David Cameron, at the CBI Annual Conference, said he would score the Local Enterprise Partnerships as a success since their launch following the last election.
We'd been given the opportunity to ask questions and I had promptly put up my hand. The PM paused as he surveyed the room, alighting on myself, saying, 'lady in grey'. Whilst tempted to reply, 'which shade of 50 would that be Prime Minister', I merely nodded gratefully, and asked about LEP performance.
"They are the right model for what is needed," he said. "They are business-led and relevant to the particular areas where they have been established. Some have been excellent, some less good. The scorecard is mixed. The Birmingham City Deal is good and an example of local leadership. And we have an excellent Minister for Cities in Greg Clarke."
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However, this response doesn't represent 'a truth that is universally acknowledged'.
Few see the LEPs as business led. Whilst this might be the gloss, they are administered by local authorities and, in the West Midlands at least, constrained by boundaries too often consecutive with local government, having too little to do with the real economics of the area or even travel to work.
Ed Balls, also speaking at the CBI's annual bash, said he'd been a big supporter of the RDAs but they were now history. He suggested that LEPs were here to stay but as they didn't have resources, power or clout they were unable to do that much.
Hard to see this as the solution either. If a model is flawed, then simply handing them more cash isn't going to sort it.
It could be argued that as far as the West Midlands is concerned that the LEPs are ' yet another ' layer amongst the many tiers of local governance. How many of us really understand who does what, who is accountable for what or what outcomes are delivered each year?
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That said, I am not simply trying to 'dis ' the LEPs. I believe the people involved in them are, by and large, doing their best to make a difference. We've been lucky to attract some highly respected business people onto the GBS, Coventry & Warwickshire and Black Country LEPs. I like the idea that they can be more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic than the RDAs. But it seems pretty fundamental that even they are not clear if they are strategic or 'doers'.
At a time when local government budgets are being cut pretty drastically and when there's been much talk about 'rebalancing our economy', we should start to think again about getting the best value out of our local services and pulling together to create quality jobs, especially for young people in the regions.
It's time for a new manifesto for local government. This would mean, I suggest, letting people know what you are spending in their areas, what it's being spent on, what the outcomes are and how you are prioritising spend.
Birmingham City Council is looking at 2/3rds of its controllable budget being cut by 2017, representing £840m reduction in spend between2010-2017. At the same time the city needs to provide +80k new houses, +30k new school places and +130k new jobs up to 2020 to meet the needs of a growing population. How's it going to pull this rabbit out of the hat? There is seen to be a lack of understanding of this amongst the Coalition government and Labour front benches.
Some in local government have been flagging up that this may be the 'end of local government as we know it'. In this scenario, there's no shadow of a doubt that services will be discontinued. It is time to forge a new path.
Local government leaders, especially in larger conurbations, have been looking at an agenda around ' Freedoms and Flexibilities '. Sir Albert Bore has aligned himself with Boris Johnson who also sees the need for local government to have greater freedom, for example, to raise money locally on the back of locally held assets.
To cut through the duplication, fragmentation and complexity in current arrangements three layers of regional governance are being discussed in political circles -
1) Sub regional level: focusing on the big agendas of transport, skills and economic growth where the LEP model in particular is not seen to be reflecting the geography, roles and responsibilities needed if we are to drive growth.
2) Total Place Agenda: If we do things at the appropriate level we can get more for less. As this agenda has been around for sometime, it is perhaps a reflection of how bad things are that this very sensible, but hard to do option, is not finally being discussed as a real alternative. Aligned to this 'Fit for Purpose' agenda, we need to align outcomes with spend and move away from a 'salami slicing' to cut budgets.
3) Neighbourhood devolution : Residents are the keenest and know most about where they live - the quality of pavements, potholes and planning - well some planning.
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Some people say 'Total Place' has never been done properly. To get this agenda to work you need to pool local budgets, place the 'resident' or 'customer' at the heart of service provision. It requires leadership, vision, clarity of objectives and of course it helps if you can measure the outcomes.
As a former Councillor in Worcestershire I was impressed by the work of our County Council in creating the partnership needed to look at Total Place - or what total public sector spending in the County was generating in terms of value for money and outcomes.
In Worcestershire there is the County Council, six district councils, 151 Parish and Town Councils. There was one Primary Care Trust - being replaced by three GP Commissioning Consortia, one Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, one Mental Health Partnership Trust, a Policing authority shared with Herefordshire, Shropshire & Telford, through West Mercia Police, and the Fire and Rescue Service, shared with Herefordshire.
In 2008/9 total public spend was just over £4bn, of which £1bn was discretionary local spend. So most money spent in the county doesn't have any obvious form of accountability.
The project looked at three themes - the public estate, reducing NEETs - the number of young people not in employment, education or training - and at one area of high deprivation to seeif better outcomes could be delivered for local people living there taking a Total Place approach.
On the public estate - there were over 1,300 public sector properties in the county at the time of the review, worth over £3bn. This work suggested that immediate rationalisation could deliver between £3-6m savings at once with back office rationalisation and co-location capable of delivering a further £18-36m savings. The report states, " Central to the realisation of such savings is a cultural change which requires service managers to focus on the customer experience, rather than the service delivery system, and to continuously challenge the barriers to change."
The team looking at the 5000 or so young NEETs in Worcestershire at the time, or 9% of the 16-24 year old age group, found that there were at least 24 different local organisations and agencies with a meaningful impact on NEETs. Whilst some had contact with each other, many had no contact with each other at all. So their first objective was to develop relationships between these partners to allow the mapping and costing of activity and begin to align their 'ambitions and approaches'.
The report states, " It is difficult to establish an identifiable spend (on NEETs) even though it is much easier to describe the activities." They reckoned spend on NEETs exceeded £8m with £400k being spent on admin and a further £9.5m on Job Seekers Allowance and Job Centres.
In the case of NEETs the group reached the conclusion that the existing arrangements were 'not fit for purpose' . There was, they said, ' a need for a new approach to youth employment with a joint strategic plan in place to cover the transition from education to employment and training from youth services to adult provision. An approach is needed that is based on a single agency taking a lead.'
The county worked with the Design Council to redesign the processes and activities looking at establishing a single commissioning process for the service, a joint strategic plan, a new front end service for JSA, new mentoring schemes, incentivising young people to pursue training, employment or volunteering and moving towards a single service model.
The fragmented policy responsibility in Whitehall with the lack of clarity on outcomes was seen as a cause of the problems, together with a lack of data sharing, a lack of engagement with local employers, a lack of focus at school on employability and life skills development.
The area of high deprivation which was looked at in the study was Oldington and Foley Park in Kidderminster, amongst the 5% most deprived places in England with a population of 5,300 in 2000 households in mostly post war social housing.
These households were in the bottom 10% in relation to health and disability. None of the children from this area on free school meals were achieving grade A-C at GCSE.
The average annual spend on special projects in the area was over £500k per year over the previous 7 years, with mainstream spend in the locality in 2009-10 at £46m or +36% higher than the county average.
One local worker quoted said, " This was a grim place 10 years ago, we've done lots of things, but it's still a grim place."
The group found services were not as joined up as they might have been. Some households had over 11 agencies and/or professionals making regular interventions. Often only the household members knew which these services were and the duplication, confusion and contrary objectives all reduced the impact of any public spend.
Crimes and re-offending were an issue so they looked at the character profiling in that area analysing 180 cases.
They found three 'characters' accounting for a considerable amount spent in the area.
One character, 'George', comprised 36 of the cases and a cost of £3.6m in a year; 'Lee' accounted for 81 of the cases and £4.5m of cost and 'Joanne' for 27 of the cases costing £864k with up to 70% of this cost as possible repeatable cost due to sustained community investment.
They concluded that by targeting resources and interventions through a deeper and more accurate understanding of the local circumstances they would be able to streamline delivery, remove duplication, and design the most efficient inter-agency interventions. The group felt 5-20% savings could be delivered in the medium term through this approach.
The core local requirement needed to make Total Place a reality was, according to this group, effective local leadership across political, community, professional and managerial, tiers in the public sector and engagement by these leaders with their counterparts in business and third sectors and across civil society.
This is something Sir Albert Bore recognised speaking at the this summer. "Birmingham needs to be seen as a global competitive player. We need clear vision and leadership."
He felt there was great economic potential in infrastructure solutions but warned, "Planning will throttle back growth if we do not act on this. Gerrard Collomb, Mayor of Lyon, has recently extended the well-developed tramway in Lyon - again - this time needing only 4 years to move from plan to implementation. We have been talking about our 'piddly little' Metro extension from Snow Hill to Birmingham New Street for over 10 years. If we cannot do something to put an economic infrastructure in place this will hold back growth."
Perhaps, given the challenges facing us - financial, competitive, the simple need to do our best for people - now is the time to explore the places we've never been before. Let's do the decent thing by designing local governance that delivers.
* Beverley Nielsen is Director Employer Engagement, Birmingham City University