7 October 2010 Local Government Chronicle 27LGCplus.com

‘‘ Not enough attention has been focused on the leadership skills needed to make partnership working really deliver

Local leadership is the crucial elementLocal government and its partners face an unprec-edented period of change and uncertainty with a drive to deliver better outcomes at a significantly lower cost, using new and different models of provision.

The focus locally is on partnership working to deliver the solutions, but partnerships are not new and have been in place for the past 10 years – so why have they not delivered the scale of benefits that might have been expected?

At the 2010 LGC Sum-mit, PricewaterhouseCoop-ers hosted a workshop that debated these issues. It reached a broad consensus that even with the most effec-tive governance relationships and the best local leader-ship skills, working in part-nership will always create challenges and will not deliver the maximum bene-fits possible.

Recent research produced by PwC suggested that while much has been done to build the processes, systems and structures needed to facili-tate partnership working, insufficient attention has been paid to the people in those partnerships.

In particular, not enough has been focused on the leadership skills needed to make partnership working really deliver.

A survey of leaders of local public organisations found that difficult relationships, low levels of trust and insuf-ficient time and skills were seen to be bigger barriers for partnerships than the lack of a legal footing, or a misalign-

ment of funding streams.Some participants in the

workshop felt that many of the incentives that had brought partners together in the past had now gone, and that reductions in funding meant that there was a risk that partners would retreat to focusing on their core businesses.

Others emphasised the democratic accountability of local government and called for this to be more clearly recognised in local delivery arrangements.

The issue of local leader-ship was explored. Partici-pants sought to clarify what it is about the leadership of local partnerships that needs to be addressed, so that part-nership working can deliver the real benefits that most who work in local govern-ment believe it can.

The workshop suggested a framework for leader-ship was needed, one which focused on four key factors – shared vision, leadership, engagement and change at

PARTNERSHIP WORKING JULIE MELLOR is a partner and MARK STEVENSON is a director at PricewaterhouseCoopers

all levels of the community. If partnerships were to

deliver, then most would need to move from their cur-rent status of ‘joint working’. This is because it involves sig-nificant time and resources, as decisions are taken multi-ple times by multiple parties and requires representatives from all partners to attend many meetings.

The move would need to be to one of ‘single party delivery’, where one partner is commissioned to deliver outcomes on behalf of the partnership and is given con-trol of the resources required to do that.

While most participants recognised the efforts and successes of partnership working to date, the over-all view was that the future needed a new way of work-ing across existing public local bodies – one that was led by a single body with responsibility for the deliv-ery of a much wider range of local outcomes.● See thinktank briefing, p28 AL

AMY

Old-fashioned leadership skills need updating to make partnership working a success