Councils must be more active in reducing tensions that can arise when local issues clash with wider considerations
‘Think global, act local’, goes the mantra. But it would be naive to suggest tensions never arise between the two. Councils constantly balance the demands of large-scale global environmental and economic challenges with the needs of communities at the most local level. And, as resources get ever tighter, these tensions will inevitably escalate.
Neighbourhood working has become a popular way of doing things in councils across the UK. It involves people in local decisions and improves services that are important to them – particularly on green issues. It helps achieve results in areas that really matter to local residents, such as refuse collection and tackling antisocial behaviour.
But neighbourhood working is not a panacea. There are limits to what neighbourhoods can achieve in relation to the bigger issues, such as tackling climate change and promoting economic resilience. And where conflicts between priorities at strategic and neighbourhood level exist, they need to be recognised explicitly and addressed upfront.
The Association for Public Service Excellence’s report, The ensuring council: a new model for governance, neighbourhoods and service delivery, identifies the risks associated with neighbourhood working. These include: a wide variation in what is provided locally can mean additional costs and fewer opportunities for savings in terms of economies of scale; creating competing ‘political fiefdoms’; divorcing the backbench councillors’ role from that of executive elected members; and pressure on politicians and professionals who must act as ‘boundary spanners’ and co-ordinate interventions across the neighbourhood and strategic levels.
The researchers behind the report, led by Dr Steven Griggs, reader in local governance at De Montfort University, examined three major cities with a long tradition of neighbourhood working: Birmingham, with 1 million residents, and 120 councillors representing 40 wards; Nottingham, with 55 councillors across 20 electoral wards and a population of 284,000; and Edinburgh, with 468,000 residents, and 58 councillors representing 17 wards.
They mapped neighbourhood governance models in the context of organisational structures found in councils across the UK. This ‘neighbourhood’ sub-local level usually comprises areas, forums, towns or parishes. Its population tends to range between 5,000 and 15,000, with an average scale of 8,500 residents. The researchers found a diversity of neighbourhood arrangements, with a ‘messy’ picture having emerged to reflect existing institutional arrangements, such as local authority wards and police beats.
The report drew on Lord Anthony Giddens’ work on the politics of climate change. He argues that an ‘ensuring state’ can co-ordinate all areas of policy and practice. Applied at local level, this means an ‘ensuring council’ must be active in making sure the needs of local communities are met within the context of wider global issues and take the lead in pulling together partners and resources to make that happen.
The need for strategic approaches has become more urgent in light of the pressing global financial and environmental issues and growing emphasis on the Total Place approach to budgets and shared outcomes. In these difficult times, communities need an ‘ensuring council’ that can balance macro-imperatives against micro-dynamics.
Local priorities cannot go to the wall in the search for solutions to global challenges, nor can pressing global challenges be sacrificed for the local. The local and the global must be balanced and the ‘ensuring council’ model offers a way of trying to do so.
Paul O’Brien is chief executive of the Association for Public Service Excellence. The Ensuring council report costs £20 for Apse members and £40 for non-members. To receive a copy, contact Mo Baines at [email protected] or download it from the website: www.apse.org.uk/research.html
