Financial pressures mean further transformation & devolution imperative, writes CCN public services reform lead Cllr Philip Atkins
Hard questions are being asked right across local government, as they have been for the last four years. Between 2010 and 2015 CCN members have seen 43% of their funding removed.
Through innovation and partnership working we ensured that our core services have been protected as far as possible. But as the new LGA review indicates, hard questions are rapidly becoming fundamental reassessments of what local government does and how we do it.
In counties this reassessment means looking again at our services and identifying how the sort of strategic transformations as the Revolving Investment Funds can be replicated.
We can point towards the 60% of local government budgets that Whitehall controls through direct funding combined with regulations and make a compelling case for further financial devolution but that will not happen overnight. In the short-term it is towards further integration and collaboration that we must look if we are going to continue to protect core services.
Initiatives such as the Public Services Transformation Network show that the central government recognises that every county area must accelerate the pace at which they emulate the most successful innovations of their peers.
This hunger for innovation is not universal across Whitehall however; the silence greeting bold initiatives like Community Budgets cannot continue if we want counties to maintain essential, but non-statutory, strategic functions like driving local economic growth.
The pressure to change how counties fund these activities is intense. LGA funding projections show the average county council will have only 27% of its budget available for services other than social care, children services and waste disposal by 2019/20 compared to 35% for a single-tier authority.
Correspondingly CCN members are increasing strident in their demands for the freedom to pool funding more creatively and reinvest the proceeds of local growth back into local initiatives that generate prosperity for entire communities.
The only way to successfully answer the hard questions being asked of counties is to allow us the devolved funding, freedom to create new forms of partnership and autonomy to find our own answers.
We literally can no longer afford expensive central government schemes that risk being disconnected from local realities.
Cllr Philip Atkins is CCN spokesman for public services reform and leader, Staffordshire CC
