When I saw the Government's Open public services White Paper, published in July, making reference to the need for ‘continuity regimes' to be established in cases of service failure, I could not help but be reminded of the various terms that, at different times, have been in vogue over the past decade or so, when talking about service and corporate performance in local government.

I spent a reasonable proportion of my professional life between 1999 and 2007 – sometimes working on behalf of the local government sector at national level and at other times working as an official within government itself – in national policy debates about concepts such as ‘robust failure regimes' and ‘ladders of intervention'.