I work in local government because I'm passionate about improving the quality of life for local people. Therefore, I should be one of the biggest advocates of the place shaping agenda. So why do I have lingering doubts about its deliverability? There are so many exciting opportunities on the table. Local Area Agreements are going to offer more local focus and funding. The Audit Commission's new Comprehensive Area Assessment framework has claimed, in its draft vision, that it will try to ‘analyse the things that matter to citizens' and ‘seek to develop a shared view about the challenges facing an area or place'. So why don't I believe the future is completely rosy? Well, perhaps I'm getting too long in the tooth, but haven't the last few years seen a fragmentation of local delivery and local governance, making it progressively more complex to join it up locally. For example, school autonomy makes it harder to get headteachers around a community-focused table. They have plenty of their own increasingly-onerous targets to focus on. And some of those targets may lead to conflicts with the wider community agenda, such as school pressures to exclude difficult children. Housing management policy has brought ALMOs, stock transfers and consequential separate governance arrangements which need to be tied in to our LSPs. Children's trusts are encouraged to have a life and targets of their own, while somehow, still be part of the whole community strategy. Each of these separate entities is also tied into their own inspection regimes, and the expectations on them tightly controlled by the sponsor government department. These complexities are linked to what is widely recognised as a truism across local government – that national government is not joined up. Separate government departments can, therefore, be instructing organisations to pull in directions often not linked to locally-agreed priorities. Perhaps the best example of this is health. Our health partners are often left focusing on reducing deficits rather than making a full contribution to local priorities. The Whitehall financial regimes force local partners to slug it out over who pays for what. The Home Office is another example. Like me, many people who read this column will be sorting out the consequences of the Home Office reducing its level of funding to crime-reduction partnerships one month after the start of the financial year. Shouldn't all well-run partnerships already have spending plans documented and action plans in hand well before the start of the financial year? Apparently that's not what the Home Office expects. This failure to join up Whitehall departmental agendas is still alive and well. The Government itself is also slow to shift towards real-time planning in its policy making. So real ongoing changes in the communities we serve are not planned for in advance or appropriately measured to reflect local community pressures. So is it all gloomy? Well no, local government has proved time and again it is able to rise to the challenge. So what could the Government do to really help partners help local people? Well, for a start: l mean it when it says it wants the Comprehensive Performance Assessment to measure all partners and hold other Whitehall departments to account, not just local government l really make statutory national targets for the LAAs as minimal as possible, and focus on quality of life and protections for those most vulnerable l set out all partners' financial frameworks well in advance – and stick to them l recognise local effects of national policies I'm an optimist, so let's hope some of these lessons have already been learned. Cheryl Coppell is chief executive of Havering LBC
