23 November 2007
Local government minister John Healey has revealed 11 areas that will act as 'troubleshooters' for the introduction of new partnerships to improve local services under Whitehall's devolution agenda.
Healey revealed the authorities that will become 'demonstration' zones for a new wave of Local Area Agreements: collaborations between councils and their partners that will identify 35 priority local targets from next summer.
The areas that will experiment with tailored priorities – which will be drawn from the Department for Communities and Local Government's 198 national indicators – include Manchester, Leeds, Sunderland, Essex and Westminster.
'We want to get to the bottom of the blockages and barriers that we might find in putting into place LAAs… to find the problems fast and to ensure that other areas benefit from this [experiment],' Healey told a local government conference on November 20.
He also warned council representatives that they faced a 'decisive period' in the devolution agenda.
He said that LAAs, plus a new concordat enshrining councils' relationship with Whitehall and a new assessment regime for the sector ensured that local authorities would be handed long-awaited freedoms to improve communities with less government interference.
But he urged local leaders to be 'visionary' and to avoid cherry-picking easy priorities. 'I want them to seize this opportunity, be ambitious and deliver genuine solutions that meet local people's aspirations and concerns,' Healey said.
However, audience members in response said that councils could soon become confused – and hindered by – overlapping local, sub-regional and regional responsibilities. Some claimed they were still unsure which services should be covered by which arrangements.
John Sowden, director of resources at Harrogate Borough Council, said that his authority was discussing a LAA with local partners. He had also been asked to contribute to a 'city-region' project, involving nearby Leeds and other authorities, that could require one of the DCLG's fledgling Multi-Area Agreements.
'There's a significant degree of confusion about responsibilities already and I can only see this getting worse if we go down the path you are outlining,' Sowden warned Healey.
Healey said the answer was for each authority to investigate what it could do best within an LAA and a possible MAA – and to disseminate that to local communities and delivery partners.
PFnov2007
