NEWS


providing the best-possible quality care for patients to meeting targets remained.


The targets/entitlements also encouraged ‘gaming’ practices such as keeping A&E patients in an ambulance until they’re ready to be treated in order to stay within the 4-hour maximum waiting time.


Equally, uniform entitlements are at odds with the generally recognised need for public services that are more sensitive to local needs and the differing circumstances facing different areas.


By compelling local bodies – including democratically elected councils with their own popular mandate – to deliver particular services, the last government was in danger of going against this consensus.


National guarantees of free bus travel restrict local government’s capacity to spend its resources on the issues that it feels are most important to the community.


While councils might choose to provide these services for themselves, it is the choice that is important.


Equivalently resourced services ought to be capable of producing better outcomes if their funding is subject to less ringfencing from the centre, not worse.


The coalition appears to have accepted these arguments but it is still sketching out what should fill this void.


Entitlements were put in place to ensure minimum standards in public service provision and to underline that providers were accountable to citizens for the substantial sums of public money that they consume.


These remain valid aims and the Jul/Aug 10


challenge now is to meet them by more subtle, localist means.


In our report, we highlight ‘place agreements’ between local authorities and central government as a potential means of doing so.


These would entail a negotiation process during which the local authority would outline its view of community priorities and what they felt could be achieved with the available resources.


The government would balance this with its wider national policy aims and objectives.


The principles of transparency and accountability would underpin the process and to this end we would expect local authorities to publish their agreed priorities in an accessible format.


A citizen-centred assessment regime would be necessary to back this up, evaluating public service performance in a way that measures the fulfilment of these priorities in terms of the benefits they deliver for their users.


This will be the focus of NLGN’s forthcoming report Through the Looking Glass, examining potential improvements to local authority performance assessment.


In order to bolster the legitimacy of decisions taken by local service providers, their democratic mandate also needs to be strengthened.


Local providers are best placed to identify the needs of their users but police forces and NHS trusts have traditionally had less direct democratic accountability to local voters.


The coalition has proposed democratically elected police chiefs and health boards as a


solution. However, this would result in the fragmentation of services and local democracy, and potentially create competing local mandates. At a time when financial pressures mean that the need for public bodies to co-operate in order to make savings through shared back- office functions and co-ordinated spending is greater than ever, this would not be a positive development.


NLGN recommends that greater responsibilities for policing and healthcare should instead be transferred to local councils.


This would mean that these services would have the democratic authority to take more significant decisions on behalf of their communities.


This in turn would lead to a health service and a police force rooted more deeply in their locality and a local council with greater scope to make a positive, ‘place-shaping’ contribution.


Combined with the general power of competence that is set to be introduced as part of the decentralisation and localism bill, the removal of entitlements is actually a much more benign development than many might instinctively have thought.


However, they should not just be individually abandoned on a piecemeal basis.


Rather, the framework of public service guarantees must be replaced by re-designed services that put shared working, transparency and democratic accountability at their heart.


In this way, the coalition will be able to realise the full potential of its localist ambitions.


While targets


compel service providers to report back on … performance measures to a civil servant behind a desk in Whitehall, entitlements mean they must now deliver tangible outcomes to actual service users


Tell us what you think at opinion@publicsectorexecutive.com pse 19


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