Public Service Reform

This article which profiles a significnat package of public service innovation by a large authority with a big rural hinterland demonstrates that cutting edge innovation around services is not the exclusive preserve of the cities. More power to the elbow of those of us who seek to celebrate the real potential within rural places to convert the localism agenda into a reality. The story itself tells us:

Cheshire West and Chester’s commitment to public innovation, and both a social and an economic recovery, goes further. In the coming months two of its managers, Linda Couchman and Helen Bailey, will spin out social care and regulatory services into employee led and owned enterprises. In Bailey’s case her aspiration is to fully mutualise regulatory services and so form the world’s first ever co-operative focused on environmental health, licensing, roads, parking and related activities.

Combined with striking plans in cultural services, sport, and housing ,there is something of an emergence of a ‘social silicon valley’ effect, a buzz in the air that is beginning to attract new partners and investors. No wonder in his speech this week Steve Robinson emphasised the need to ‘keep it dry’, not to talk in broad sweep about possibilities but to pay real attention to concrete and achievable outcomes which deliver.

While Cheshire West and Chester emerges as a community to watch in its own right, standing tall now alongside unitary authorities such as Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds as a source of innovation, the point here is not to hold up its energy as the only approach to change. Steve Robinson himself repeatedly wants to stress a collective need to renew. In the run up to county council elections, it is rather a question of reflecting on the fresh approaches that northern counties can bring to social and economic recovery as well. And to suggest that, while in the language of ‘re-balancing’ cities have a special contribution to make, the most energetic counties have a unique niche too.

For if Whitehall’s narrative of localism becomes one swamped by the northern urban communities they have heard of, the talent, hopes and contribution of so many people and places in between will be ignored at all our expense. And that would be more than ironic.