Commission calls for number of councils in Wales to be halved

A proposal to merge the existing 22 local authorities in Wales into between 10 and 12 larger councils was the headline recommendation in a report from an independent commission published this week.

Chaired by Sir Paul Williams, the Commission on Public Service Governance and Delivery rejected a redrawing of council boundaries from scratch.

It called on the Welsh Government, local authorities and key stakeholders to agree the programme arrangements for mergers by Easter 2014 at the latest. The Welsh Government should also support and incentivise early adopters who wanted to begin a voluntary process of merger.

Justifying the recommendation, the report said urgent and radical action was “needed to tackle the risks to governance and delivery, of low capacity, a lack of resilience and unsustainable costs and overheads that small organisations face”.

The Commission said town and community council areas should also be merged or enlarged, to maintain and enhance community and neighbourhood representation.

In its report, a summary of which can be downloaded here, the Commission concluded, overall, that:

• The public sector in Wales was “too crowded and too complex” to cope with the severe pressures that would continue to be placed on it. There were too many public organisations, and their interrelationships were too complex. “This is true both of formal structures and their inter-relationships, and less formal partnerships and collaborative arrangements”;
• Many public organisations in Wales were too small. “While some of them may perform well (and some large organisations may perform badly), the smaller ones face multiple and severe risks to governance and delivery which are likely to get worse in the medium term”;
• Many organisations were slow to respond to pressure for change. “Their internal governance arrangements and those of partnerships are often ambiguous and inadequate; and public engagement, audit and formal scrutiny are only sporadically effective at best.” As a result, innovative means of delivery and operational good practice were slow to spread;
• Values and cultures within the Welsh public sector were not aligned to meet current and future challenges. “Too often they allow parochialism, defensiveness and insularity rather than innovation, flexibility and responsiveness. And while there is some very good leadership within the public sector, not enough is being done to recruit or retain them, or to identify and develop the leaders of the future”; and
• The performance of major public services in Wales was “poor and patchy, and certainly not adequate to meet the challenges ahead”. Equally, the way in which the public service managed performance could lack ambition and was unnecessarily complex. Change is needed to sustain accountability and drive improvement.

In addition to mergers between authorities, the Commission recommended that governance and scrutiny should be strengthened. This would ensure that services were responsive and the mechanisms for holding the public sector were better informed and more effective.

“All elected members, independent health board members, non executive directors, and officers must acknowledge the importance and value of scrutiny in improving services for people and organisations in Wales,” the report said. “The independence of scrutiny must be strongly asserted and protected, as must its essentially constructive and positive nature.”

It added: “Executive members, non-executive directors, and officers, must similarly acknowledge the value of scrutiny in helping them to deliver services better. They must publicise and explain their decisions clearly, and invite scrutiny of them, including pre-decision scrutiny, willingly and openly. They must also acknowledge and respond to scrutiny reports promptly and in good faith.”

Other recommendations were: ensuring that citizens and communities are at the heart of service design and delivery; creating “new and more coherent” approaches to leadership to ensure the best people as leaders are appointed and developed; encouraging a new culture of one public service for Wales “with organisations united around a shared, collaborative and citizen centred set of public service values”; and simplifying and streamlining performance management “by introducing a single and concise set of national outcomes, with local partnerships and organisations feeding in to them, to increase clarity and accountability”.

Sir Paul Williams said: “We are very clear that public services in Wales face severe and prolonged challenges. The effects of recession and austerity on public-sector budgets will continue to be felt for many years.

“At the same time, our population is changing, meaning that the need for some of our most intensive and costly public services is bound to grow. That creates twin and conflicting pressures – demand for public services is growing, through demographic change and increasing public expectations, while resources to provide them are falling. These pressures are nobody’s fault, but they will be felt by all of us.”

Sir Paul said current and future challenges could not be ignored. “It is far better to invest in reform now, before it is too late, and to create world-class public services and a public sector of which we can all be proud.”

He called for the recommendations to be implemented as a whole, warning that in isolation they would not provide the solution to the problems faced by public services in Wales.

“Issues of culture and leadership, for example, are just as important to the delivery of sustainable public services as the structural changes that we recommend,” he said. “We urge the Welsh Government, the Assembly and the wider public sector to proceed accordingly."

In a statement the Welsh Local Government Association warned that decisions on the future of services “cannot be taken lightly”. It added: “These are public services paid for by our communities and they must have a say on their future.”

The WLGA said that the report would require considerable time and analysis to do justice to its contents.

“The WLGA notes that the Commission proposes that the Welsh Government must secure agreement on the way forward by Easter 2014,” it added.

“This will obviously depend on their reaction following widespread consultation with council taxpayers. As such the WLGA awaits a formal response from Welsh Government which we seek at the earliest opportunity in order to plan for the future.”

The Association also said that the Welsh Government needed to be clear whether a reorganisation would assist in alleviating the pressures caused by funding cuts and rising demand or exacerbate them.

“Any change must be firmly based on a robust cost benefit analysis and precise identification of the up front resources required to pay for large scale change,” it argued.