It’s not often events run at 6pm on a Monday appeal enough to get you to give up your evening, but this week I attended (and enjoyed!) an evening run by London’s Regional Improvement Partnership (Capital Ambition) entitled “The Challenge of the Governance of London”.

Set up in early 2006, Capital Ambition is one of nine Regional Improvement Partnerships around the country with the remit of coordinating improvement work across London’s public sector, including the 33 London boroughs, London Councils, the Greater London Authority and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority.

No mean feat you might say. However, Capital Ambition and the bodies it supports have seen a number of successes in the last 2 years, with the majority of London’s councils now either said to be improving well or improving strongly according to their regulator the Audit Commission, while similarly London now has only one 1-star rated council (assessed on a 0-4 scale where 0 is poor and 4 is excellent).

Much of the work to date of Capital Ambition has been relatively targeted improvement activity, allocating resources to drive up performance in areas such as environmental or cultural services through efforts such as the Peer Support Scheme where officers from strongly performing authorities are seconded into less strong authorities for a period to support change and improvement.

But alongside these more tactical interventions and with one eye on the longer term future of London, Capital Ambition has commissioned the London Collaborative to undertake a major piece of research over the next 18 months to better understand the challenges the future is likely to bring. Led by the Young Foundation in partnership with Office for Public Management and Common Purpose, and with access to a wide range of other organisations and advisors (including LSE, UCL, Local Futures Group, Shared Intelligence, and Forum for the Future), the London Collaborative brings together an impressive cross-section of knowledge and expertise on London and organisational change. Interestingly the programme is also sponsored by the forward thinking BT, who obviously recognise the potential corporate social responsibility cred this programme will bring them.

So back to Monday night. As a one time member of the National Graduate Development Programme for Local Government (NGDP), I and others were invited to attend a session with the rather intimidating title of “The Challenge of the Governance of London” as part of the kick off work of the London Collaborative. Its aim was both to inform us about the research as stakeholders in the future of public services in London, glean our thoughts on the challenges facing London’s institutions and, on the more fun side, bring us together socially to network with one another with many of us no longer on the graduate scheme but instead in some relatively influential positions in and around London.

Speaking at the event were three of London’s current movers and shakers, John O’Brien (Chief Executive of London Councils), Nicola Bacon (Local Projects Director at the Young Foundation) and ex-NGDPer Amelia Cookson (now Head of the Centre for Service Transformation at the Local Government Information Unit). Asked to speak for just 5 minutes each (a challenge in itself), some of their main points included:

• London is a special case. Not only is it different from every other city in Britain but also every other ‘global city’ around the world. Its history, culture, built environment, people, economy all set it apart as unique
• London is a fundamentally dichotomous city with widespread tensions. Social tensions (more tolerant than almost any other city yet prime target for terrorist attacks), economic tensions (successful, dynamic economy bringing wealth on the one hand although a lack of affordable housing on the other), infrastructural tensions (global leader in the shift away from the car but a fragile public transport system that still creaks), environmental tensions (ambitious CO2 reduction plans and actions but sustainability still a distant hope) and political tensions (a stable and effective model of governance but one that has seen the emergence of right wing extremism into mainstream politics)
• But London has proven itself well able to adapt to the challenges placed before it in the past and is likely to continue to do so, with the long predicted collapse of London looks as unlikely as ever
• In this future, two significant challenges facing the public sector include the need for those bodies to work closer together to provide more joined up, customer friendly services to Londoners (the opportunity for London borough councils to take on the lead locally in the areas of policing and health is there), and the efficiency agenda (there is no more additional cash so the need to work together is not only good for the residents of London but an economic necessity)
• Futures thinking is not a precise science and should not viewed in that way. Major issues facing us today (climate change being the most stark example) were not even on the radar of futures thinkers at the turn of the millennium.
• However, the London Collaborative recognises this and instead will be taking a slightly different tack using futures scenarios predominantly as a catalysts for organisational development, a way of getting key people together to think about institutional responses to challenges rather than focus on predicting the nature of change itself per se.
• Emerging findings from the research identifies three key characteristics that are central to both London as a city but also, more importantly for this project at least, the ability of London’s public sector being able to cope with the future: Resilience (managing change and trauma), Collaboration (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts), and Dynamism (agile government in an rapidly changing context)

I’ll finish just by sharing my views on what I heard on Monday night in terms of the challenges facing public services in London over the next 10-20 years:

• My challenge to London’s public sector would be to try and take this opportunity to think radically. After 10 years of a New Labour Government, conceiving and implementing bureaucratic reform is now the bread and butter of the government official, but rarely has this reform ever truly gone beyond the traditional ‘fiddling at the edges’ organisational restructuring. And this is at a time when the world all around government has changed faster than at any time previously, becoming more dynamic, networked and interconnected (the world of Wikinomics in essence). In this context, government bureaucracy looks more dated than ever, set back in an industrial model of organisation having been left behind by both post-industrial and now networked society. It is time for government to catch up and truly move beyond hierarchy and towards a networked bureaucracy, and where better than to make it a reality in the dynamic global leading edge city of London.My greatest fear (expectation in fact) is that many of those in the room on Monday night, the future guardians of London’s public services, fail to take the bull by the horns and may this a reality. Unfortunately it remains most likely that by choosing to perpetuate the current creaking system and emulate the behaviours of those who have gone before, the future prospects of our public services may well bring themselves personal success but at the expense of achieving a transformation in the way London government does business. But let’s hope I’m wrong.
• As part of this shift to a flatter, more networked model of governance, London needs to also take the opportunity to think more about what it can do to forge alliances with other UK cities, changing its view of those cities to one of symbiosis rather than parasitic as it appears to currently. Perhaps the answer to some of the pressures faced by London lies in the need to “ask not only what London does for the regions, but also what the regions can do for you”.
• Related to this, it seems sensible to me that London would benefit greatly from its public sector forging stronger ties with institutions in other similar (if not identical) global cities such as New York. London (and other cities) must develop opportunities to both learn from one another and to form a ‘club’ of international city-regional institutions capable of steering the direction and shape of both the institutions themselves, the cities in which they are located and even the fortune of the countries in which they reside. While some of these ties already exist (such as the world mayors network), on the whole these networks tend to benefit only the few and not the many.
• It strikes me that not only is the public sector bad at collaborating internally across the plethora of agencies (central government, councils, PCTs, police, hospital trusts, Job Centre plus, further and higher education…), but they are often even worse at working collectively with the private and voluntary sectors. This is no doubt in the scope of the work of the collaborative but making this happen is a key opportunity not to be missed.
• And finally, a question I put forward at the event itself. The focus not only of this project but also many before it tends to be one that builds a vision for the future through identifying and involving the current movers and shakers of London through hierarchical importance (the Chief Executives, Leaders etc) or (more productively and to the credit of the London Collaborative) asks these senior managers to nominate those less senior officers that are ‘most likely to succeed’ to participate. Yet at the same time, future gazers question why futures thinking has failed in the past. Could it not be the case that this may be one reason why? Taking such a hierarchical perspective will tend to only give the view of current leaders, ones who will not be the owners of the future when it arrives and tends to fail to pick up on those people buried within or even sat outside of the system who are just as likely if not more so to have a major impact on the shape of London and its institutions. The majority of organisational or social influencers are rarely found in formal positions of power as they believe they can better innovate and impact from elsewhere. Clearly to ignore those in power would be foolish in the extreme, but to ignore the informal network of influencers inside and outside of London government would be equally so.