All change, all change by Andrew Smith

Councils in April 2020

Local Authorities up and down the country, large and small, are an essential part of everyday life. For a lot of people, the only time the Council appears on their radar is when their bins don’t get emptied or the park grass doesn’t get cut. Most will not see the integral role of their local Councils, but as is more apparent every day, they support some of the most vulnerable in our communities, maintain our environment and work with other public services to make us safe.

As we continue to live our lives in the time of the pandemic, Councils are ever more indispensable. The Government have recently announced that Councils across England will receive an additional £1.6 billion in additional funding to respond to the pandemic.

Undoubtedly, this funding will be critical in providing services to our most vulnerable, whether through adult social care, tackling homelessness or public health, and continue to support other public services across the community.

While Council Leaders have been calling for additional funding to prevent a flurry of Section 114 notices, now that they have received it how can then ensure it is effectively and sustainably spent in response to crisis? And how can they start to plan for the new norm alongside the financial pressures faced pre-pandemic and the new challenges (such as loss of Council tax and revenues) being faced?

Operating Model for the Future

If you ask 100 people how to design a new operating model for a Local Authority, you are likely to get 100 different answers. While a large part of the effort will be, quite rightly, going into tactical responses and standing up services on a day-to-day basis, there is a real opportunity right now to fundamentally change the organisation structure and its delivery methods.

Debate often focuses on in-house versus external versus mixed-economy provision, but this discussion is too narrow. By having a frank and open dialogue about the Operating Model of the future, the conversation can be broadened and ultimately lead to more sustainable change. This will provide Councils with ‘the What’ that needs to be done.

Create your Vision – where do you want to go and what are the features of a Council in a new future. While this will differ from region to region and customer need, in changing times the overriding consideration should be how organisations can be set up to be adaptive and responsive to changing customer needs. These should be the key principles for any council.

Design, then Model

Just like on the catwalk, you need to design long before you need your model. While an organisational delivery model is necessary, in our view, it is always best to get agreement on the Design Principles as a starting point rather than focusing on the method.

Design Principles are the underpinning ‘rules’ that guide the organisation when designing for the future. They provide vision and focus and will support the decision making process when you’re stuck in the minutiae of building your Operating Model.

In the future, and we have seen some great examples of this at present, collaboration, system-thinking, cooperation and sharing, and building trust within communities will become the norm in terms of how public services work on behalf of its customers. Spending time with your stakeholders to get buy in to the Design Principles will be far more productive in moving forward collectively than focusing on a model-based discussion.

Once your Design Principles are agreed, examining a blended approach of in-house and external provision, use of third sector and community assets should naturally follow. It is vital that Councils play the leading role as community broker and focal point of local democracy, with as minimal a bureaucracy as is needed.

This provides the basis for how and where to focus investment and finances – you can clearly assess the Service Offer, customer experience and associated operational design costs (such as data, people, ICT and governance) of each option. This is the part that organisations generally do not do well – they spend time focusing on strategy but then fail to systematically design the business architecture required to enable that strategy.

Starting your Future

‘The How’ of delivering change is for another time, but it is worth noting here that when this process starts, the change needs to be considered from the point of view of both the service user and those delivering the service. Running an effective change programme will be just as critical as the time spent designing your Operating Model for the future.

Whatever the future post-Covid-19 will hold, the need to design and deliver change – and therefore control the purse strings – around service users and providers will not change. And the need for Local Authorities to continue to be responsive will be a constant.

If you’d like to speak to Andrew about some of his ideas on co-creating your Design Principles, building Operating Models or just plain anything, send us a note and he’ll get right back to you.