10 Downing Street News

Tuesday 3 July 2007

LGA conference - Sir Simon talks tough

Well it appears Sir Simon Milton (Con) has marked out his opinion clearly on the efficiency debate at the first day of the Local Government Association conference.

As readers well know, government is very keen on local government making savings by ‘transformation’, that lovely bit of jargon which essentially means councils changing the way they deliver services rather dramatically to make them more customer-focused and, frankly, cheaper. Shared services and shifting more transactional services online are two such options as to how.

However in his first speech as new LGA chair, delivered around an hour ago, he has said: "Innovation and efficiency cannot make up for an inadequate funding settlement that fails to deal with the real cost pressures in adult social care and waste. We cannot let government pile more costs onto the council tax."

I think we can expect there to be a few tough words between government and local government over the issues of funding pre and post- comprehensive spending review. The thing is, like most issues, this is not black and white. It is probably safe to say there are councils out there who have not investigated all their options to ‘transform’ in these key pinch point areas, and for as long as they stay that way, government will have an argument to turn the screws.

Another interesting quote from the new chair was: "There have been reports that the prime minister wants to create an independent board to run the health service. But I say these services should be run closer to the people not further from them. We should develop a local health service alongside the National Health Service. So I am inviting the group leaders today to establish a cross-party commission to examine the practicalities of this approach and produce an initial report in time for our next conference."

There has been much chat of late in some local government circles about basically decentralising some aspects of the health service, and indeed some are quite keen on the idea of decentralising it pretty much altogether, such as councils taking over primary care trusts. Considering the political importance of the NHS this seems unlikely to happen any time soon, although interestingly new communities secretary Hazel Blears recently wrote in LGC how keen she was to see elected members on PCTs.

No comments: