Developing a County Council’s corporate approach to local working and community engagement
Spirals worked with a large County Council’s senior management board to develop a strategic corporate approach to working locally, building on existing good practice, focussing on representative democracy and enhancing the role and decision making capacity of local county councillors. Spirals’ approach was based on our experience and on the brief derived from an initial client meeting. A number of assumptions were identified at this meeting and our final proposals were based on those assumptions.
The approach to delivering this review was as follows.
Phase One: Diagnostic Review - An audit and analysis of existing County Council initiatives and current activity – conducted through both interviews with key County Council officers and through desk-top analysis of current policies and practices.
Phase Two: Good Practice Research - Identifying and assessing the applicability of, good practice elsewhere – drawn from national research and experience in other authorities and assessed to ensure any initiatives met the brief’s criteria and did not constitute “traditional” local authority solutions.
Phase Three: Development of Recommendations – In the context of the findings of Phases 1 and 2 Spirals developed a number of recommendations specific to that Authority working with key stakeholders to ensure that they met the brief and were bold, innovative, flexible and value for money.
Phase Four: Produce final Report – Whilst outlining a strategic, corporate approach to local working and community engagement the final report delivered a “menu” of options that could be refined and configured in a number of different ways and which could be implemented individually or as part of a package. This report was presented to the Council’s Strategic Management Board.
Recommendations were made in three key areas:
• Effective Local Member Working
• Wider Community Engagement
• Working with Local Partners
This work has been highly influential in determining the authority’s corporate approach to working locally, community engagement and National Indicator 4.
Spirals recognise that Localism and community engagement are not about to disappear from the political agenda irrespective of which party forms the next government. Ensuring that local people feel able to influence local decision making and being able to demonstrate that local services are developed in accordance with locally identified need are two of the key challenges facing local government in the immediate future.