The government is to undertake a major consulation exercise on how to improve the nation’s health and wellbeing. Health Secretary John Reid has unveiled “Choosing Health?”, a document that sets out wide-ranging questions on how the country might tackle health problems like obesity, smoking and sexually transmitted infections.It will form the basis of a nationwide consultation over the next three months, designed to engage the whole population in debate. The National Health Service, local councils and public health organisations are expected to orgranise hundreds of events across the country. More than 50 of them will involve health ministers taking part.

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The Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA) is highlighting work done by three local authorities – Gateshead, Wandsworth, and Kingston-upon-Thames – as examples of life-changing council service delivery. The stories are being published on the IDeA website to commend the councils for delivering public services that have transformed the lives of their citizens.These stories have been released following the success last year of the book, ‘The Man In The Caravan’ commissioned by the IDeA and written by Charles Leadbeater. It featured seven stories of exceptional council improvement and service delivery, and these can be seen alongside the three new stories.

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This advice from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister explains the merits of incremental partnering, in contrast to the large and complex strategic service delivery partnership deals adopted by a few large councils. Studies of incremental partnerships by the ODPM show that they have a low risk stage-by-stage approach, allowing confidence in the partnerships to be built up before moving to the next level. This is the normal way, individuals and organisations, relate to each other and it has many attractions to both local government and the private sector.Incremental partnering might be of interest to large, medium or small councils or clusters of councils working jointly together. It involves working with a strategic partner or partners but without, initially, a long-term commitment to a partnership covering a range of core activities. Instead, it allows the council to build up confidence with a supplier partner to work with them to develop a stage-by-stage approach to process re-engineering their activities. The challenge of incremental partnering is to provide the basis for a long-term commitment without the all-inclusive contracts that characterise some of the big strategic partnering in local government in the UK.

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