More councils than ever before are now actively pursuing commissioning as a means to deliver a far wider range of services. Commissioning differs from traditional outsourcing in many ways, but often councillors are ill-equipped to manage its challenges and opportunities. In particular, the management of relationships with providers by council officers often seems designed to keep politicians away from what is seen as a data-driven relationship.We can help to explore how councillors might better be “built in” to the design and review of commissioning arrangements. From thinking of ways to get councillors more actively – and productively – involved ...
Local government is undergoing profound change – the pressure both to make financial savings, and to make sure that local public services are aligned to local people’s increasingly complex needs (especially around, for example, social care), presents a big challenge.Councillors are the best-placed people to make considered judgments about how these changes should be planned and managed, and whether their impact (positive and negative) on local people is justified.And yet councillors have, in some places, found it difficult to engage properly with plans for major change and transformation. The sheer scale of many change programmes, and the fact ...