www.wiltshire.gov.uk
Wiltshire Local Area Agreement Newsletter - Issue 1
Welcome to this very first edition of the Wiltshire Local Area Agreement (LAA) Newsletter. The purpose of this newsletter will be to inform the wider community about the LAA and its progress. The aim is to keep it simple and easily readable in order to encourage the widest possible interest. For anyone requiring more detail please feel free to contact the author. There will be a Wiltshire LAA website in due course which will allow access to more background information and will chart the progress of the LAA.
Just what is an LAA?
For a comprehensive explanation try www.idea.gov.uk, however in simple terms an LAA is an agreement signed between central government and a Local Strategic Partnership (WiSB in our case) which will allow greater freedom in how local partners meet the needs of their communities. Such an agreement must recognize national priorities, but will also give much greater freedom to use resources in a manner that suits the local circumstances.
In practice a well negotiated LAA will allow us to pool resources around problems rather than organizations and departments and thus allow all sectors, including voluntary and business, to work closer together in achieving our joint aims.
A further benefit is that the LAA will focus on what it is we are actually trying to achieve – the outcome – and let us decide what indicators or targets are required to demonstrate progress towards achieving our outcomes. Not only does this give us the opportunity to slash the number of targets we have to report against, but it also allows us to develop our own targets based on our closer knowledge of local circumstances. This gives us the potential to reinvest time that had been spent measuring and reporting against numerous targets back into actually improving outcomes. Moreover, by developing our own targets we can ensure that they drive the activities that will actually generate the desired outcomes, rather than the perverse behaviour encouraged by some nationally set targets.
The opportunity to do things smarter
LAAs also offer an opportunity for us to challenge the rules that constrain how we do business. The government has promised that where we can produce a case as to how we could do things better then they will give serious consideration to relaxing centrally imposed rules, or allowing us to opt out. Indeed, there are numerous such rules currently being challenged by LAA partnerships that are in an earlier wave of this initiative. These requests for freedoms and flexibilities, as they are known, can be found on the IDeA website referenced above.
The real opportunity for us then, is to gather together all the people that are involved in delivering a particular service, whatever sector they may be from and ask the following questions:
- What is the actual outcome that we are trying to achieve?
- How would we work together and what would we do if we were starting from afresh and did not have to work within existing rules?
- Which rules need changing to allow our ‘ideal’ system to operate?
The challenge then is to put forward a well argued case to be able to change the rules to allow us to meet local circumstances in the way we know is best.
Next steps
It is very early days for the Wiltshire LAA. The plan is to have an agreement ready to be signed off late 2006 for implementation in Apr 2007. Our immediate aim, and the purpose of this newsletter, is to start a dialogue within the community on what we would like to see go into our LAA. So the message at this stage is to start to think about what our local priorities are, and where the freedoms offered by the LAA could make a real difference to how we meet the needs of our community.
This is the time to be talking to all those that have an influence in the delivery of the service that you have a stake in, and to the customers of the service. You should be asking the three questions listed above (and any others you can think of) to start coming up with some ideas of how we can exploit the opportunity offered by the LAA.
Hopefully by the time you start coming up with some ideas we will have started a process of going out to stakeholders to discuss ideas, and of setting up working groups to explore the key themes for the LAA. However, if you have a burning idea that you want to share then please do not hesitate to contact either of the people listed below.
Contact Details
By Post
David Bareham, Wiltshire LAA Project Manager
or
David Maynard, Wiltshire LAA Policy Development Manager
Chief Executive's Office
County Hall
Bythesea Road
Trowbridge
Wiltshire
BA14 8JF
By Email
By Telephone
Tel: 01225 713117 : David Bareham, Wiltshire LAA Project Manager
Tel: 01225 713118 : David Maynard, Wiltshire LAA Policy Development Manager
By Fax
01225 713092
Opening Hours
Monday to Friday 9am - 5pm
