The Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs Rural Services Review 2006 highlights loads of good practice stories about delivering better services in rural areas. Many of these highlight the role of partnerships.
Chester City Council and Crewe and Nantwich Borough Council work together in a back office IT partnership (strategy, procurement and services) that save their residents loads of money.
The Confederation of British Industry says that local people must be more involved and engaged if public services are to improve. For example:
- In Woking, a sample of 350 residents are polled every three months on how satisfied they are with street cleaning services. Ten per cent of the contractor's fee is at risk based on the results, and the contract can be terminated if satisfaction dips too low;
- In Breckland, members of the public are given disposable cameras to identify 'grot-spots' in need of clean-up by the street cleaning firm, and in Welwyn & Hatfield the contractor has given PDAs (hand-held computers) to selected 'community champions' so they can send emails flagging up problems for action;
- In Slough, the involvement of the public through a consultation board or 'citizen's jury' has contributed to the town becoming one of the cleanest in the South East.
There are more examples in their report: Empowering Neighbourhoods: Delivering better local services for local people (link opens a pdf document). The Breckland example sounds a lot like the award winning Love Lewisham site, I blogged about on Friday.
The Home Office has published Tackling Robbery: Practical Lessons from the Streetcrime initiative which has a very straightfoward performance management approach and some common sense lessons for partnerships. (At least it says it does - I haven't read it). There's also a link to an interesting looking publication called Become a problem solving crime analyst - in 55 small steps
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