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Corporate planning in local government— Implications for the elected member
Corporate Planning in Local Governmentthe Implications Elected Member John
Cartwright,
M.P.
With the spread of Corporate Planning to local government, the attitudes of the elected members can be an important factor in applying the concepts. This article considers some of the petinent aspects, It illustrates through a case description how the policies laid down by elected members are carried through on a planned basis. The author argues that corporate planning does not pose a threat to the power of the people’s representatives.
C
ONVENTIONAL
WISDOM
AMONGST
TOO
MANY
elected local Councillors suggests that corporate planning is some deep laid Machiavellian plot designed to undermine the whole democratic basis of local government. The charge is usually that the system concentrates effective power into the hands of a tiny minority or, worse still, that it transfers power from elected members to appointed officials. The ‘crime’ of being ‘run by the officers’ is one of the most heinous that can be levelled against any local Councillor but it dates back long before the introduction of corporate planning. If elected members are unwilling or unable to devote the time, interest and energy needed to exercise firm political control, then power will inevitably fall into the laps of the officers, and that remains true whether the Council concerned has embraced corporate planning, free thinking or Zen Bhuddism.
John Cartwright was a Director of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society Ltd and has had considerable experience as an elected member in local government in the U.K.
46
Much member criticism of corporate planning rests on nothing more than natural suspicion of something new and different which comes liberally gift wrapped in business jargon. Other critics rest their case on their own unfortunate experiences in moving towards some form of corporate management. Thus, the appointment of Directors at high salaries instead of traditional chief officers, the streamlining of multifarious committees, the establishment of officers’ management teams and many other changes are all lumped together in members’ minds as sins to be laid at the door of corporate planning. Yet few Councillors would deny that the basis of such a planning system is both logical and long overdue-that local authorities spending millions of pounds of public money every year and exercising substantial powers ought to be run on some planned basis rather than the pragmatic ‘doing the best we can’ that has characterized so many Councils over the years. Indeed, if local govemment is not to lose still more powers to central government and to ad hoc appointed bodies during the next few years, there is an urgent need for Councillors to put their management house in order. EFFICIENCY
AND
DEMOCRACY
But must managerial efficiency be bought at the sacrifice of traditional democratic control? After more than 3 years experience of corporate planning in the London Borough of Greenwich my own verdict is quite the reverse. The planning system we introduced has certainly not solved all our problems but it has considerably strengthened the position of elected members vis-a-vis the officers by enabling them to take more
LONG
RANGE
PlANNING
informed decisions and by providing them with far more powerful tools with which to control the running of the authority than they ever had before. In their first assessment of the situation in Greenwich produced in May 1970,’ McKinsey & Co. Inc. identified five major weaknesses in such planning systems as then existed. Firstly, the objectives of the authority were not clearly defined because members were not given the opportunity of thinking through what it was they were in business to try to achieve. Secondly, the Council devoted a great deal of time and attention to the actual sums of money spent but made little attempt to establish what results were being achieved by that spending. The third failing was the lack of any adequate system of priorities governing the allocation of scarce resources between many competing claims. McKinsey’s fourth criticism was the absence of any systematic analysis of Key issues and problems facing the authority which meant that members were not being presented with a range of policy options on vital issues. The final weakness was the fact that the Council’s planning system did not look far enough into the future. This was particularly important in a period of scarce resources since members were not being shown how far freedom of action in future years was being pre-empted by current decisions. These criticisms, valid as they were in relation to Greenwich, probably applied with equal force to the great majority of British local authorities at the time. Even today they could probably be fairly levelled against many of the new enlarged Councils created by the 1972 Local Government Act. To tackle these problems McKinsey proposed a programme planning system with five main elements : programme definition statements ; Key issue analysis; policy committee guidelines; a Community Plan; and an all the year round planning cycle. APPLYING
THE
RECOMMENDATIONS
The start of the system was the drawing up of the programme definition statements. This was simply an attempt to set out the objectives of the various services provided by the Council, to establish the best possible estimates of the actual need for each and to assess how far existing provision exceeded or fell short of meeting those needs. For elected members this was a far more difficult exercise than discussing the quarterly allotment return or the siting of traffic diversion signs, but the importance of trying to establish what it was we were attempting to do was readily agreed. Indeed, for many members it was the first time they had seen on paper a description of the various services which their Committees were actually providing. Nevertheless, there were a number of practical problems. In some areas there were easily definable standards which could readily be accepted-the Department of Education recommendations on
APRIL, 1975
provision of library books, for example. In other areas it was much more di5cult to establish meaningful measurements of need without extensive research. There were still other areas, like housing or social services, where the establishment of standards was clearly a matter for members’ subjective judgment or, indeed, a matter of political belief. When it came to comparing needs with actual provision there were some sceptics amongst elected Councillors who questioned the realism of the whole exercise. What was the point of going to a great deal of trouble to prove conclusively what we already knew-that in many vital services there was a substantial demand which could not, in any case, be met because of limited resources or central government restrictions. However, the very limitation on the Council’s freedom of action called for a planned approach to our problems so that we could take conscious decisions as to which of the gaps it was most important to try to fill. KEY ISSUE ANALYSIS
A great deal of light was thrown on these di5cult policy decisions by the research undertaken for Key issue analysis. Members selected a number of problem areas on which they required more information and the reports produced by the Programme Planning team attempted to establish the extent and scope of the problem and to put forward a choice of policies based on impartial research rather than prejudice. Key issue reports have so far been published on a number of the Council’s services including those for the elderly, the under fives, the mentally ill and handicapped and the physically handicapped. Other issues researched include the development of the library service, the impact of tourism on the Borough and the management of the Council’s transport system. Members have generally welcomed these reports as providing them with facts which they need to reach balanced decisions on the development of vital services. Indeed the demand for issue analysis became so great that a priority system had to be introduced to ensure that manpower resources were concentrated on the most important questions. Nevertheless, there were some snags, the most di5cult arising from the tight central government control over local authorities. For example the report on the under fives showed a massive unmet demand for day nursery provision. As a result, top priority was given to the opening of two nurseries in the areas of greatest need and a programme to provide two more day nurseries each year for 4 years was written into the Community Plan. Our research suggested that this would meet about one third of the known need. Unfortunately, central government cut back this programme to only one day nursery a year for 2 years. Nevertheless, without the solid facts about
47
the situation provided by the issue analysis, it might not have been possible to persuade the civil servants to allow even this modest improvement. Inevitably, the success of the whole planning system depended to a very large extent on the ability and the determination of elected members to decide on priorities. With a welter of competing claims for limited resources, someone had to make value judgments about which projects were to have priority in the corporate plan. This responsibility naturally fell to the Policy Committee. To ensure that this would be sufficiently powerful to carry out the task we included not only all the service commitee chairmen but the Leader, Deputy Leader and Chief Whip of the majority party together with six back benchers elected annually by the majority party group to represent their interests. The addition of two minority party members gave us a committee of 18 which many people have criticized as being too unwieldly. However, the fact that it was generally trusted by the majority party enabled it to operate more effectively than would have been possible with a small select elite. In the past, arguments about resource allocation in Greenwich had, as in most other authorities, been settled on the basis of whichever chairmen could exert the greatest political muscle power. This contest had usually taken place in a dramatic ‘night of the long knives’ when the inflated estimates had to be savagely butchered to get down to an acceptable level of rate increase. Later years had seen a fairly crude system of ‘rate rationing’ which allowed all service committees a block percentage increase in spending without much regard for the extent to which they were using it to meet the corporate aims of the authority. Clearly there had to be a better and more scientific way of approaching the problem although McKinsey had warned that no mechanical technique could do the job. The planning system could provide all the available evidence but the final judgment must be one for members. POLITICAL
PRIORITIES
Starting from this basis, we attempted to define the members’ political priorities in the hope that we could construct a system for testing against them the competing claims for new and improved services. After a good deal of frustration and several false starts we found that the best method was to judge new schemes by the extent to which they had an impact on the major problems facing the authority. We, therefore, listed 13 policy issues and asked members to judge their importance by allocating points to each out of a total of 130. Having tried this out on the Committee Chairmen, the full policy committee and finally the entire Council we found a high degree of agreement in placing these 13 issues in 3 clear groups. In the high priority category came problems like
48
the housing shortage, the needs of children in deprived areas, families in danger of breaking up and the difficulties of the physically and mentally handicapped. The middle priority group included the Borough’s employment problem, the need to prevent sickness or disease and the incidence of social and political alienation. Low priority rating was awarded to issues like limited sporting, cultural, entertainment and recreational opportunities, the cleanliness and appearance of the Borough and the need to guard against accidents. By judging the effectiveness of all new plans in meeting these problems, we were able to classify them as A, B or C in terms of the Council’s overall priorities. Each service committee was then asked to rate its own proposals 1, 2 or 3 in terms of its own individual priorities. In this way we constructed a system which rated every new proposal on a scale from Al to C3. Inevitably there were then heated objections from service committee chairmen who found that their cherished schemes could not emerge from the exercise with a rating higher than Cl. When they complained of discrimination we had to point out that the very act of setting priorities was in itself discriminatory since it was impossible for every plan to be of equal priority. However, when it came to determining the Council’s overall strategy it was decided that “as much growth as possible should be concentrated in high priority areas, whilst a measure of growth should be maintained in middle and low priority services.” In the current 4 year community plan about three-quarters of the planned growth is in high priority services with the remainder split equally between middle and low priority. THE
COMMUNITY
PLAN
The community plan itself is a rolling 4-year programme The first year contains firm proposals on which the rate is levied whilst the remaining 3 years are successively less firm. Members have always been anxious that the plan should not be allowed to become a straight-jacket preventing them from grasping unforeseen opportunities. The proposals for years 2, 3 and 4 are therefore noted by the Council as a basis for further detailed research and consideration. As the introduction to the current plan states:’ “The community plan shows the Council’s programme for the future as clearly as we can see it at this stage. But it is not a straight-jacket and it will be reconsidered and revised each year as problems and priorities change and as research, participation and comment by the public lead to a clearer understanding of the needs of the community.”
The full plan is a thick and fairly formidable publication, but as a comprehensive working document it offers a great many advantages for the elected member. For a start it shows the expected tinancial impact of the Council’s present and future proposals. This was sharply brought home when
LONG
RANGE
PLANNING
the first edition showed that we were planning to double the Borough rate in 4 years! By setting out in one document all the Council’s likely plans for a Cyear period, the objectives of each service, the amount of money actually spent on each service in the preceding year and the estimated spending for the coming 4 years, together with the results actually achieved in the preceding year and expected to be achieved in the forthcoming 4 years, the community plan gives elected members far more hard information in an easily referred to form than they could ever have obtained under the pre-corporate planning system. This has proved particularly valuable for newly elected members who have only to refer to the plan to learn a great deal they need to know about the services they are responsible for running. The existence of forward plans in a published document also enables the Council to undertake meaningful public consultation on its proposals before final decisions are taken. It also ensures that the provision of resources-money, staff or landcan be programmed to meet the likely future needs of the authority. Probably the most important advantage of the community plan is that it gives both officers and members a clear target against which to measure the actual progress of the Council. CRITICISMS
OF THE PLAN
Some critics complain that the creation of a corporate plan of this type based, as it must be, on the political aims and objectives of the ruling party would prevent a newly elected administration from seeking to carry out policies based on different political objectives. There can be no doubt that it would take a little time to rewrite the community plan to take account of a diametrically opposed political philosophy but at least there would be only one comprehensive document to rewrite. There would be no need for an incoming administration to waste time trying to discover all the unpublished plans and projects being worked on in each Council department. However, the plan does have some deficiencies. It covers only the services provided by the Council and since these do not include education, transport, health, tie, police or water, it can hardly be described as a full ‘community’ plan. Nor have we yet been able to take much account of the forward plans of the authorities providing these vital scrvices to ensure that we are aware of their impact on our own plans. Then there is the effect of sudden alterations in central government policy. The plan may have been drawn up at a time when Ministers were actively encouraging the expansion of certain Council services. Implementation may, however, coincide with an imposed cut in Council spending. In this way the whole purpose of forward planning may be undermined by Government insistence on using local authority spending programmes for the purposes of short term economic management.
APRIL, 1975
fiqually diflicult is uncertainty about the actual level of government rate support. It is relatively simple to project the likely growth of Council spending. It is much more diEcult to predict the likely level of resources available to meet that spending, and when, as in 1974, the actual level of rate support grant is not known until a few weeks before the start of the financial year it is far from easy to take intelligent decisions about the amount of growth which can be ahowed. MONITORING
PERFORMANCE
This sort of uncertainty has made it difficult to stick to the all year round planning timetable which McKinsey recommended, but one element of this approach which members have found particularly valuable has been the regular monitoring of perfOllMll~. This now falls into three parts. The extent of demand for individual services and their effectiveness in meeting known needs is not something which undergoes rapid change and this type of long term review is, therefore, based on the research undertaken for key issue analysis. This aspect of performance review also involves very difficult judgments. What is the purpose of the meals on wheels service, for example? If it is simply to provide housebound people with a meal, it may be judged simply by the numbers of meals delivered. If it aims to improve the nourishment of the recipients, a great deal will depend on the quality of the food supplied and its effect on those who eat it, and if part of the purpose is to keep the housebound in touch with the outside world by means of a quick chat, the performance level is indefinable. Far fewer problems are raised by the short term performance review which is simply a monitoring of the new projects planned to be started during the current year. Until the implementation review was launched members had no means of knowing whether or not these had gone according to plan until the end of the year-by which time it was too late. The implementation report, produced quarterly, compares the planned timetable and financial estimates with actual progress and cost and provides explanations for any variations. This enables members to consider corrective action made necessary by problems like staff shortage, building delays or government restrictions. This has proved to be a very useful discipline for officers and members alike. It requires officers to plan the implementation of all new schemes in the current year’s plan and to set target dates for which they accept responsibility. For members, on the other hand, these reviews underline the need for realism in producing new plans. It is little use producing programmes requiring the recruitment of skilled staff if the current year’s plan is falling behind schedule due to the inability to recruit such Std.
49
Similarly there is little point in making firm proposals for massive capital schemes in social services, for example, if the department is refusing to sanction similar projects in the current year. In this way the regular flow of information on the progress of the present year’s schemes can lead to a more realistic approach in the final preparation of the following year’s plan. The greatest difficulty in undertaking performance reviews has arisen in the mid-term areathe annual comparison of actual performance achieved against the targets set in the community plan. Although this was a basic element in the McKinsey approach, the first such review in relation to 1973-1974 has only just been produced. Although members tended to regard this as a straightforward and essential part of the planning process, officers were much less keen. They pointed to the fact that some of the original targets used in the plan were little more than intelligent guess-work based on very limited research, and that information on actual levels of achievement was either not available or diicult to extract without substantial investment of staff time better used elsewhere. Valid though these objections might be there was a feeling amongst members that programme area directors were naturally reluctant to see the introduction of a system which attempted, however superficially, to judge the actual achievements of the services for which they were responsible. In this sense the corporate planning team would be acting very much as members’ independent auditors of performance. However the determination of members to introduce the annual review of performance against plan has resulted both in an improvement of target setting, since-directors now know they will be held responsible for them, and a rather greater flow of information on actual achievement. When we first decided to go ahead with the corporate planning system in Greenwich over 3 years ago we were well aware of the fact that not all the snags had been ironed out. We decided that the best approach was to get the show on the road and make adjustments in the light of experience as we went along. I believe that events have proved us right. Had we tried to solve all the problems before we began we would never have got started. Moreover the effectiveness of the system has been considerably improved by the refinements that have been introduced as a result of practical experience. Nevertheless there are a number of criticisms that can still be levelled against the Greenwich system as it has now developed. It can, for example, be argued that the choice of programme areas was dictated much more by the existing Council depart‘ments than by the political problems facing the Council. Instead of having programme areas for housing, social services, recreation, basic services, corporate services and support services, it might have been better, given freedom of action, to define programme areas dealing with major problems like the environment, traffic and transport, commerce 60
and employment, children and community development even though this would have required programme area committees in addition to statutory Council committees. Despite attempts at promoting a corporate approach through a powerful Chief Executive’s office and an officers management team, the problem of departmentation remains. Indeed the structure, with one programme area director responsible directly to one committee tends to accentuate this problem. Perhaps most serious is the fact that the whole process has so far been concentrated on planning the introduction of new or improved services. We have not yet been able to apply our corporate priorities to existing services to see whether the continuation of low priority operations is preventing the introduction of new services of a much higher priority. From the limited attempts so far made, it is quite clear that any such approach will meet strong opposition. But with resources-particularly of skilled staff-likely to be in very short supply in the foreseeable future it is certain that the attempt will once again have to be made if high priority needs are to be met. On the credit side the corporate planning system has certainly strengthened political leadership, by enabling members to know far more about what goes on in the authority, by giving them the facts they need to take intelligent decisions and by providing them with a clear programme against which progress can be monitored for political as well as management purposes. It has certainly not made decision taking any easier. In some ways it has become more difficult since tough decisions cannot be shuffled off or referred to sub-committees, but at least members are now much clearer about the results which are likely to flow from their decisions and can examine the likely implications for later years. The system may well have concentrated power in the hands of a limited number of members who have to take decisions in the policy committee but these decisions are subject to scrutiny and debate in the full Council meeting when all members can express their own personal points of view. To sum up, our corporate planning system has ensured that policies laid down by elected members are carried through on a planned basis, that members have a regular and systematic flow of essential management information and that decisions are taken on a much more informed basis. My conclusion, therefore, is that corporate planning poses no threat to the continued power of elected members. Properly used it can do just the reverse-ensure a powerful extension of member control over the affairs of the authority. n REFERENCES (1) A New Planning 8 Co. Inc. (2)
System for Greenwich.
McKinsey
London Borough of Greenwich Community Programme Budget 1974-75 to 1977-78.
LONG
RANGE
Plan and
PLANNING
Cartwright,
M.P.
With the spread of Corporate Planning to local government, the attitudes of the elected members can be an important factor in applying the concepts. This article considers some of the petinent aspects, It illustrates through a case description how the policies laid down by elected members are carried through on a planned basis. The author argues that corporate planning does not pose a threat to the power of the people’s representatives.
C
ONVENTIONAL
WISDOM
AMONGST
TOO
MANY
elected local Councillors suggests that corporate planning is some deep laid Machiavellian plot designed to undermine the whole democratic basis of local government. The charge is usually that the system concentrates effective power into the hands of a tiny minority or, worse still, that it transfers power from elected members to appointed officials. The ‘crime’ of being ‘run by the officers’ is one of the most heinous that can be levelled against any local Councillor but it dates back long before the introduction of corporate planning. If elected members are unwilling or unable to devote the time, interest and energy needed to exercise firm political control, then power will inevitably fall into the laps of the officers, and that remains true whether the Council concerned has embraced corporate planning, free thinking or Zen Bhuddism.
John Cartwright was a Director of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society Ltd and has had considerable experience as an elected member in local government in the U.K.
46
Much member criticism of corporate planning rests on nothing more than natural suspicion of something new and different which comes liberally gift wrapped in business jargon. Other critics rest their case on their own unfortunate experiences in moving towards some form of corporate management. Thus, the appointment of Directors at high salaries instead of traditional chief officers, the streamlining of multifarious committees, the establishment of officers’ management teams and many other changes are all lumped together in members’ minds as sins to be laid at the door of corporate planning. Yet few Councillors would deny that the basis of such a planning system is both logical and long overdue-that local authorities spending millions of pounds of public money every year and exercising substantial powers ought to be run on some planned basis rather than the pragmatic ‘doing the best we can’ that has characterized so many Councils over the years. Indeed, if local govemment is not to lose still more powers to central government and to ad hoc appointed bodies during the next few years, there is an urgent need for Councillors to put their management house in order. EFFICIENCY
AND
DEMOCRACY
But must managerial efficiency be bought at the sacrifice of traditional democratic control? After more than 3 years experience of corporate planning in the London Borough of Greenwich my own verdict is quite the reverse. The planning system we introduced has certainly not solved all our problems but it has considerably strengthened the position of elected members vis-a-vis the officers by enabling them to take more
LONG
RANGE
PlANNING
informed decisions and by providing them with far more powerful tools with which to control the running of the authority than they ever had before. In their first assessment of the situation in Greenwich produced in May 1970,’ McKinsey & Co. Inc. identified five major weaknesses in such planning systems as then existed. Firstly, the objectives of the authority were not clearly defined because members were not given the opportunity of thinking through what it was they were in business to try to achieve. Secondly, the Council devoted a great deal of time and attention to the actual sums of money spent but made little attempt to establish what results were being achieved by that spending. The third failing was the lack of any adequate system of priorities governing the allocation of scarce resources between many competing claims. McKinsey’s fourth criticism was the absence of any systematic analysis of Key issues and problems facing the authority which meant that members were not being presented with a range of policy options on vital issues. The final weakness was the fact that the Council’s planning system did not look far enough into the future. This was particularly important in a period of scarce resources since members were not being shown how far freedom of action in future years was being pre-empted by current decisions. These criticisms, valid as they were in relation to Greenwich, probably applied with equal force to the great majority of British local authorities at the time. Even today they could probably be fairly levelled against many of the new enlarged Councils created by the 1972 Local Government Act. To tackle these problems McKinsey proposed a programme planning system with five main elements : programme definition statements ; Key issue analysis; policy committee guidelines; a Community Plan; and an all the year round planning cycle. APPLYING
THE
RECOMMENDATIONS
The start of the system was the drawing up of the programme definition statements. This was simply an attempt to set out the objectives of the various services provided by the Council, to establish the best possible estimates of the actual need for each and to assess how far existing provision exceeded or fell short of meeting those needs. For elected members this was a far more difficult exercise than discussing the quarterly allotment return or the siting of traffic diversion signs, but the importance of trying to establish what it was we were attempting to do was readily agreed. Indeed, for many members it was the first time they had seen on paper a description of the various services which their Committees were actually providing. Nevertheless, there were a number of practical problems. In some areas there were easily definable standards which could readily be accepted-the Department of Education recommendations on
APRIL, 1975
provision of library books, for example. In other areas it was much more di5cult to establish meaningful measurements of need without extensive research. There were still other areas, like housing or social services, where the establishment of standards was clearly a matter for members’ subjective judgment or, indeed, a matter of political belief. When it came to comparing needs with actual provision there were some sceptics amongst elected Councillors who questioned the realism of the whole exercise. What was the point of going to a great deal of trouble to prove conclusively what we already knew-that in many vital services there was a substantial demand which could not, in any case, be met because of limited resources or central government restrictions. However, the very limitation on the Council’s freedom of action called for a planned approach to our problems so that we could take conscious decisions as to which of the gaps it was most important to try to fill. KEY ISSUE ANALYSIS
A great deal of light was thrown on these di5cult policy decisions by the research undertaken for Key issue analysis. Members selected a number of problem areas on which they required more information and the reports produced by the Programme Planning team attempted to establish the extent and scope of the problem and to put forward a choice of policies based on impartial research rather than prejudice. Key issue reports have so far been published on a number of the Council’s services including those for the elderly, the under fives, the mentally ill and handicapped and the physically handicapped. Other issues researched include the development of the library service, the impact of tourism on the Borough and the management of the Council’s transport system. Members have generally welcomed these reports as providing them with facts which they need to reach balanced decisions on the development of vital services. Indeed the demand for issue analysis became so great that a priority system had to be introduced to ensure that manpower resources were concentrated on the most important questions. Nevertheless, there were some snags, the most di5cult arising from the tight central government control over local authorities. For example the report on the under fives showed a massive unmet demand for day nursery provision. As a result, top priority was given to the opening of two nurseries in the areas of greatest need and a programme to provide two more day nurseries each year for 4 years was written into the Community Plan. Our research suggested that this would meet about one third of the known need. Unfortunately, central government cut back this programme to only one day nursery a year for 2 years. Nevertheless, without the solid facts about
47
the situation provided by the issue analysis, it might not have been possible to persuade the civil servants to allow even this modest improvement. Inevitably, the success of the whole planning system depended to a very large extent on the ability and the determination of elected members to decide on priorities. With a welter of competing claims for limited resources, someone had to make value judgments about which projects were to have priority in the corporate plan. This responsibility naturally fell to the Policy Committee. To ensure that this would be sufficiently powerful to carry out the task we included not only all the service commitee chairmen but the Leader, Deputy Leader and Chief Whip of the majority party together with six back benchers elected annually by the majority party group to represent their interests. The addition of two minority party members gave us a committee of 18 which many people have criticized as being too unwieldly. However, the fact that it was generally trusted by the majority party enabled it to operate more effectively than would have been possible with a small select elite. In the past, arguments about resource allocation in Greenwich had, as in most other authorities, been settled on the basis of whichever chairmen could exert the greatest political muscle power. This contest had usually taken place in a dramatic ‘night of the long knives’ when the inflated estimates had to be savagely butchered to get down to an acceptable level of rate increase. Later years had seen a fairly crude system of ‘rate rationing’ which allowed all service committees a block percentage increase in spending without much regard for the extent to which they were using it to meet the corporate aims of the authority. Clearly there had to be a better and more scientific way of approaching the problem although McKinsey had warned that no mechanical technique could do the job. The planning system could provide all the available evidence but the final judgment must be one for members. POLITICAL
PRIORITIES
Starting from this basis, we attempted to define the members’ political priorities in the hope that we could construct a system for testing against them the competing claims for new and improved services. After a good deal of frustration and several false starts we found that the best method was to judge new schemes by the extent to which they had an impact on the major problems facing the authority. We, therefore, listed 13 policy issues and asked members to judge their importance by allocating points to each out of a total of 130. Having tried this out on the Committee Chairmen, the full policy committee and finally the entire Council we found a high degree of agreement in placing these 13 issues in 3 clear groups. In the high priority category came problems like
48
the housing shortage, the needs of children in deprived areas, families in danger of breaking up and the difficulties of the physically and mentally handicapped. The middle priority group included the Borough’s employment problem, the need to prevent sickness or disease and the incidence of social and political alienation. Low priority rating was awarded to issues like limited sporting, cultural, entertainment and recreational opportunities, the cleanliness and appearance of the Borough and the need to guard against accidents. By judging the effectiveness of all new plans in meeting these problems, we were able to classify them as A, B or C in terms of the Council’s overall priorities. Each service committee was then asked to rate its own proposals 1, 2 or 3 in terms of its own individual priorities. In this way we constructed a system which rated every new proposal on a scale from Al to C3. Inevitably there were then heated objections from service committee chairmen who found that their cherished schemes could not emerge from the exercise with a rating higher than Cl. When they complained of discrimination we had to point out that the very act of setting priorities was in itself discriminatory since it was impossible for every plan to be of equal priority. However, when it came to determining the Council’s overall strategy it was decided that “as much growth as possible should be concentrated in high priority areas, whilst a measure of growth should be maintained in middle and low priority services.” In the current 4 year community plan about three-quarters of the planned growth is in high priority services with the remainder split equally between middle and low priority. THE
COMMUNITY
PLAN
The community plan itself is a rolling 4-year programme The first year contains firm proposals on which the rate is levied whilst the remaining 3 years are successively less firm. Members have always been anxious that the plan should not be allowed to become a straight-jacket preventing them from grasping unforeseen opportunities. The proposals for years 2, 3 and 4 are therefore noted by the Council as a basis for further detailed research and consideration. As the introduction to the current plan states:’ “The community plan shows the Council’s programme for the future as clearly as we can see it at this stage. But it is not a straight-jacket and it will be reconsidered and revised each year as problems and priorities change and as research, participation and comment by the public lead to a clearer understanding of the needs of the community.”
The full plan is a thick and fairly formidable publication, but as a comprehensive working document it offers a great many advantages for the elected member. For a start it shows the expected tinancial impact of the Council’s present and future proposals. This was sharply brought home when
LONG
RANGE
PLANNING
the first edition showed that we were planning to double the Borough rate in 4 years! By setting out in one document all the Council’s likely plans for a Cyear period, the objectives of each service, the amount of money actually spent on each service in the preceding year and the estimated spending for the coming 4 years, together with the results actually achieved in the preceding year and expected to be achieved in the forthcoming 4 years, the community plan gives elected members far more hard information in an easily referred to form than they could ever have obtained under the pre-corporate planning system. This has proved particularly valuable for newly elected members who have only to refer to the plan to learn a great deal they need to know about the services they are responsible for running. The existence of forward plans in a published document also enables the Council to undertake meaningful public consultation on its proposals before final decisions are taken. It also ensures that the provision of resources-money, staff or landcan be programmed to meet the likely future needs of the authority. Probably the most important advantage of the community plan is that it gives both officers and members a clear target against which to measure the actual progress of the Council. CRITICISMS
OF THE PLAN
Some critics complain that the creation of a corporate plan of this type based, as it must be, on the political aims and objectives of the ruling party would prevent a newly elected administration from seeking to carry out policies based on different political objectives. There can be no doubt that it would take a little time to rewrite the community plan to take account of a diametrically opposed political philosophy but at least there would be only one comprehensive document to rewrite. There would be no need for an incoming administration to waste time trying to discover all the unpublished plans and projects being worked on in each Council department. However, the plan does have some deficiencies. It covers only the services provided by the Council and since these do not include education, transport, health, tie, police or water, it can hardly be described as a full ‘community’ plan. Nor have we yet been able to take much account of the forward plans of the authorities providing these vital scrvices to ensure that we are aware of their impact on our own plans. Then there is the effect of sudden alterations in central government policy. The plan may have been drawn up at a time when Ministers were actively encouraging the expansion of certain Council services. Implementation may, however, coincide with an imposed cut in Council spending. In this way the whole purpose of forward planning may be undermined by Government insistence on using local authority spending programmes for the purposes of short term economic management.
APRIL, 1975
fiqually diflicult is uncertainty about the actual level of government rate support. It is relatively simple to project the likely growth of Council spending. It is much more diEcult to predict the likely level of resources available to meet that spending, and when, as in 1974, the actual level of rate support grant is not known until a few weeks before the start of the financial year it is far from easy to take intelligent decisions about the amount of growth which can be ahowed. MONITORING
PERFORMANCE
This sort of uncertainty has made it difficult to stick to the all year round planning timetable which McKinsey recommended, but one element of this approach which members have found particularly valuable has been the regular monitoring of perfOllMll~. This now falls into three parts. The extent of demand for individual services and their effectiveness in meeting known needs is not something which undergoes rapid change and this type of long term review is, therefore, based on the research undertaken for key issue analysis. This aspect of performance review also involves very difficult judgments. What is the purpose of the meals on wheels service, for example? If it is simply to provide housebound people with a meal, it may be judged simply by the numbers of meals delivered. If it aims to improve the nourishment of the recipients, a great deal will depend on the quality of the food supplied and its effect on those who eat it, and if part of the purpose is to keep the housebound in touch with the outside world by means of a quick chat, the performance level is indefinable. Far fewer problems are raised by the short term performance review which is simply a monitoring of the new projects planned to be started during the current year. Until the implementation review was launched members had no means of knowing whether or not these had gone according to plan until the end of the year-by which time it was too late. The implementation report, produced quarterly, compares the planned timetable and financial estimates with actual progress and cost and provides explanations for any variations. This enables members to consider corrective action made necessary by problems like staff shortage, building delays or government restrictions. This has proved to be a very useful discipline for officers and members alike. It requires officers to plan the implementation of all new schemes in the current year’s plan and to set target dates for which they accept responsibility. For members, on the other hand, these reviews underline the need for realism in producing new plans. It is little use producing programmes requiring the recruitment of skilled staff if the current year’s plan is falling behind schedule due to the inability to recruit such Std.
49
Similarly there is little point in making firm proposals for massive capital schemes in social services, for example, if the department is refusing to sanction similar projects in the current year. In this way the regular flow of information on the progress of the present year’s schemes can lead to a more realistic approach in the final preparation of the following year’s plan. The greatest difficulty in undertaking performance reviews has arisen in the mid-term areathe annual comparison of actual performance achieved against the targets set in the community plan. Although this was a basic element in the McKinsey approach, the first such review in relation to 1973-1974 has only just been produced. Although members tended to regard this as a straightforward and essential part of the planning process, officers were much less keen. They pointed to the fact that some of the original targets used in the plan were little more than intelligent guess-work based on very limited research, and that information on actual levels of achievement was either not available or diicult to extract without substantial investment of staff time better used elsewhere. Valid though these objections might be there was a feeling amongst members that programme area directors were naturally reluctant to see the introduction of a system which attempted, however superficially, to judge the actual achievements of the services for which they were responsible. In this sense the corporate planning team would be acting very much as members’ independent auditors of performance. However the determination of members to introduce the annual review of performance against plan has resulted both in an improvement of target setting, since-directors now know they will be held responsible for them, and a rather greater flow of information on actual achievement. When we first decided to go ahead with the corporate planning system in Greenwich over 3 years ago we were well aware of the fact that not all the snags had been ironed out. We decided that the best approach was to get the show on the road and make adjustments in the light of experience as we went along. I believe that events have proved us right. Had we tried to solve all the problems before we began we would never have got started. Moreover the effectiveness of the system has been considerably improved by the refinements that have been introduced as a result of practical experience. Nevertheless there are a number of criticisms that can still be levelled against the Greenwich system as it has now developed. It can, for example, be argued that the choice of programme areas was dictated much more by the existing Council depart‘ments than by the political problems facing the Council. Instead of having programme areas for housing, social services, recreation, basic services, corporate services and support services, it might have been better, given freedom of action, to define programme areas dealing with major problems like the environment, traffic and transport, commerce 60
and employment, children and community development even though this would have required programme area committees in addition to statutory Council committees. Despite attempts at promoting a corporate approach through a powerful Chief Executive’s office and an officers management team, the problem of departmentation remains. Indeed the structure, with one programme area director responsible directly to one committee tends to accentuate this problem. Perhaps most serious is the fact that the whole process has so far been concentrated on planning the introduction of new or improved services. We have not yet been able to apply our corporate priorities to existing services to see whether the continuation of low priority operations is preventing the introduction of new services of a much higher priority. From the limited attempts so far made, it is quite clear that any such approach will meet strong opposition. But with resources-particularly of skilled staff-likely to be in very short supply in the foreseeable future it is certain that the attempt will once again have to be made if high priority needs are to be met. On the credit side the corporate planning system has certainly strengthened political leadership, by enabling members to know far more about what goes on in the authority, by giving them the facts they need to take intelligent decisions and by providing them with a clear programme against which progress can be monitored for political as well as management purposes. It has certainly not made decision taking any easier. In some ways it has become more difficult since tough decisions cannot be shuffled off or referred to sub-committees, but at least members are now much clearer about the results which are likely to flow from their decisions and can examine the likely implications for later years. The system may well have concentrated power in the hands of a limited number of members who have to take decisions in the policy committee but these decisions are subject to scrutiny and debate in the full Council meeting when all members can express their own personal points of view. To sum up, our corporate planning system has ensured that policies laid down by elected members are carried through on a planned basis, that members have a regular and systematic flow of essential management information and that decisions are taken on a much more informed basis. My conclusion, therefore, is that corporate planning poses no threat to the continued power of elected members. Properly used it can do just the reverse-ensure a powerful extension of member control over the affairs of the authority. n REFERENCES (1) A New Planning 8 Co. Inc. (2)
System for Greenwich.
McKinsey
London Borough of Greenwich Community Programme Budget 1974-75 to 1977-78.
LONG
RANGE
Plan and
PLANNING