Governance Matters with Peter McKinlay

In New Zealand, we seem obsessed with amalgamation as though it is the only way of lifting local government's game.

Look elsewhere and you can see some excitingly different things happening.

The London Borough of Barnet has reinvented itself as a ‘commissioning council'. This means, for every service it goes through a thorough process of deciding who should be the provider and how.

The objective is not to hang on to the work for the council, but to get the best outcomes for its community.

It used to outsource recycling, but has brought this back in-house.

It's placed major cultural activities in a charitable trust. Back office services are now provided by a joint venture with Capita, a major service provider to local government.

The joint venture is a trading activity generating revenue for both the council and Capita by providing services to third parties as well as Barnet itself.

In California the contract cities organisation links together councils which deliver no services. Everything is contracted to other parties: councils, non-government organisations, and the private sector.

These councils argue their proper job is to decide on services, and make sure their communities get the best deal – not to hang on to service delivery themselves for the sake of it.

It's part of a growing trend to focus on what is the ‘real deal' for communities, rather than the disruptive and often unproductive pursuit of the ‘big is better' vision of amalgamation.

Councils which go down this path know some things need to be done at scale – but this is about merging individual services, not councils. They also know their central role is local governance, working with their communities, and give this priority in everything they do.