Re-engineering and a Blast on the Trumpet

March 30, 2011

When I were a lad (as they say in Yorkshire) engineering was often physical and heavy. And if you were to have mentioned ‘re-engineering’, they would have thought you had meant: ‘faulty design, back to the drawing board’. Nowadays though with much of our heavy industry having upped sticks and gone, the term tends to be used metaphorically.

And so it was by CBI Director-General, John Cridland, speaking to Dermott Calpin of MJ (Municipal Journal) on 24 March 2011. ‘What we need,’ said Mr. Cridland, ‘is the re-engineering of our public services’ to ‘fill the gap between resources and expectations’. So what did he mean? ‘It’s not a new thing,’ he explained. ‘Most large organisations have re-engineered their products and services in response to the pressures of a dynamic, competitive world’.

But, he argued, the best ones ‘have done this with deliberate disregard to the status quo and by starting with a clean slate. So whilst fear of change is understandable, employees do ‘need to appreciate that long-term security comes from working for an organisation whose products and services are wanted, needed and affordable’. And to achieve this, he argued ‘we need reform – liberation from constraining structures and a focus on results rather than processes’.

And whilst sharing services is fine, ‘scale sharing alone isn’t re-engineering,’ according to Mr. Cridland, who argued that evidence from the Total Place pilots ‘shows that the greatest gains are made when change is more comprehensive, and funding streams come together to tackle problems’. He adds that everyone involved in public services needs ‘to dismiss the notion that a service can’t be changed because it has always been done this way’.

Tempting as it might be for some to write-off Mr. Cridland’s comments as the predictable and ill-informed prejudices of an industry rep with very little knowledge of the nature and worth of the public services, it is worth giving them some pause for thought and reflecting on whether custom and culture in your authority and its partners is actually open to creative change in the way he describes.

For Cridland’s focus is not of course on public service itself but on entrenched tramlines of dysfunctional or less than optimum delivery. It goes without saying that public services are there to serve the public and not those who work in them and culture is a sticky and pervasive beast which can be hard to alter. It also tends to have the invisibility of familiarity.

But local government lawyers positioned as they are at the sharp end of all the authority’s business are well-positioned to help drive necessary changes and to wire them into the fabric of the organisation and prospective community budgeting partners. And many are doing just that in the way local authority legal services are provided. Lincolnshire is one example with Eleanor Hoggart and her colleagues.

The shared service arrangements in Hammersmith and Fulham and Kensington and Merton and Richmond are others. As is the entrepreneurial approach taken by Geoff Wild in Kent and the contribution of Charlie Adan to joined up health and local government in Herefordshire. I could go on.

So given that local authority lawyers are so often active on the front line and showing themselves to be drivers of creative solutions which add value and keep the front line in business, as I suggested in my 22 March blog, it is unfair and wrong for them to be characterised as part of potentially dispensible ‘back office’.

Nevertheless, given the unfortunate black hole in the hearts of many where deep love and affection for lawyers should reasonably reside, those in local government will need to be active in communicating positive messages about their achievements. For, although it may go against the grain, sometimes blowing a blast on your own trumpet can be beneficial, particularly if avoids others sounding your trump of doom.

Dr. Nicholas Dobson is a Senior Consultant with Pannone LLP specialising in local and public law is also Communications Officer for the Association of Council Secretaries and Solicitors.