Local Government Reorganisation – will we change our sector’s reputation?

This post skips about a bit, and is mainly some general musings on LGR that go on in my head (!), but hopefully some of it will be interesting… we’ll get back to BAU in our next one with an update on our new strategy!

Having chatted to a few people working in local government, it seems our experiences are fairly similar when it comes to trying to explain to friends and family what Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) actually means – and why it matters.

Something that seems to crop up each time is, how much do people really know (and therefore, care…?!) about the role local government plays in their personal lives or in their communities? I honestly think it’s not much. I think (understandably) that many people don’t fully understand the responsibilities of councils, how under resourced they are and therefore don’t have a sense of what is being achieved. There will obviously be people that do have a deeper understanding, but the many amazing outcomes being delivered by councils across the country are being overshadowed by frustrations with complexity or inefficiency – and that has such a big impact on how people understand and perceive local government.

I started my local gov career as a communications officer, and ever since then (probably from responding to the many, many social media posts which make it clear that most people aren’t aware how or why local government works in the way it does) I’ve thought the sector needs to do things differently. Not the classic comms request to ‘give it a new logo and share some good news stories’ type approach, but a proper reshape of how the sector operates. And now with LGR on the table, it’s an encouraging glimmer of what might be possible.

For people to start to want to engage with us, and understand what we do and why (and ultimately help shape what we do), we need to rethink how we operate as organisations: how we genuinely listen to and understand our residents and communities, how we can work more closely with partners in the public and private sector, and how we can use digital, data (inc AI) and technology to design services that actually work for them in a way that they want them to. If LGR just reshapes council responsibilities without changing the customers’ experience of services, then for many, many people it will seem we’ve effectively just moved problems around but on a bigger scale.

I know from discussions with people working in government and local government that, for some, LGR doesn’t go far enough – especially when it comes to tackling the super transactional stuff (probably one for another blog), but it’s impossible to not admit there’s lots more opportunity that comes with LGR in terms of simplifying, improving, joining up and offering consistency for our customers.

From my perspective (and I know this will come as no surprise!), we should take this opportunity to design new organisations to be truly customer and digitally-minded. I recently touched on this at the LGA Conference in Liverpool last week – sharing what we’ve been doing at Tewkesbury Borough to take a practical, outcome-focused approach to customer experience and digital… covering leadership, culture, tools and skills – and how actually the strategy doesn’t need to be overly complicated but really important to be pragmatic.
I was on a panel with Atika Mohammed (Luton), Simone Thomas (Cheshire West and Chester), and Denys Nazarenko (Kyiv City Council), who all had different challenges in their place, but there was some really strong shared thinking around how digital and data can support better outcomes for our customers and local communities.

DDaT in Gloucestershire

In Gloucestershire, digital and customer experience is already being seen as an important consideration in LGR. Alongside other workstreams, we have set up a Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) one, with really great people from across the seven councils. We’re currently looking at system aggregation/disaggregation for the different options to inform the submissions, as well as developing our DDaT ambitions (the things we think are most important!) for any future organisation/s.

I’ve already mentioned how important I think it will be for new unitaries to be customer and digitally minded, and that’s a clear position we’ve adopted as a workstream. Supporting our thinking, we’ve developed seven strategic components of what that means – with a big thanks to Dave from Localise in providing helpful input, challenge and learning from elsewhere.  Two critical ones are transformative leadership and having an adaptive operating model – shifting to an experimental culture and a ‘build, test, learn’ way of working, as recently endorsed by the government’s ‘Test, Learn and Grow’ reform programme – leading by example through experimentation, working across boundaries and trusting in continuous improvement.  LOTI’s five habits of innovative councils are a great source of inspiration here for me, too – some amazing examples showing how leadership teams can play a huge role in making change possible in complex organisations.

Another added benefit of our workstream is that, LGR aside, we’re already doing more together across the county. A nice example is the county council inviting our staff into their Digital Skills Week, which I know colleagues from Tewkesbury found to be really helpful. We’re also looking at setting up subgroups for DDaT teams, including AI, technical and digital – opening up the opportunity for people working in similar roles across the county to get to know each other and talk about opportunities and challenges.

On that note about challenges and opportunities…. the support from councils who’ve been through LGR before is proving to be invaluable — a big thanks to Kate from Cumberland and Madi from North Yorkshire for being so helpfully honest about what’s worked, and what hasn’t, from a DDaT perspective.

Given where this blog post started, I’m not really concluding anything here (!), but perhaps more starting a conversation about how LGR is not only a chance for us to do things differently but also a chance for us to finally get more people understanding what we do and why we do it, and the benefits of that could be really unbelievable… (including retaining the amazing staff that we have delivering the great things!!… oh I could go on…!)  and how in Gloucestershire, the establishing of a DDaT workstream early on is a really promising start.

If you’re also working in the DDaT space in LGR, please do get in touch for a chat – it would be so good to hear how other areas are approaching it. I’m in conversations with LGA around a focussed group for us to collaborate and talk through opportunities and challenges, so hopefully there’ll be more on that soon.