There is every reason to applaud the Minister of Local Government, Rodney Hide, when he says he wants to get ratepayers value for money. The global economic downturn has made it inevitable that New Zealanders have to be getting better for less. That means taking a very lateral approach to how public resources are to be deployed.
So the Minister for Local Government’s response to supposed public waste in local government is to redefine the “core services” of Councils. In yet another local government Bill to go before Parliament, the Minister is reining in community economic potential instead of unleashing innovation in local government practice in Auckland.
Currently, the wording of the Local Government Act about what Councils can do is very broad. Councils are supposed to provide for four community “well-beings” – economic, social, cultural and environmental wellbeing. Councils can be as innovative as they like in responding to community needs.
Mostly, they spend their money on roads and rubbish, on libraries and reserves and recreational facilities and so on. Since just about all of the operating expenditure of Councils could reasonably fit the new definition of “Core Services” in the Bill, it appears the government is responding to a popped pin with a sledgehammer.
What is good value from a Council? This depends, of course, on agreement about what we want. Can the various bits of Auckland actually agree about what will provide good value?
We Aucklanders have been reasonably clear in recent opinion polling that the Super City might leave us worse off. The Royal Commission spelt out the danger of Auckland’s economic future drifting away because of social under-performance in parts of the city. The reality is that the Wellington bureaucracy hasn’t been effective in dealing to social change in Auckland.
Social value has to become central to politics in Auckland. Obtaining social value isn’t mentioned in the Bill as a “Core Service”. The international evidence is that you can get real, measurable social change when you combine the understanding about communities that local government has with the financial clout of central government. The answer to better value for taxpayers and ratepayers must surely be to ensure that all contributions to community wellbeing are effectively deployed.
Partnerships are very common internationally, where symbiotic relationships with not-for-profits organisations and city, state or federal governments are increasingly being seen as ‘co-productions’[1] to create economic and social wellbeing.
Effective councils become brokers for social change. If literally implemented in the Super City, “Core Services” will shackle social entrepreneurship and innovation, setting the city back years in establishing economic development and community development priorities and addressing needs in the most deprived areas of the city.
A key outcome could be to abandon any city commitment to a Social Policy Forum in Auckland, and to walk away altogether from the recommendations of the Royal Commission.
In the UK, Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) were introduced by the government in 2000 as part of a national strategy to tackle problems in some of the most deprived areas of England. These partnerships took a lateral approach to how core services could be funded and delivered, by whom, when and where; creating flexibility in responses at the city level. An LSP essentially is a locally-located formal body that brings together the different parts of the public sector (local and central government) as well as the private, business, community and voluntary sectors so that different initiatives and services support each other by working together. It operates at a level that enables strategic decisions to be taken, but is close enough to individual neighbourhoods to allow actions to be determined at a community level. Cities such as Birmingham have turned around their economic and social futures by concentrating effort around strategic goals driven by national as well as local priorities.
A more recent parallel initiative in the UK, the Operational Efficiency Programme, mapped the spending of central government and local government – in localities, such as the City of Birmingham[2] – in order to point to further efficiencies and value. By putting people at the heart of service design, the pilot programme showed that public authorities are able to improve outcomes and eliminate duplication and wasteful spending. This discovery has resulted in the UK Treasury supporting Total Place: A whole area approach to public services[3]. The imperative to get more for less is becoming even more urgent in the context of the UK government’s fiscal blow-out and the possibility that bankruptcies of some European states could have a flow-on effect.
The clause in the new legislation in New Zealand will become a barrier to getting good value for money. Driving a social agenda for Auckland into oblivion is surely not what the government actually intends.
Removal of the clause would allow a “New Auckland” to emerge that responds with innovation and gusto to growth needs.
[1] Victor Pestoff & Taco Brandsen (eds) 2006: “Co-production, the third sector and the delivery of public services”. Public Management Review, vol. 8, issue 4.
[2] For example, the Be Birmingham project, at http://www.bebirmingham.org.uk/page.php?id=21&mt=t
[3] HM Treasury, 2009. (2010): Total Place: A whole area approach to public services. London: Communities and Local Government. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/psr_total_place.htm
