Posted on February 23rd, 2010
‘Total Place and the third sector’ – IDeA recommendations to CLG
The Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) has consulted with voluntary and community (third) sector representatives to produce recommendations for its report on the Total Place pilots to the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG).
The recommendations emerged from a day-seminar on 15 January 2010, attended by voluntary and community (third) sector partners. These included NAVCA’s Director of Policy and Communications Neil Cleeveley and Improving Local Partnerships Policy Adviser Robert Beard, together with chief officers from several NAVCA member organisations.
The recommendations identify four over-arching themes:
IDeA concludes that ‘It is vital that the learning about the experience and contribution of the third sector in the pilots is not lost. Third sector colleagues must be at the table at the beginning, recognised for the full range of their role and knowledge locally.’
You can Download the recommendations from the website at http://www.navca.org.uk/localvs/infobank/ilpunews/totalplace3rdsector.htm
Total Place IDeA ‘Doing the High Level Count’ seminar: 22nd January
Thank you to colleagues from both pilots and parallel places for their contributions to the Total Place high level count event last Friday. We were joined by Jayne Bench from BeBirmingham, Ricky Fuller from Improvement East and Ben Rowland from Tribal who all gave stimulating presentations on how the high level count had gone for them. Delegates have fed back, both on the day and via emails this morning that they found the event really helpful. Presentations, contact details, a link to the London Collaborative report and the DWP resource pack will be uploaded to the Total Place CoP this week. There will also be some further thinking on how we could develop a lessons learnt, key things to consider type resource as was requested. If anyone has any input on this, it would be greatly appreciated.
Further seminars are planned and the full list can be found on the CoP www.communities.idea.gov.uk
London Councils: ‘Towards a new service model for Londoners’ report: January 10
‘New research unveiled yesterday by London Councils suggests that devolution from central government and quangos to a local level could save billions of pounds from the capital’s public purse. London Councils commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) to map public expenditure in the capital and to investigate how the government’s ‘Total Place’ approach might improve services for Londoners. Their research showed that £73.6 billion of public money was spent in London in 2008/09- or around £10,000 for each Londoner. However, less than half was directed through bodies that are directly accountable to Londoners – the capital’s boroughs and the Greater London Authority. Local government in London has no control over the 156 quangos responsible for £5.6 billion of the capital’s public expenditure bill in 2008/09. Nor does it have any say over the £25 billion spent by national government departments in the capital. Just one government department (Department for Work and Pensions) accounts for £11 billion of the capital’s total public expenditure.’
PwC’s commission was to map expenditure for London at the headline level and apply Total Place thinking to three public service themes. The three themes need to be seen as exemplars of a way of working through Total Place at this early stage: they are certainly not the only relevant Total Place ideas for London. They are:
To download the full report go to http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/media/current/pressdetail.htm?pk=926
National Land & Property Gazetteer
This helpful resource was pointed out to me by Diane Fieldhouse working at the Local Land & Property Gazeteer in Nottingham City Council. It’s a unique link to definitive land and property addressing. ‘The NLPG is the first, definitive, national address list that provides unique identification of properties across England and Wales and conforms to the British Standard, BS 7666. Local government, and potentially the public and private sectors, can link their information systems to this source of addresses and accurate geographic location’ – it is supported by the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU).
For further information, please visit www.nlpg.org.uk
Total Place Community of Practice
www.communities.idea.gov.uk
An analysis of the CoP statistics this week revealed that the Total Place CoP has been the second most active on the IDeA platform. Thank you for the excellent participation levels.
The presentations from the ‘Total Place: doing the high-level count’ event are now in the library. If you didn’t have chance to go along you can view them here.
The PWC report ‘London Councils Total Place – towards a new service model for Londoners’ has also been posted in the CoP forum, with a number of related news articles. Select this link to read all about it.
Total Place ministerial meeting: 12th January
Cllr David Parsons and John Atkinson met with Ministers from all the main government departments (DH, DWP, CLG, HMT, DCFS, MOJ, HO) on the 12th January to give the fourth briefing on Total Place. Irene Lucas led an item on government-wide efficiencies and links with Total Place and gave an update on Total Capital. There was also a paper on mainstreaming Total Place from the CLG Secretariat, followed by ministerial updates.
With only a few weeks to go before pilots submit their final reports, Ministers were asked to set out what specific steps they will be taking in the next 3 weeks to:
Total Place Learning History
The Leadership Centre has now commenced work on the Total Place Learning History. The learning history creates a valuable space for those directly involved in Total Place to reflect on their experience. The learning history approach captures stories that people tell about a change effort and reflects them back to the organisation to help it to learn and presents the experiences and understandings of participants in a way that generalises the learnings as a whole and helps people to move forward effectively. It includes reports of actions and results, descriptions of learning methods and techniques and underlying assumptions and reasoning as well as perspectives of a variety of people including those who did not support the effort.
The Learning history tells the story in the participants’ own words, is a critical part of the infrastructure to support learning and is a tried and tested approach to building learning organisations.
The State of Happiness
A new report from the Young Foundation and the IDeA highlights that promoting and influencing happiness is no longer an airy aspiration. As the recession forces difficult public spending choices, services focused on wellbeing are delivering widespread economic and social benefits – especially to children.
‘The State of Happiness’ brings together four years of work based on in-depth pilots – from teaching resilience to children in schools to promoting neighbourliness – with three councils in very different areas of the country: Manchester, Hertfordshire and South Tyneside.
For the final PDF version of the report, please visit the Total Place CoP or click here.
Senior leaders networking event: Gateshead, 15th January 2010
The South Tyneside, Gateshead and Sunderland Total Place pilot kindly hosted the senior leader’s event last Friday at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. We heard from Cllr Mick Henry, Leader of Gateshead Council and Cllr Iain Malcolm, Leader of South Tyneside who welcomed us to the event, and from Dave Smith, CX of Sunderland who spoke about the South of Tyne & Wear story. Senior leaders from the pilots, their partners, parallel places and members of the high levels officials group came together to discuss the opportunity to influence the potential open doors of radical reform around how local government, national government and local agencies work together in the future. There was a rousing call to action by both Helen Bailey and Irene Lucas for pilots to be clear, factual and concise in the contents of their final reports and to be bold about what the project means for the future.
The next and final networking event within the official project timescale will be in Bradford on the 4th March 2010.
Sir Michael Bichard’s high-level officials group meeting: 18th January
The meeting of the Bichard Group yesterday focused on the pilots’ issues, challenges and barriers around the drugs & alcohol workstream. John Sinnott, CX, Leicestershire CC, Dave Smith, CX, Sunderland, and Jackie Russell from BeBirmingham presented a joint update on the work of Total Place in their theme. The presentation provoked a good conversation and was followed by a discussion on accountability issues in Total Place led by Amyas Morse, NAO Comptroller & Auditor General. Geoff Alltimes (CX, Hammersmith & Fulham) and Chris Bull (CX, Herefordshire) joined the group to discuss their experience as Joint LA-PCT Chief Executives and in particular:
There was also a paper on mainstreaming Total Place led by Andrew Campbell. The next meeting will be held on the 18th February.
Local learning workshop
The second Local Learning Workshop is planned for Monday 22 February in London. The day will again aim to bring together a variety of people from Total Place pilots, parallel places and other areas interested in this type of work. We hope it will offer participants a shared space to discuss issues arising from partnership working as well as considering ways in which they can help spread this way of working. Other possible topics for discussion include social enterprise, governance and accountability and place leadership.
Total Place Community of Practice
www.communities.idea.gov.uk
The Total Place online community of practice continues to grow in the new year, and we’re just shy of the 600 members mark.
Sir Michael Bichard’s ‘hot seat’ videos are now live in the forum. They’re well worth watching, whether you’re new to Total Place or you’ve been active in the process from the start. If you’re unable to watch the videos, transcripts are also available here.
Thanks to Phil Swann for his blog ‘If at first you don’t succeed….Celebrate’ that reminds us failure is as crucial to learning as success.
We look forward to seeing more blogging/stories on the CoP in 2010.
Total Place: key reports to share
Lessons learnt – a report by OPM
This report brings together buy cheap cialis online learning from the evaluation studies of previous government initiatives and interviews with key policy makers and commentators and was commissioned by the Leadership Centre.
Some of the key learning points were:
The report went to the high level officials group in December for discussion and is available on the website www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/totalplace
Purpose, Power, Knowledge, Time & Space: a report by Professor Keith Grint
This interim report draws some provisional conclusions from the Total Place Initiative established in 2009. It is based on a reading of documents and interviews with key stakeholders and participants, and locates the initiative within a wider body of academic literature on leadership and change. At this point (December 2009) the empirical data is illustrative rather than definitive and more data will be available, reported and evaluated for the final report due in April 2010. It reflects on the initial developments and findings of the TPI and sets the results in an academic context. It is not intended as an exercise in arcane theory but a way of ensuring that the learning can be ‘copylefted’ and not copyrighted – we can all learn something of value from this rather than only those with privileged theoretical or monetary resources.
Both reports available on the website under ‘learning’ at www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/totalplace
Total Place pre-pilot learning report
‘The Leadership Centre for Local Government supported three large-scale programmes since summer 2008. “Calling Cumbria” was the first programme of its kind to create a space for the conversations that matter to happen across a whole county. This intervention has been called ‘a soft intervention for hard outcomes’ – through building the right conditions for relationships to flourish, services will improve.
Two more programmes followed in 2009: “The Lives We Lead, The Leaders We Need” in Suffolk and Norfolk’s “LEAPP” (Lead, Engage, Aspire, Perform in Partnership).
Although each programme had a different context, design and purpose, they shared common principles of encouraging trust, developing a better understanding of leadership, innovation, learning, and whole-system transformation’.
Please find a link here http://www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/totalplace/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Pre-pilot-learning.pdf to the full pre-pilot learning report – we hope you find it informative.
LGA & IDeA – International learning
‘Faced with the demand for ever more efficient and cost-effective services, there has never been a better time for councils to look to international examples of innovative service delivery for fresh perspectives’. The LGA and IDeA have established this new resource which aims to help council officers and elected members learn from the approaches of international counterparts to particular policy challenges.
You can find more information at http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=14636528
2010 MJ achievement awards
The launch of The MJ Local Government Achievement Awards 2010 at The Hilton on Park Lane, London was announced just before Christmas. Now in their 7th Year, the MJ Awards are a great chance to get together with old and new faces to celebrate achievements in 2009. This year there will be ‘Total Place Achievement of the Year’ award and nominations for that and all of the other award categories are now open. You can enter online here at http://www.localgov.co.uk/index.cfm?method=awards.newhome – the nomination deadline is Friday 22nd January 2010.
Total Place community of practice
Some colleagues will have received the online community newsletter last week. Since then, the CoP’s current online membership has risen to 570 – quite a number in such a short space of time.
There’s been a lot happening on the Total Place CoP forum including a call for examples of ‘outcomes-based community planning’ or good examples of plan rationalisation; a discussion on the need/enthusiasm for a workshop on ‘high cost families’; a discussion about the sharing of data being an increasingly significant barrier to Total Place; members ask that the CoP is used for group discussions rather than email; and the questions have started to come in for Sir Michael Bichard who’s in the ‘hot seat’ on Thursday 14th.
There is also a comprehensive calendar of Total Place events and a wiki with some excellent media content.
You can visit the CoP library to read the pre-pilot learning report by Lesley Cramman; the 2nd learning update for some valuable info on TP; and a series of articles that address some of the things being learnt on the Total Place journey.
And get blogging on the CoP: Iqbal Hussain talks about The Young Foundation report on acute needs and ‘new year, new determination’, Adrian Smith talks about ‘Making Cambridgeshire Count’ www.communities.idea.gov.uk
NHS Excellence through Partnership event
NHS Leicestershire County and Rutland are running an Excellence through Partnership event on 27th January, aimed at Chief Executives and Executive Directors nationally across local government, PCTs’, SHA’s and partners.
For more details on the event, please visit http://www.networks.nhs.uk/news.php?nid=3726
West Midlands Regional Observatory
The WMRO are a great source of regional research, facts and figures. They’re responsible primarily for helping the West Midlands to develop better access to well organised information but their nifty graphs and tables are handy for comparing across regions also. Their website can be accessed at http://www.wmro.org/standardTemplate.aspx/Home/AbouttheWestMidlands
Senior leaders networking event: Gateshead, 15th January 2010
The South Tyneside, Gateshead and Sunderland Total Place pilot are hosting the next senior leader’s event this Friday from 10am to 3pm at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.
Facilitated by the Leadership Centre, this is the last occasion to get together before the final Total Place reports are put forward and the day provides a real opportunity to shape what will be said about Total Place and provides a chance to influence the shared report that will be produced alongside the Budget Report documents. Sir Michael Bichard, Helen Bailey, Irene Lucas, other members of the high levels officials group and senior leaders and officers from the pilots and parallel places will be joining us.
Crucially, the timing provides an important opportunity to influence the potential open doors of radical reform around how local government, national government and local agencies work together in the future.
This invitation is for local authority Chief Executives, elected Leaders, Chief Executives of your local partner organisations and other local leaders.
Category: news
thanks for making this post available, i find your information very useful in general
Comment by Sally Saunders — July 21, 2010 @ 3:03 pm