The seeds of doubt over Johnson’s competence were sewn during his election campaign. An exasperated Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight could not get him to answer a straight question on spending commitments. Boris seemed flustered when asked for policy specifics. Is this really a man who can deliver multi-billion pound projects such as Crossrail and the Olympics?

Well, perhaps. Johnson will retain much of the executive management at the London Authority such as Tim O’Toole at the London Underground and Peter Hendy at Transport for London, both of whom will be crucial in renegotiating the collapsed agreement with MetroNet. Conservative Central Office will also surround him with experienced businessmen such as Bob Diamond of Barclays Capital.

The 2012 Olympics remain a major part of London’s future regeneration and Johnson’s ability to manage an already over-running budget will be crucial to his chances of re-election, given that the next election will fall a few months before the Games begin. Much control will remain with central Government and Olympics Minister but Johnson might attempt to claw back some of the earmarked spending from London council tax payers and would certainly be hostile to any increase.

On housing, having rejected Ken Livingstone’s approach of obliging boroughs to build an increased number of affordable housing, the Mayor will take a more conciliatory approach, working with councils to achieve a target suitable for each party. Will this however put the Mayor in conflict with Conservative councils in the outer London boroughs, who have hitherto been critical of his Livingstone’s plans to increase the city’s housing stock? Don’t expect too much of a fight though as the Mayor has already pledged not to allow any new buildings on green-belt land.

Solving London’s creaking transport infrastructure was a central part of Johnson’s campaign and he will be under immense pressure to deliver the £16bn Crossrail scheme. In my opinion Livingstone didn’t receive enough credit during the election for finally buttressing the Government into agreeing the scheme and Boris will have to show that he possesses Ken’s skills of negotiation with central Government.

Finally, one important aspect of his Mayoralty will be how Boris works with the London Development Agency, one of the key drivers of regeneration and social cohesion in the Capital. During the election campaign, Johnson was highly critical of its ongoing scandals and the official Conservative Party policy is to abolish the RDAs. Johnson could very well reduce its budget should he be looking for savings to be made from the Mayoral budget.

So what will he have to achieve to make his mark on London? I hope Boris reprises some of the energy and enthusiasm from Livingstone’s first term, introducing new and radical policies and sometimes having to stand up for London against central Government interests. Many underestimated his ability to win an election and now the man they called the clown could surprise us all by showing he is able to govern.

While Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson have been slugging it out in community halls and talk radio stations all over London, another election is about to take place to elect 25 members of the London Assembly, a body that scrutinises the mayor. You’ll be forgiven if it hasn’t been the major talking point in your household. Precious few people have paid attention to who will represent them at a constituency level in the assembly. Yet assembly members (AMs) are supposed to have a key role in checking the power and performance of the mayor’s considerable budget and responsibilities. So why is no one taking any notice of them?

The assembly’s primary role is to scrutinise the activities of the elected mayor of London, a role that to be fair it has performed adequately since its inception. By and large, AMs are pretty dedicated and hard working politicians. Whether they deliver value for money is more questionable. Any mayoral system should certainly have an element of scrutiny, but does London really need to employ 25 full-time politicians to fulfill this role?

Being an assembly member shouldn’t be a full-time job. Indeed some members combine it with the role of Member of Parliament. Other than voting on the mayor’s budget and scrutinising his various strategies, much of the assembly’s time is spent investigating issues affecting London - some important, such as the inquiry into the 7/7 attacks, and some more superfluous, such as “The impact of the droit de suite on London’s art market”. This work could easily be performed by a cross-party regional select committee of London MPs.

So if the assembly’s scrutinising role were removed, who would monitor the work of the mayor? I believe that this role would be best served by the 32 elected borough leaders in Greater London. They already offer highly visible leadership and are directly accountable to their local population. Furthermore, through day to day interaction with their local communities, they would be best placed to offer first-hand guidance on the views and aspirations of ordinary Londoners.

At the New Local Government Network, we want to establish a London Leaders’ Council (LLC) of all elected council leaders in London, whose sole role would be to approve the mayor’s budget, to review his strategic plans and documents and to question the mayor, his staff and organisations under his control - namely Transport for London, the London Development Agency, the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority and the Metropolitan Police Authority.

Outer London boroughs often complain that they are overlooked in favour of inner London, which is geographically and politically closer to the current mayor. To prevent this happening, the mayor’s budget could only be passed by the LLC if a clear majority of councils from both inner and outer London endorsed it. This would ensure that any mayor would have to take into account the interests of all areas of London and liaise with all London leaders, regardless of political denomination.

Would this lead to political posturing between council leaders and the mayor? Perhaps, but it would then be up to them to explain to their electorate why they had chosen short-time political gain above agreeing a budget that is right for London.

One advantage of this new system would be that it would be much cheaper to run than the current assembly. Some £6.6m could be saved and either handed back to council taxpayers or used to pay for more than 150 additional police on London transport, or to help the 6,000 homeless people in London to get a place of their own.

By May 2, there is a reasonable chance that the city could be governed by a Conservative mayor and a majority Conservative assembly. Given this possibility, plus the fact that the mayoral election campaign has been dominated by debate over Ken Livingstone’s power and accountability, now is the right time to address how he should be scrutinised.

London’s borough leaders are ready to step up to the plate and offer constructive scrutiny and effective oversight. By bringing them together with the mayor, local people will feel closer to their elected representatives and more able to influence them. Better governance may not be the most scintillating issue in London at the moment, but it remains one of its most pressing.

Stuart Weir’s piece in this column (The iron rule of the central executive, Apr 12 2008) rightly argued that a local government ruled through central dictat will not drive interest in local democracy. Nor will it produce the innovative, personalised services that 21st Century citizens deserve.

Few people would disagree that local democracy is in need of revival, but part of this process must be for councils themselves to try new things. The combination of central controls, local democratic deficit and deep-rooted risk adversity can make ambitious or innovative local action hazardous. But without it, how will they prove they have what it takes to reignite local democracy or to sustain vibrant local communities?

There are some grounds for optimism. I was intrigued to see the comment posted beneath Stuart’s article, “local authorities will have to give that door a bloody hard push if [the concordat] is to lead to anything worthwhile.” It is strong local leaders, ambitious Chief Executives and creative local authority staff, together with local residents, that will make this happen.

Local authorities to grasp the opportunities now available to them. Across subjects as varied as climate change, housing, migration and waste management, we have consistently argued for bolder local decision-making. We believe that strong elected Mayors have already improved outcomes for communities on the ground, though the combination of strong political vision and effective executive drive can be found in councils of all types, political persuasion and location. Now these leaders – and the LGA – can push for more.

LAAs have started the ball rolling and Ministers are already fighting for the ear of councils in order to get their own national priorities on the local agenda. More and more councils are going to the Government with ambitious, well-worked, locally supported plans for their area. Progress may be slow and frustrating but councils must push harder, not be disheartened. The pressure will start to show. As Government deadlines creep nearer it will get harder and harder for Ministers to say no. For once, the media might even fall in behind local authorities, increasing the pressure on central Government to explain why their own plans are preferable to those of local people?

Local authorities can take the policy initiative away from Whitehall and prove that locally devised ideas can make a difference nationally. The best councils are already doing just this, not waiting for national guidelines but working out how national rules can be stretched to support local action. With a fragmented national politics, and a shortage of original policy ideas in Whitehall, councils can fill the policy void. At the danger of alienating Conservative councils around the country, local authorities have nothing to lose but their chains.

Timing the London mayoral elections to coincide with the local council elections taking place throughout the country on May 1 has thrown these contests into sharp relief.

On the one hand, there’s a high-profile media frenzy in London. Few cannot be aware they should be at their local polling station on that day to vote for a candidate they know on first name terms.

On the other hand, you have a contest where turnout may be just one in three people, where few know what the results of the elections are, the names of those they elect, or what they are there to do.

Obviously the election for London’s mayor will always get the big headlines - it’s our capital city, the heart of the nation’s economy and home to 11 million people. The candidates are big personalities, and the media all too often struggles to look outside the M25 in any case.

But there is no doubt these elections have captured the public imagination and those of us who are passionate about reinvigorating local democracy should look to what we can learn from this.

Firstly, we have seen from our existing elected mayors around the country that there is a clarity of accountability with the mayoral structure that resonates with the public. There can be no doubt the complexities of local government structures turn some people off. With a mayor, they have a clear figurehead and know who to blame if things go wrong. The public can see how their vote matters in an era when reality TV sets a high bar for instant, gratifying voting procedure.

Mayors also have greater recognition among the public. Polling carried out in 2003 revealed that on average, elected mayors were known to 57% of local people (73% in north-east England where there were three Mayors), more than double the proportion of a council leader.

Mayoral contests also seem to escape some of the disillusionment with traditional party politics. There is no doubt that many fear for the relevance of party politics today, at a time when people are members of individual pressure groups, vote on specific issues and remain highly committed to particular causes, yet are less bound to a political party by traditional ideological dividing lines or family loyalties. Four out of 13 elected mayors are independent and the question must be asked whether Ken’s recent video, where he confessed his proudest moment was “smashing the Labour Party”, was not a deliberate attempt to disassociate himself from the national party once again, a tactic which had worked so well for him back in 2000.

There also appears to be a genuine interest in the policies of the candidates. While it has been claimed that mayoral elections mean too much focus on personalities, this is not necessarily the case in London. Let’s face it - if it were simply a beauty contest, neither would be running high. High profile debates and hustings have forced candidates to develop policies and proposals that stand up to scrutiny.

It’s not just democracy that benefits from the mayoral model. Better performance and citizen satisfaction have a proven link to stronger leadership powers in local government, particularly in the case of mayors, according to research from Professor Gerry Stoker.

An identifiable leader can draw citizens and other local stakeholders like business or public service providers into a shared vision for an area. Mayors can become a local figurehead or advocate for an area - moving away from the perception that council leaders are just responsible for running services.

And more executive power means a greater efficiency of decision-making which all too often can be slow and weighed down by political instability in divided cabinets.

Yet it would not be right to see mayors as the silver bullet for reviving local democracy - they do have some shortcomings. Naturally, there are some concerns about the direct election of an executive rather than Britain’s tradition of parliamentary democracy.

Many councillors feel their ability to hold the executive to account is diminished under this system, and accusations of cronyism could yet prove to be a decisive factor in London. Moreover, it requires a two-thirds majority to overturn a mayoral policy or proposal, giving them substantial autonomy.

And there are issues of geography - London is a very clear centre, whereas people living in Trafford or Stockport might not see themselves as part of Greater Manchester in the same way that people in outer London still regard themselves as being part of the capital.

Yet this is an important opportunity for debate. Local democracy works best when it has clear vision, clear leadership, accountability and transparency. We know the current government is keen on mayors and if we want Whitehall to divest itself of more power, we need to think about the best models for local government.

Current communities secretary Hazel Blears has been a stronger advocate for elected mayors that her predecessor, whilst David Cameron is also fan. Can we therefore expect a wave of Kens and Borises all over the country?

Now is the time to be bold in local leadership. More elected mayors may just prove to be a winning solution.

What skills will tomorrow’s council chief executives require to face the vast policy operational challenges of running a modern local authority? With some two million council staff now representing the largest sector of the UK’s workforce and with ever greater demands being made on local public services across the country, a failure to forecast local authority workforce requirements would be a fundamental abandonment of sound management.

Local government is facing two critical challenges. The first is an ageing workforce, with a third of local government’s staff due to retire in the next ten years. This demographic trend is particularly acute within the senior management teams of many local authorities with some due to lose over half their top team to retirement over the next five to ten years. At the same time, local authorities do not have the young talent to step up to fill their boots; the proportion of those under 25 is 7% compared to 15% in the wider economy. An increasingly competitive market-place for skills, coupled with restrictions on salaries tightened by the ongoing efficiency agenda, means the strain on the talent pool is growing.

The second challenge centres on how local authorities should respond to the rapidly changing environment within which they function. It is more important than ever for councils to think ahead and secure the type of managerial leaders able to face the new demands of partnership working, of community leadership, of delivering services through networks and of rising citizen expectation.

A new NLGN report this month reveals a catalogue of complex organisational problems which must be tackled before the local government family can significantly address these challenges head on.

We argue that the starting point must be to recognise the types of skills and competencies needed. Our research shows that in the new working environment the premium will not be on traditional professional qualifications but instead on more generic management competencies. Management skills for service delivery include deal-making, negotiating and partnership working. But managers also need underlying competencies, such as political acumen, the ability to manage ambiguity and risk, and to lead through influence. There is a new emphasis on networks, on partnerships, on delivering outcomes and on cross-sector participation, which demand joined-up services across the local area.

Traditional departmental approaches and career routes cannot provide the answers to questions posed in this new context. New organisational competences necessitate a fresh emphasis on cross-sector working and a move away from professional service-led working practices to outward-looking broader management competences.

Defining the talent needed is difficult enough. Securing and recruiting that talent is a hurdle that local government is currently failing to surmount. Our research identifies critical obstacles at each stage of the HR process - recruiting, selecting, development and succession planning - and we recommend several radical reforms.

Currently local government is struggling to bring in talent, not only at the senior level, but also at the graduate level. Comparative to its size as a sector, its position in The Times Top 100 Careers List at number 40 reveals the distance from where it must be to ensure that it has the profile to tap into the best young talent. Sadly, our focus group research of final year university students reveals an overwhelmingly negative impression of what working in local government is expected to be like: staid, comfortable, stagnant, dull, white, middle-class, male and slow. This is not just a historical accident and it is not one that can be dodged or blamed on external factors. To a large degree it is a problem of local government’s making, stemming from the failure to market jobs to the right audience in the right way. While much of the working population would look with envy on the local government pension package, the majority of job adverts fail to mention this draw to potential recruits. Even fewer ads mentioned career development opportunities or training.

The false divisions between civil service and other public sector jobs is hampering talent recruitment. A nationwide ‘Governing Britain Fast Track Scheme’ should be set up to bring the best of all the fresh potential to shape public service across the country, not only from local government, but from the civil service, police and health. This would have myriad benefits including raising the profile of local government employment, and ensuring a rounded skills-set and breadth of experience for future managers.

How to select from this enlarged pool is the next test. Local government ignores some of the best talent. There remains a lingering reluctance to bring in talent from outside local government and the public sector. Yet this is precisely the diverse talent that local authorities need. By their advertising mechanisms such as over-reliance on the trade press and specific publications and other restricting criteria they discriminate against those from the private sector. Instead, there should be a presumption that all adverts are open explicitly to non-local government candidates.

Bringing in talent is only part of the challenge. What happens to it thereafter is of equal significance. Our research has found that young managers are unlikely to remain within local government if culture and organisational structures remain unchanged. Those on council graduate schemes spoke of their organisations as ‘staid’, as ‘a painful machine’ and that career progressions felt like a ‘lottery’. Underlying this are serious flaws in driving performance, with excessive departmental ‘siloism’. Too many councils do not have systems to understand who the most talented are; the majority reward and promote simply on the basis that someone has been in post for a certain number of years. These approaches contribute to stagnation and hinder the progression of the best employees.

There must be a new concept of fairness that rewards those who work excellently and who deliver solutions for citizens. This means fewer and broader pay bands; performance-related pay and promotion based on robust appraisals and competency frameworks; and fixed term contracts for managers.

However, a new overarching approach is needed. The unique structure of local government, which sees over 450 organisations competing for the same talent, means that individuals are always likely to seek opportunities in different authorities. If a council invests in good training and development, the beneficiary may leave to work in another council elsewhere. So in this context, how can we ensure that they remain incentivised to invest? We recommend that a transfer fee system should be considered – perhaps facilitated by the Local Government Association - where the new employer should pay a fee to the old employer. This should be calculated on the basis of the costs of investment in training in the individual, with a cap of 5% of salary. Other parts of the public sector could be encouraged to join the scheme too.

The final piece of the jigsaw is ensuring that councils plan for the future: both within their organisations and across their local public area. Different training and practical experience is needed to provide the next generation with political acumen and innovative leadership skills. Together these recommendations offer a means to bring in and develop the leaders of tomorrow. Ensuring that the most talented individuals are snapped up by the local public sector and then given new skills to meet the needs of residents is a fundamental duty all councils must put at the top of their agenda.

Subtly and without great fanfare there are changes afoot in the Government’s approach to public service reform. Alastair Darling’s first Budget speech did not dwell on the details but the associated Red Book papers outlined a quickening of pace towards the goals of value for money and policy creativity. The Prime Minister is clearly in the lead asserting what he characterises as a “third act” in public sector reform, building on the initial investment injected a decade ago, and on the focus on standards and performance in recent years. Now Brown and Darling are determined to press ahead with the diversification of service providers in order to ensure both competitive dynamics and choice for consumers. Some may have expected that the rhetoric of the Blair years would not be enacted so enthusiastically following a change in Prime Minister – but it appears that this is far from the case. The PM is keener than anyone to built-in alternative providers to challenge under-performance, to develop further the personalised budgeting that service users have at their disposal, and even expand further previously controversial devices such as the Academies programme as the best route to quality improvement.

Not only is the Government determined to employ the private sector more rigorously – especially in the delivery of technical fixes and imbuing cost disciplines in back-office services (more of which we are told to expect in next year’s 2009 Budget) – but the drive to involve the third sector is also exceptionally strong. Whether the diverse and varied nature of charities and community groups can fit within a flexible and understanding commissioning regime still remains to be seen, but there is relentless commitment at the top of HM Government to ensuring that a broad coalition of service providers becomes the norm.

While the investment priorities for Government have been clear now for some time – schools, health, crime, transport – it is interesting to see the emergence of a ‘Public Value Programme’ intended to design incentives for further value for money. The road building programme, regeneration expenditure and IT projects are all in line for closer scrutiny to ensure that they are truly delivering every bang for each buck. We are also in the early stages of a new approach to health service commissioning, led especially at PCT level, which should in theory provide challenge in every area to the usual assumptions about spending priorities.

Housing policy is a particularly sensitive area where massive efforts to counteract the external economic climate are being made by the Treasury and CLG. On both issues of new supply of units and affordability, the noise of frantic policy-makers is ever louder and we can expect novel interventions both in terms of housing finance and land use planning over the coming months.

In pure financial terms the Spending Review of 2007 set out very tightly defined limits which have forced all public bodies to dig deep, especially on the efficiency agenda. The figures are reasonably impressive (£30 billion due to be saved over the CSR07 period) but the thorny decisions on asset disposals and head office relocations are still not being taken quickly enough.

Yet despite the insistence on reform from the top of Government, is it the case that these enthusiasms are percolating into all levels of the public realm? And where does local leadership and devolved decision-making fit into this picture? We are told that this new era of public services is one where the needs of each individual will be attended to more carefully, with tailored services and one-to-one support wherever possible. Such attention to the needs of the customer is obviously laudible, but it can also be expensive and incredibly difficult to dictate from the centre. Delegating the details down to the frontline is surely long overdue, but there remains too much reluctance to trust local leadership and local democracy to make the necessary tough choices. It is certainly good news that CLG are planning an ‘empowerment white paper’ for the summer to propose new ways of involving citizens in service choices and delivery. But there is a big difference between ‘consultation’ and letting neighbourhoods choose their own destinies, especially if they vary from the national script.

The Government needs to balance careful on the tightrope between driving its own version of public service reform while simultaneously getting the most from frontline experts, trusting their judgement and allowing them to innovate. Governments quite legitimately set parameters and overarching strategies, but they must be careful to nurture and not smother the eager public service worker keen to do the right thing. We do not want more years of frontline staff waiting for permission or guidance from the centre before taking their own initiative. Government needs to encourage risk and recognise that efficiency is only one side of good management – and that creativity is still insufficiently exploited as part of our public service reform programme.

Is it fair that two London boroughs with a population of 240,000 have more influence on the boards of this country’s quangos than the entire county of Yorkshire (population 5.1million)? You may not realise it, but power and decision-making in the UK isn’t only exercised through the House of Commons or House of Lords, but daily through non-elected “public bodies” constituted as arms-length agencies of Government, with appointees overseeing £123 billion of taxpayer’s money. These “quangos” – shorthand for ‘quasi-non-governmental organisations’ – spend roughly the same amount of public money as elected local authorities, but operate under far less scrutiny, despite being ultimately accountable to Ministers. Government departments have set up thousands of quangos in the past two decades, started in part by the Thatcher administration as a first step towards outsourcing large chunks of the public sector. Some were eventually privatised, but many others continue to operate as nominally independent bodies reliant on taxpayer funding, for instance, the Arts Council, Sport England, the BBC, the Environment Agency.

In order to shed some light on where power is held in Britain today, the New Local Government Network decided to conduct a survey of the primary residential addresses of over 1000 board members with seats on the country’s largest quangos. We wanted to see if all corners of the nation were fairly represented in these public bodies, or if these appointments had a bias in a particular direction. It took some time to persuade these quangos to reveal simply which local authority area their board members lived in – some using the excuse of privacy or data protection to keep this basic information private.

The results are startling, but perhaps confirm what many feel to be true; that power is centralised and gravitates around the capital city, and London dominates almost every decision-making forum in Britain today. The four London boroughs of Westminster, Camden, Islington and Kensington & Chelsea together have more clout than the entire north of England. Greater London residents account for 36% of seats on public bodies, despite representing only 14.8% of the population. Yorkshire’s residents hold only 6% of seats on our quangos, despite representing 10% of the population.

Worse still, there are whole parts of the country where it appears no-one is deemed worthy to appoint to any national public body. Bradford and East Yorkshire barely register on the national quangocrat lists and we couldn’t find a single resident from Hull sitting on a quango with England-wide responsibility! There is an important principle at stake here, the principle of fairness and the basic democratic concept that everyone is of equal worth regardless of where they live or where they come from. But more than this, it is a sign of poor management if the issues affecting service users in whole swathes of the country are not heard or aired because no-one is there to speak up for them. Making sure that we are governed well must surely involve sharing power evenly across the country. If the people chosen to make decisions are skewed towards one part of England and away from another, who is to say that the actual decisions themselves are not also skewed?

It cannot be the case that there is nobody of sufficient merit living in these unrepresented parts of the country. So how else are these quango ‘deserts’ explained? The appointment process to the boards of public bodies is too hidden and obscure, and too often it is only those already ‘in-the-know’ who navigate the system. All vacancies should be opened up to public view, with better advertising and perhaps even an invitation to elected representatives in the regions to proactively nominate people from their area. Eventually, many of the quangos should be democratised and integrated into democratically elected local authorities. In the meantime, Government should monitor the ‘national diversity’ of the appointments it is making and it should publish each Minister’s performance in filling posts from broader backgrounds. We should insist that more of the headquarters of quangos are relocated out of the capital and in the regions, which in turn would prompt greater diversity in their work and governance. And when vacancies are advertised they should explicitly state that applicants from outside the south east would be especially welcomed!

This is the first year since 2003 that local government has not been waiting for Whitehall to deliver the next big step in devolution. Last year we waited for the final Lyons report. In 2006 we waited for the Local Government White Paper. In 2005 it was Lyons again. In 2004 the Balance of Funding Review was to solve the problems of a centralised state.

We are still waiting. But that is not because of a lack of progress, instead it reflects the way that the political initiative has moved from Whitehall to town halls across England. Changes such as the new local area agreements create the opportunity for councils to address issues far beyond their statutory duties.

The supplementary business rate (SBR) and the multiple area agreement (MAA) regime, that follow the Treasury’s review of sub-national economic growth provide a platform on which local government can prove that they are best placed to deliver stronger economies based on more than “trickle down” from London.

Of course, central government’s initiatives do not all point in the same direction. There are reasons to be concerned that the new performance framework will have too much of the micro-management style that typified CPA specifically and Whitehall controls generally.

Ministers have created more financial incentives for councils, including SBR and the replacement of Planning Gain Supplement with a “roof tariff” style planning charge. But the complex LABGI grant incentive has been cut.

Ministers have agreed warm words in a Concordat between central and local government, but as yet there is little sign that the proposed Constitutional Reform Bill will enhance local government powers.

At the same time the legislative programme includes a range of bills that are directly relevant to local government, but do not propose major increases in its powers. The Planning Bill and the Housing Bill are just two examples where Ministers will have to choose whether they believe that their national promises are best delivered through more top down targetry, or through a devolved approach that allows local politicians to tailor national policies to fit local circumstances.

In the pre-2008 culture these would all be indications that Whitehall was back peddling on its promise of devolution. In fact something far more hopeful is happening. Constrained by tighter finances in the Comprehensive Spending Review and by the increased political risk of error in the face of reviving opposition parties, national politics has become more fragile. The result is less confidence at national level to deliver in practise what is believed in theory.

That is the opportunity for local government; ambition is the way to seize it. In the hands of the best in local government, the partial reforms that have been delivered provide enough leverage with which to demonstrate new local solutions to national policy dilemmas. That in turn provides a platform upon which to build public support for further devolution. That devolution can be given substance by pressing to amend the government’s current programme.

For example national government is seeking to close the gap in regional economic growth rates. It is relying on local government to deliver solutions, possibly through MAAs. Councils that build robust strategies with vocal local support will be well placed to push for the Planning Reform Bill to provide a fast track for those plans.

On worklessness national government’s desire to help the long term unemployed back into work cannot succeed without joining up government at local level. Kent’s Supporting Independence Programme and Southwark Works show how local government is ahead of national. Might this be the basis on which to push for new financial incentives delivering more public service, within tighter budgets, through devolution?

In different communities there will be different priorities. In every community this is the year in which local government should be using the partial reforms of the recent past to seize the initiative.

Real autonomy comes when we no longer wait for Whitehall to give us permission to act. The politics of 2008 should not be about left and right, but about central and local. To convert hope into reality local leaders must not ask which Whitehall initiative we are waiting for, but instead ask: “How big is our ambition?”

For ten years government has increased spending on public services while the civil service has delivered reforms to management and accountability. s a result public expectations have been transformed. As NLGN explain in Changing Whitehall’s DNA government cannot meet these higher expectations unless the culture and working assumptions of the central civil service are transformed.

It is no longer enough to provide basic services at a reasonable cost. People want services designed to fit in with their lives; they want them delivered in a way that empowers, involves and respects the user.

To achieve this government has to join up at local level where people actually use public services. Intellectually public servants in local and central government know this. Most of the five year plans produced by the civil service before during 2005 promised joined up services through devolution to local government. Yet progress is too slow.

This is not due to any lack of talent. It is the result of internal dynamics and culture programming the civil service to work in a particular way. At the heart of government the pressure is always to look upward to Ministers immediate wants, not outwards to the citizens that Ministers want to impress; policies are designed to fit departments more than people or projects; the culture respects the quality of disinterested advice more than successful delivery.

The symptoms of this programming are most visible in the scale of national performance frameworks designed by departments. Letting go is just too hard to do at the pace required by public demands. So for instance, in the year that targets on local government are to be cut from 1200 to 200, councils will actually see an increase in the target burden to handle the “transition” to devolved working.

Yet responding to micro-management by calling for civil service reform is a strategy with a disappointing pedigree. The present government has made several attempts.

Modernising Government was one of Labour’s first initiatives. Intended to transform the heart of government, the focus soon moved to the frontline. With a new Cabinet Secretary in 2002 so came a new plan for change. Reform & Delivery was to produce stronger links with the rest of the public sector. In 2004 Delivery & Values was the label on a further package of civil service reforms. During this period the Tony Blair also tried to shape the management of government by creating a range of high profile ‘Units’ including the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and the Social Exclusion Unit.

With the arrival of Sir Gus O’Donnell, Departmental Capability Reviews came closer to using the external challenge which has helped other public services to improve. They revealed a senior civil service that is more comfortable with strategy than delivery.

What is needed is an approach that swiftly changes the environment in which civil servants operate making is possible for them to use their talents to work with the grain of the wider public service reforms that citizens expect. It turns out that the Public Service Agreement (PSA) system may offer that chance.

PSAs were created by Gordon Brown as Chancellor in the first Comprehensive Spending Review. There were 600. They were designed to fit Whitehall Departments. Almost 90% were process or output targets, reinforcing micro-management. A decade of refinement has cut these to 30 built around people or projects, so breaking the link to departments and focussing on delivery rather than micro-management.

Today the PSA regime is too weak to survive Whitehall’s traditional culture. Yet if nurtured it could spread throughout Whitehall changing the pressures on civil service careers and so changing Whitehall’s DNA.

Public Scrutiny and external challenge can build on the new PSAs to drive cultural change and so deliver where past reforms have failed. NLGN have recommended increased scrutiny through Parliamentary Question Times for each PSA; holding Ministers to account for delivery on projects instead of activity within departments. Select Committees and the Liaison Committee, comprised of Chairmen of Select Committees, should scrutinise PSA progress annually. Parliament should hold annual debates on PSA progress led by the Prime Minister.

Public scrutiny increases the political pressure on Ministers to put delivery ahead of activity. A new focus for Ministers’ will reinforce the civil service accountability for outcomes. More can be done. In 2007 Gordon Brown created a new civil service post, the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO), personally charged with delivering each PSA. NLGN propose that SROs should be given a duty, like that of the Principal Accounting Officer, to report annually, irrespective of Ministerial opinion, with their judgement of whether the civil service has done everything possible to maximise PSA progress.

Using PSAs it is possible to distinguish between issues where the government has promised national common standards and those where people expect local choice. External challenge on both local government and Whitehall can be increased by using PSAs and local area agreements (LAAs) to cut back the jungle of national controls.

As councils develop LAAs any proposal to change, or delete, national performance targets for councils, or their public sector partners, should be automatically approved where three conditions have been met. Councils should have local public support; support from the leaders of the local arms of relevant national public services and their proposals must be consistent with relevant PSAs.

There will be genuine disagreements as to whether these conditions are met. This is an opportunity to accelerate improvement in both local and central government through external challenge. Disputes should be referred to the relevant Select Committee of the House of Commons for final arbitration. The National Audit Office and the Audit Commission should offer technical support to these Select Committees.

These reforms support Capability Reviews by replacing checklists of activity with measures of progress that citizens can see. But they will do something more lasting. By changing the pressures on civil service careers they change Whitehall’s DNA, equipping it for the next stage of public service improvement.

A decade of reform and growth in public services has transformed public expectations. Basic services delivered in silos are no longer enough, people expect solutions designed to fit their lives; they want to feel empowered, not managed. Whitehall is now the major barrier to these aspirations.

The problem is not a lack of talent, but the internal dynamics and culture programming the civil service to work in a particular way. It is like a genetic code, or DNA. The larger and more complex the organisation, the harder it is for leaders to make it deliver policies that conflict with this DNA.

Civil service DNA points upward to Ministers, not outwards to people; defines policies around departmental silos instead of people or projects; gives disinterested advice, rather than being accountable for success.

As NLGN explain in Changing Whitehall’s DNA, there is now an opportunity to reform without diverting energy from the public’s concerns and so being punished at the ballot box. Public Service Agreements (PSAs), created by Chancellor Brown, are like a fragment of DNA that once implanted could spread reform throughout Whitehall.

Since 1997 Gordon Brown has refined PSA targets, cutting them from 600 to 30. The early targets were silo based built to fit Whitehall fiefdoms. Almost 90% were process targets allowing Whitehall to micro-manage local delivery. With the second Comprehensive Spending Review in 2007 all 30 PSAs were designed around people and projects, breaking the link to Whitehall departments. They also reflect what we know of Gordon Brown’s vision for Britain.

Brown has given named Cabinet Ministers responsibility for delivering each PSA. He has created a new civil service role, the Senior Responsible Officer (SRO), charged with implementing Ministers’ decisions on PSA delivery. Both roles cut across Whitehall silos. To handle the inevitable departmental turf wars, Brown reformed the Cabinet Committee system last year, aligning committees with PSAs and making Cabinet Ministers who chair them accountable for “resolving inter-departmental disputes”.

These reforms can change Whitehall’s DNA by changing the pressures shaping civil service careers. Success can now be measured against projects instead of departmental status. As a result accountability for delivery is increased, but the need to deliver directly is reduced. Reform will reward civil servants who deliver by devolving; it will reward effective strategies over ‘big government’ strategies; it will reward consistent progress over newsworthy initiatives.
Of course Ministers also want bigger budgets and constant initiatives. The Prime Minister’s reform of Ministerial accountabilities has the potential to re-direct that instinct. Cabinet Ministers’ accountability for PSA delivery and Cabinet Committee Chairs’ duty to resolve turf wars creates a new way to measure political success; where delivery counts more than activity.
New rules for civil servants and Ministers connect new ways of managing Whitehall to new ways of managing politics within the heart of government.

But these reforms are fragile and without nurturing they will not last. The old Whitehall organism will reject this fragment of DNA, downgrading and delaying PSA targets when they trigger hard choices. That temptation must be made more costly. If the new programming is to spread through the body politic it must be incubated with the light of public scrutiny and accountability.
New roles for Parliament and local government can lock in the new way of working. The forthcoming Constitution Reform Bill is the chance to ensure that the new organisational culture takes root.

Ministerial accountability for delivering projects can be raised through introduction of Parliamentary Question Times for each PSA target. Ministers should be required to report annually to Parliament on the PSAs for which they are responsible. Select Committees should assess PSA progress made by Ministers and SROs. Parliament should hold an annual debate on PSA progress led by the Prime Minister.

The role of the SRO should be strengthened gaining the same duties as the Principal Accounting Officer (PAO). Uniquely amongst civil servants the PAO must report to the National Audit Office (NAO) on the proper use of public funds, irrespective of the views of Ministers. SROs should report to the NAO annually with their personal judgement on whether Whitehall has done all it can to maximise delivery. Select Committees in Parliament should regularly scrutinise the work of SROs.

These changes will drive reform from the top, changing the culture of Whitehall to encourage delivery and discourage departmental silos. A bottom up approach is also needed and the new local area agreements (LAAs) can deliver it.
The cross-cutting goals of PSAs come together in tangible services at a local level. It is here that silo based national targets and micro-management do most harm. Using PSAs it is possible to distinguish between issues where the government has promised national common standards and those where people expect local choice.

In future as councils develop LAAs any proposal to change, or delete, national performance targets for councils, or their public sector partners, should be automatically approved where pre-stated conditions have been met. Councils must demonstrate local public support; they must have support from leaders of the local arms of relevant national public services and their proposals must be consistent with relevant PSAs.

Central and local officials will have genuine disagreements as to whether these conditions are met. This is an opportunity to accelerate improvement in both local and central government through external challenge; the mechanism that Whitehall has applied so well to other public services.

Parliament is the natural site for external challenge. Disagreements should be referred to the relevant Select Committee of the House of Commons for final arbitration. The National Audit Office and the Audit Commission should be given a new duty to offer technical support to these Select Committees.

Because Britain is a centralised state these reforms can be delivered swiftly without diverting government from its immediate priorities. Public scrutiny and external challenge will consolidate the delivery and people focus of the PSA regime, so spreading the new DNA throughout Whitehall.

However, the lasting benefits of Whitehall reform take time to become visible in people’s services. Without early political gains this opportunity may not be seized. For Gordon Brown changing Whitehall’s DNA delivers three quick political wins.

The Prime Minister’s vision is now a political issue. Yet close reading of Brown’s PSAs offer both an analysis and a response to the challenges of globalisation and the knowledge economy. Highlighting them through Parliamentary scrutiny could showcase the clarity of Brown’s vision for Britain.

Political opponents claim that Brown is a centraliser, yet his most thoughtful speeches on the state suggest the opposite. He argues that “command and control …is not the way forward” and the state must be “devolving further and faster to local government”. Extending PSAs to drive devolution will show that his words were the prelude to action.

Most importantly, changing Whitehall’s DNA can also deliver David Cameron’s emerging vision of “post bureaucratic” government and localism. If Brown does not build on his PSA reforms he may find that Cameron makes them his own, giving substance to the Conservative promise of a different vision for Britain.