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.

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