Why an 'enabling council' is simply an enabler of profit

It was reported in yesterday's Guardian that Suffolk Council is planning to become an 'enabling council' - one that provides none of its own services but which outsources everything to private companies and voluntary organisations or social enterprises.

With potential budget cuts of up to 30%, it is certainly an attractive option to look at outsourcing services as the companies that bid for them almost always claim they can save money.

But I worry that Suffolk, and others who choose to follow them, may well be going too far.

It is certainly possible for a council to handover some services to private contractors or the third sector. This is easiest in the case of simple bulk operations where the contract specifications are unlikely to change. Waste collection is one such. There is a set contract to collect particular types of waste from residential properties (a clause can be added to cover new builds) at a set frequency. Private companies and the council's own in-house providers can bid for the contract and the cheapest will win. Penalty clauses ensure that the service is up to scratch and if the external contractor wins then TUPE rules ensure that staff are transferred to the new service at their existing rates of pay and conditions. So far, so good.

But this is a far more difficult operation in cases where the service changes on a regular basis or where it is subjective. Take building control, for example. The peaks and troughs of the housing market means that at some points there will be many new homes being built whilst at other points there will be virtually none. If the service is in house then the council can meet demand and shift budgets to cope. A contractor has no incentive to do so.

The advent of new technologies will also cause problems. The cheapest contracts will be the longest, but these will also be the least flexible. If a new pattern of working or new Government legislation emerges then the local authority will either not be able to alter the contract or will have to pay vast sums to do so.

There are clearly services that can and should be subject to tender. There are also layers of bureaucracy within many local authorities which should be stripped away. But I question whether a totally out-sourced council will deliver the high quality front-line services with the flexibility that local residents have come to expect.

Council cuts - still no clearer on what will happen in Cornwall - UPDATED

(Note: Since I wrote this post, I have had a reply from Alec Robertson as detailed in red below)

It's the start of a week of programmes on the BBC focussing on local government. Over breakfast there were the competing delights of Evan Davis ripping Local Government Minister John Denham to shreds on the Today Programme (scroll forward two hours and 10 mins) and the four party leaders in Cornwall speaking to Radio Cornwall (scroll forward about 2 hours).

But the main headline concerns a survey by the BBC about the level of job cuts in councils around the country. They claim that the total will be more than 25,000.

Here in Cornwall, there is still a lot of confusion about what cuts the Conservatives are planning. There was a think tank report which claimed that the number would be around 3500. This was dismissed by Deputy Leader Jim Currie who appeared to say that the real number would be about 1500.

And then, almost three weeks ago, the Council and the unions got together and said that the number would be about 500-600 and these would come through natural wastage (ie not replacing people who retire or resign.

So I wrote to Council Leader Alec Robertson to ask him what the true position is - will there be 500-600 job losses or 1500? And how would the decision be taken about which jobs should not be replaced? He has confirmed that the true picture is the 500-600 figure and that the '1500' number was a misrepresentation by Radio Cornwall of what Jim Currie actually said.

I am not automatically opposed to slimming down the workforce. There are room for more efficiencies within the council. But these need to be carefully planned. It's no good adopting a blanket 'natural wastage' policy as this will almost certainly lead to cuts to vital services. Instead, the policy of which jobs will not be replaced should be agreed in advance. And that debate should happen in public so that we know which services are likely to suffer. And, crucially, we need to know how many cuts there will be.

Whilst I am grateful to the Council Leader for confirming the likely number of job losses, we still need to know more about how this will be managed to ensure no loss of frontline services.

Why Councils should blog

Mark Pack, former Lib Dem Geek-in-Chief, has written a series of articles for Total Politics magazine on the use by councils of new technologies. In this month's article, Mark argues the case for councils having blogs. He says that it should not be a means of communication solely for individual councillors, but that council officers should consider using a blog to communicate what the council is doing.

The key argument that Mark makes is that people come back and read blogs regularly because they know they will have something new to say. Regular websites, on the other hand, need to advertise when they have something new to say because people only go to them when they want information that they know is there.

Anyway, read the whole article.