developed at a local level. This is where trust between professionals can be built, shared outcomes agreed and protocols implemented. Crucially, for efficiency savings to be realised, shared incentive frameworks must be adopted that recognise the input of different services and can engineer a genuine shift away from fragmented models of care towards whole person care, with services shaped around the individual.

Greenwich Integrated Care, a partnership between the council, CCG and the local NHS foundation Trust, is showing how an integrated whole-system response to care needs can improve health and independence, and so

51 Appendix I: 1.14.

18 Local Government Innovation Taskforce reduce the need for more expensive types of care and support, such as residential care, A&E and hospital admissions, with an overall social care budget saving of £900,000.52 The approach was developed actively with staff, creating agreement and ownership over the direction of it. Integrated teams of different clinical and community professionals now offer a seamless package of support via a single point of contact and referral pathway management. By adopting this shared approach, a shared workforce culture is emerging and inefficiencies and duplication are being driven out, strengthening organisational resilience.

In Greater Manchester, the single Community Based Care framework between local authorities, health and other partners is developing new models of care, early results of which are already showing a reduction in hospital admissions.53 By piloting, scaling and embedding this approach gradually across the area, this has the potential to re-shape services and provide more care in the community whilst maintaining and improving patient experience. It is only as community-based services build up capacity to support people that fewer acute services are needed – and successfully responding to this shift in demand can only be sustainably achieved with the engagement of patients and staff throughout transitions. Operating at a sufficient scale to share both risk and realisable savings on the one hand, whilst also avoiding gaps in provision, is crucial – this cannot be effectively driven from a national level.

Integrated care will need to look different in different parts of the country to take account of differences in population, geography and existing provision. If central government is too prescriptive about what integrated care should look like, this will constrain innovation and new ways of working with different partners to find solutions that best meet specific local needs. While integration cannot be mandated by the centre, government can play an important enabling role to ensure the conditions are in place to deliver integrated care at a local level: incentives for joint working and providing more care in the community; ways of bringing funds together across health and social care; and aligning outcomes frameworks for the NHS, public health and social care.54

Investment in prevention, early intervention and promoting independence to avoid the costs of failure ‘Innovations built Innovations built on strong local partnerships are overcoming some of on strong local the problems caused by rigid service boundaries at the edge of their partnerships are responsibility that can create artificial gaps through which people can fall. By working across a place, this can create stronger “whole system” approaches overcoming some which better build in early prevention and can more effectively align of the problems incentives for a fuller shift towards prevention over the longer term. caused by rigid service boundaries Locally-led partnerships across services are seeking to identify problems at at the edge of their an early stage and deal with them effectively, avoiding the risk of spiralling responsibility’ further. Nottingham’s early intervention approach across partners and services in the city has had a positive impact on key indicators of life chances including teenage pregnancy rates and crime rates reducing faster than

52 Appendix I: 2.2. 53 Appendix I: 2.3. 54 NHS Confederation submission to the Taskforce.

First Report: The case for change 19 national trends.55 By adopting the approach city-wide, all partners have a strong, formal commitment to early intervention, based on a shared recognition of the goals to improve life chances of children and young people. Underpinning this, workforce teams have been developed together to create multidisciplinary teams and have shared training opportunities in evidence-based practices. The result is a more responsive system: a universal offer to children and families is combined with early engagement of those with emerging needs, with quick and early support where required.

Plymouth’s whole system transformation of services for children, families and young people is further demonstrating that shared objectives are best built and delivered on across a place.56 The city’s Early Intervention and Prevention Strategy involves the council and partners including schools, clinical commissioners, police and the voluntary and community sector. As part of this, new approaches are overcoming the gaps through which the most vulnerable children can fall: for example a new joint protocol between police and education ensures children present at domestic abuse incidents receive support at school or early years settings the next day. Joint commissioning for educational support services between the council and local schools is having a positive effect on the numbers of exclusions and there is evidence of a narrowing attainment gap.

Greater Manchester’s Early Years New Delivery Model is in the early stages of development.57 The approach has the potential to engineer a whole system shift towards early intervention, with multiple services and agencies sharing investment, a single outcomes framework and a comprehensive universal offer for all children with multiple tiers of interventions depending on assessed needs. The difference with this model is that by investing up front, agencies are being asked to work beyond traditional boundaries on the recognition that they ultimately benefit from better outcomes, for example if school readiness levels are improved prior commencing school, there will be a knock-on effect on attainment levels further down the line. This pioneering model could engineer a genuine whole-system shift towards prevention in early years support. For the approach to reach its full potential and be sustainable, the ability to align incentives across different agencies is a critical factor. Currently the costs fall disproportionately on one service which invests up front, whilst the benefits are realised elsewhere in the system with other agencies experiencing reduced demands or costs.

Evidence from the national Troubled Families approach, led locally by councils, is demonstrating the potential scope for better outcomes to be delivered which can reduce demand pressures on other services. Results from Greater Manchester are showing significant reductions in levels of anti-social behaviour, offending, worklessness and improvements in school attendance amongst other indicators.58 Oldham Council estimates that as a result of improvements in outcomes for the families their pilot has worked with, there is potentially a £160,000 cost saving from the reduced need for reactive services such as police call-outs, A&E attendances and school attendance support.59 These savings average around £7,500 per family, and

55 Appendix I: 4.1. 56 Appendix I: 4.2. 57 Appendix I: 4.3. 58 Appendix I: 3.1. 59 Appendix I: 3.2.

20 Local Government Innovation Taskforce if work is scaled up across the borough Oldham identify the potential to generate an annual saving of £1.1 million across the public sector.

Measures to reduce reoffending being led locally are demonstrating reduced pressure on the criminal justice system, as well as the wider individual and community benefits of people’s lives being turned around. Islington Council’s joint work and information sharing arrangements with two local prisons is demonstrating how the numbers of offences committed and related costs of crime can fall significantly.60 Manchester City Council’s Intensive Community Orders are producing positive impacts on employment outcomes and reducing reoffending with the cohort of young men worked with, and there is an estimated return of £183 million on £12 million invested over five years if the scheme is widely implemented.61

Yet in the current system these individual innovations are not realising their full potential. Savings are at present too often divided between different agencies and services, with no one service contract or commission experiencing a large enough reduction in demand to justify taking money out or reconfiguring. For example, the upfront costs of Troubled Families interventions are borne by local government, whilst the benefits of coordinated intervention, estimated to be double or three times the initial investment, accrue to central government: this model can quickly become unsustainable for local government.62

A wider whole place approach would have the potential to scale up and ensure identified savings between agencies were cashable over the medium to longer term and accrue more evenly across the services that invest. Local government is best placed to manage the pooling of costs, risks and benefits across services in a locality. The evidence base for a reformed approach is being developed. Using evidence from the first two years of the Troubled Families programme Manchester City Council has devised an investment model and agreement between public service partners. Crucially this contains a mechanism which enables investment in shared priorities across public services to isolate and capture the benefits arising so they can be recycled back to partners and scale up further investment. Over a five year time frame to 2017/18 the total benefits to the approach are projected to be £88.7 million, with costs estimated at £62 million. The areas of public spend which would benefit the most are child safeguarding costs and a reduction in worklessness benefits. Over time the model projects a shift in the focus of activity from crisis intervention with troubled families, towards identifying and supporting those at risk of becoming troubled and so builds in an evolving preventative approach.63

These approaches demonstrate the level of place provides the most effective scale at which to engineer a whole system shift away from higher cost reactive interventions and towards prevention. This would need to be built on strong partnership working across agencies, the alignment of funding and outcomes, and crucially the ability to ultimately realise cashable savings sustainably shared between the services investing up front.

60 Appendix I: 3.5. 61 Appendix I: 3.4. 62 Ways and Means: Money management and power in local government, Z Wilcox and J Sarling, 2013, Centre for Cities. 63 Manchester City Council submission to the Taskforce.

First Report: The case for change 21 Towards a different approach

By 2015, with rising demand and continuing resource constraints, Labour will need to take a radically different approach to meet its ambitions for a stronger, fairer society in which everyone can play their part. Reform of public services will need to be linked to growth, to create a system which effectively invests in people to become more productive and better equipped to take advantage of future opportunities, and over time reduces demand by shifting from high cost reaction to long term prevention. The innovations being driven by Labour locally present a clear opportunity for Labour nationally. They are showing how at a local scale service design and delivery can better support people into work, align skills provision to job outcomes, provide appropriate care that promotes prevention and independence, build in early intervention and appropriate support for children and families; and tackle complex cross-cutting challenges such as anti-social behaviour, offending and worklessness. By demonstrating improved outcomes for people and increased value for money for the public purse, they begin to chart a different route to organising and anchoring public services around places.

‘Reform will need Public services will be required to challenge and overturn the social to alleviate the determination of poor life chances with constrained resources in ever more pinch points complex circumstances. Reform will need to overcome the barriers inherent identified and seek in the current system and alleviate the pinch points identified by devolving to devolve power power to local areas where national programmes have failed. In this way, a to local areas new system can evolve which better contains then overcomes failure and where national encourages innovation, to more sustainably respond to challenges. The programmes have locally-driven innovations give us a glimpse of what can be done, but more failed’ fundamental reform will be needed to build on their lessons, lock in their success and realise their full potential.

More power for people to shape their services in response to their needs and those of their communities can be secured through stronger horizontal accountability across a relevant geographic area, as opposed to predominantly vertical accountability to separate Whitehall departments. This has more potential to tailor provision to local circumstances, respond to local needs and involve people more directly in decisions. Greater collaboration and co-operation between services can be secured through measures to align priorities and pool budgets across a place, which can squeeze out duplication, direct capacity where it is needed and ensure integrated, sequenced support. A strategy for public services based around places that specifically seeks to overcome systemic disincentives and institutional silos has the best chance of bringing about the longer term approach needed to secure a sustainable shift towards early intervention and prevention.

Change on the scale required will not be easy. Analysis of previous attempts to decentralise power that have fallen short of declared ambitions in recent decades in the UK demonstrates the resistance that can exist from national government, including lack of trust in the ability of local

22 Local Government Innovation Taskforce government and accountability for failure64. Cultural and practical caution over decentralisation can extend to the public, who have in the past not supported institutional reform where it has not been clear what difference it will make to their lives. Likewise within the Labour movement in particular, greater local variation can be perceived as allowing a race to the bottom rather than enabling a race to the top. In setting out a new strategy that creates a greater role for places to shape their own services and pushes power down from the centre, the Taskforce will seek to genuinely engage with and address concerns.

‘Since the status Since the status quo is not working for anyone, radical reform will involve quo is not working changes for all involved. The centre would need to let go and recognise the for anyone, radical lack of efficacy of top-down levers of control, instead seeking to exercise reform will involve “power” in a different, more subtle way that influences, encourages and changes for all’ enables. Greater accountability across places would have implications for way in which Whitehall works, including how it deals with different areas and how public money spent locally is accounted for. Local government would need to deliver on new responsibilities and powers to design solutions for their areas by setting high standards and creating new ways of working and partnerships locally to demonstrate scale and capacity. It would also need to robustly challenge weaknesses and ensure strong, open and accountable leadership.

To embed social justice, a different approach will need to involve a clear framework of national entitlements and outcomes that reflect the ambition of a future Labour Government, and form the basis of a devolved approach. Strong accountability to places would still need to involve reassurance to the centre that it retained the ability to intervene if things went wrong. But within these overall parameters, a new system would enable much greater scope for local areas to innovate to meet needs, more comprehensively tackle demand pressures and ensure that no community is held back.

64 See Achieving political decentralisation: Lessons from 30 years of attempting to devolve political power in the UK, T Gash et al (2014), Institute for Government.

First Report: The case for change 23 Next steps

The next phase of the Local Government Innovation Taskforce’s work will be to develop and set out how a strategy for public services anchored in places would work in practice. This will be done alongside other policy work led by Labour focussed on boosting growth and delivering fairer funding across local government. The scope of this review is to consider how public services can be reformed and improved, so a new strategy will focus on this specifically, but this would seek to develop capacity and sustainability in the longer term.

The Taskforce’s final recommendations will seek to clarify and build a relationship of equals between local and national government with clear roles, responsibilities and accountabilities. There are several objectives that should guide a new model for public services so that clear and ambitious reform can meet the demands of the future:

• Building in success: seeking to reinforce existing initiatives and build in successes already operational. Avoiding costly and time-consuming top down structural overhauls, a reformed approach would instead enable, spread and embed innovation.

• Operating at scale: understanding the point at which an economy of scale becomes a diseconomy of scale, and the appropriate platform across an area to demonstrate the capacity at which devolved approaches can maximise their impact.

• Achieving better outcomes: basing national entitlements on wider, whole person, whole family and whole community outcomes that are broader than service boundaries, and relevant to lived experiences. Local areas would need to deliver on these but have greater flexibility in how this is achieved.

• Driving up quality: regulating and inspecting performance to better assess contributions of services to achieving whole person, whole family and whole community outcomes.

• Incentivising the right things: funding would need to incentivise collaboration, prevention and early intervention and break down institutional and other barriers which can frustrate progress towards meeting wider needs.

• Opening up public services: developing stronger and clearer accountability for all public services across a place will need to ensure transparent decision-making and clearer routes for people to participate. An important aspect of this will be opening up data – both better sharing it between agencies and more power over information for people who use services.

24 Local Government Innovation Taskforce The Local Government Innovation Taskforce will continue discussions with stakeholders and interested parties and would welcomes further views in response to this first report. In particular, questions the Taskforce’s final report will seek to address are:

• What sort of outcomes should national government set from the centre? • What services could be given more devolved responsibilities? • On what basis would the centre and local areas set and agree priorities in the context of a decentralised approach? • How can we ensure stronger accountability that gives confidence to both people and to national government that a new system is robust?

If you have views on these or any of the issues raised in this report, please email [email protected] for consideration by the Taskforce, ahead of a final report which will be published in the summer of 2014.

First Report: The case for change 25 APPENDIX I – Case studies

The Taskforce held a Call for Evidence as part of its inquiry, and the following sections detail some of the case studies that were submitted as examples of innovation.

Section 1: Increasing employment, improving skills and tackling worklessness

1.1. Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield, and Newcastle and Gateshead are delivering the Youth Contract for 16–17 year olds as part of their city deal flexibilities. The nationally-commissioned Youth Contract has only helped 27 per cent of 16 and 17 year olds it has worked with into work or learning. The local results have delivered at least double the level of success nationally: Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield have helped 57 per cent into work or learning and Newcastle and Gateshead have achieved 47 per cent positive outcomes. New flexibilities enabled the councils to create approaches relevant to their places which fit in with existing local services and are aligned with support provided by the local voluntary sector and other providers to increase the effectiveness of the interventions. This is proving better at identifying and engaging young people, and the councils are able to share intelligence and expertise across the area.

1.2. Newham Council’s Workplace scheme is modelled on understanding the needs of both jobseekers and employers. The scheme builds in responsiveness to local employers’ needs: account managers are frequently embedded within companies for short periods to better understand the challenges they face, what jobs they have available and what skills they need. Residents are then offered support and training focussed on those real jobs, rather than generic training like national schemes such as the Work Programme. The scheme’s successes include:

• People have been placed into more than 5,000 jobs each year for the past two years (2011/12 and 2012/13) • More than half of job outcomes are for people who have been unemployed for more than 12 months. • 86 per cent of people starting Workplace jobs were still in place six months later. The DWP benchmark is 52 per cent still in work after six months.

1.3. Jobs for Haringey is a locally designed support programme for unemployed and economically inactive residents. Specialists are commissioned locally to deliver the programme alongside partnerships with local providers to address specific barriers to work on behalf of some residents for example health or substance misuse. Residents are engaged through a single point of access in neighbourhoods, public and community settings. They are provided with information advice and guidance, and action planning setting out agreed pathways into employment including skills development, work trials and placements. From the beginning of the programme in June 2012 to December 2013, Jobs for Haringey delivered 27.6

26 Local Government Innovation Taskforce per cent sustained job outcomes for people on the programme who had been unemployed for 6 months or more. In the same area, the nationally designed and commissioned Work Programme between June 2011 and September 2013 delivered 14.8 per cent sustained job outcomes for people who had been out of work for between three and 12 months.

1.4. Newcastle Council’s Let’s Grow Scheme is a £30 million, locally developed programme funded by the Regional Growth Fund running from February 2013 to December 2014. By the end of 2013, nearly all of the funding was already invested creating 2,275 jobs – over 50 per cent above target. At £10,444 the cost per job created is under a third of that from the nationally administered Regional Growth Fund. This demonstrates local schemes are quicker to deliver and more attuned to local economic conditions to maximise returns.

1.5. Camden Council works closely with local regeneration projects to secure employment and training opportunities. For example the council has worked with the developer of the King’s Cross Central development to create opportunities for local residents. The King’s Cross Construction Skills Centre supports 240 people into construction jobs or apprenticeships each year and approximately 29,000 “end use opportunities” will be created over the course of the development as businesses move to the site. Through section 106 agreements the council can ensure a proportion of the newly created jobs are made available to local people – there is a target built in to the agreement that 15–30 per cent of these jobs will be for local residents.

1.6. Southampton City Council has developed a bespoke approach to Section 106 Employment and Skills Plans, and has negotiated 32 plans as part of new developments in the area. These have created 15 new apprenticeships, 500 supported jobs for unemployed people (youth and adults) and have supported other activities such as work placements for young people and employer curriculum activities in schools and colleges. The approach has been expanded to procurement practices to ensure work opportunities are created as part of the appointment process. The council is now piloting a new approach with the Highways Agency to create work opportunities to ensure residents benefit from and contribute to growth.

1.7. Get Oldham Working is the council’s strategic programme to increase skills, employment, business engagement and support opportunities, linked in to capital improvements in the borough to ensure local residents have the skills, support and mindset to access work opportunities. The programme has two medium term aims to provide 2015 work-related opportunities by 2015 and to guarantee every 18 year old leaving school by 2015 access to continued education, training, apprenticeship or a job. Activity is focussed in four areas: supporting people in work preparation; stimulating work opportunity creation with employers; linking people with available jobs; and ensuring sustainability of jobs. Early results indicate the programme is having an impact on falling unemployment rates.

First Report: The case for change 27 1.8. The Warrington Skills Commission was led by the council and involved representatives from the Warrington Chamber of Commerce, the NHS, local businesses, the Cheshire and Warrington Local Enterprise Partnership and local schools and colleges. The Commission investigated the local economic, learning and skills landscape to establish key areas of change and identify future skills development needs. It produced an action plan for growth to encourage economic prosperity in the borough. Predicted local growth areas are manufacturing, energy, nuclear, construction, communications, logistics and distribution. The key areas for skills and education providers to focus their resources on, in addition to the identified growth areas, include ICT, science, technology, health and social care and general employability skills. This plan is now guiding priorities and investment across the borough to ensure skills supply meets current and future growth demand.

1.9. City of York’s City Skills Strategy works with partners in the public and private sector across three strands of activity, recognising the council’s role as a strategic influencer and enabler of provision. A skills for business growth strand focuses on developing and supporting plans for workforce development linked to key economic sectors for the city and targeting identified skills gaps. A skills for employment strand connects people to jobs, directing public funding to raise the skills of unemployed residents and supporting them into available vacancies – this includes managing a programme of support back into work for longer unemployed 18–24 year olds across York and neighbouring districts funded through Leeds City Region. The third strand, skills for the future workforce, focuses on support for young people in mainstream education and training, including working with higher education.

1.10. The Liverpool City Region Employment and Skills Board, led by Knowsley Council, is driving a strategy across the city region that is identifying need and aligning resources to deliver on defined objectives. A Labour Market Information Service has been set up which provides a clear picture of the skills businesses in the area need to grow, combining research with sector based consultations with local businesses and skills providers to understand the demand side of the local economy. This has mapped the future likely job and skills needs and identified the biggest areas of supply and demand mismatch. It has also informed new Skills for Growth agreements for the local growth sectors of advanced manufacturing, the SuperPort and the visitor economy, which set out in detail the skills needs of the sectors and what businesses, schools, colleges, training providers and universities can do to meet these needs. Knowsley Council is also the financial accountable body of a new Skills for Growth Bank which is seeking to better align national funding for skills with the needs of businesses to overcome the problem of provider-led supply. The Bank part-funds a range of training which employers co-invest in, thereby maximising the social and economic return on investment by better aligning it with employer demand.

1.11. In response to extremely poor job outcomes for ESA claimants on Work Programme of just 2.8 per cent, Greater Manchester is

28 Local Government Innovation Taskforce developing a whole system model for those who have left the Work Programme with no sustainable employment. This is a pioneering new approach to tackling worklessness which involves better prioritised, integrated and sequenced support from a range of public services addressing barriers to work for individuals. It will adopt a ‘whole family approach’ by recognising that understanding the influence of the peer group and the impact on the individual has a strong impact on behaviour and life chances. Referrals begin in March 2014 and as outcomes emerge against local and national benchmarks and evaluation for this most complex of cohorts, the model could unlock a different deal between central and local government on welfare delivery models.

1.12. Lewisham, Lambeth and Southwark are developing a community budget that will work across borough boundaries to support people into work and improve local skills. Partners including Jobcentre Plus, Work Programme providers, the Skills Funding Agency and local colleges are signed up to the approach, which will build on what works well and reduce duplication. An evidence base is being developed tracking adult skills provision, employment programme performance and the characteristics of work programme returners. This will inform an approach developed during 2014 that makes the case for devolution of funding and responsibility for employment and skills across the boroughs, to ensure residents with the most complex needs get the right interventions at the right time, from universal credit application through to employment, and provision is aligned to meet these needs.

1.13. Volunteer Stevenage is a partnership between Stevenage Council, North Herts College and the Council for Voluntary Services (CVS). Located adjacent to Stevenage’s Jobcentre Plus office for direct referrals, jobseekers are offered volunteering opportunities to provide current experience to boost their CVs. It is linked to a Business Technology Centre to encourage people who are out of work to consider setting up their own business, and which supports them to do so by providing facilities and business development support. So far this project has provided information and support to 564 potential volunteers and directly placed 109 volunteers with local community organisations.

1.14. Waltham Forest Council identified significant capacity in the borough dedicated to getting people skills or into work across Jobcentre Plus (three buildings), Work Programme prime contractor (three hubs), local colleges (three buildings), the council’s own adult learning service (three dedicated buildings and 38 community venues) and other skills providers (an estimated one hundred operating from their own premises, ten based in the borough). The council initiated a new joined up approach, bringing together all business, employment and skills services into one department focussed on two key drivers for growth: increasing the availability of jobs in the borough and increasing residents’ skills to take advantage of job opportunities. Jobcentre Plus staff are co-located with council so they can work together and access other services to support people such as housing. This hub approach has sped up processes, for example

First Report: The case for change 29 in the first five months of operation over 500 job vacancies with partners, contractors and developers were identified and passed to Jobcentre Plus. The council is better placed to understand where extra skills are needed and broker training from their own service or from other providers to fill gaps, directing Skills Funding Agency money where it is needed. The joined up approach has shown positive results. An agreed target with Jobcentre Plus to reduce the JSA total below 8,500 within 12 months was reached in four. In nine months since the approach was operational, the number of JSA claimants reduced by 16 per cent and for under 25s this reduced by 21 per cent, due to individuals moving into work or training.

Section 2: Better integrating health and care around the needs of the whole person

2.1. Hackney London Borough Council’s social care reforms focussed on interventions that promote independence and resolve crises based on recovery and restoration. The aim of the care is preventative – helping people where appropriate to stay out of formal care. The programme incorporates projects focusing on preventative services, universal services, day care, directly provided services and integration. The project delivery approach is combined with a continued focus on workforce development, personalisation and user and carer involvement. In 2012/13 Hackney achieved £2 million savings as a result of the approach and a further £4.4 is projected for 2013/14.

2.2. Greenwich Integrated Care was launched in 2011 and is a partnership between the Council, Oxleas Community Health Services and the local CCG, based on the shared desire to integrate services in order to improve outcomes for users and to use resources more efficiently. To effectively merge staff from different workforce cultures and implement a service with minimal bureaucracy and disruption to users, the approach was developed “bottom-up” by fully engaging staff in a two year development phase from 2009 to design the model before implementing it, creating agreement and ownership over its direction.

The model is designed to offer effective and seamless health and social care for adults, whilst enabling choice and maximising independence. To that end, six fully integrated teams provide a whole system response, which include nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, reablement workers, social workers and care managers, and operate under shared management arrangements. The service is accessed via a single point of contact which immediately addresses users’ needs and manages referral pathways.

The model is resulting in a clearer focus on shared outcomes underpinned by a shared workforce culture and driving out inefficiencies and duplication to create greater organisational resilience. Outcomes as a result of this integrated approach include:

• More people accessing universal services and an average of 50 per cent fewer people entering full social/health care pathways

30 Local Government Innovation Taskforce • 64 per cent of people receiving a package of reablement require no follow up care package • A 7 per cent increase in the number of A&E admissions avoided • A 27 per cent decrease in the number of hospital admissions • A 13 per cent reduction in delayed hospital discharges • A 7 per cent reduction in care home admissions per annum • A productivity saving of 5.5 per cent on local community health budgets • The social care budget has saved £900,000.

2.3. In Greater Manchester, local authorities, health and other partners have agreed a single framework covering reforms to Community Based Care (Primary Care reform and Integrated Health and Social Care) to reshape services whilst improve patient experience. New models of care are being developed that will reduce admissions to A&E, reduce the length of stay for people in hospital and reduce long term admissions to residential care. Early results are positive, for example in one CCG pilot area, compared to planned activity levels (based on the previous year’s activity), there has been: a 4.5 per cent reduction in A&E attendances; a 10 per cent reduction in non-elective admissions and discharge improvements including non-elective elective excess bed days 30 per cent below plan. These models will be implemented at scale from 2014/15 and implemented district-wide from 2015/16.

2.4. For the last three years Oldham Council has publicly rated all 43 residential care homes in the borough (excellent, good, adequate, poor) and pays £25 and £18 per week premiums to excellent and good homes. As a result of this reward and recognition strategy, the quality in local care homes has significantly improved.

2.5. Calderdale Council is part-funding a redevelopment, along with the local CCG and led by housing provider Connect Housing, of an empty block of flats which is close to a hospital into short-stay supported housing, providing accommodation with intermediate care. Residents can live with more independence than in residential care, and this approach has saved money for the NHS and long term care budgets. The council estimate that the cost of a delayed discharge from hospital to the NHS is £3,800 per person. They estimate the cost for each person readmitted after re-injury is £2,012. Assuming full occupancy at an average of 6 weeks per stay, it is estimated that this approach could generate NHS savings of up to £700,000 each year. (Source: National Housing Federation).

2.6. Derbyshire County Council and Hardwick CCG developed a ‘virtual ward’ integrated care model which involves a care team between health and social care services. A practice-based register of people with complex health and social care needs identifies those most at risk of admission. They are then supported by a ‘virtual ward’ which includes bespoke care and support plans for each patient, including contingency planning and improved coordination of care and support at home. Evaluation shows that length of stay has reduced when people supported by the Virtual Wards are admitted

First Report: The case for change 31 and A& E attendances are reduced compared to those patients with similar characteristics who are not supported by Virtual Wards.

Section 3: Improving living standards for vulnerable people and those with the most complex needs

3.1. Evidence from the first year evaluation of Greater Manchester’s Troubled Families programme has generated positive impacts on key outcomes. The following statistics represent the percentage reduction or improvement in families that had particular issues before or during the intervention in comparison to the 12 month period after the end of the intervention:

• Worklessness reduced by 8.5% • Offending reduced by 73% • Police incidents reduced by 86% • YOS breaches reduced by 60% • Domestic abuse improved in 64% of cases • Mental health improved in 64% of cases • Alcohol misuse improved in 54% of cases • 40% of children had reduced safeguarding needs (majority into universal services) • 46% of children with persistent absence had increased their attendance to above 85% • 42% of families reduced or cleared general debt issues • 64% of families at risk of eviction, avoided eviction.

3.2. Oldham Council estimates that as a result of improvements in outcomes for the families worked with on the pilot Family Focus programme (part of the Troubled Families scheme), there is potentially a £160,000 cost saving from the reduced need for reactive services such as police call-outs, A&E attendances, mental health support, drug and alcohol rehabilitation and school attendance support. The potential savings from these reductions in demand average around £7,500 per family, and if work is scaled up across the borough Oldham identify the potential to generate an annual saving of £1.1 million across the public sector. Yet these savings would not be cashable in the present system as they are divided between services and agencies.

3.3. Stronger Families teams in Barnsley have been developing a multiagency approach to sharing information between services and identifying better ways to support vulnerable families. The approach is based on the recognition of the need to drive out duplication and the dissipation of effort, so there is a clear focus on early identification of the key service and the key intervention for each family through the use of a common assessment framework. Professionals from health, children’s social care, troubled families workers and others work together and links with relevant agencies such as schools, children’s centres and other provision have been developed. The method of working is leading to better information sharing between the agencies and better understanding of wider issues: for example other professionals are trained in domestic abuse response so they are better able identify and support families who experience it.

32 Local Government Innovation Taskforce 3.4. Greater Manchester is piloting justice reinvestment for the Ministry of Justice – starting in 2011, this became a theme of Greater Manchester’s community budget pilot, with a whole-system approach focussing on points of arrest, sentence and release. Over two years the approach reduced adult demand costs by 14.1 per cent and youth demand costs by 42.1 per cent with a notional saving of over £7.6 million. The approach is now being built into Greater Manchester’s wider public service reform agenda, with the use of intensive community orders one of the key mechanisms for addressing the offending behaviour of those individuals at risk of a short term custodial sentence. Designed to address the complexity of offenders’ issues, these are intensive support and control packages for 18–24 year olds at risk of short-term custodial sentences, and involve a range of interventions such as intensive supervision, unpaid work, attendance centre, a curfew, employment and family support and victim awareness. Emerging evidence demonstrates this approach can be effective in terms of improving outcomes and reducing reoffending rates. Of an initial pilot cohort of 350 young men aged 18–24:

• 27 per cent found employment, which is more than double the national rate of 13 per cent for ex-prisoners. • There was a 52 per cent reduction in the number of offences committed by the cohort in the twelve months after intervention compared to the twelve months before. • Offenders receiving an intensive community order committed 10 per cent less offences than those offenders receiving short term custody.

Greater Manchester estimates a potential to return of £183m on £12m investment over five years from wider implementation of the approach.

3.5. Integrated offender management in Islington includes a FOCUS project, a multi-agency team around the offender service. Adult offenders are targeted with the aim of reducing the frequency and seriousness of offences, improving their health and in the longer term desisting from crime completely. The council and two local prisons have developed information sharing arrangements to improve the engagement of offenders. Evaluation of the approach found a 45 per cent reduction in total number of offences committed by a tracked cohort over a two year period 2011–12. There was also a significant reduction in the identified costs of the crimes from £523,000 in 2011 to £295,000 in 2012.

3.6. Lewisham’s approach to integrated offender management (IOM) has developed under the previous Labour Government and the current government, and involves a locally commissioned model of support for currently ‘non-statutory’ offenders – those serving short sentences and not normally subject to probation service supervision. In partnership with the Ministry of Justice, a ‘Justice Re-Investment Model’ was designed to achieve a reduction in demand on the criminal justice system and involves payment by results to a London provider of the programme. As a result of improved IOM processes, re-offending rates among the cohort are comparatively low at 22 per

First Report: The case for change 33 cent compared to a MET Police average of 26 per cent and a national average of 28 per cent.

3.7. The ‘No More’ Project in Stevenage takes a holistic approach to working with clients to reduce their alcohol intake and to reduce the levels of crime and anti-social behaviour this has led to. A multi agency approach involving Stevenage Borough Council, Hertfordshire County Council Adult and Children’s Services, Hertfordshire Constabulary and the Probation Service works in partnership with voluntary agencies. The project seeks to support and change the behaviour of a small group of clients whose past criminal activity resulted in high costs to services and communities, particularly related to alcohol consumption. This has led to reduced demand on other services locally such as police call-outs for anti- social behaviour and criminal activity.

3.8. Lambeth Council commissioned the Gaia Centre which provides specialist support to all victims of gender based violence from the age of 13 years. It is an integrated ‘one stop shop’ which provides community outreach, young women’s advocacy, peer support and mentoring, a sanctuary scheme, counselling and crèche services. Lambeth also provides training for GPs, health staff and other professionals to raise awareness and referrals. Although a complex area to measure value of activity, results are extremely positive including:

• 100 victims prevented from being homeless • 39 per cent risk of harm reduction for females • 54.7 per cent risk of harm reduction for males • 86 per cent of all safety improvement outcomes achieved (i.e. safeguarding or police work) • 90 per cent of all health and wellbeing outcomes achieved (accessing GP/substance misuse/mental health)

Section 4: Supporting children to improve their life chances

4.1. Nottingham launched as an ‘Early Intervention City’ in 2008 with a 20 year mission to develop effective services that will improve the social and emotional capabilities of children and young people, enhancing their wellbeing and quality of life. The first five years have involved transformational change to workforce teams, establishing multidisciplinary Family Community Teams within localities to provide both a universal offer and to identify and engage families with emerging needs to prevent problems spiralling. A Family Support Pathway provides a consistent process for all practitioners to follow, and an evidence-based approach involves embedding nationally recognised best practice in parallel to developing a local evidence base through piloting new schemes such as Life Skills and Active Families programmes. These have been evaluated to show improved outcomes in knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour change.

Nottingham has invested in a comprehensive early intervention package of Early Years provision and support which has boosted Foundation Stage profile results to above the national average.

34 Local Government Innovation Taskforce The wider approach jointly with partners across the city appears to have contributed to a positive impact on key indicators including a decrease in crime of all types from 53,883 in 2008 to 30,403 in 2012; and a decrease in rates of teenage conceptions from 73.5 per 1,000 15–19 year olds reported in 2008 to 42.6 reported in 2012.

4.2. Plymouth Council has led a whole system transformation of services for children, young people and families through an Early Intervention and Prevention Strategy with partners including schools, clinical commissioners, police and the voluntary and community sector. This includes Operation Encompass, a joint approach with police and education to ensure children present at domestic abuse incidents receive support at school or early years settings the next day. Joint commissioning arrangements with primary schools for early help services have created multi-agency teams for 5–11 year olds with learning mentors, counselling, education psychology, therapeutic support and family support workers. This has contributed to Plymouth’s success against national comparators including:

• No primary school children receiving a permanent exclusion in 2012/13 compared to 0.7 per cent nationally • 0.3 per cent primary school children receiving one or more fixed term exclusion in 2012/13 compared to 0.9 per cent nationally • Having a narrower gap than statistical neighbours in English and Maths at Key Stage 2 between those of free school meals and their peers – 17 per cent compared to an average of 21 per cent.

4.3. Greater Manchester is developing an Early Years New Delivery Model to address the challenges from evidence which indicates only 40 per cent of school children in reception class are assessed as not school ready, and a 10 per cent improvement in school readiness could over time lead to a rise in earnings of 2.5 per cent and a fall in youth unemployment by 1 per cent across the authority. The approach is being developed based on learning from a pilot in Ardwick which combined an approach to improving early years with one to improve life chances. The model used universal screening of infants in their first year to identify those at risk of observable conduct disorder by the age of three, and supported those with significant risk factors into evidence-based targeted programmes. For those who completed relevant interventions, outcomes included reported reductions in parental stress and depression and child behaviour problems and improved attachment, behaviour and emotional wellbeing.

The Early Years New Delivery Model now seeks to build on the impact of this pilot, which was developed also as part of the community budget pilot, to test a more enhanced model on a larger scale. This will be a pioneering whole system shift to early intervention, which includes a comprehensive assessment of children’s needs from pre-birth to 48 months, a shared outcomes framework across all services and more targeted support to cover core areas of parenting behaviours, maternal attachment and cognitive stimulation.

First Report: The case for change 35 4.4. In Southampton, Jobcentre Plus staff are located in children’s centres in some more deprived areas. This approach enables Jobcentre Plus advisers to gain a greater understanding of the wider family circumstances of the individuals they see and has proven successful in engaging individuals who would have been harder for traditional Jobcentres to reach. Parents report a preference for the location where their children can feel more comfortable, and during inspections Ofsted remarked on the model as an example of good practice.

4.5. Although as a district council with no statutory function on education, Oxford Council is actively pursuing strategies to raise educational attainment across the city and to support pupils who are digitally excluded. Their education attainment programme involves working with local head teachers to deliver two strands: training for teachers by a psychological and education research consultancy to improve reading, writing, spelling and numeracy at age 7 and 11; and a leadership programme to assist school leaders including governors to raise attainment in the city through seminars, workshops, action learning and coaching for senior and head teachers. After a year reported positive impacts include significant improvement in steps of progress recorded in reading and numeracy. A joint programme with schools in partnership with Oxford University’s Internet Institute is seeking to overcome digital exclusion amongst pupils in year 9–11, recognised as detrimental to their ability to study at home. The schools are funding laptops and the council is funding broadband access for students in schools identified as not having access to the internet. The aim is to raise their attainment and social confidence and the Institute is monitoring academic and social outcomes to contribute to an evidence base to support the approach.

4.6. Knowsley Council has pursued a consistent focus on early years support, combining children’s centres and family support with specific strategies to use international research into experiential learning to support children vulnerable to underachievement; commissioning teacher mentors for practitioners to challenge and support a quality learning environment and better identify vulnerable children; and a focus on reviewing and improving the quality of PVI provision in the borough. As a result, outcomes for children including school readiness are improving, with 64 per cent of girls achieving a ‘good’ level of development compared to 60 per cent nationally, and 47 per cent of boys achieving a ‘good’ level of development compared to 44 per cent nationally.

Section 5: Empowering communities

5.1. Oldham Council’s co-operative approach is focussing on what works for different neighbourhoods, and building success on strong relationships between ward members, locally-based services and communities. To that end, the council has devolved extensive powers to six District Town Halls with local budgets and supporting staff. These neighbourhood working arrangements are designed to build local relationships and bring about co-operative opportunities for service delivery. Neighbourhood-based officers embody a new type

36 Local Government Innovation Taskforce of public provider, focused on the community they serve rather than professional drivers, and building capacity, resilience and productivity in communities that is critical in shifting public services from reactive to preventative intervention. A “Call-in” power for communities ensures members on the district executives are more directly accountable to their communities – any decision can be ‘called in’ by a community to be reviewed by the council.

5.2. Young Lambeth Cooperative is a completely independent, community owned organisation with over 1,000 adults and 650 young people coming forward to decide what play and youth services are provided in the borough. The YLC is a membership body; set up to lead the commissioning of youth and play services in the borough and the council has empowered them with a £3m budget to decide what programmes should be taken forward. The YLC operates at arm’s length from the council, but with access to support. It gives young people, parents and the wider community the chance to ensure provision meets their needs and by doing so is better value for money. The model involves commissioning by the community, for the community, with the council taking on the role of a facilitator and enabler. Citizens bring insight and experience to the commissioning process, but by creating a partnership between public services and citizens, there is greater opportunity to develop a shared sense of ownership over provision.

5.3. Sunderland Council’s Community Leadership Programme has decentralised local public services to five areas within the city, including the governance and delivery of environmental (street scene) services, youth services and prioritisation of local highways maintenance activity. This has involved budgets of over £15 million being subject to local influence at an area level so that decision-making can be more responsive to local needs. Results have included, for example, the council receiving its highest ever satisfaction ratings for environmental services since the changes were introduced. Area-based budgets with a combined value of over £1.5 million enable councillors to work closely with communities to establish local priorities, strengthening engagement and helping manage demand by promoting self-help.

5.4. Wirral Council established a Public Service Board in 2012 to identify all public sector spend in the borough and develop a cross-agency whole system approach based on prevention and early intervention, cost benefit analysis and a commitment to ensuring residents actively shape and influence new service design and delivery. The council’s new neighbourhood working arrangements around four constituency committees provide a mechanism for communities and residents to have more power and involvement in decision-making. The constituency committees will agree priorities for neighbourhood plans and commission activities from devolved budgets accordingly, maximising the impact of investments and capitalising on existing community assets. They are each supported by local public service boards which will act as the operational coordinators of the ‘team around the issue’. Service reviews currently underway in the areas of

First Report: The case for change 37 community safety, streetscene and youth activities are underway to determine what will be devolved to constituency level.

5.5. Durham County Council established 14 Area Action Partnerships as an engagement mechanism and a means through which to deliver action on locally determined priorities. Over 11,000 people are members of AAP Forums which undertake project work to develop and implement ideas. The council allocated £21 million to deliver local priorities (which has brought in a further £34 million match funding) and through participatory budgeting exercises people have been able to vote for local projects. Almost 19,000 people have voted in participatory budgeting events allocating over £1.5 million to 300 projects. These have included extra support for people with mental health problems, more activities for young people and investment in a new sport area.

5.6. Barnsley Council is developing a new approach to communities and area governance in the borough, which involved setting up six area councils. This has entailed a shift away from a top-down approach to community engagement to one which enables more flexibility to work more directly with different communities. There is greater opportunity for local ward members and community representatives to work with residents to determine priorities through workshops and consultations. Each area has developed a ward plan and funding from the council is being devolved so that they can deliver on agreed priorities, such as environment, young people, economic development, and shape specific plans to meet their objectives.

38 Local Government Innovation Taskforce APPENDIX II – Call for Evidence participants

The Local Government Innovation Taskforce held a Call for Evidence during the autumn of 2013. The following organisations and individuals submitted evidence as part of this:

Accelerating Innovation in Local Government Research Project Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (ACEVO) Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) Mr Harry Barnes British Medical Association (BMA) Calderdale Council Camden London Borough Council Carillion Plc Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Centre for Cities Centre for Public Scrutiny (CfPS) Cllr James Alexander, Leader of City of York Council Co-operative Councils Innovation Network Core Cities Group Crisis Derby City Council Derbyshire County Council Design Council Cllr Simon Henig, Leader of Durham County Council Early Action Taskforce Early Years Foundation Exeter City Council Merseyside Fire and Rescue Authority (MFRA) Gateshead Council Gloucester Labour Group Halton Borough Council Haringey Council Labour Group Health Foundation Home Group Institute for Public Policy Research (ippr) Islington London Borough Council Joseph Rowntree Foundation Kirklees Metropolitan Council Labour Group Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council Lambeth London Borough Council Lewisham London Borough Council Cllr Mark Ingleby of Lewisham London Borough Council Local Government Association (LGA) Lichfield District Council Labour Group Cllrs Steve Munby, Anne O’Byrne and Nick Small, Liverpool City Council Cabinet Members London Councils London Early Years Foundation (LEYF) Manchester City Council Manchester Labour Group National Housing Federation

First Report: The case for change 39 Newcastle upon Tyne City Council Sir Robin Wales, Executive Mayor of Newham London Borough Council New Local Government Network NHS Confederation Nottingham City Council Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council Oxford City Council Labour Group Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) Plymouth City Council Cllr Peter Rankin, Leader of Preston City Council Royal College of Nursing (RCN) Rotherham Council Labour Group Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) Cllr Geoff Smith, Sheffield Labour Group Secretary South Gloucestershire Council Labour Group Cllr Iain Malcolm, Leader of South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council Cllr Peter John, Leader of Southwark London Borough Council St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council Stoke-on-Trent City Council Sunderland City Council City and County of Swansea Telford and Wrekin Council Unite the Union Cllr Mark Rusling, Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Corporate Resources, Waltham Forest London Borough Council Warrington Borough Council Martin Willis, Director of the West Midlands Local Enterprise Board Wirral Council Wolverhampton City Council

As part of its Inquiry, the Taskforce also held a series of evidence sessions with Labour councillors. Representatives from the following local authorities participated:

Aylesbury Vale District Council Barking and Dagenham London Borough Council Barnet London Borough Council Barnsley Metropolitan Borough Council Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council Birmingham City Council Bolton Metropolitan Borough Council Bracknell Forest Borough Council Bradford Metropolitan District Council Brent London Borough Council Bromsgrove District Council Burnley Borough Council Bury Metropolitan Borough Council Cambridge City Council Camden London Borough Council Cheshire East Council Cheshire West and Chester Council City of York Council Corby Borough Council Coventry City Council

40 Local Government Innovation Taskforce Croydon London Borough Council Derby City Council Derbyshire County Council Doncaster Metropolitan District Council Dover District Council Durham County Council East Lindsey District Council Exeter City Council Gedling Borough Council Hackney London Borough Council Halton Borough Council Hampshire County Council Haringey London Borough Council Harrow London Borough Council High Peak Borough Council Hounslow London Borough Council Hull City Council Islington London Borough Council Knowsley Metropolitan Borough Council Lambeth London Borough Council Lancashire County Council Leeds City Council Leicester City Council Lewisham London Borough Council Lichfield District Council Liverpool City Council Manchester City Council Merton London Borough Council Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council Newcastle upon Tyne City Council Newham London Borough Council North East Lincolnshire Council North Tyneside Council North Warwickshire Borough Council North Yorkshire County Council Norwich City Council Nottinghamshire County Council Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council Oxford City Council Oxfordshire County Council Preston City Council Redditch Borough Council Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council Rossendale Borough Council Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council Royal Borough of Greenwich Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea Rushmoor Borough Council Salford City Council Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council Sheffield City Council South Kesteven District Council Southwark London Borough Council

First Report: The case for change 41 St Helens Metropolitan Borough Council Stafford Borough Council Staffordshire County Council Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council Stoke-on-Trent City Council Stroud District Council Surrey County Council Surrey Heath Borough Council Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council Telford & Wrekin Council Trafford Metropolitan Borough Council Walsall Metropolitan Borough Council Waltham Forest London Borough Council Wandsworth London Borough Council Warrington Metropolitan Borough Council Warwickshire County Council Watford Borough Council West Lancashire Borough Council West Somerset District Council West Sussex County Council Winchester City Council Wolverhampton City Council Worcester City Council Wyre Forest District Council

42 Local Government Innovation Taskforce

Published by the LGA Labour Group