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A three-star accolade wasn't the only thing to stem from the 22 councils judged as "excellent" in the comprehensive performance assessment at the end of last year. Better, perhaps, was the chance to experiment with the accompanying new freedoms and flexibilities granted by the government.

To garner this into a co-ordinated work programme, the Local Government Association and the government came up with the idea of an innovation forum to develop, explore and test new ways of working. The forum held its first meeting in May and expects to meet every four months or so - the next one will be in October.


Phil Swann, LGA director of strategy and communication, says: "The idea emerged out of discussions we had with the government this time last year when comprehensive performance assessment was being proposed. We wanted those excellent authorities to have a chance to develop genuinely new radical ways of doing things."

Initially, the authorities identified four themes that would improve the quality of services locally: public service integration, school improvement, community safety, and care of older people.

"These are four challenging areas of public policy where there's a need for everyone to do better," says Swann.

There is one lead local authority for each theme and the remaining 18 councils will sign up to at least one to help develop a programme of action that will be carried out in their areas.

"Some things won't work and we need to be grown up about that," says Swann. But where they do, he says, the government is committed to making these freedoms available more widely as a tool for improvement rather than a reward for success. "If what the forum does is shown to work, the government is prepared to extend it - so it's not an exclusive club."

Care of older people

The most radical idea is being explored by Kent Council. It proposes to reduce hospital admissions and delayed discharges of older people by commissioning health and social care services for older people from a single point - led, crucially, by social services rather than health. Services included within this single commissioning point would be: acute care, intermediate care, community hospitals, residential care, nursing home care, housing support, occupational therapy and domiciliary and day care.

The NHS, Department of Health and the Treasury are considering the proposition. When Kent and the other authorities that sign up to the proposal have the go-ahead - hoped to be by the next forum meeting - they will start a pilot.

Episodes of acute care in a continuing care bed in hospital are much more expensive than community care packages and preventive services, says Sandy Bruce-Lockhart, leader of Kent Council. The cost of keeping someone in a continuing care bed in hospital can be as much as £1,500 a week, compared with about half that in an intermediate care home, and even less if they are cared for in their own home. The proposal aims to save money by diverting investment towards more cost efficient preventive services, intermediate care, community care and treatment in primary care settings, rather than in hospital.

"We are trying to work hard on the admissions side while the government has been looking hard at the discharge side and coming up with fines," says Bruce-Lockhart. "That's because they are looking at hospital capacity, but the most important thing isn't necessarily the speed you take people out but the number of admissions that go into hospital in the first place.

"It will be in our interest to speed people through or prevent them going into hospital in the first place, giving us more money for preventive care."

The proposal includes plans for local authorities and participating primary care trusts to receive financial benefits for each acute hospital admission that is avoided - money they will be able to reinvest in alternative services.

There are wider issues in that preventive services, earlier intervention and rehabilitation require partnership working beyond that of health and social care services. To be successful it needs the whole spectrum of local public services, including transport, police, fire, housing, leisure and benefits, and the idea is that local government is well placed to make this happen.

The benefits to older people will be that services will put their needs first rather than those of commissioners and providers. Ultimately, it should ensure that older people can live more independently for longer and enjoy a better quality of life.

Creating safer communities

The London Borough of Camden is the lead authority for the community safety theme, tackling drugs, antisocial behaviour, youth offending and street crime. The theme will look at information-sharing between agencies, the lack of financial incentives for local authorities to invest in early intervention community safety work, the involvement of young people in crime as victims and perpetrators, and ways to reduce fear of crime.

Dennis Skinner, Camden's assistant chief executive, says the main hindrance to successful community safety work is bureaucracy. He wants authorities to have more freedom to set local targets rather than having to concentrate on nationally driven targets and to be monitored less. He says: "Some of the monitoring requirements are ridiculous. For the community against drugs fund we had to send copies of every invoice, some for £10, to the government office for London. We spend too much time on monitoring and on monitors monitoring the monitoring, and not delivering.

"In the first four months of this year our drug action team had to produce 15 reports for various parts of government. We are tying up resources on filling in schedules."

Although early intervention schemes can be cost effective and local authorities are often best placed to deliver them, there is little financial incentive for councils to invest in them, he says. "They are long-term and if there are efficiency savings down the line it will probably be in another agency such as the courts. We want the government to look at ploughing the money back into the local authority."


Information sharing and data exchange about community safety issues between partners is often poor because of anxiety about data protection issues. "Why is it we find it a problem to share information? We need to create a culture of doing this," says Skinner.

So does he envisage these ideas coming to fruition? "Generally there's a feeling that it's probably easier to make some quick progress in this area than in some of the others. I can see the one pot of money and less monitoring requirements actually happening."

He is keen to ensure that there is some significant progress before the next innovation forum meeting. "Many of these things should be rolled out to all councils as quickly as possible. In some cases there may be a need to pilot some ideas but wherever it's feasible the additional freedoms and flexibilities shouldn't just be for 'excellent' authorities. If they make sense we should be pushing for them in all authorities."

The theme's proposals include:

- Setting up a single pot of money for community safety that is allocated over a three-year period rather than yearly. This should enable expenditure to be moved from one year to the next.

- Freedoms and flexibilities to be available to all agencies on the crime and disorder partnership, not just the "excellent" authority.

- Creation of an Invest to Prevent budget for "excellent" authorities.

School improvement and early years excellence

Blackburn with Darwen is leading on school improvement and early years excellence, and the 12 new children's centres planned are examples of the sort of proposals the forum is looking at.

Aimed at under-fives and their families, these centres will provide child care and support services, early years education, health services, family support services, all nursery school provision and adult learning. The first nine centres are due for completion by March 2004 and the rest are expected to be completed during 2004-5.

"It's bang in line with the government agenda for early years provision," says Peter Morgan, the council's director of education and lifelong learning and lead officer for the forum on this theme. "Early years is about having intervention at the earliest stage of a child's life and putting in the support from a variety of agencies so that we don't have to remedy the situation later.

"At the moment strategy is reactive, and it needs to be proactive."

There has been progress on the early years child care strategy nationally, but access and choice remain patchy for many families, particularly those from disadvantaged areas. The proposal is intended to allow councils to take a lead role in developing innovation through integrated children's centres.

"Stuck schools" will also be tackled within the school improvement remit. These schools are ones that fail to improve under existing strategies and pupil numbers drop as parents remove their children. Consequently, the schools end up taking on children who have been excluded or have difficulties. There is at least one stuck school in every local education authority and they tend to be in the most socially excluded communities, says Morgan.

Proposals include greater flexibilities around funding to enable "excellent" local education authorities to look at new ways to help stuck schools, as well as more collaborative work with other agencies including Ofsted, the Department for Education and Skills and the Learning and Skills Council, particularly over inspection.

Public service integration

The aim of this proposal, led by Sunderland Council, is ambitious: to develop the integration of a range of services so that local people have a choice about how, where and when they access them. At the lowest level this could involve "one-stop shops" for various services, but more ambitious plans could involve, according to the proposal document, "a new breed of services which would not be attributable to any one existing agency - not unlike the youth offending service".

To do this, several barriers that stand in the way of local solutions to problems need to be removed. Issues to be addressed include:

- Developing joint strategies relevant to local circumstances.

- Establishing a single set of key performance indicators, targets and defined outcomes serving all local and national requirements.

- The flexibility to share data and address confidentiality.

- Establishing joint budgets for services across public agencies.

This proposal has the potential to contribute to the seven shared priorities for improvement in key services agreed through the central local partnership, including: raising school standards, improving quality of life for young, old and families at risk, promoting healthier communities and building safer communities.