The duty to co-operate - Why we have a new duty – who is affected and what next?

In the ideal world, it would never be necessary for law-makers to pass legislation insisting that public bodies co-operate with each other!

That this became necessary, in the 2007 Local Government & Public Involvement in Health Act, is testimony to a silo mentality throughout the public sector, genuine problems of bureaucratic boundaries or just meddlesome Ministers unable to leave well enough alone; take your pick ...! Whatever its motivation, Section 106(3)(a) stands, and we will shortly receive CLG Guidelines on how to interpret this new duty, and how to apply it in practice. It applies to a long list of public bodies - mostly those not accountable directly to the electorate, and the idea is that they must play ball with the local authority in determining the targets for what is done in a particular locality. So look through this list - and reflect on how many of them there are ...... and may be relevant to you.

Here is an incomplete list ...... but enough to get the flavour of this new duty. It includes:-

Arts Council .... Environment Agency .... Fire & Rescue Authorities .... Highways Agency Jobcentre Plus .... Learning & Skills Councils .... Local Probation Boards .... Natural England NHS Trusts .... Primary Care Trusts .... Sport England .... Youth Offending Teams ...and so forth

Not all of these have a wonderful track record of close co-operation with Councils; many of them are notoriously like bumper cars swivelling and turning aggressively in the municipal fairground; some even take a perverse delight in pushing the other off course. That is why we have this provision .......

But its relevance to our agenda is this. Public engagement suffers when public bodies fail to get their acts together; consultation fatigue becomes widespread, and communities feel disempowered with major decisions happening to them rather than being taken on their behalf. The idea of Local Area Agreements (LAA's) is to force those agencies which have a role to play in improving an area to commit to the whole project, not just their narrow part of the action. It's not only about speaking with one voice ..... but also listening with one collective ear.

Good Councils are approaching these partners and setting up the detailed mechanisms that are needed for this co-operation to work. Hopefully this will include sifting the wish-lists for consultation exercises and producing a sensible forward calendar for engaging the public. But it should go further, and these bodies should learn to share scarce skills and resources.

Take new technology, for example. So many bodies have dabbled half-heartedly in e-consultation or some of the other tools. They've installed the software, and maybe a few enthusiasts have used it, but it has failed to find favour with some departments - so the online public only receive a partial picture. It would be better if LSP's took over this task, invested properly (it's still peanuts for IT budgets) and spent time ensuring everyone could use these excellent systems better.

Skills are in even shorter supply. Although many people think they have an inherited talent at public engagement, the proliferation of methods today means that few are really proficient at a range of techniques. And, in any case, the nuanced political skills that Consultation officers require are pretty rare anyway. No-one wants to dissuade each department from skilling up for essential tasks like facilitating focus groups, but dispersing some of these skills right across a large complex organisation is inefficient.

We recently saw how Cardiff City has converted its excellent public engagement skills into a commercially-active unit able to offer specialist skills to neighbouring Authorities and other public bodies - and even the third sector. It enables them to leverage their new technology infrastructure - and saves others from re-inventing certain processes and capabilities.

This may well be a role model for others to examine, and may also be the kind of advanced co-operation that recent legislation may bring about. Shared services may not have been the intention, but it may be a very useful result. Trigger points

• Become familiar with the full list of bodies referred to in the Act. Tick how many are relevant to your own area
• Steve Jarman of Cardiff CC will be speaking at the Institute's Technologies for Participation on 10th June in London and will specifically discuss how Cardiff Research Services uses new technology tools for public engagement
• The Duty to co-operate has to be understood alongside the other innovations of the 2007 Act. To learn more, consider attending our Comprehensive Engagement Strategies course

This is the 111th Tuesday Topic; a full list of subjects covered is available for Institute members and is a valuable resource covering so many aspects of consultation and engagement