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In a number of letters to the highly regarded Police Review, operational officers were critical of the abandonment of the policing pledge and the trust and confidence target.


This begs the question - if as much importance had been placed on the single trust measure and the pledge’s qualitative offers as had clearly been given to the plethora of volume crime targets, would more attention have been given to investigating the series of sex crimes in London?


We will never know, but neither do we know how this latest reform of the police will be assessed in terms of building confidence in the public of the police’s ability to respond to all types of crime and in significant proportion to its seriousness and to have this recognised.


Serious crime costs money to investigate and current efficiencies may well act against this. All the more reason, it could be argued, to be clear that the emphasis given by Teresa May to local accountability is still able to demonstrate that public value is being achieved.


Difficult times often require innovative and even radical change. There is an opportunity now to move assessments away from the quantitative ‘tick-box’ (easy to measure) matrices and more towards the qualitative ‘real-world’ (more challenging to measure) frameworks focusing on those things that are really valued by the public and not just the politicians.


Measuring what matters does not just mean looking at what individual services do through the myriad of priorities and targets placed on individual services.


The impact quite simply has Nov/Dec 10


been that the police have chased the targets in relation to burglary, muggings etc, hospital workers have focused very clearly on such measures as waiting times for surgery and for treatment in the Accident and Emergency Units and school heads have been compared using 173 ranking methods not many of which actually focus on the quality of teaching and links with educational attainment.


The coalition government has pledged to move away from this regime but to what extent will the coalition really display collaborative characteristics?


Innovative and radical change in the delivery of public services must be clearly linked to the community leadership role of public sector leaders not just individually but collectively. The phrase ‘getting a bigger bang for the buck’ springs to mind as a good rationale for collective leadership in the delivery of public services.


Local government can play a critical role in pulling this together. The role of local government in this future delivery landscape should be important and to what extent will that erstwhile description used by former communities minister Phil Woolas - of councils as ‘first-among-equals’ and local strategic partnerships as the ‘partnership of


partnerships’– stand the test of the coalition times?


We can ask the same question of Total Place. As former Labour communities and local government minister John Denham said (PSE Mar-Apr): “Total Place is about all the local spend and all local services in an area, not just those provided by local government”.


As new ministers shape up their reform agenda, we can ask to


pse 31


what extent are they looking horizontally across Whitehall to look for collaborative opportunities before they look down vertically to the implementation of new policies through the public service delivery chain?


Public leadership starts at the very top and ministers must set the scene for a truly collaborative approach in tackling community problems and to ensure – whether by qualitative measures or otherwise – that this is really happening.


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