By Richard Johnstone
11 May 2011
Ambitions to outsource local authority services to the voluntary or private sectors could take as long as a decade to achieve, Public Finance has been told.
Tony Travers, director of the Greater London Group at the London School of Economics, said Suffolk County Council’s suspension of plans to contract out almost all its services showed how difficult it was councils for to do this in one step.
The Conservative-led authority announced last week that it was putting on hold the controversial plans to divest a host of functions, including the running of libraries and children's centres, to other providers. The council is now conducting a ‘complete’ internal review of the proposals ahead of new council leader Mark Bee taking office on May 26.
Travers said that Suffolk had been ‘rhetorically leading the pack’ on service reforms in light of government spending cuts and Big Society ambitions.
But he said ‘the rhetoric has got ahead of the reality’ in the proposed timeframe.
The council was initially looking to become a strategic commissioning council in April, only four months after the Local Government Finance Settlement in December. Back-office services would be merged and all its outsourcing policies implemented by September 2012.
Travers added: ‘This is a big change to how they run themselves. This change is possible in five or six or ten years, not one or two.’
Anna Turley, director of the new Progressive Localism think-tank and former deputy director of the New Local Government Network, told PF it was ‘a shame’ that the proposals at Suffolk had been put on hold.
She said councils needed to be able to innovate. ‘It’s a little bit disappointing in that something that was very brave and bold is not going forward [for the moment], given the financial situation,’ she said.
‘There’s concern about proposals for outsourcing and how far the public is prepared to go, but it was an exciting and interesting project. Councils won’t be able to deliver as they always have done.’
