This paper from the Improvement and Development Agency is about priorities and the process of prioritisation. It attempts to unpack what these mean in practice. It addresses the challenge of a continual stream of new things that need to be done. There are always new national priorities, new local priorities, or existing services that need to be developed, improved or renewed. Taking on new activity is often not balanced by dropping some of the old. The result is often too much ‘on the books’.Like a lot of aspects of performance management, setting priorities involves detailed analysis, hard thinking and careful handling. It can’t be done superficially. But getting it right can bring big rewards. The paper explores what happens to areas that aren’t on the priority list and how to respond to the stakeholders of issues that have become non-priorities. It realistically looks at the easier option of not engaging with ‘wriggly worms’
Elected councillors, local authority chief executives and other senior officers who have responsibility for resources are being offered a chance to learn from last year’s beacon winning councils at an Asset Management Leadership conference organised as a final opportunity for those authorities to disseminate information.The conference next month has been organised by IDeA, which says asset management can have a major impact on councils’ comprehensive performance assessment scores. The beacon councils, it says, offer excellent examples of how good asset management can be embedded into wider business and financial planning cycle. The lessons are being adopted by the IDeA Asset Management Peer Review. Each of the Beacon councils, it says, provides an example on how to improve and together they represent a range of local authority experience.
Almost three quarters of people want to see local people given greater control over budgets and services, according to a poll conducted by the think tank the Local Government Information Unit in publishing a new pamphlet, “Empowering Neighbourhoods: Going Beyond the Double Devolution Deal.”The pamphlet calls for the Government to reinvigorate forms of community governance and to promote a scheme for new neighbourhood councils. It also urges the introduction of participatory budgeting pathfinders that would directly involve people from a local community in decisions on how money is spent.