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Labour aims to transfer power from Westminster to local communities through landmark devolution legislation, deepening and widening devolution across England. This will enable towns and cities to gain new powers over transport, education, housing, and employment support. To explore the solutions that can best support this transition, we spoke with Johnny Hugill, Director of Commercial, Spend & Impact at PUBLIC. Our discussion delves into strategies for empowering local authorities, lessons learned from modern financial technologies, and how digital evaluation can optimise resource allocation.
Getting the balance right between supporting local authorities, and giving them the power to set their own priorities is tricky. Local authorities know their local places better than anyone, so are best placed to be the ones to design and implement local services. But there are still ways the centre can support, which I think have proven to be successful in the past. This is particularly because the services that authorities need to deliver are the same, and the challenges they face are often similar.
So in a world with greater devolution to the local level, there are still a few areas where the centre can be helpful:
1. Building communities of practice. I think big change projects benefit from having a community of fellow changemakers. If an authority wants to radically re-think how it is delivering local care services, or wants to pilot a novel use case of AI, having a community of others on the journey can be really helpful. I think the community that has been built around the MHCLG Digital Planning Programme is a great example of this in practice.
2. Sharing and scaling best practices. If councils have more powers to set and fund their own strategies, it’s important that they continue to share and learn from each other. The LGA’s Digitalisation Almanac is a great example of what this can look like in practice, and their AI Network is helping to provide inspiration and practical advice for councils who want to implement AI. More of this kind of thing will be really helpful in the context of more devolution!
3. Standards and data. Many of the challenges faced by local authorities when trying to tackle cross-council problems is that they are unable to access data across different systems and siloes. And to join up problem-solving across multiple authorities is even more difficult. Efforts have been made in recent years to establish data standards from the centre in different sectors, like in planning data (Open Digital Planning), or community services (Open Referral), or vulnerable adults (SAVVI). This kind of standard-setting feels like a key role that can be taken by the centre, in the context of authorities and regions having more autonomy.
Local Growth Plans are an exciting development, and I am pleased to see local areas laying out their plans for local economic development. I found the Centre for Cities’ guidance on Local Growth Plans to be a useful primer for how to maximise the benefits of these kinds of plans. They call out a few things that need clarifying, like how plans will be developed in two-tier councils, or in Combined Authorities. They also point out how plans should be targeted at attracting private investment, as well as towards central government, which is sound advice.
Of course, I’m most excited about how local areas can boost the local digital and technology sector. For the past couple of years, we’ve been working with the @Local Government Association to deliver digital training for local Councillors, and one of the things we’ve helped them to think through is how digital and technology can form part of a wider local economic development strategy. Sometimes councils can be focused on improving their own digital systems and processes, without always looking externally to see how important digital can be in their local economy.
One thing I noticed recently was the York and North Yorkshire Growth Hub running a programme to support local businesses to take their initial steps using AI. I think this is really powerful: there have been lots of local AI programmes run in the past, especially by InnovateUK and the Catapults, and often these might focus on high-tech and frontier use cases. Local areas can also play an important role in working with a much wider range of businesses, who are unlikely to access funding for cutting-edge research, to get started with new technologies. And in fact, many of the challenges local businesses face are similar to those being tackled by the council. Finding the right use cases, taking steps to ensure safety, convincing people to change, working with HR, CRM, ERP type systems: these are all things that councils themselves go through and can help with!
So I’d love to see Local Growth Plans with a strong focus on digital, technology and AI - and creative ways that councils can work to support local businesses, sometimes by helping communicate and share their own challenges!
We’re really big on procurement data and the benefits it can bring to local areas. We published a case study last year about the work we did with three councils in the South West: Teignbridge, South Hams and West Devon. That work aimed to use data better to benchmark their spend, identify potential areas of saving and duplication, and to create a culture of better spend management.
I really encourage Combined Authorities - and any other local authorities - to get into the practice of using their procurement and spend data better. That includes having better oversight and dashboards of spend, and understanding of how procurement spend aligns with planned budgets and financial plans, and an assessment of areas of overspend or risk.
In particular, I think more authorities could be benchmarking their spend profiles nationally. Often an authority will have good internal procurement data, but won’t have clear visibility of whether they’re getting good value-for-money on a unit cost or per-user basis, when compared to other authorities nationally. It starts with cleaning and collecting your own procurement data, then scrutinising and looking for when you can improve, and then seeing how you compare to other authorities.
It’s true that larger, longer term and more flexible funding would need clear evaluation and monitoring guardrails around it.
Shorter, more targeted funding, which may have been competitively ‘bid’ for, involves more simple monitoring approaches. In the past, a council may have bid £250,000 for a given project, with clear delineated timeframes, a business and benefits case, and a spending and implementation plan. If we loosen the funding requirements at the front-end, to give more flexibility to authorities, it’s important that we are evaluating and reporting on outcomes as projects develop. Councils should also be confident to publish the outcomes and results of their projects publicly, and show how they are iterating and learning based on these outcomes.
PUBLIC’s focus in particular has been on evaluating digital, technology and data projects - which are especially difficult to track and evaluate. We’ve been working with MHCLG and local councils to appraise the impacts of a wide range of digital projects, and have published some of our guidance in this evaluation guidebook. We recommend that councils start to use common evaluation tools, like randomised control trials, experimental design methods and other research tools to understand whether their digital projects are working, and how they might be improved.
In the context of authorities being given more autonomy to set their own strategies and to iterate and evolve their projects, these kinds of proper evaluation tools can be really valuable. I’d love to see more of it!
I mentioned our training with the LGA above, supporting Councillors to understand the importance of digital, and to lead with more expertise and confidence on the topic. It’s been brilliant - we really feel like we have helped to equip leaders, often newer to digital, with the skills they need to lead from the front. I think having Councillors who really get digital, who will support it and help to get things pushed through will prove to be invaluable for councils, as they go on their digital journeys.
Our advice would be to develop a skills and learning programme for the entire council on digital, which covers multiple levels and service areas. From the top, it’s important for Councillors, Chief Executives and leadership teams to learn about how to set digital strategies and lead digital teams. And throughout the rest of the council, it’s important to support staff to build the skills they need for different corporate and service functions. That might mean slightly different training and guidance for planning teams, or adult care teams, or corporate procurement teams - where technology is transforming all of these different functions in different ways.
To find out more, contact our Director of Commercial, Spend & Impact, Johnny Hugill, at johnny@public.io.
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