In this iconic year, local authority budgets are at an all-time low and many leisure facilities stand in desperate need of repair and investment. Councils are therefore being urged to embrace several options available through partnership working to help revitalise their leisure provision. Here we speak to local authority representatives from around the UK to discuss how they have transformed their leisure offering through effective partnership working.

Indeed, local authorities have three options available to them; they can borrow money from the exchequer at a low rate, develop lease back agreements where private companies build facilities then lease them back to the council, or councils can work more extensively with private partners. It is estimated that over half of all local authorities now outsource their leisure provision, with many partnering with private companies to increase footfall and reduce annual revenue costs.
DC Leisure, the UK’s leading leisure operator, currently manages over 100 sites on behalf of their partner local authorities. Working with 29 clients, DC Leisure has invested over £32 million in partnerships with local authorities in the last 15 years plus a further £80m developing nine new centres via the PPP and PFI structures.

Peter Kirkham, Development Director at DC Leisure explains: “By developing dynamic and responsive partnerships with local authorities, we optimise the performance of leisure facilities so that they can better serve their local community and achieve both economic and social objectives. By bringing together the right teams, possessing the necessary drive, skills and experience we have forged some very successful partnerships which continue to grow.”

Elmbridge Borough Council

DC Leisure has formed a winning partnership with Elmbridge Borough Council best illustrated by its flagship development Xcel Leisure Centre, a great example of a Public Private Partnership (PPP). This site has seen sport participation levels increase by 210% across the Borough and swimming attendances rise by a staggering 170%. The ‘iconic centre’, as described by Sport England, saves the Council in excess of £6 million over the 15 year contract.

The partnership was created in 2003 when Elmbridge Borough Council undertook a review of its leisure provision. At the time, there were three ageing facilities which were increasingly expensive and inefficient to operate. The Council decided to combine these sites into one state of the art facility using the PPP framework, allowing greater creativity and financial security for the future.

Ian Burrows, Head of Leisure and Cultural Services, at Elmbridge Borough Council, says: “DC Leisure was appointed as the preferred bidder as they demonstrated their heavy investment in the project, spreading the risk and reducing our costs. DC Leisure managed the design and build process, and now operates the facility. “Following the PPP route has enabled us to create a modern leisure complex that the community can take real pride in and will undoubtedly attract interest as a regional and international venue in years to come.”

Peter Kirkham adds: “We’re all extremely proud of this project and five years down the line, our partnership with Elmbridge Borough Council has gone from strength to strength. The Xcel Leisure Centre was awarded 87% in its last Quest accreditation assessment for excellent standards of service, management and customer care, which is testament to the dedication of the team at all levels.”

Eastleigh Borough Council

Another best practice example of partnership working is that of DC Leisure and Eastleigh Borough Council. Having worked together for over 20 years, over £6 million has been invested into the redevelopment and management of Fleming Park Leisure Centre.

The complex is now a thriving and highly sought after leisure centre, catering for the whole community, with footfall of over one million visitors per annum. The centre boasts two swimming pools; a main 25 metre facility and a smaller teaching pool, a 120 station gym and three fitness studios with over 100 workout classes. Fleming Park is also home to a wide range of diverse sports including; judo, table tennis, hockey, trampolining and gymnastics.

A successful grant application to the Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) and Sport England in 2010 secured the development of Fleming Park Tennis Centre, comprising four floodlit macadam tennis courts. The centre offers a broad range of activities including; adult and junior coaching programmes, adult ‘return to sport’ classes, local leagues and other LTA competitions.
DC Leisure has launched a number of initiatives to make physical activity more accessible to disadvantaged groups, with schemes such as the GP referral scheme and a Buddy programme for people with disabilities. A ‘Passport to Leisure’ programme also caters for over 60s, students and low income earners who are interested in sporting activities but may have been discouraged in the past.

Julia Birt, Sport and Active Lifestyles Manager at Eastleigh Borough Council, says of the partnership: “In this difficult financial climate, it has never been more important to collaborate and extend partnership working. Our alliance with DC Leisure allows us to provide exceptional community sports facilities across the Borough, I believe we have raised the bar higher than many local authorities would have dreamed possible twenty years ago.”

Flintshire County Council

Sector specialists Alliance Leisure offers a design, build and capital package that enables development to be achieved without the need for capital expenditure. To date, Alliance Leisure has delivered 85 schemes with rentalised requirements, made affordable from revenue created by the new facilities. One of its schemes is the largest refurbishment project of its kind in the UK; the partnership with Flintshire County Council has created what is now widely known as North Wales’ flagship leisure centre. A three phase £6million project has transformed a once virtually derelict leisure centre into an impressive, state of the art facility that is financially robust.

Deeside Leisure Centre now comprises six 5-a-side 3G football pitches replacing the existing 11-a-side area, a health and fitness suite, new reception, café and soft play centre, which opened in two phases in August and November 2011. The final phase, the first Welsh public spa and largest indoor public Extreme Centre, opened in January 2012. In the first week alone, membership sales for the Extreme Centre hit 66% of the target for year one.

The Council had originally planned to demolish the site and start again from scratch, at a cost quoted at £18million. Instead, Alliance’s four-year framework agreement with the Council allows up to £10million to be invested in the infrastructure of the authority’s leisure portfolio. On top of the £6million ploughed into Deeside Leisure Centre, a further £2.5million was recently committed to reworking Flint Pavilion to create a tenpin bowling and indoor bowls facility with additional investment into its soft play, café and fitness provision.

Cllr Dennis Hutchinson, Executive Member for Leisure and Public Protection at Flintshire Council Council, says: “Without the support of Alliance Leisure the council would not have been able to access the funding needed to undertake anywhere near this level of leisure development. In tough economic times, when all the talk is of public sector budget cuts, partnering with a private sector company means we can still look to make facility and service improvements for the benefit of the local population.”

Julia Goddard, Alliance Leisure’s Business Development Manager adds: “We’ve been able to bring what are traditionally seen as high-end facilities to a community centre, which in many ways surpasses its private sector counterparts. By working alongside the centre for the next five years we can ensure that the big potential for revenue generation is met and that all the facilities will be used by local people, at a cost that is affordable – that is the crucial element.”

Despite the current economic climate, the case studies reviewed demonstrate that local authorities must embrace new ways of working to finance their long term leisure provision. There are undoubtedly positive and innovative solutions available through partnership working that can exceed expectations in terms of revenue projections and provide modern, exciting facilities for the local communities they serve.

The NAO found that the take-up rate for three and four-year-olds in early education has been sustained at 95 per cent since 2008, despite an eight per cent increase in eligible children. There are however, wide variations in take-up between local authorities. Take-up for children from the most disadvantaged families is lower than overall take-up.

The quality of nurseries, schools and other providers offering the free entitlement has been sustained overall since 2008-09, but access to high quality provision varies depending on where children live. According to NAO analysis of Ofsted data, the percentage of good or outstanding provision across local authorities in March 2011 ranged from 64 per cent to 97 per cent. Areas of highest deprivation are less likely to have high quality provision.

Children from disadvantaged families are much less likely to take up free nursery places, and also less likely to attend high quality nurseries that boost their achievement. While the best local authorities achieve almost 100 per cent take up of provision, in one local authority the take up rate was only 62 per cent.

Anand Shukla, Chief Executive of Daycare Trust said: “This should not come as a surprise to the Government, as Daycare Trust’s recent survey of Family Information Services revealed that nine in ten local authorities have cut their budget for family information, making it harder for parents to get the support they need to take up their entitlements. This is of particular concern for parents on low incomes who are less likely to use word of mouth to find out about local childcare services.”

She added: “We will only end this shocking postcode and income lottery by providing better information and outreach services.”

The Health Committee looked at the issues facing the future of social care and concluded that joined up services are crucial to meeting the needs of older people. It is impossible to deliver either high quality or efficient services when the patient is passed like a parcel from one part of the system to another, without any serious attempt to look at their needs in the round. While this is an obvious truth and has often been repeated, it is seldom acted upon.

The Committee found that the way healthcare is funded is a major barrier to improvement. The funding for NHS care, social care and social housing comes from different sources and attempts to join up these funds and to integrate services have been disappointing.

The Committee recommends that there should be joined up commissioning. The Government should place a duty on the new clinical commissioning groups and local councils to create a single commissioning process, with a single accounting officer, and a single outcomes framework for older people’s health, care and housing services in their area.

This would improve outcomes by making it easier to move money around the local health, housing and social care system. It will also play a significant part in delivering the Nicholson Challenge for the NHS of 4% efficiency saving every year over the next four years.

Growing demand, coupled with an unprecedented efficiency challenge, makes it more urgent than ever before to respond to the challenge of joining up services. The Committee looks to the Government to set out in its Social Care White Paper how this vital objective will be met.

The Committee’s recommendation for joint commissioning of services is supported by evidence presented to them by the Torbay Strategic Partnership which developed their approach with a grant of £250k from the Regional Improvement & Effiecient Programme to take forward the Total Place methodology. Total Place has now evolved into the Community Budgets initiative where pilot projects are bringing together all funding on local public services from the area into a single pot and allowing multi skilled teams to work across organisational boundaries to find innovative solutions. Torbay has demonstrated that their approach provides a better service at a lower cost.

The Committee’s report will provide a boost to Community Budgets, but it has also revealed that the Department of Health has little enthusiasm for moving control of budgets from Whitehall to allow spending decisions to be taken locally. Care Services Minister Paul Burstow told the Committee that he sees Care Trusts (such as Torbay) as “an experiment that […] did not really get out of the lab”.

The trials are organized by the Behavioural Insights Team in the Cabinet Office which has a remit to help local authorities, charities, government and private sector organisations to develop responses that encourage healthier behaviours. Some £21 billion is lost to fraud in the public sector while £7–8 billion is lost on overdue debt.

The Team draws on insights from behavioural science and behavioural economics which encourage behavioural change without resorting to legislation or costly programmes.

The trials are showing the effectiveness of the nudge approach. In a debt recovery trial £160m of tax debts were advanced over a 6 week period. Another trial brought in over £1 million from doctors in additional yield to HM Revenue and Customs, while a further trial saved Manchester City Council up to £240,000 in council tax discounts.

Overall, these trials showed effect sizes of up to 30 percentage points, underlining the key role that behavioural insights can play in tackling fraud, and debt. They demonstrate that even relatively minor changes to processes, forms and language can have a significant, positive impact on behaviour, and can often save the public time and money.

Traditional attempts to combat fraud and debt have made a number of assumptions about human behaviour. They have tended to assume that individuals rationally weigh up the personal costs and benefits of committing fraud by calculating the amount that they expect to gain, the probability of being caught and the magnitude of the punishment. But studies show that people can be encouraged to do the right thing by making the process easy, highlighting key messages or emphasising what most people are already doing.

Research also indicates that it is important to look at the system as a whole from an end user’s perspective in order to identify key points where people may be tempted to be dishonest. It is then possible to tailor interventions to that specific context in order to encourage honesty and compliance.

The Behavioural Insights Team drew on an experiment in Minnesota where people were told that their perception that many other people did not pay their taxes was incorrect. This increased rate of voluntary tax compliance. The Team have collaborated with HMRC and taxpayers in a locality were told that 9 out of 10 people in the area had already paid their tax. This resulted in substantial increases in tax repayments compared with the control group.

The guide focuses on how to devise systems to suit your strategy and goals, not on how to generate information on their activities and results for external use. It covers the principles, ideas and practice involved in performance management. As organisations review their systems and ask ‘what does performance mean for them?’ and what measures and reporting will convey this information to their stakeholders, this guide offers relevant and up-to-date experience in performance management and how it can lead to improvements in performance.

By having a performance management system in place, organisations can focus on the better use of its resources and meeting desired goals and objectives. But many organisations still find this process difficult to manage. The guide covers the broad perspective of performance management. It sets out the principles of sound performance management and discusses the various tools and techniques which can be used when developing and operating performance management systems.

The guide is published by CIPFA
at £100.

One of key recommendations of the Munro Review of Child Protection: A Child centred system, published earlier this year was for local services to be freed from government targets, national IT systems and regulations, and allowed to design their own services and procedures. However, in a time of severe budgetary cuts and constraints this recommendation has unnerved some social care organisations, being construed as an expensive route to improving efficiencies. Undoubtedly, organisations will want to continue to see service improvements, and more tangible benefits in the form of cash savings and intangible benefits including improved employee performance, but they will need to fund these from a new slim line budget.

Enhancing mobile working is a cost effective way for organisations to achieve both these hard and soft benefits. With this in mind, OLM Systems, the UK’s largest independent solutions provider for children’s and adult services, has unveiled the CareMobile App Store. It delivers mobile functionality through easy to use, bite size apps, providing frontline social workers with online and offline access to case information whilst away from the office.

“In agreement with Munro’s call to free social workers of lengthy administrative burdens, Nushra Mansuri, professional officer for the British Association of Social Workers and the College of Social Work (BASW/CoSW) has echoed the frustrations of many: “ Social workers are prevented from working directly with the people who need their services and…are under extraordinary added pressure from deep funding cuts.” The pressure on organisations to be more efficient has trickled-down from management to frontline workers. However, with administrative obligations and off site travel unavoidable, little headway has been made towards improvement.

A recent ROI study for a social care department identified potential savings of over £300,000 by introducing mobile working. This included savings of 2.5 hours per social worker, per week from saved travel time, a reduction in time typing up notes, and savings on mileage claims (approximately 20 miles per week, however, rural areas can generate even greater travel savings). In the current climate, these savings cannot simply be overlooked. In addition to providing real savings, innovative mobile working technology can both increase productivity and enable social workers to spend more time with vulnerable adults, children and their families.

Crucial development

Following a successful development partner programme, including Devon County Council and Hull City Council, the CareMobile App Store is now on general availability.

The App Store runs inside the mobile device’s browser, and delivers a wide variety of social care apps to enable mobile working across the entire social care team. Functions are broken down into individual, easy to use apps, ensuring that the relevant ones are delivered to the right staff on demand. This ensures minimal user training. They are available on all platforms, including tablet, netbook and smartphone, and are fully offline functional, which means that encrypted data is cached securely on the device. This enables the user to continue working without having to worry about having an internet connection.

The App Store currently includes the following apps:
? ‘Assessments’ enables forms to be downloaded and completed whilst with a client or directly afterwards
? Existing case notes can be viewed and new ones created in ‘Observations’
? ‘Find person’ enables client records to be searched
? Via ‘Person details’ users can view person information including addresses, telephone numbers, relationships, classification and roles. Warnings are also displayed which has an important role to play for personal safety
? ‘Create person’ captures the details for a new client, whilst avoiding any duplication
? ‘Briefcase’ enables a number of client records to be downloaded in anticipation of being out of network range
? ‘Messages’ allows messages to be viewed and created while on the move
? ‘Lone worker’ provides a facility to generate SMS or email alerts either from an alarm button or a timed function

Addressing challenges

Councils want to know the savings they stand to make before committing to or implementing any new solutions, which is understandable particularly in the current economic climate. This is something we are happy to do for them, after which a pilot project can be initiated before the full roll out takes place. At each stage the benefits can be established and ROI projections calculated.

Undoubtedly, mobile working can lead to hard cash savings and the CareMobile App Store can certainly help with meeting many of the challenges associated with this objective. It also gives councils an opportunity to radically transform the way case recording administration is supported.

In areas with poor 3G access, a signal cannot always be guaranteed when visiting clients in their homes, and may be lost completely if the home is located within a block of flats. The CareMobile apps are fully offline tolerant, meaning data can still be recorded even when there is no signal.
Historically, technology has been viewed as a barrier to client interaction. Social workers had seen the twin requirements of focusing and spending time with families, whilst systematically recording their involvement, as being mutually incompatible. Nowadays slim line technology and simple to use apps have gained support from social workers as the technology is unobtrusive and the social worker can record quickly and efficiently in the front line, thus resolving this issue.

The benefits

Probably the most noted benefit amongst organisations is the cash savings made on office space, travel time and administration time.

The App Store gives frontline workers the mobility to bypass the office and go straight from home to the client; it increases their flexibility to work from anywhere. Not only does this mean that their work/life balance is improved, but it also means that they are spending less time on the road and more time with their clients. In turn, client engagement is also improved as, when appropriate, clients can see their comments being recorded as they speak thus making them feel more involved (this is most evident with older children).

Employee performance is also improved as the App Store allows them to speed up the completion of assessments, employ greater accuracy when logging information, and helps them to meet performance targets. In addition, it also increases morale amongst social workers by helping them to feel more professional and in control.

The App Store itself requires minimal user training as a simple and modern interface is provided. It is also available for multiple platform formats and can be accessed via Tablet, laptop or Slate, with the option of keyboard or handwriting recognition, and also Smartphones.

The solution, designed with simplicity at its heart, ensures frontline workers gain valuable time, have access to client records on the move and record information more accurately. Introducing innovative mobile working technology to adult social care teams will increase productivity and promote joint health and social care working. This ensures that the availability of social workers and their expertise is maximised to improve the quality of care offered.”

Caroline Cozier is the product manager with OLM Systems.

The Commission believes that, so far, councils have responded well to these challenges. Auditors have some confidence that most will balance their books this year. Many have also protected the most vulnerable people in their area. But with more reductions to come, and wider economic problems intensifying the pressure, councils need to prepare for a potentially rocky road ahead.

‘Good financial management and the continued search for efficiency savings will help councils navigate their way through this period, but they will also need to make some tough decisions about how to bridge the funding gap in the coming years.’

Local government faces three more years of cuts in government funding with almost 60 per cent of the total reductions yet to come. To meet this future challenge the report finds that some elements of councils’ cost-reducing strategies will have to change. In the larger councils almost half of this year’s savings will come from planning, housing and cultural services, but these only cover 16 per cent of service spending. These services cannot deliver similar savings every year. Many councils will face difficult decisions about how to meet their funding shortfall in the next few years.

Strong leadership and financial management mean that most councils should balance the books this year. However, many have had to cut back on services to secure their financial stability. Most local authorities are taking the right steps to make efficiency savings but have also had to reduce the quality and quantity of services. Charges are going up in many councils.
Although most councils are coping, the report finds that a minority of councils were considered by auditors to be ‘at risk’ of not meeting their budget for 2011/12.

The common characteristic of these councils is a combination of financial and managerial issues. Facing large funding reductions is not, on its own, enough to cause auditors to worry about a council’s financial resilience. It is councils with both big funding reductions and weak financial management that are at most risk of not achieving their budget. ‘At risk’ councils were less likely to have thoroughly evaluated their savings proposals and were more likely to use short-term financial fixes.

Tough times can be downloaded here.

The warning was prompted by a report from the NAO on progress in cutting costs in central government. Margaret Hodge highlighted the weaknesses in the way departments are managed, including lack of vision of how they will work with less money and poor understanding of the relationship between spending and outcomes. There is also no consistent way to measure progress in seeking efficiency across government.

The NAO report reveals that departments cut spending by 2.3 per cent in 2010/11, but they need to cut a further 19 per cent over the four years to 2014-15. To achieve this saving fundamental changes will be needed to secure sustainable reductions on the scale required. A major difficulty in achieving this target is that there are gaps in departments’ understanding of costs and risks, making it more difficult to identify how to deliver activities and services at a permanently lower cost.

Looking behind the mandarin speak this means that gathering the low hanging fruits is relatively easy and quick and does not need much imagination. But once this harvest is over, cost cutting becomes a completely different ballgame.

The NAO was unable to find out how far spending reductions represented year-on-year changes in efficiency and whether front-line services were affected. It concluded that forward plans are not based on a strategic view.

Departments’ financial data on basic spending patterns is sufficient to manage budgets in-year, but information about the consequences of changes in spending is less good. Longer term reform is a Cabinet Office priority and departments will need to look beyond short-term cost cutting measures and make major operational change.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said today: “Government departments have been successful in cutting costs and managing within their reduced spending allocations for 2010-11. However, most departments will need to cut their spending by much more over the next four years. This will not be possible without their recognizing that short-term measures are not enough and that fundamental changes are needed.”

The findings of the NAO are in line with the Audit Commission’s findings relating to local goverment.

Some 150 councils have so far indicated that they will take the freeze grant offer. They include Hammersmith and Fulham, South Oxfordshire, Stratford-on-Avon, Tendring and Windsor and Maidenhead which will reduce their council tax.

Council tax bills more than doubled since 1997 until last year’s freeze. This is the second year the Government has offered support to freeze council tax to support local residents, families and pensioners.

The Government has set aside up to £675 million for local authorities in England to help keep council tax down. Last year’s freeze saved households up to an estimated £72 on a Band D bill, and this year’s freeze could potentially do the same.

This new support builds on the offer taken up by all councils last year boosting what they could get over four years to £3.3 billion if they hold council tax for a second year.

The level of concern at the lack of response to the offer is shown by Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles who said: “Every councillor still to decide (on the level of council tax) has an obligation to keep the living costs of their residents down and take the freeze money. A vote against a freeze is a vote for a punitive tax-rise when typical bills are already around £120 a month.”

The pension reforms just negotiated will make little or no difference to the long-term costs of public service pensions. The savings from higher pension ages are, on average, offset by other elements of the pensions becoming more generous. In general lower earners in the public sector will actually get a more generous pension as a result of the recently announced reforms. That is, they will be able to retire at age 65 with a higher annual pension than they would receive under current arrangements. This results from the move from final salary to career average schemes and the particular changes to accrual and indexation rules.

Conversely higher earners are likely to lose out. The move from final salary to career average relatively penalises those who see big increases in their earnings over time. By increasing the generosity to lower earners – a group less likely to have a good employer pension in the private sector – the reforms increase the difference between the public and the private sectors.

However, the taxpayer has already started to benefit from the move from RPI to CPI indexation of public service pensions, introduced by the government in the October 2010 Spending Review. This will substantially reduce costs.

On pay, the IFS study found that at the end of the two-year public pay freeze and the two year of 1% pay increases, public pay will return to where it was relative to private sector pay in 2008. This is because private sector pay reacted quickly to the recession. Pay in the public sector did not.

The IFS findings have been challenged. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: “The big increase in contributions immediately reduces the cost of public sector pensions by taking a big chunk out of most public servants’ pay. But if you take the package as a whole there can be no doubt that many public sector workers may have to pay more, work longer and get a pension that will not keep up with the proper measure of the cost of living.

The Treasury dispute the finding that the proposed pension arrangements will not save any money.