News Summary of Collaboration and Shared Services from 20th August 2014

It’s been a busy time over August for collaborations and shared service projects.  There are 17 new jobs at the end of this news update, if you are looking for a new role.

 

But, before we get to that, I am still laughing at the Edinburgh Fringe joke of the year from Tim Vine:  "I decided to sell my Hoover... well it was just collecting dust."  If you haven’t seen the top 10 jokes then click here.  There are some crackers!

 

Back to your update on the collaboration and shared service news…

 

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Blue Light

 

If you have been away, then one of the key pieces of news in the last couple of weeks was the announcement of successful bidders to the £50m 2014/15 Police Innovation Fund. There is a balance of collaborative projects and some in-house. The list of winning bids is here…

 

Home Office rewards police innovation with £50m
Every police force in England and Wales will receive a share of a £50 million Home Office fund for projects aimed at transforming policing through innovation and collaboration.

 

Here is one example of how the innovation fund is to be used in a collaborative context…

 

Rural crime focus for police funding

Police in Gwent and South Wales are set to develop an app to help officers in remote locations. The Gwent force will receive a portion of £2.2 million towards projects which aim to transform policing from the Home Office’s Police Innovation Fund. Read more >>>

 

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Local Government

It feels like another wave of shared services is on the way in local government. Part of that measure is that we have just been asked to deliver Shared Service Practitioner - SS(PRAC) - sessions into a three-council programme and we have been funded by the LGA to work with another 4 partner grouping. Also, CIPFA and CFOA feel there is sufficient new market demand to offer the SS(PRAC) programme to their members.

The following two stories are enlightening in that they give transparency to the personal and financial cost of shared service redundancies…

West Suffolk: Eight more staff at St Edmundsbury and Forest Heath handed £60,000-plus payoffs - taking authorities’ total spend to almost £5million

Eight more council high-earners in west Suffolk have walked away with payoffs of more than £60,000 - taking the authorities’ total spending over four years to almost £5million. Read more >>>

Legal chief departs council in wake of shared services deal

The London Borough of Sutton is parting company with its chief counsel after forming a shared services partnership with three other south London boroughs. Read more >>>

If you are an SSA or SS(PRAC) here is a story for your Highway Code of Shared Services  folder if you have not encountered the legal structures of an ABS (alternative business structure) yet. It can go in the “legal vehicles” section…

‘The overall benefits are potentially enormous’: Bucks County Council granted ABS licence with emergency services group

In a move that has been welcomed by the Legal Services Board, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has granted an alternative business structure (ABS) licence to local authorities for the first time, as Buckinghamshire County Council enters into a joint venture with Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes Fire Authority. Read more >>>

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Housing

I have been asked to speak on shared services at a housing conference in September and am still not convinced that is necessarily where the sector should go. Housing would do well to learn from local government shared services that they must sort out their internal collaborative working first before talking to possible partners. What is evident in housing is the growing numbers of direct mergers in the sector (maybe district councils could be learning from this!). For example this is the third announced this year…

North West housing association merger announced

Eastlands Homes and City South Manchester Housing Trust intend to merge to create a new 12,400-home landlord. The two organisations will now begin formal discussions ahead of a six-week consultation with tenants. Read more >>>

Here is an example of learning from local government group energy schemes, on how Housing can lead on building collaborations that provide innovative services into their neighbourhoods…

Landlord alliance to sell energy to tenants

Landlords with 357,000 homes to form company to sell energy at cost price. A nationwide consortium of housing associations plans to set up an energy company to help tenants cut spiralling household fuel bills. Read more >>>

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Central Government

The Commissioning Academy is seeking senior leaders to join its programmes. It would look good on your CV if you have completed its excellent sessions…

 

The Commissioning Academy

The Cabinet Office and its partners developed the Commissioning Academy as a development programme for senior leaders from all parts of the public sector. It is designed to equip a cadre of professionals to deal with the challenges facing public services, take up new opportunities and commission the right outcomes for their communities. Read more >>>

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Health

In our Collaborative Leadership programme there is a whole toolkit on engaging communities in development and delivery of transformational services. A gateway to that is often through the local voluntary agencies working in the locality and this is emphasised in this paper…

Comparing apples with oranges? How to make better use of evidence from the voluntary and community sector to improve health outcomes - NHS Confederation

This briefing gives an overview of the knowledge, expertise and insight that voluntary and community sector organisations hold about their local communities and diverse groups of people within these, as well as the different ways this knowledge can be used to enhance Joint Strategic Needs Assessments (JSNAs) and commissioning. Read more >>>

My colleagues have been working recently with Heath Education East Midlands on joint working across services and CCGs. Some of this is about reassembling working relationships that were dissolved when CCGs were created. This also seems to be happening in this approach in Kent to join up the CCG health and care teams…

5-year plan to transform healthcare in Kent

A Kent-based CCG has released a five-year plan to transform healthcare to better cater for the needs of the region. NHS Dartford, Gravesham and Swanley Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has released plans to join up health and care teams in GP practices and the community to improve care and relieve the pressure on primary services. Read more >>>

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News Summary of Collaboration and Shared Services from 9th July 2014

Local Government

Fortunately I didn’t bet on Brazil beating Germany last night, but maybe I would bet that the shape of local government across the UK will very different in five years’ time. The Welsh Government is beginning to unpack the Williams report using some nice Lewin Change Management Modelling by stating how bad things are now (unfreeze) and how change will make it better. If the Williams report is fully ratified, then make the change from 22 to 10 councils and refreeze…

Council mergers: Poor services 'letting people down'

People are being "let down" by poor public services, according to a member of the commission that proposed a major overhaul of the public sector. Read more >>>

So what about England? Over the last year or so in this email, we have tracked the growing calls for unitary local government to replace two-tier. Some of the CLG Innovation Fund bids are thought by some, to be funding for re-organisation of two tiers systems by the back door. This new NLGN collection of essays on the subject makes great holiday reading for the beach (!)…

Right Tier, Right Now

The future of two tier local government is one of most vexed questions facing the sector as a whole. It is quite clear that the current division of labour between counties and districts is unsustainable for some parts of the country as both tiers struggle to cope with unprecedented budget cuts. Read more >>>

The real issue though is that it’s too late to be building bigger back office silos through shared services. Collaborative Transformation is the only game in town that can save £bns, rather than the £500m maximum that can be gained from shared services. So, adventures like the following in Dorset, could offer the opportunity for restructure decisions that blur the traditional boundaries between departments and services to serve the needs of their communities with new, better,  lower-cost services…

Dorset councils propose shared working

Three Dorset councils are considering sharing a senior management team and developing joint services as part of a bid for transformation funding. Read more >>>

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Blue lights service

I was teaching a collaborative leadership day in a Fire Service a few weeks ago, when the comment was made to me that the Fire Service has been too successful and is putting itself out of a job…

Fire deaths fall by 5% in past year

The number of fire deaths in England has fallen by 5% in the past year, according to official figures released by the Office for National Statistics. Read more >>>

However, one of the deputy chiefs in the room was quick to point out that the Fire Service has very successfully transformed into being the major Prevention Service in the UK. They have saved billions of downstream costs to the emergency services, A&E and private sector insurance companies, by ensuring that incidents do not happen. Maybe collaborative transformation for them could start by changing their name from the Fire & Rescue Service, to the Prevention Service, counting the cash benefits of the downstream savings they are making and see who wants to play. Me? I would invest in the Fire Service, not cut its funding.

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Social care

To complement that theme, you may remember a few months ago, a news item reporting that councils in receipt of substantial social care funding were applying it to upstream activities to prevent the need for the costlier, downstream direct social care. This hurt the social care providers who were only geared up to do things to people who already have social care needs. It looks like this could be the hot topic for 2015 as the full funding and new Care Act comes online…

The social care sector must pull together to address the funding crisis

No-one who works in care services would have been in the least surprised at the two pieces of news this week. The LGA told us on Monday that care for disabled people was at "make or break point". Read more >>>

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