Closing the commissioning skills gap
Author: Alex Thomson, Localis, in The MJ |
As the Government reshuffles its ministers, but maintains its priority is rebuilding the economy, the latest report from think-tank Localis looks at providing the skills for councils to change how they work. Alex Thomson explains.
In the struggle to reignite our economy, and put our public finances on to a more sustainable footing, we all know that achieving improved outcomes in supply side measures such as skills have never been more important.
Whether it is ensuring our school-leavers have the literacy and numeracy skills to equip them to enter the workforce, or to go on to further and higher education, or facilitating the long-term unemployed with the skills to seek, win and hold down that all-important job opportunity, talk about skills will always feature in any conversation about how to promote local economic growth.
At Localis, we have long argued for greater local influence over skills funding, and believe local government, via individual local authorities, local enterprise partnerships (LEPs), or emerging city-regional structures such as ‘combined authorities’, are the best place to locate many of the decisions over skills policy and funding.
This would give those with real local knowledge, including local employers, the flexibility to determine what sort of provision is most suitable for their local economy.
However, another important aspect of the skills debate is the skills which councils themselves already posses in-house.
Our new report, Catalyst councils ? a new future for local public service delivery, argues that as councils seek to adapt to funding pressures, and the changing nature of demand on their service by pursuing alternative models of provision, it is essential that they ensure their officers and elected members are equipped with the requisite skillset to enable these new models to succeed.
In our horizon-scanning report, we look at how successful local government has been to date in both responding to the Government’s financial squeeze and moving towards to a policy agenda favouring more personalised, localist and diverse service provision.
We argue that local government is way ahead of the curve in this respect, particularly in terms of moving beyond the ‘public = good, private = bad’ debate ? or vice-versa, depending on your approach to political economy ? and that over the past few years, it has begun to embrace innovative and potentially-truly radical models and methods of local public service delivery.
These range from adopting a more enterpreneurial approach through the development of commercially-traded services, to working with the private and third sectors via ‘next generation’ joint partnership arrangements which achieve a greater degree of flexibility and balance in the sharing of risk and reward than was achieved under previous schemes, such as the private-finance initiative.
At the heart of this reconfiguration of what a local authority does, and how it does it, is local authorities’ ability to build and maintain positive relationships with a number of key stakeholders ? with their citizens and communities, and with public, private and third sector partners.
This presages a new role for councillors, not just as community champions articulating the needs of their neighbourhoods but also as service scrutineers.
One of the key findings from our research was that the number one reason for working with external partners was to bring in expertise, not just in capital intensive projects or specialist technical knowledge relating to ICT systems and business transformation, but also in enabling councils to leverage their partners’ innovative ideas and commercial acumen to generate additional income for the council.
While this can and should be developed in-house, there may be an initial need for it to be provided by private sector or social enterprise suppliers ? or indeed, other, more experienced local authorities.
The single-greatest determinant of a successful shift to a new approach to public service provision will be the proficiency and capacity of those acting as commissioners.
Despite the fact that local government has much more commissioning experience than the rest of the public sector, a majority of respondents to our research said they needed greater skills in this area ? and it is likely that this need is greater in other arms of government.
This is too important to leave to chance. There is an urgent need to strengthen local authority, and wider public sector capacity and skillsets in commissioning, so that councils can focus on the flexible, locally-responsive and outcomes-focused contracts that will underpin many of these new service delivery arrangements.
That is why we are recommending that the Local Government Association (LGA) joins forces with the Government to establish a ‘Commission on better commissioning’, to determine how best to ensure that councils and the public sector can close the commissioning skills gap.
This commission, as well as assuming responsibility for the Government’s already-announced ‘commissioning academy’ would also be tasked with publishing and publicising definitive best practice on all aspects of public sector commissioning, including on revised EU procurement Directives.
Confident navigation of these often bureaucratic and burdensome regulations can require a very unique skillset that few ? in local government or beyond ? would profess to have.
Alex Thomson is Localis’ chief executive. Localis’ new report, Catalyst councils ? a new future for local public service delivery, was launched by Oliver Letwin MP, and chairman of the LGA Cllr Sir Merrick Cockell, and is available from Localis’ website.