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Local Area Agreements: a strategic approach to delivering local priorities

Date of speech	27 October 2005

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Transcript of the speech as delivered.

1. I hope you had a very productive day. I speak as one of the strongest advocates of local area agreements along with my colleague David Miliband, Minister of Communities and Local Government. I think that this is a very good opportunity to put into context where we are coming from and where we are going with them. I hope you go away from today, certainly aware of the difficulties that there are in making local area agreements work but also enthused by the possibilities and opportunities that they present.

2. It is very clear to me - having looked at the early rounds of local area agreements, having studied the agreements across England, having local knowledge in my own constituency, having looked at all of the evidence - that local area agreements are in my view the most significant change in public service and local funding that we have had since the Second World War. I believe the possibilities that they open up for local service delivery are profound and I think they have deep and broad consequences for national government as well.

3. There is a 'but' of course. The 'but' is that if they hit choppy water, if they start to take decisions where differences between partners are real and difficult, then the enemies of local area agreements will be very quick to criticise, and vested interests and small 'c' conservatism will fill that back in. So I believe that it's very important that all of us work to make local area agreements work.

4. As I say there are going to be some tensions. Some of those tensions may already be there. They may be long standing tensions between partners, and the local area agreement just brings them out into the open. That's a good thing because now they can be addressed. Some of the difficulties may be the result of plans being over ambitious, or one partner being more enthusiastic than the other. Some from partners having very different viewpoints and different priorities and different experiences. We are not going to achieve everything that we think we could through LAAs, straight away. So my first point is about being realistic about what they can deliver.

5. My second point is that we must believe in the purpose of LAAs and be prepared to defend them. I am very optimistic on this point because the concept didn't come just from a think tank or a policy unit of government. LAAs emerged from local government itself and their local delivery partners in conversation with central government and thinking outside the box. We all own local area agreements - local and central government - and we are all signed up to them. Very rarely can that be said of a policy direction of such profound importance.

6. The third point I want to make is that whatever the setbacks, whatever the energy-sapping problems, whatever the difficulties and the initial barriers, they are a 'price worth paying'. It is worth getting this right.

7. And fourth and last, we must recognise this is a step change in local service delivery. I believe that we are going into a period where the attack on the public service ethos and the attack on the idea of public service–private sector partnership is going to increase. I believe that there is an agenda in some areas of wanting public service delivery not to have a step change improvement. So I think that this is a very important period for us.

8. We have come a long way with local area agreements in a very short space of time. It was only just over a year ago that we were thinking of announcing the nine pilots to test the theory. That quickly became 21 pilots with negotiations concluded in double-quick time, and now we are not talking about pilots but about the roll-out programme. LAAs are coming to all areas within England.

9. The first pilot areas are well into implementing their LAA and already we are seeing some new and unexpected developments coming out of that.  The 4th block is new to all areas, including the pilots, and I am confident that we will see a similar level of creativity and innovation in this 4th block. I see the 4th block as the opportunity for the area to stamp the local brand on the LAA.

10. By April 2007 we will have in place local area agreements in every area of England. I don't think we should underestimate that this represents a seismic shift in the way that government and local partnerships are doing business. We are fully committed to realising this and have brought together the local PSA process into local area agreements as the 'reward element'. Another step forward in bringing everything together.

11. So LAAs help to reduce bureaucracy, deepen partnership working and move away from a mind-blowing array of local service delivery silos.

12. But they are also much more than that. LAAs are about improving services for everyone across the piece. They will deliver the customer-focussed, joined-up outcomes, the vital neighbourhood agenda, which is central to the government's plans. A large motivation and component of English domestic revaluation was the need to have time to consider and implement radical changes in this area. These are the changes that make a difference to people in our communities.

13. Up to now users have had to find their way to the right agency, in the right place, at the right time, before they could access the service they need. Because the LAA is built on strong local partnerships between local public service deliverers, this means the user just needs to tap into one area. The concept is this: the public servants, in, for example Telford, who have come together through their LAA and are the only single pot LAA in the country, now work on the concept. That they work not for Whitehall, not for regional management, not certainly for government ministers, except in the sense that there are shared minimum standards and shared targets in a minimum number of areas. They work not in the silos of their line managers but together for the people of Telford and that is the change. When you meet with the LSP there it is difficult to differentiate between which individual is working for which agency because they share their agenda.

14. I have given it the idea of 'Team Telford' rather than Jobcentre Plus, Telford Council, Primary Care Trust, Wolverhampton University. The people in that LAA and LSP work in promoting Telford within certain nationally set minimum standards, that Parliament has the right to request. That is the level of change that is taking place.

15. Once LAAs have been fully rolled out where do we go from there? Are they an 'add on'? Or are they a component of the main conversation between central and local government? Can we reduce further the number of key outcomes to bring together those issues where there is both a legitimate national interest plus priority outcomes for the local area? What scope is there for including all area based funding to clean up the delivery chain and help establish a new delivery contract between central government and local areas?

16. I cannot pretend that we have all of the answers to these questions. But I can say here today that we are determined to find a positive solution to those questions. There are live issues and we will only be able to tackle them as we continue to work together.

17. Later in the month we will be publishing a consultation document on the workings of local strategic partnerships. We have to learn the lessons, we have look at what works and what doesn't work, because the LSP and the LAA will underpin public service delivery in the future.

18. There is lots of other work going on but we need to keep the momentum up in developing the LAA concept and improving its potential to deliver. We have to, for example, ensure the configuration in other public service areas away from local government match and complement the Local Area Agreement agenda. We are also looking, for example, at freedoms and flexibilities and how they could be expanded. Other work is looking at the performance framework in a positive way that will evolve and decentralise.

19. The pilots, the Government Offices and the central government departments involved are all looking together at how we develop the performance framework that moves from driving the best of silo delivery to driving the best area-based outcomes. Now that's not an easy task.

20. My Colleague John Healey talked about delivering the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative, which will be a key part of the core block. I am delighted to report that on this, like many other initiatives, because of the existence of Local Area Agreements government departments have been brought together to look at how we can help local service delivery rather than is sometimes - or at least appears to be - the case.

21. In this case the Treasury, DTI and ODPM have been working closely together on this programme, on the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative, not least to make sure it is fully integrated into the LAA so that all partners in your area share the benefits and share the objectives of the LEGI money. In the next few days we will be issuing an application form with some broad national criteria, which Ministers will use to assess bids. These documents will be published on our website within the next few days.

22. It has already been said that local government must be at the hub, as the only body that is democratically accountable for the area. It is the first amongst equals. The councils are the linkage with local partners, with the community strategy and with the LSP. They are of course also the accountable body to the people of the area. In the role of scrutiny of the workings of public services I believe there is a very exciting opportunity to broaden that so that the people in an area really do believe and really do have levers of power that they can pull to hold people to account. That will drive, again in my view, public service delivery improvement.

23. So it's a big challenge for local government This is a very significant change. It's a challenge to join up, facilitate, champion the area, as well as delivering higher quality public services itself. The success of local area agreements may well be integral to the future success of local government. Indeed I believe it will, because I do not believe that the public judge public services by institutions. They judge it by what it delivers. We know this through common sense, anecdotal evidence and real market research by MORI and others that the public don't have a deep understanding of the structures and institutions that deliver services. I don't believe they need to have and I'm not really interested in that. I'm interested in whether or not they believe that they get good public services and whether they have a stake in them.

24. The concept of LAAs certainly embodies and takes forward much of the thinking emerging from the debate that was started by the Deputy Prime Minister and my colleague Nick Raynsford on the local:vision document.

25. There isn't a blueprint for a local area agreement. That isn't the idea at all. This is something that has to be learnt locally and of course we can share ideas. It is not something that you can pull off a shelf and impose. There are of course guiding principles - they must be innovative, they must make full use the freedoms on offer and most importantly they must focus on outcomes for residents and the area - their needs and their priorities. Not what you can deliver, nor on individual service deliverers, and not on national 'norms'. That much is clear.

26. I think that this is a very exciting agenda indeed. I invite you to put your shoulders to the wheel of the development of local area agreements so that we can truly say that public servants work with the people in their area to provide what we know is needed in the modern era.

27. The final point is this: perhaps the most profound implication of the local area agreement is not actually in the local area, but it is here in Whitehall. Because the local area agreement is based on a public service agreement and is based on an agreement between government departments as well as between central government and local partners it is an agreement that can stick.  It is no coincidence that this conference is in HM Treasury. There is no better evidence of the fact that we mean it when we say that this is helping to join up central government. That is a key reason why David Miliband put his foot on the accelerator and said that we want local area agreements in every area because we believe that this is the future for our communities.

Thank you.

Speech by Phil Woolas MP on 27 October 2005