I have a favourite saying at the moment when addressing our cabinet members: ‘Your planets are at last aligned'.

Here in South Lakeland, we have a Lib Dem controlled district council, a Lib Dem controlled county local area committee, a Lib-Lab coalition at the county cabinet, a Lib Dem MP and a Con/Lib Dem national government coalition.

There is plenty of effort being made to look at how this situation can be worked to our communities' best advantage, driven by our belief that it is the right thing to do.

The greatest long-term improvement to local issues will be our work with the county council.  I'm bored with the usual mantra ‘that's not us, it's them'.  No matter how much we try and paper over the cracks, the reality is, each organisation looks after its own responsibilities, and maybe occasionally, we give a little bit.

It's a challenging undertaking to get two very different organisations, culturally, geographically and service provision wise, to think as one.

I am tackling it from the service user's perspective, to see what the world looks like to them, and what the improved outcomes for them might be.  I have left politics out of it for now, as that will come later, first let's get the principles agreed.

It's interesting to see what limited knowledge we actually have of each other's roles.  For example, the impact of adult social care and children's services are around us every day, but at the district we only come into contact with a small part of the bigger picture.  The same can be said on the reverse around the provision of housing, in all its forms.

I am fortunate that I have a number of inroads to access unitary authorities and to look at how they work things through, but that can be in real contrast to our issues relating to rurality and sparsity.

Some of the topics will be strategic in nature, others more service driven.

Our relationship through the LEP and our combined support to economic development will be essential to make it the success we want it to be, and now we will be contributing some of our New Homes bonus, it will make that even more of an imperative.

The provision of highway infrastructure to realise our local plan and the demand on new housing and business investment must sit hand in hand.

We are not blessed with too many public land assets so what we do have must be co-ordinated to get the best result to help shape our communities for the future. Our customer contact must be seamless and the services that we provide as a follow up, must be of the same quality.

Gritting, flooding, ITC, public health, waste management, street lighting, libraries, democratic and parking services along with joint management at the right level for both organisations seem the only way to progress.
As a service user and taxpayer myself, I would demand nothing less.

Now, what was I saying about the politics?

Lawrence Conway is chief executive of South Lakeland DC