Show us where the joins are... The fact that the Department for Communities and Local Government is consulting on its new structure is to be welcomed. Its permanent secretary, Peter Housden, seems to be aiming towards a matrix-type structure that Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey might describe as ‘courageous’ when looked at in a conventional Whitehall sense. But there is more to this approach than meets the eye. Although I am not at heart a structuralist, what the new department seems to be trying to do is promote excellence in individual areas of service activity and, at the same time, join things up across the organisation The obvious missing link is the proposal to put efficiency together with finance, as if that was the primary linkage, whereas everyone I have spoken to in local government clearly recognises the intimate linkage between improvement and efficiency. If that integration is underdeveloped or lost, the overall cohesion of the approach is under threat. So come on DCLG, let’s see a structure which reflects the coming together of improvement and efficiency as we are seeing across the country between Regional Centres of Excellence and improvement partnerships in our regions. The other critical join to get right, as we get into CSR07 and focus on shared services and longer-term investments to move to the next level, in terms of efficiencies across the public sector, is where it is best to join up – down the silos or in localities. There are unquestionably large gains to be had in both directions through aggregated procurement, shared service design, development of integrated teams and delivery. This calls for a much closer discussion between central and local government to identify the incentives that are needed to move things along, beyond the natural point of consensus on shared services and facilities, locally and nationally. These are difficult questions, and they are to do with increasing the momentum of public service reform across the entire public sector. If we imagine, for a moment, that the whole of two-tier England might not want to be restructured over the next period, then we in local government need to act now to identify the considerable benefits that can be won from improving the current arrangements with or without structural change, and be bolder about grasping them. n
