annual report 2011 Contents 3 Preface, Councillor Richard Williams, APSE National Chair 4 Foreword, Paul O'Brien, APSE Chief Executive 6 Section 1: The year in profile 8 Section 2: A focus on APSE in your area 11 Section 3: Organisation and services 17 Section 4: Finances Appendices 21 Appendix 1: APSE members 2010 / 2011 22 Appendix 2: APSE performance networks members 2010 / 2011 23 Appendix 3: APSE National Council members 2010 / 2011 24 Appendix 4: Advisory group and strategic forum chairs and secretaries 2010 / 2011 26 Appendix 5: Seminars, meetings, training and promotional activity 2010 / 2011 29 Appendix 6: Award winners 2010 / 2011 30 Appendix 7: Briefings, publications and media 2010 / 2011 33 Appendix 8: APSE best value consultancy client and APSE partners list 2010 / 2011 34 Appendix 9: Staff and resources annual report 2011 Preface It has been both a great privilege and a pleasure to have been elected as APSE’s National Chair for the second time - having previously served as National Chair in 2004 - at the Annual General Meeting held in Derry in September 2010. My predecessor Councillor Shaun Gallagher of Derry City Council led APSE with great distinction during his year of office ably supported by his National Secretary Ellen Cavanagh also of Derry City Council. Both of them handed over to me a strong organisation both financially and in terms of its reputation for producing high quality work and representing its membership effectively. The past year has been hugely challenging for local government. The General Election in May 2010 produced a hung Parliament which led to the formation of the first Coalition Government since the Second World War. The austerity programme embarked on by the Government in order to meet its ambitious deficit reduction strategy, has wide ranging implications for local government and for the public sector. The far reacting cuts which we are now having to manage threatens the very existence of much needed front line public services. The whole focus of APSE’s work over the past year has been aimed at supporting its membership in identifying ways in which to deliver greater efficiencies and continuing to provide quality services to local communities. At a time of increasingly scarce resources, the value of APSE as an organisation comes to the fore in terms of providing an effective network for local authorities dealing with the challenges of successive rounds of budget cuts and spending restraint. But even amidst all of the bad news affecting local government, APSE has been at the forefront of identifying new and innovative approaches to support local authorities in managing transformational change. As an environmental scientist and a long time campaigner on the issue of climate change and renewable energy, I have been delighted that APSE has been leading the way in demonstrating to local authorities the considerable benefits of pursuing renewable energy initiatives from solar, biomass to wind and geo thermal energy. It is a great opportunity for councils to generate new sources of income, reduce dependency on fossil fuels and become more energy efficient, saving considerable sums of money in the process. It also demonstrates community leadership at a time when only local authorities can take a strategic overview of the wider needs of local communities and push forward this agenda positively. APSE has undertaken some pioneering work on developing a revolving fund concept for solar pv installation that can also be adopted for other renewable energy forms. Of equal importance has been the quality and output of the APSE research programme and I was pleased that during my year of office we were able to establish a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with De Montfort University with funding through the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), to continue with the high quality research output that APSE has become renowned for. The KTP is a two year project which should build up APSE’s research capacity and skills and undertake a series of projects to support the APSE membership around transforming council services during a period of reducing financial resources. I have enjoyed my year of office and I look forward to the annual seminar coming to Bristol in our South West Region. I have received excellent support over the past year from my National Secretary, Roger Byrne of Swindon Borough Council and from all of APSE’s professional staff. I have also been privileged to have chaired APSE’s National Council who have continued to set a strategic direction for the Association and assist me in the stewardship and governance of the organisation. We all face some monumental challenges ahead of us in local government and our communities will depend upon the leadership and support that we can provide in difficult economic and financial times. I believe that APSE is in very good shape to meet the challenges ahead and remain a vital and passionate advocate of front line service providers in local government. Councillor Richard Williams National Chair APSE 3 Foreword If the past year has been a difficult time for many APSE member authorities, then as a membership organisation, APSE has not been immune from the cold blast of spending reductions and cuts that has swept through most of the local government sector. We have focussed all of our energies on supporting our member authorities in difficult times and ensuring that APSE is fit for purpose in meeting the challenges ahead. It gives me great satisfaction to report that despite a difficult trading environment which has impacted upon membership retention in organisations across the local government sector, APSE has enjoyed another successful year and that the Association is in a healthy financial position going forward into even choppier waters ahead. This is in no small measure due to the efforts of APSE staff who have continued to provide a range of services which have enjoyed significant take up from the APSE membership. Over the past year we produced 80 briefings for the membership on a whole range of topical policy and operational service issues, from winter resilience, to the impact of the Comprehensive Spending Review and from renewable energy opportunities to achieving efficiencies across local government services. We have organised a range of relevant seminars and events which have been well attended by the membership and APSE’s National Council set aside resources through a membership retention fund to provide focussed support to individual authorities through training or consultancy and benchmarking in order to demonstrate the added value that APSE can bring through membership. We have expanded our research programme and produced a range of quality publications including work on efficiences and transformation in “Avoiding the road to nowhere”. Our new business plan for 2011 -14 was approved by the Full Association in January 2011 and whilst it is difficult to second guess the impact of the spending squeeze on local government going forward and how this will affect APSE, we have put in place the resources we need to meet the needs of our membership and a flexible medium-term plan which can sustain APSE through a difficult period ahead. I need to thank our National Chair, Councillor Richard Williams of Southampton City Council, and our National Secretary, Roger Byrne of Swindon Borough Council for their unswerving support, advice and constructive criticism on occasions. They have been excellent stewards of the Association during their term of office and have achieved a great deal. Together with APSE’s National Council they have continued to set a clear strategic direction within which APSE can move forward over the coming years. I look forward to meeting many of you at our National Seminar in Bristol to look at how local government’s front-line should respond to the changing world in which we find ourselves. Paul O’Brien Chief Executive annual report 2011 Overall council of the year in service delivery at the APSE service awards in Derry: Stockton on Tees Borough Council kindly sponsored by LACA Cllr Shaun Gallagher with annual service awards presenter Sile Seoige and APSE Chief Executive Paul O’Brien in Derry, September 2010 5 Section 1 - The year in profile Events my dear boy, events! - What direction now for local government? When asked by a journalist what represented the greatest challenge for a statesman, the former Conservative Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan (1957-63) is reputed to have said “events my dear boy, events”. Buffeted around by the events of the last year, this quote could almost have been coined for the situation in which much of local government has found itself. The tectonic plates of the political landscape shifted following the General Election in May 2010 and the subsequent negotiations leading to the formation of the Coalition Government. Almost immediately a strategy to tackle the country’s budget deficit became the centrepiece of the Government’s fiscal and policy agenda set out in the Coalition Programme for Government. An emergency budget in June followed by the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) in the autumn, saw the Government embark on a programme of tax rises and massive public spending cuts designed to eliminate the deficit over the lifetime of a single Parliament. This also had significant implications for the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The impact of the biggest programme of austerity measures since the Second World War has defined the environment within which all of us in the local government sector have had to exist over the past 12 months. The new Communities Secretary, the Rt. Hon Eric Pickles M.P. hit the ground running by announcing the abolition of the Audit Commission and the paraphernalia of national targets and performance indicators together with the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) performance framework in England.