Online brainstorm: Opportunities for inquiry

From Future of Local Services to the Public

As part of the Ipsos MORI/LGA/HSC online brainstorm, Chief Execs and other local decision-makers were asked to identify knowledge gaps and opportunities for change and further investigation. The (verbatim) responses are given below and provide a prompt for the local government horizon scanning community and practitioners to undertake further work.

Based on the issues you have been considering, what more do we need to know (e.g. new research areas or evidence gathering)?

• Get real about the localism agenda. Strengthen elective democracy and leave the rest alone. Try to persuade all government to do less better and not to do more worse.
• I think you need to generally focus less on what happens in London and the Mets and more on what happens in other areas of the country. I would like to see more evidence on the level of effectiveness of the regions and whether the regional boundaries need to be re drawn
• What enthusiasm is there within communities to take on the extra role proposed by govt? What effect will govt proposals have on the role/future of the elected representative? Will there always be a part of society that is 'behind the curve' with technology, and therefore will local govt always have to maintain some channels of delivery that are 'old school'?
• What motivates people to take an interest in public services?
• Need more predictive models of need in the local area.
• Evidence of what works in community engagement Evidence of what impacts on public satisfaction Toolkit for helping citizens engage in participatory democracy Examples of partnerships making a difference to local quality of life
• What works in achieving behavioural change Deploying greater democratic engagement to improve outcomes for residents Improving democratic accountability of public services and respecting LA mandates
• An understanding of the impact of issues beyond the control of government on the environment and the lives of the people. The survey takes an extraordinarily myopic view of the nature and pressures of future change. For example, climate change, food wars, globalisation.
• Fear of crime is a mental health issue which needs to be addressed in much more sophisticated ways. We need to stop asking people what will make them feel less afraid of crime, and start looking at the evidence about what REALLY affects people's mental health. Evidence showing how local authorities make people happy. Government / local government need to use the power of psychology and behavioural economics to influence for the good - we are way behind the commercial sector in knowing how to influence behaviour. We base our actions on the prejudice of Members and on the ideas of civil servants who don’t stay in any Department long enough to know much. We need to be as clever as the multi-nationals in manipulating consumer choices.
• Regional differences
• I don't think it’s about what you need to know but more about how your evidence is turned into a model which can form the basis of further discussion.
• John Seddon’s books and papers on systems thinking are excellent
• We need to nationally plan more clearly for the needs of an ageing population, a growing population, a changing population (in terms of e.g. BME communities), climate change mitigation, and new energy sources and infrastructure.
• need to have more reliable pop info between censuses need more fragmented info - based on different equalities/ disadvantaged groups - probably based on focus groups - needs to be more sophisticated
• The new Comprehensive Area Assessment will place greater emphasis on citizen experience. We are promoting wellbeing as a priority within our mainstream activities to help improve health and get people into jobs. How we tackle wellbeing will impact on how we deliver services with our partners. We are developing ways of measuring wellbeing to understand local need and the impact on service delivery.
• Should investigate the extent of genuinely shared commissioning / budgets between LSPs.
• Alternative forms of supporting an older community
• We need a better review of options to finance local government that was achieved by the Lyons Report.
• How have other countries responded to some of these challenges? (e.g. Holland and flood risk) and how do they engage their communities in deliberating on the issues?
• Clear sense about where personalisation of services will go - how far - how deep - what is potential - where do people want them?
• Not so much research but effective ways of getting local govt to act in a concerted way, as a self-confident and mature sector, on some of the insights generated by exercises like this.
• Mapping life led from the customer perspective not the service provider perspective. What makes people choose where they live, why the need the services they consume, what would make them make better choices than they do, can they choose to tailor to their needs.
• Research on whether the quality of life and services in towns etc. in other European countries which have smaller sized local authorities than the UK are any better / worse than in the UK
• More work needs to be done on the links between localised control of services and the link between localism and equity. The current govt inevitably links equity to centralised state control.
• I think we need to really understand the potential impact of an ageing population and the implications for our ability to care for them with dignity and respect.
• There need to be local sensitivity analyses - along the lines of the JSNA - so we can understand the local impact of national / international changes.
• More about relations between citizens and their elected representatives. More about options for radical reform of local government and local decision making.
• For older people, evidence from other countries including what their 'offering' to older people consist of, together with how they maintain momentum in a changing political environment (our Cabinets all change frequently in GB!). Partnership working (locally and with central govt) - again evidence from elsewhere and research into what needs to happen (legislative change, less scrutiny by central govt, focus on outcomes not outputs) - what's stopping it happening?
• worth thinking about regional variation, e.g. will social marketing approaches work better in some areas - what are the conditions necessary
• Children's Services reports and Children and Young People's Plan for Herefordshire 2008
• To continue the futures work already going on, but bring it together in a way which shows how the various elements are likely to combine, on a timeline, indicating likelihood. A challenge to do it diagrammatically, but could produce real rewards in getting the message across if it could be done (e.g. 3d, or dramatisation).
• Evidence of best practice and innovation - so much has and is happening in local government, at a fast rate, that it would be valuable to have that evidence.
• social trend behavioural trend what is influencing public opinion
• Carry out some research on why Whitehall controls more than it did 30 years ago despite all the talk about devolution and localism.
• Some questions that are raised for me out of this survey are: How can Local Authorities prepare for changing demographics that affect the health services (ageing population) and educational services? How can our democratic systems of elections every 4-5 years prepare Local Authorities adequately for dealing with major long term changes? How could funding be realigned to deal with longer term issues, rather than just short term outputs?
• We need to start testing scenarios and identifying the risks associated with the suggested scenarios and what actions we could or should be taking.