Goodbye Sandy, welcome Simon

Well, it's the end of an era. This week sees Lord Sandy Bruce-Lockhart step down as chairman of the Local Government Association, and as exclusively revealed by LGCnet on Friday, Sir Simon Milton will be taking over.


Lord Sandy has been, in LGC's opinion, an extremely effective chair and is obviously well respected in both in central and local government circles. LGC's political editor Nick Golding interviewed Lord Bruce Lockhart ahead of him stepping down, which readers can see in detail in the forthcoming July 5 issue. Without giving too much away however Lord Bruce Lockhart had some strong words to say about how the government handled the publication of Sir Michael Lyons' report.

He said: "When they've commissioned a report that had taken five years of work and a very large amount of people's time, to reject the bulk of its recommendations with 24 hours is, I think, disgraceful."

Meanwhile, what do we know about Sir Simon Milton? He set out his stall on what he wanted to do as chair exclusively in LGC last month, which is archived online for LGCnet subscribers. For non-subscibers however here is a summary of his three main priorities:

"We must have a relentless focus on council performance in terms of service quality and value for money. Nobody should be able to claim that councils aren't up to the job. I would look to create a performance board at the LGA with a commissioning role that would lead to a significant reshaping of the currently confusing array of support bodies.

We must take responsibility for generating local solutions to problems rather than waiting for Whitehall guidance. Collectively, as a sector and across the political parties, we have some of the best brains in public service. I want to make better use of them as one-size-fits-all Whitehall solutions rarely work.

Finally, we need to promote and celebrate the importance of local democracy and not just local services. We need to re-connect local democratic institutions with the people they serve. That means listening to the public on issues like weekly rubbish collections."

Nick Golding is interviewing Sir Simon on Monday however so we hope to have some more detail then on how he now intends to go about achieving these, working in partnership with chief executive Paul Coen.

Added by Nina Lovelace