Audit Commission and IDeA Competition
Innovation in local public services
Foreword
By Michael O’Higgins, Chairman, Audit Commission and Lucy de Groot, Executive Director, IDeA
Local government faces huge challenges. The agenda includes coping with the implications of demographic change and migration; addressing sustainability and the challenge of climate change; and tackling systemic inequalities in health, worklessness and levels of cohesion, both between and within localities.
To confront these issues, councils need to work collaboratively and in partnership with local stakeholders; ways of working which bring their own challenges. Authorities and their partners are also developing their approaches to changing individual lifestyles and behaviour, such as reducing levels of obesity and smoking. And all of this needs to be done in the context of increased public expectations, council tax pressures, tighter funding and more demanding efficiency targets.
To address these challenges local authorities will both have to do new things and do some things in new ways. And that requires innovation. That does not mean ignoring the day job in favour of blue-sky thinking. Innovation needs to be closely linked to day-to-day service delivery, learning with and from communities, users and employees. And rather than neighbouring authorities re-inventing the wheel, what is needed is innovation in the local government sector as a whole, which means that sharing and learning from each other is crucial.
The need for innovation will grow over the coming years as councils and their partners address increasingly complex and pressing issues. This is clearly identified by Clive Grace and Steve Martin in the IDeA paper, Getting Better all the Time?.
Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) results show a dramatic improvement in councils’ performance, but there is now a need to look beyond making transactional changes – squeezing a little more improvement from council services year on year. The best authorities are pursuing a transformational agenda, making radical changes to established practice to achieve a leap in performance or release resources to the front line.
The Audit Commission’s report in 2007, Seeing the Light: Innovation in Local Public Services , and associated case studies showed how innovative councils and their partners can be, and the tremendous potential for further innovation. The IDeA has been working with others to develop its understanding of innovation and is developing proposals to promote innovation within local government.
The Audit Commission and IDeA have built on that work by running a competition to find and share more examples of innovation. We have selected four winners from the 42 submissions we received from local authorities. Access case studies of the winners, together with briefer descriptions of short listed initiatives.
As with the earlier case studies in Seeing the Light, the benefits lie as much in the story of how authorities went about their innovations as in the final innovations themselves; it is the how as well as the what.
The case studies illustrate significant aspects of the process:
- the spark for an idea could come from many different sources – it is important to think laterally based on your own experience, but also to look widely and be prepared to borrow from anywhere;
- leadership and support from the top helps dramatically in ensuring that ideas come to fruition;
- it won’t be plain sailing, so be prepared to stick with it;
- involve people as much and as early as possible – to make use of a wide range of experience in getting the innovation to work, and to build awareness and goodwill towards it; manage the risks, for instance by building up from small-scale pilots.
What came through very strongly from the case studies was the overwhelming commitment of everyone involved to making a difference to the people they serve, whether it was people with long-term health conditions, people involved in emergency situations or members of the general public in their day-to-day relations with the council. The desire to provide better services to local people is what drove them to success: and what better driving force could there be? We commend these examples of excellent practice to you.
Access the full 'Innovation Competition Report' (PDF file, 32 pages, 244 KB).