Any national improvement strategy must be genuinely jointly owned by central and local government, say Sir Simon Milton and Lucy de Groot
This is an important moment for local government to influence key government decisions which will determine whether councils have more freedom to help people and improve places.
We welcome the proposal for a national improvement strategy in the White Paper, but it must be genuinely-jointly owned by central and local government. The strategy cannot be nationally determined.
Long-term real change will only come when the financial and constitutional arrangements between local and central government have been made fit for the 21st century.
We can't take local politics out of improvement, and any improvement strategy should enhance councils' role as community leaders to tackle the big public concerns such as crime, health and economic development. And that's why we would like to see greater involvement of elected members.
There is inevitably tension between local and national priorities, but locally-agreed priorities must not be crowded out in a way that reduces councils' ability to improve. Lifting the burden of performance indicators from 1,200 to 200 would help. The task force needs to show practical results soon, followed by fewer national targets in the Comprehensive Spending Review.
Without these changes, the balance of power for local government improvement won't shift.
The expertise on improvement already lies with councils. The last CPA results showed 70% of counties and single tiers were improving ‘strongly' or ‘well'. And the Audit Commission said three-quarters of those councils exceeded its standards for effective use of resources.
A national improvement strategy should reflect what local government is for – helping people and improving places. Last year, the LGA and IDeA published Driving improvement which set out a new performance framework, which rebalanced the current, centrally-driven regime by focusing on local priorities, emphasising citizen and customer satisfaction and accountability, with a bigger role for peer challenge and self-assessment. And the principles of that model should be embedded in the national strategy. 
We should expect more of ourselves in developing as a sector to respond to the future challenges to public services. Those challenges include the rising expectations of service-users, the need to harness technology to improve access, the pressures in increasingly diverse communities, and the need for greater efficiency with tight public finances.
Local government should be enabled to work with partners across all sectors, with councils taking the lead within their communities to make things happen without necessarily providing every service. Liverpool City Council led a city-wide coalition to ban smoking in public places, after identifying over-whelming public support. The CLG clearly sees regional improvement partnerships (RIPs) as an important vehicle for council support. But the important thing is that councils can get improvement support and challenge at local, regional and national level.
Councils do the improving, but improvement can be enabled through a blend of regional and national support which challenges and shares learning and knowledge. A lot of work will have to happen sub-nationally to make this model successful. We recognise that councils want simplified access to improvement support. The IDeA's regional associates already act as brokers for councils, and this may be a useful model to develop. But an improvement strategy which was genuinely owned by local and central government would articulate what councils needed to improve and the sector needed to develop.
That's why there needs to be a sector-wide debate to provide an opportunity for the sector to say what it needs to improve.
The LGA and IDeA are hosting a workshop with chief executives and leaders next week to begin a debate across the sector so that the national improvement strategy can be genuinely jointly owned.
Sir Simon Milton is chair of the LGA improvement board, and Lucy de Groot is executive director of the IDeA. The LGA and IDeA improvement conference is on 6 and 7 March 2007