An archive of the Leadership Centre’s fortnightly Total Place updates for June 2010.
Fortnightly update 47: highlights
Fortnightly update 46: highlights
Fortnightly update 45: highlights
Places, people & politics: helping you make the best use of the Total Place Learning History
The attached slide pack with accompanying facilitator’s notes has been created to assist the use of the learning history as a tool and form the basis of a four hour workshop. The workshop’s purpose is to introduce the learning history, understand the experiences and lessons learnt so that you can consider how to apply this to future holistic and area based work. If you would like further information on how to use this tool, please contact Holly Wheeler at holly.wheeler@localleadership.gov.uk and to download a copy of the learning history please visit www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/current/publications
New CLG Ministers’ views on the Total Place agenda
Greg Clark on decentralisation
“When you give people the opportunity to get on and do the things that they have a passion about and let them make use of their knowledge of the community they can work wonders.
Decentralisation is about giving power back to local people so that they can to come together to shape their communities in the way that they want. I want it to be easier for people who have a great idea to be able to get on and do it.
If you can get the money away from the bureaucrats in the centre who tell people how it should be spent, and transfer it so that people can come together and say how they’d like to spend it, more of a difference can be made.
Decentralisation is about giving power back to local people so that they can to come together to shape their communities in the way that they want.”
For more information, please visit CLG’s website www.communities.gov.uk
Bob Neill on localism
Last week, local government minister Bob Neill said “it is time for a culture change across Whitehall and local government to ensure that localism – the real devolution of power to local people – takes place”.
Speaking at the Municipal Journal (MJ) annual leadership conference in London, Bob Neill said that there is much to do to promote a radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government and community groups.
He said change is needed at a time of financial pressure for local government, especially when it accounts for almost a quarter of UK public sector spending. He highlighted that these challenges are not mere problems but a mandate for radical change, and that we need a strong society where individuals, families and communities are more able to take on responsibility to improve their areas.
He said:
“The old rules of central control are not a fixed part of the system – we need to change the culture to enable us to rewrite the rules. We want local deliverers to be much more accountable to the people they serve rather than focussing on Whitehall.
“The tired, old bureaucratic approach needs to go and the balance of power between central and local government needs to be reset. It’s time to build a new system around our trust in people and professionals.
“Strong local government ultimately comes from rising voter turnout. Success will be further recognised when local citizens and national media routinely ask locally elected leaders for answers and not Ministers in Parliament.
“Decentralisation needs to happen by moving decision making down through the town hall, starting with individuals, families, communities and voluntary groups. It’s not about which type of politician is in charge. Hard questions have to be asked by everyone about how far power can be transferred to put people fully in charge of their own destinies.”
For the full article, please click on http://www.communities.gov.uk/newsstories/localgovernment/1621287
Benefits realisation: a Turning Point report
“As we know, commissioners around the country support closer working across health and social care. However they need data to test some of the assumptions of integrated services. Turning Point Connected Care has carried out a comprehensive desktop review of the evidence base of the costs and benefits of integrated services. This work has shown that integrated approaches are not only better for the service user, but lead to big cost efficiencies and savings for commissioners. In particular early intervention and prevention can realise significant financial benefits. For example, studies have illustrated that integrated early intervention programmes can generate resource savings of up to £2.65 for every £1 spent. The benefits realisation work complements their separate programme of cost benefit analysis carried out across different projects”. To access the report, please follow this link http://www.turning-point.co.uk/commissionerszone/centreofexcellence/Documents/Benefitsrealisation2010.pdf
Connected Care
Connected Care is Turning Point’s model for community led commissioning; one that integrates health, housing and social care service delivery. Launched two years ago, they are now successfully working with commissioners across the UK to bring community-led solutions to health and social care problems. Connected Care supports commissioners by:
Connected Care is currently working in ten areas of the country, including Hammersmith and Fulham, Bolton, Essex, Hartlepool, East Lancashire, Suffolk and East Sussex. Their projects are undertaken in different geographical areas and a number also focus on specific communities of interest, for example the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller population in East Lancashire and carers in Suffolk.
The Leadership Centre will be working closely with Turning Point on taking this work forward. For more information on Connected Care and Turning Point, please follow this link http://www.turning-point.co.uk/Pages/home.aspx or contact Richard Kramer at richard.kramer@turning-point.co.uk
Total Place Summit : Sharing and building on whole area working
Once again, thank you to all those who made the event. It was fantastic to have so many enthusiastic people at the event discussing the future of place based working. Please find below an overview of events and a collection of experiments that you created during the open discussions on day two.
Further summit details, including video and workshop presentations are available at the Total Place website and can be accessed by following this link: www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/totalplace/news/missed-the-total-place-summit/
BBC Radio 4’s Today programme
Prior to last week’s Budget, BBC Radio 4’s Today programme featured Lord Bichard discussing public sector savings and Total Place. As part of the discussions, public sector workers were invited to send in their examples of service redesign and efficiencies. The request was not for “imaginative, hypothetical, untested” ideas (their words not ours!), but tangible examples of work underway.
This is a great opportunity to raise the profile of the important work you are all engaged in. Examples will be “considered by the Institute for Government” but will also be seen by the Radio 4 team. Emails to: today@bbc.co.uk with PUBLIC SECTOR SAVINGS in the subject bar.
For more details and a chance to listen again at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8753000/8753114.stm
HMT launches the Spending Challenge
“The Spending Challenge is your chance to shape the way government works, and help us get more for less as we try to bring down the deficit. It’s open initially to people who work in our public sector. Share your idea with us. Your idea could be small-scale, but quick and easy to put into action. It could be more radical, involving significant changes to where and how government works. Every single idea will be considered and the best ones taken forward by departments, the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. The steps are as follows:
For more information visit http://spendingchallenge.hm-treasury.gov.uk – deadline for submissions is the 8th July
LGA group response to the emergency budget
Commenting on the Budget, Dame Margaret Eaton, Chairman of the Local Government Association, said:
“This is a very tough Budget that will have far-reaching effects. Councils provide vital front line services upon which millions of people rely. Ministers need to recognise that council services such as adult social care and safeguarding children are as important to residents as services such as education and health when the Government makes detailed decisions on spending in the autumn.
“Councils are in the vanguard of reforming the public sector and will work with the Government to ensure that savings will be made by pruning out the maze of quangos, middlemen, bureaucratic funding streams and audit arrangements, rather than salami slicing services that the most vulnerable people depend on. We need nothing less than a transformation of the way the public sector works to deliver savings by giving power to the people who know their areas best.
“Town halls are the most efficient part of the public sector and have led the way taking difficult decisions to deal with the financial crisis. They have already made significant savings, and have already made it clear that they are unable to offer staff a pay rise this year.
“Councils work hard to keep council tax down, and are looking to government to confirm that the proposed tax freeze is paid for from savings outside local government such as central government marketing and consultancy.”
To access the group’s full ‘on the day’ briefing please visit http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=12016217
Workforce issues: CIPD response to the emergency budget
John Philpott, CIPD’s Chief Economic Adviser, warns that economic growth will slow by far more than the budget suggests.
You can read the CIPD’s repsonse to the implications of the Emergency Budget for jobs, public sector pay, pensions and the default retirement age here http://www.cipd.co.uk/pressoffice/_articles/220610-The-CIPD-responds-to-the-implications-of-the-Budget.htm?wa_src=email&wa_pub=cipd&wa_crt=editorial_1_none&wa_cmp=cipdupdate_230610 .
The Innovation Unit: Radical Efficiency report
“Radical Efficiency is about public service innovations that deliver different, much better outcomes for users at significantly lower cost. Radical Efficiency is not about tweaking and improving existing services. It is about generating new perspectives on old problems to enable a genuine paradigm shift in the services on offer – and transform the user experience.
The Innovation Unit have uncovered more than 100 examples of radical efficiency across the globe in different services, contexts and on different scales. Our top ten case studies range from Mental Health First Aid in Australia to mobile banking in Kenya and from Chicago Police Department’s virtual crime mapping tool to Solar Lamps in India”. For the full report please follow this link http://www.innovationunit.org/radicalefficiency
“The Innovation Unit has begun to develop the case for radical efficiency in practice. Working with colleagues in Croydon, Central Bedfordshire, the Eastern Region of the UK, the Royal College of General Practitioners and Early Years professionals across the country has demonstrated the power of radical efficiency to inspire and structure a new kind of thinking about public service reform”.
‘Control Shift’: Conservative localism policy paper
Although over a year old, we thought it was worth sharing the policy green paper outlining Conservative plans to give power back to local communities for those who haven’t seen it.
In February 2009, David Cameron explained that “decentralisation, devolution and empowerment” were naturally part of a Conservative approach to government, and stressed the importance of an “empowering state” rather than an “overpowering state”.
‘Control Shift’, their decentralisation green paper, outlined a series of policies that would see powers transferred from the central state to local people and local institutions:
For the full document, please visit http://www.conservatives.com/news/news_stories/2009/02/its_time_to_transfer_power_from_the_central_state_to_local_people.aspx
CAA brought to a close
Communities secretary Eric Pickles officially brought to an end the short-lived system of Comprehensive Area Assessments on Friday, after instructing the five inspectorates behind the unpopular rankings they are no longer required.
“Mr Pickles wrote to all council leaders in England on 15 June, stating he had instructed the Audit Commission, Ofsted, the Care Quality Commission and the prisons and probation watchdogs to halt the ‘costly top-down reports officially known as the CAA’. Instead, the coalition government has said it wants to hand responsibility for the quality of local services, and their continued monitoring, to local public bodies. The move forms part of the coalition’s wider plan to empower localities, which also includes a “general power of competence” – a wide-ranging power allowing councils, not Whitehall, to determine the future direction of many public services.
Mr Pickles said: ‘In the face of the £156bn deficit, central government needs to stop the costly top-down monitoring that is engulfing councils and start trusting them to do what is right locally.’
It follows widespread concern across local government that the area-based CAA system, introduced to replace Comprehensive Performance Assessments last year, had been a costly and bureaucratic regime that unnecessarily used up councils’ scarce resources.
Camden LBC, which emerged from the inaugural CAAs as England’s highest rated local authority, had led calls for the regime to be ditched.
Independent research had put the average cost to public bodies of reporting back to the government through the CAA at £1.8m. Some councils said the internal cost of reporting on the complex system, which attempted to assess the quality of public services across entire localities, including joint working practices, had risen to £3.7m.
The CLG effectively announced the end of CAA as soon as the coalition government came to power. While in opposition, the Conservatives had pledged to scrap the new regime”.
A statement by the department on 15 June read: ‘The government is committed to shunning the bureaucratic levers of the past by replacing the heavy burden of Whitehall oversight with greater public transparency and accountability so councils can focus on frontline services.’
Mark Conrad writing for www.local.gov.uk
High level officials group meeting: 22 June
The high-level Total Place officials’ group met last week. They are actively exploring place-based working to determine its viability for inclusion in the spending review process. Meetings of this group are planned well in to the autumn.
Website and practitioner’s guide updates
We’d really appreciate any updates you might have to add to the Total Place website. If you’d like to update your page, please send text to Rebecca Cox at rebecca.cox@localleadership.gov.uk We’re particularly interested in any new contact details as your work has progressed, and also in the range of organisations which might now be involved. We receive enquiries on a daily basis from places who want to start doing work with a Total Place approach and correct contact details for the website and the CoP are really useful for sharing your learning.
Similarly, if you have any tools, concepts, activities and/or other approaches to this way of working that you’d like to share in the practitioners’ guide, please do email them through to me. The guide has been downloaded across the globe and sent to over 1500 people in the UK. It now needs a reprint so anything new and exciting you have to add to it would be greatly appreciated.
CLG breakdown of £1.166bn grant cuts: LGA briefing
On 24 May, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a package of £6.2bn of savings from the current year. A significant share of this total, £1.166bn, was to come from local councils. The LGA Group has stressed to the Government that councils will have to make exceptionally tough choices; even more so as the cuts are to 2010/11 budgets which have already been approved. The extra flexibility to take local spending decisions through the un-ring fencing of certain budgets should help councils cope with this.
CLG has announced details of these savings, of which:
Of the £878m revenue grants only some £451m (51%) has been identified to individual councils; the balance of £427m (49%) has not been disclosed. Councils need urgent clarification of how and where these other cuts will fall.
CLG has ensured that the £451m of identified cuts amounts to no more than 2% of any authority’s total revenue grant allocation. However this total revenue grant allocation includes ring-fenced elements such as the Dedicated Schools Grant, over which councils have little control.
Of the £288m capital cuts, some £212m has been specified but £76m remains to be disclosed. Several capital reductions fall heavily on individual authorities.
CLG also set out details of the £1.3bn of grants they will un-ring fence.
Details of individual reductions are available on the Communities and Local Government website.
Download the full briefing from the LGA.
Dr Monica Sharma: ‘scaling up of systemic change for service improvement’ masterclass
The Leadership Centre for Local Government is keen to build on the key role of sharing learning and experiences of systemic change work, especially in view of efforts to spread insights and good practices to broaden the place based approach further across the public sector. The Centre is collaborating with AeneasKTC on a masterclass which will focus on scaling up of systemic change for service improvement. The masterclass will be presented by Dr. Monica Sharma and will take place on the 16th July 2010 in London.
The class offers colleagues an opportunity to explore whole system change and gain practical experience from working with a renowned international practitioner. As the public sector moves into a period of fiscal restraint and focuses anew on the importance of keeping users at the heart of public service, leaders at all levels need to be able to work effectively with change and to leverage efficiency and productivity through collective and collaborative efforts on scaling up good and best practice
Monica is a thought leader and transformational change practitioner. She was until a few weeks ago Director of Leadership and Capacity Development at the UN. Her large scale change programmes have impacted on the lives of hundreds of millions of individuals. Through our partnership with Aeneas KTC the masterclass is offered at a discounted rate of £355 per delegate. For further information, please email eli@aeneasktc.com quoting LCMS1
National Audit Office and the Audit Commission: a review of collaborative procurement across the public sector
The National Audit Office and the Audit Commission last week called for public bodies to work together much more effectively than they currently do to maximise savings from procurement activities.
“The public sector procurement landscape is fragmented, with no overall governance. There are nearly 50 professional buying organisations, as well as individual public bodies running commercial and procurement functions. Many of these organisations operate framework agreements for similar goods and services.
The implications for value for money are clear. Public bodies are incurring unnecessary administration costs by duplicating procurement activity. In addition, the public sector is paying a wide range of prices for the same commodities, even within the existing collaborative arrangements.
The public sector is not maximising its significant purchasing power. There are a large number of framework agreements and organisations are not exploiting the potential benefits of volume when using these agreements. There are also few constraints on brand or specification choice.
In 2007, the Office of Government Commerce established a Collaborative Procurement Programme which has led to some real improvements to the way public bodies buy goods and services and is managing over £18 billion of spend under nine categories of goods and services. However, a step change in public sector procurement is now required, which builds on the Office of Government Commerce’s existing work”.
More details and the full report.
Local Government Group Annual Conference and Exhibition 2010
Changing times, Changing minds, Tuesday 6 – Thursday 8 July 2010, Bournemouth International Centre
A new central government, the deficit, the Olympics, devolution, climate change – what do all these mean for local government in the coming year?
The conference is an opportunity to meet new contacts, build on existing relationships and to speak frankly with leading thinkers inside and outside the sector.
Plenary, workshops and fringes sessions will provide delegates with an opportunity to tailor each day to suit your needs and interests and provides plenty of opportunity to network.
The Gala Dinner will be held on the last day at which the Council Worker of the Year Awards and the results of the Local Government Challenge will be announced.
Hear from and interact with key chairs and speakers such as:
To book your place at conference (either as a full delegate or day delegate) and the Gala Dinner, visit the dedicated website.
Commissioning for Better Outcomes and Efficiency
“Across the country those working in children’s services are facing a significant challenge to cut spending while continuing to improve outcomes for local children and young people. Directors of Children’s Services and Chief Executives of local authorities will be charged with leading their organisations through these changes while avoiding the paralysis and uncertainty that have too often been a feature of past attempts to reduce expenditure, recognising that there is a risk to services if efficiencies are not sought in an intelligent and strategic way.
The Commissioning Support Programmme’s Outcomes and Efficiency Methodology is tailored to children’s services enabling the delivery of Total Place ideas and concepts. It has been developed specifically for leaders of children’s services to tackle the need for efficiencies. It builds upon the tools we already have to redesign children’s services through commissioning, but accelerates the usual commissioning processes which can be too slow or cumbersome as they are designed for a steady state economy.
Directors of Children’s Services and other area leaders are encouraged to make contact with the Commissioning Support Programme to find out more about their Outcomes and Efficiency methodology and the support that is available. Running all of the key elements of transformation in parallel and applying user-centric systems-thinking gives the best chance of overcoming our local financial, political and social challenges.”
For further details, please contact Lorraine O’Reilly, Programme Director, Commissioning Support Programme lorraine.oreilly@commissioningsupport.org.uk
Community of practice
This week we have linked the CoP to the Workforce Matters community to start to address workforce issues as pilots and parallel places move to the implementation phases of their projects.
We have also made the community of practice a public resource. At nearly 1100 members it is a hugely useful tool for sharing information, making introductions, and keeping up to date on activity within places. If you haven’t yet joined, please do so at the website.
BIS report on evaluation
In December 2009, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) jointly developed the Impact Evaluation Framework (IEF) as a basis for guiding RDA work on evaluation. The IEF incorporates, or makes reference to other major guidance on evaluation, for example, HMT’s Green Book and English Partnership’s Additionality Guidance. It provides a set of guidance concerning the approach to evaluating impact and provides a robust overall approach on the principles of evaluation. A central thrust of this guidance concerns helping move from monitoring and reporting on outputs to measuring net outcomes and impacts. For the full report please follow this link www.bis.gov.uk/files/file54095.pdf.
Young people driving change: 21 July 2010
The Citizenship Foundation will be hosting a unique event showcasing ‘Young people driving change’ on the 21st July 2010. Taking place at the House of Lords, the reception will be a chance for young people from Citizenship Foundation projects to share their commitment to driving change in their communities. There will also be an awards ceremony to recognise the outstanding work of some of the schools that we work with. The event will take place in the Cholmondeley Room, 12.30pm to 2.30pm. Further details to follow shortly, however, if you would like further information please contact the Citizenship Foundation’s Press and Events Officer, Emma Doyle on emma.doyle@citizenshipfoundation.org.uk
(The Citizenship Foundation flagyl er 750 mg is an independent education and participation charity (registration no 801360) that aims to encourage and enable individuals to engage in democratic society).
Summit feedback
Feedback from the Summit, including video footage, presentations from masterclasses, and other information will be available on the Total Place website this week. See the page for more details.
Lastly, for those of you who will be watching the World Cup football (and have got over Saturday night), we found a handy tool you can use to plan your viewing.
Learning History launched at the Total Place summit
The Leadership Centre hosted the Total Place Summit at the Honourable Artillery Company on Tuesday and Wednesday last week. We were joined by 180 delegates from local government, central government, the voluntary sector and local partners. It was great to see so many of you there.
We were delighted that Bob Neill MP could join us for dinner on Tuesday evening. Mr Neill spoke to delegates after dinner about the forthcoming spending review and the importance of focusing on outcomes for citizens rather than the process of service delivery. He could also be seen last Sunday morning on the BBC’s Politics Show talking about joined up working.
The Total Place learning history was launched at the Summit and can be downloaded at http://www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/totalplace/learning/total-place-learning-history/
Government responds to LGA’s call for a general power of competence
The Government’s recent announcement http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/newsroom/news_releases/2010/100518-news-big-society-launch.aspx on the Big Society programme marks the first lobbying success for the LGA Group in the new parliament by including a commitment to a general power of competence for councils. The LGA’s draft bill, which seeks to set out how such a power might be enacted can be accessed here http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=4716749
Dame Margaret Eaton said
“We proposed a general power of competence to give councils greater freedom to save money and deliver great services that people want. It is good news that the new Government has listened. This will deliver better results for communities, and citizens will truly believe their vote matters, helping to create a more vibrant local democracy.
National politicians have called for a ‘new politics’ that is closer to voters and brings them closer to the people they serve. Locally elected councillors are already practising it. We believe a radical devolution of power to local authorities will deliver big savings to the taxpayer and help make vital services even more responsive to people’s needs.”
Lord Bichard: no need to wait for government support for before implementing Total Place
Speaking via video link at the Total Place national members event on the 21st May, Lord Bichard said “local authorities must not wait for central government legislation before implementing Total Place”. He urged council leaders to “maintain the momentum” of Total Place in order to “convince the new government this can not be let go”.
In the Budget in March, the Labour government launched the second phase of Total Place, saying public bodies could sell up to £35bn of property through taking a more joined up approach to their assets. Speakers at today’s conference confirmed this work is continuing.
Bichard said councils should not wait for the new coalition to back the initiative before they implement its thinking. He said: “I don’t think Total Place as a brand will survive. But in a way, that misses the point. It’s a way of working.”
Bichard welcomed the new coalition’s promise to devolve more power to local authorities, saying: “We have one of the most centralised governments in the world.”
However, he warned that decentralising without breaking down the barriers between different funding streams and departments, such as health, police, and councils, would make matters worse.
“There is now a minister for decentralisation, which is a good thing,” he said. “But if we devolve power through silos of government spending, we could make get the worst of both worlds, by giving more power to small public bodies that are not joined up and conflict”.
“Can we justify not sharing back-office resources – sharing property and IT? There is real money to be saved there.”
Cllr David Parsons, leader of Leicestershire County Council and chair of the Local Government Association’s Improvement Board, called on the new chief secretary to the Treasury to follow his predecessor’s lead in backing Total Place.
Towards Total Partnerships- the Challenges and Opportunities of Total Place for LSPs
Hosted by CLG this event on the 10th June will address the practicalities of Total Place from an LSP perspective and explore the challenges and opportunities of moving towards Total Partnerships. Delegates will hear the current thinking from both CLG and the Leadership Centre post-election, and in a workshop setting discuss developments with two Total Place Pilots.
The programme aims to:
For more information and to book, please contact Prue Dakin on 0845 4715202 or prue@lspfutures.org.uk
Total Place ‘second life’
The Leadership Centre is working with the Coventry, Solihull & Warwickshire pilot to develop a virtual world where ‘Total Place’ is a reality. People often respond better to ideas when they are graphically represented and they can interact with that representation. The virtual Total place would enable the end user to simulate scenarios of changes over a number of years, showing what the area would be like in the future based on their decisions. Simulations of 10 to 15 years of real-time are compressed in the computer model to the timescale of minutes. One suggestion is a ‘SimCity’ style tool where users can affect the outcomes of the population by changing a set number of variables, e.g. moving money from acute to preventative care
We’re really excited about this work and will keep you updated on progress.
Coalition agreement
For those who haven’t seen it yet, the coalition agreement is available via this link http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/files/2010/05/coalition-programme.pdf
The LGA group have put together an open and comprehensive offer from local government to the new coalition government which can bee accessed via this link http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=1
“Local government is ready to work with the new coalition government to reduce spending and reform the state. Councils are ready to strike a deal with central government which will see local government take full responsibility for delivering more with less”.
The LGA’s offer in summary is:
For more detail, please click on the links above.
UK Location Council – invitation for a Total Place pilot
“Most local authority information has a geographical component……after all everything happens somewhere and location matters!
However, the data is often held in isolation and cannot be easily accessed, linked and shared with other organisations to delivery services locally, in many ways similar to accessing information during the Total Place project”.
The Location programme is establishing an infrastructure to make it easier to access and evaluate location based data through metadata discovery and data publishing services linked to data .gov.uk and by adopting common data standards based on the EU INSPIRE. http://location.defra.gov.uk/
The UK Location Council is inviting submissions from Total Place contacts for a pilot to demonstrate and deliver operational and financial benefits that would be derived from adopting the location infrastructure and publishing model and the EU INSPIRE regulations on data sharing.
An ideal pilot would solve a significant operational problem drawing on their own data sets and information flows, along with at least two from other organisations, that once correctly formatted or incorporated in a process change will deliver a business wins by exploiting their enhanced geographical intelligence (“interoperability” is the jargon word!)
So if you are ever left wondering “if only this were not like that or if we could just get this dataset to combine with that and that…..”. then maybe you have the makings of a suitable pilot.
To discuss or submit your suggestions please contact Gesche Schmid at gesche.schmid@lga.gov.uk or dean.morton@ordnancesurvey.co.uk
Pilot criteria can be seen at http://location.defra.gov.uk/programme/pilots-and-early-adopters-programme/pilots/
Full background on the UK Location Council and the context of the pilots can be found by exploring their web pages at http://location.defra.gov.uk/
AGI Local Public Services Special Interest Group (LPSIG) & Local Government Association (LGA) seminar: 29 June
Share to Save: How GI can equip the public sector to do more with less
“Total Place pilots have demonstrated that a whole area approach to public services can lead to better services at less cost. Now though, the challenge for everyone in the public sector is to save money by sharing local public services, staff and buildings.
Geography and GIS are fundamental to understanding place. Many government organisations already employ GIS to deliver better services for the customer at less cost. The seminar will concentrate on three key elements:
The seminar will provide an opportunity for participants from the Local Government and Health sectors to discuss best practice, learn from peer organisations and see where opportunities exist to do more geospatially with less.
For further information, see http://calendar.agi.org.uk/ViewItem.html?integral=0&detail=0&cal_item_id=702&dtwhen=2455377&style_sheet=userStyle.css&checkafter=1274692435955
New CLG department takes shape
Eric Pickles, the new secretary of state for communities and local government, has been joined at the department by fellow Conservatives Grant Shapps and Greg Clark. Mr Shapps, MP for Welwyn Hatfield, steps directly up from his shadow housing minister role. He will be responsible for driving through plans to introduce a council tax incentive mechanism to encourage more councils to build homes.
Mr Clark, MP for Tunbridge Wells and former shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change, will take responsibility for the government’s decentralisation agenda.
Before becoming an MP in 2005, Mr Clark was director of policy for the Conservative party for three successive Leaders – William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.
The department has three junior ministers. Bob Neill, MP for Bromley and Chislehurst, was a London councillor for nearly 30 years, serving on the former Greater London Council and London Assembly, and as leader of the Greater London Authority’s Conservative group until June 2006. Andrew Stunell, MP for Hazel Grove and the former Lib Dem parliamentary spokesman on communities and local government, served as a councillor on Cheshire and Stockport councils. Conservative peer Baroness Hanham was leader of the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea for 11 years until 2000.
Elsewhere, Nick Hurd, MP for Ruislip Northwood Pinner, was appointed minister responsible for charities, social enterprises and voluntary organisations in the Cabinet Office. He said such organisations were “at the very centre” of the new government’s ‘Big society’ mission to deliver better public services. Mr Hurd steered the Sustainable Communities Act 2007 onto the statute book.
Irene Lucas appointed acting permanent secretary at CLG
We hope you’ll join us in congratulating Irene Lucas, one of local government’s most vocal supporters, as she takes the helm at the Department for Communities & Local Government.
Ms Lucas has been appointed acting permanent secretary of the department following Peter Housden’s appointment as permanent secretary to the Scottish Government. An open competition will be held for the post.
Ms Lucas joined the department last year as director general for local government having spent seven years at South Tyneside MBC as chief executive.
Mr Housden was appointed to his new post by cabinet secretary Gus O’Donnell with the agreement of First Minister Alex Salmond. Commenting on his appointment, Mr Housden said: “To be leaving Communities in these circumstances is a huge honour, but also a great wrench. I have tremendous regard for my colleagues in the Department, and for our all partners and friends in public services and in civic society. In the four and a half years we have worked together, we have served communities to the very best of our ability.”
Mr Housden was chief executive of Nottinghamshire CC between 1994 and 2001.
http://www.lgcplus.com/briefings/people/management/lucas-to-take-the-helm-at-dclg/5015004.article
The Ethics of Privacy: University of Leeds
The IDEA CETL at the University of Leeds is hosting two major events on the Ethics of Privacy in June 2010. An academic conference (17-19th June) will address applied and theoretical issues on the nature and value of privacy. Within this, a public event (18th June, 5.00-6.50pm), open to all and free of charge, will focus on privacy issues in politics and public policy, addressing the question, “How much importance should be given to privacy considerations when making public policy?”
Speakers include Susan Mendus, Pauline Neville-Jones, Onora O’Neill, Geoffrey Scarre, Matthew Taylor and Georgia Testa
For more information visit www.idea.leeds.ac.uk/privacy
Total Place community of practice
The Total Place CoP continues to grow, and now has over 1000 members. Thanks to everyone who participates and shares ideas, events, research and news. We are now considering how the CoP might work in the future, with an eye to making it more accessible to anyone interested in Total Place; please let us know if you have anything to add to the discussion. Don’t forget that the CoP is a great way to connect with other Total Place practitioners and to carry on networking after events…
Look out for a new CoP poll today on a new name for Total Place! www.communities.idea.gov.uk
Lastly, the Total Place ‘Practitioners Guide’ has been downloaded over 1000 times since its launch in May. For your copy please visit http://www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/totalplace/learning/a-practitioners-guide
Category: event
