WHITEHALL

What's on your mind?

A recent SOLACE survey conducted among its members to name their current worries brough some surprises, as David Clark found out

In August, I asked SOLACE members to name the six big issues which were on their minds.

When the answers came back, there were clearly some favourites. Some of these, perhaps, were obvious, but others a little surprising.
This was not a scientific survey, merely a snapshot of what chief executives and senior managers in UK local government are thinking about. And this is what they told me.

Number one in the charts, by a long way, was finance, with a combination of the Comprehensive Spending Review and local budgetary pressures having the potential to cause real pain in local authorities.

You may feel that this is unsurprising, since the British taste for US levels of taxation and Scandinavian levels of public service have always meant that local government faced financial pressures. But, in fact, it is a big surprise, since no SOLACE survey in the last decade has shown finance as the number one issue of concern to our members.

But I think this is understandable. We may be seeing the toughest settlement for a generation. The second big issue of concern was looking at alternative ways of delivering services, or transformational government, as it is known in some quarters.

Many members talked of the lack of skills within their organisation to handle a major change agenda.

Number three seemed to relate to housing and planning matters, with the problem being managing both. It is no secret that the UK is suffering a major shortage of people with planning expertise at a time when growth and regeneration agendas are at the top of many local authorities lists. Equal third was SOLACE members reporting on the problems of grappling with the shared service and/or partnership working agenda.

The major issues here concerned cross working with other public bodies, or with other councils, and in difficulties arising from trying to find a suitable private sector partner for a range of service delivery issues. Again SOLACE members talked about the lack of capacity within their own organisations to engage properly with other organisations.

The fifth-biggest issue was, as you might expect, a whole range of matters relating to local government reorganisation in England, ranging from general uncertainties through to difficulties of engaging in an enhanced two-tier work setting.

The sixth big issue is one I found the most surprising. More than one-quarter of SOLACE members replying said local political issues were the major concern.

Now, from time to time, SOLACE members may have difficulties with elected politicians, and this is often reported in The MJ, but the issues that were being raised here were not ones where members and officers were finding it difficult to get along, but was something quite different.

SOLACE members were expressing concern that many of their senior local politicians lacked experience in running large organisations and/or were new to local politics and, therefore, were finding the running of the council incredibly tough going.

Despite the efforts of SOLACE Enterprises and state-funded bodies such as the IDeA, it still seems that we find it difficult to support local politicians in developing the skills to run large and complex organisations.

The reason this came as a surprise was simply that this has never really featured in any survey that SOLACE has done before.

Perhaps, in a way, all these six points are linked. Faced with an increasingly-complex agenda and multiple demands from government customers and citizens, local government finds itself lacking in the cash and human resources to engage fully in the way that it wants.

For lay people, such as local politicians coming into this for the first time, it is an incredibly difficult challenge and possibly, a thankless one at that.

Of course, in the overall survey, many other issues appeared, some specifically local, such as an incinerator here or a by-pass there, but these six issues give a fair snap-shot of what is concerning senior managers as we enter the last quarter of 2007. n

David Clark is director general of SOLACE

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