{"id":898,"date":"2020-03-07T14:45:25","date_gmt":"2020-03-07T14:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/?p=898"},"modified":"2020-07-06T13:13:37","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T13:13:37","slug":"a-brief-view-of-some-of-birminghams-dalliances-with-varieties-of-localisations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/?p=898","title":{"rendered":"A brief view of some of Birmingham\u2019s dalliances with varieties of localisations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>The city as a local entity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\nis a long time since Birmingham was recognised, by Charter, as an\nadministrative structure in its own right. Various surrounding towns and villages\nwere incorporated into the city, making it the largest local authority in\nEurope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\nhave been recurring issues lasting until the present: <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>What freedoms and flexibilities does the city have, or is it there mostly as a locality for the delivery of central government diktats? <\/li><li>The city has always looked for Birmingham solutions to Birmingham problems (from early sewerage systems; civic developments; slum clearances and Manzoni planning; \u2026.) but with the dangers that its size makes Birmingham \u2018over-important\u2019 or that its history as the City of a Thousand Trades encourages it to dismiss ideas not Made in Birmingham.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Birmingham has had various attempts at getting a local dimension to city planning and governance, to service delivery, and to the engagement of residents in neighbourhoods in key actions in their locality. Some key features, and tensions, of these are set out below. This is not an in-detail account of all aspects of localisation in cities, but a brief overview of some developments within one city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p><strong>In-city area structures for local service delivery and management<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Given\nthe size of Birmingham there has been an urge for the division of services into\narea-based teams localised along constituency lines. This has particularly been\nthe case since the 1960s and particularly for services managed by the City\nCouncil. At the same time, police had their own boundaries; public health\nservices had their boundaries; and schools were clustered into various\nconsortia groupings. &nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tensions\nincluded:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Boundary disputes where\nservice needs overlapped across boundaries for different services\u2019 delivery and\nlocal management.<\/li><li>The degrees of relative autonomy\nafforded to locality service management and to whole-city planning: Locality\nstructures being primarily there to ensure that central intentions reach into\nevery locality; or there to feed intelligence from the \u2018swampy lowlands of\nfrontline practice\u2019 up into the shaping of central decision-making.<\/li><li>When budgets tightened\n(1980s; early 1990s; since 2007) locality services were increasingly merged\nfrom being managed on the basis of 12 separate constituencies, to 4 areas of 3\nconstituencies, to 3 areas; etc\u2026 with area managers being asked to take on more\nand more activities across wider-spread localities. Balancing city-wide and\nsmall-area development has been a recurring theme.<\/li><li>Potential lack of clarities\nand responsibilities, particularly where Area Managers each had responsibility\nfor a locality, but where some also took a citywide lead on particular themes\nor for specific client groups.<\/li><li>Senior managers were\nexpected to attend multiple locality meetings, each with the same agenda. One potential\nresult of this was attendance at regular, scheduled, locality-focused meetings\neroding time and energies from the oversight of service delivery across localities.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Localisation of governance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In\n2004, a strong effort was made to embed this localisation and devolution. Birmingham\nCity Council established a set of &nbsp;local\nconstituency-based Area Sub-Committees \u2013 to bring some decision-making closer\nto the communities involved; to engage locally-elected councillors with the\nservice delivery of partner agencies; to allocate small improvement grants for\nlocal spend; to diversify services based on detailed locality profiles. A lot\nof energy went into these actions. Community engagement was enabled;\ninter-service understandings improved and joint-working improved. Substantial\nimprovements in the lives of local residents were less easy to demonstrate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tensions\nincluded:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Determining what is best for\nBirmingham: &nbsp;central overview perspectives\ncf aggregated local determinations.<\/li><li>How far Birmingham should take\nlocalisation forward: A push for up to 50 parish councils? Delegated, devolved,\nTotal Place budgeting?<\/li><li>Endless recycling of committee\npapers up, down and across overlapping governance and decision-making processes\nacross layers of the Council, various partner agencies, specific projects and\ninitiatives etc.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Financing localisations<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In\naddition to arguments for reshaping mainstream budgets towards some level of\nplace-based or community-budgeting, Birmingham has had various versions of\nspecific budgets for localised developments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Neighbourhood\nRenewal: Based on a whole-city framework re teenage pregnancies, infant\nmortalities, domestic violence, NEET, employability, housing needs etc; to be\ncoloured in locally to bring about local changes, steered by local processes\netc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Single\nRegeneration Budgets: Rolling together various strands of national development\nmonies to give a unified fund behind a single locality (or theme) plan across\nseveral years; with approved Annual Development Plan commitments to next-step\ndevelopments, quarterly monitoring to ensure planned progress is made. Two\nmodels were tried in Birmingham, with Audit finding one more successful than\nthe other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Working\nNeighbourhood Funding: 47 neighbourhoods were identified, determined by the\nday-to-day lived experiences of local residents rather than by a distant carving\nup of existing administrative areas. These were localities where there were high\nlevels of unemployment and low levels of skills. Year-on-year progress in the\nneighbourhoods was to be driven forward by a focus on work and employability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Tensions\nincluded:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such\ninitiatives brought about significant changes in the city but, in many cases, encouraged\nthe establishment of a separate team\/organisation to manage the process, with\nsome replication of existing management and decision-making. Too often, there tended\nto be an over-focus on money, bids and projects rather than ensuring that\nlonger-term progress was locked into place across target localities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Networks of localised professional understandings and actions<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Fifty\nyears ago Birmingham had an established pattern of professional workers\u2019 meetings\nin localities: 20-30 local workers from a range of local agencies; for about an\nhour over a sandwich lunch, monthly; a round-robin update on changes to staffing\nor policy for each agency followed by a short input on a topic of local\nrelevance, then a brief discussion of implications for the area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Recent\nversions of this have focused more on immediate family problems: Up to 10 staff\nfrom police\/ housing\/ care\/ health\/ schools etc; discussion of urgent issues\nfor specific local families; each agency committing to particular actions; with\nsome sense of urgency; commitment to meet in a week\u2019s time to confirm that\nproblems had been fixed for the families. These initiatives were, however, unusual\nrather than the norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The\nmore consistent model, over several years, was one of services across a local\narea being co-located in a local appropriate venue eg a Children\u2019s Centre; a\nNeighbourhood Office; a Community Hub. Locating services in a shared property\nhas been one position on a spectrum that included integration of information;\nsingle-door access points for residents with multiple concerns; and a potential\nfor integration of staffing, planning, budgets and responsiveness across\nservice silos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>These\nmodels have generally provided organisational improvements, better working\nacross agencies, and improved services for residents of the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Summaries<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Localities\nand neighbourhoods have always been important in Birmingham, as has operating\nas a coherent set of whole-city arrangements. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Various\naspects of localisation need to be considered, across a range of agencies\ninvolved at different levels: decision-making; management structures and activities;\ndelivery of improvements and stabilities in the lives of people needing\nparticular forms of support and development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Structural\nfeatures (boundaries, financings, accountabilities, leads etc) can start to\nhave more emphasis than is sometimes necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There\nhave been successful models. The extent to which these got embedded into normal\npractices depended largely on national policy and funding changes, but also on\nthe extent to which they were used as opportunities for real change or perceived\nas one-off initiatives driven by finance or by organisational restructurings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Insights\nhave been gained from past experiences, but organisational memory is weak in a\nlarge fast-shifting city. The tensions and issues emerging from the wish to\nbalance city\/local can be avoided, minimised or optimised by careful\nforethought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The city as a local entity It is a long time since Birmingham was recognised, by Charter, as an administrative structure in its own right. Various surrounding towns and villages were incorporated into the city, making it the largest local authority in Europe. There have been recurring issues lasting until the present: What freedoms and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[113,141,55],"class_list":["post-898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-cities","tag-localisation","tag-neighbourhoods"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=898"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":909,"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions\/909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thewordsthething.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}