This summary is taken from the Audit Commission national study: 'Working Better Together? - managing local strategic partnerships’.

Local agencies work together.

• There is nothing new in local agencies working voluntarily together to deal with complex challenges.
• Government policy has moved from encouraging partnerships towards mandating them, even though voluntarism is the key to effective joint working.
• Many local strategic partnerships (LSPs) have enabled partners to deliver local outcomes, but partners must ensure they get the benefits of joint working with the minimum of costs and administration.

LSPs must bring a complex network of local agencies together to achieve common goals.

• LSPs are part of a complex local governance network that includes local councils, other statutory agencies (including health, police, fire and rescue), and the private and third sectors. LSPs in many areas bring different agencies together to tackle local problems.
• LSPs work through three main layers:

1. strategic: oversight, vision, and direction-setting
2. executive: resource allocation and performance management
3. operational: service management and delivery

• Local partners, and central government, do not always understand how these layers work.
• A whole systems approach can help LSPs develop both formal and informal aspects of collaboration.

LSPs work through leadership, culture, and relationship management.

• Effective joint working needs active leadership and purposeful relationship management.
• The leadership styles of the chair, and of the council, affect how others see an LSP.

Councils must ensure that partners see local leadership: not domination or control.

• Social network analysis can strengthen working relationships.
• Delivery chain analysis can strengthen the links between LSP objectives and partners’ action.
• Partnership working is more complicated in multi-tier areas where there is often less experience of collaboration.
• LSPs need systems to support a culture in which performance is tested and challenged.

Standards and systems must support LSPs’ layered roles.

• Partners need performance measurement and reporting for shared objectives; common data quality standards and mechanisms take time to develop.
• Performance management and influence has developed unevenly across LSP activities, weakening joint working and crowding out some objectives.
• Most LSPs lack mechanisms for assigning mainstream resources towards achieving the goals of the sustainable community strategy (SCS) and the local area agreement (LAA).
• Few LSPs have assessed the costs and benefits of joint working.
• National failure to align planning and reporting cycles makes it difficult for local agencies to align performance and resource management systems.
• Governance arrangements should support LSPs’ accountabilities to member organisations and through them to local people.
• There is little evidence that councils are using overview and scrutiny arrangements to hold LSPs, and partners, to account.