Having developed your strategy and set your priorities, perhaps the biggest challenge of all is in delivery. Whilst recognising that many things will remain out of your control, such as the continued evolution of the pandemic, the direction and timing of government policy decisions and the wider macro-economy, it is vital that councils set themselves up to be able to deliver on the intent and specifics of their strategies. This will likely have to be done within a continuing context of budget pressures on local authorities and public sector partners as well as competing pressures from changing and rising demand across services, meaning there are unlikely to be many easy choices.
Pessimism can be contagious. Almost as contagious as the virus itself. But so too can optimism. In both cases it can be self-fulfilling. It’s all about creating your narrative. A story about the sun being out tomorrow is crucial for improving the weather today.”
- Andy Haldane, Deputy Governor of the Bank of England
To do this, councils will have to take confidence from the work they have done in developing a strategy, understanding the needs of their communities and setting their priorities to then organise their resources to support delivery. This will mean promoting flexible and responsive ways of working so your teams can be agile in reacting to change and taking opportunities; aligning your resources holistically around the activities that will promote the outcomes you are aiming to deliver; working collaboratively and with common purpose across your communities; and backing yourselves in taking the right risks to support the economic and social outcomes you aspire to.
The experience of the pandemic has provided some useful lessons for how to do this.
Councils have stepped up rapidly to deliver support to vulnerable people at the start of the pandemic using their resources flexibly and responsively and have been adaptive in setting up systems and processes to deliver unprecedented financial support to businesses. Across the country many business rates teams have become grant assessors and staff at all levels across authorities have supported front-line efforts to support local vulnerable people.
Collaborative, partnership working has become standard across a range of activities in responding to the pandemic, with councils working hand in glove with local partners such as Clinical Commissioning Groups and the third sector to support each other in providing the best response and support for their residents; and, new and enhanced structures have been established to enable more proactive engagement and collaboration with private sector partners to better understand and respond to the needs of businesses.
Some places have used the experience and learning from collaborative work during the pandemic to refresh and repurpose partnerships to better develop and drive future strategy. For example, Sheffield are using the learning opportunity to refresh their partnership structures, Bradford have created a recovery board with an independent chair, and Shropshire established an economic taskforce with three distinct sub-groups for employment and skills, town centre recovery and sectors.
Decision-making has been streamlined to enable more rapid decisions to be made and reduce costly administrative delay to help businesses and communities adapt to the changing circumstances of the pandemic. In Sheffield decisions have been sped up to respond to businesses’ needs. An example of this includes decisions on businesses making use of outside space to enable Covid-safe trading were reduced from three months to a week.
Continuing and developing these approaches through the next stages of response, re-opening, recovery and renewal of your local economies will support your ability to deliver on your strategies. To support your planning you may want to ask yourselves:
On resources:
- Have you got the right resources in place to deliver on your strategy and priorities?
- Have you adapted your resources, management and performance around delivery of your recovery strategy and priorities?
- Do you know what capabilities you will need to deliver on your priorities?
- Are your partners alongside you in supporting your recovery strategy and are you aligning and co-ordinating your collective resources to maximise your ability to deliver?
On decision-making:
- Do you have the right frameworks in place for timely, robust, collaborative decision-making to support an agile recovery?
- Should any changes to decision-making made during the pandemic be made permanent, or further improved?
- Are your partnership structures set up to support delivery as well as strategy development?
- Do your governance structures support delivery of the strategy priorities across the council and across partners?
Communicating your strategy and implementation:
- How will you maintain an ongoing, meaningful conversation with your communities and businesses during implementation of your plans, including those less well represented?
Investing in recovery
Fundamental to driving local economic recovery will be the leadership in recovery and place shaping shown by the council. This will mean investing in the things that will promote the conditions and nature of the recovery you want to deliver for your communities. You will need to be prepared to back yourself and take risks to invest in the future of your area. Investing with partners and investing in developments to promote and stimulate private sector investment may enable your investment to have a greater impact on your place. As several senior Local Authority officers have said to us “if we don’t take some risks to invest in our towns how can we expect the private sector to?”
As an example of this, Essex County Council created a new £100 million capital fund to invest in economic recovery and alongside this are creating additional capacity to drive growth and recovery across Essex. The investment in internal capacity to support an employment led recovery reflects the relationship between employment and other outcomes, for example Public Health expertise embedded within the new economic development team.
Recovery from the pandemic will also create some opportunities for you to invest in ways that can shape the future development and character of your places. For example, the pandemic has exacerbated the existing trends in retail leading to oversupply of retail space in many town centres, creating both the need and opportunity to reshape, repurpose and revitalise places. There will be opportunities to develop more experiential, leisure and cultural offers to support footfall and vibrancy in town centres, alongside longer-term changes in land use, including increased residential use. The strategic and investment leadership of councils will be vital in creating the places your recovery strategies will aspire to.
However, such investment needs to be undertaken with due diligence to the risks it will involve. To maximise your impact, investment in key assets should aim to deliver both a place shaping function, as well as a long-term financial plan. Taking control of key assets to invest in reshaping and repurposing them to create the vibrant places communities want in the future, whilst supporting long term returns and values across the wider place may pay multiple dividends for years to come.
For example, Oldham Council have bought the town’s central shopping centre as a catalytic investment to support recovery. With a plan to redevelop and repurpose the space, providing office space for the council and other local public sector partners as well as relocating the market and freeing up other sites for an urban park and housing. The investment will support multiple policy goals of improving the town centre, creating new communities in the town centre, protecting and creating new green spaces, supporting jobs, improving outcomes for residents and delivering cost efficiencies for the council.
In Blackpool, the pandemic continues to have a huge impact on the leisure and tourism sector. However, the council is backing the return of leisure and tourism and is pursuing long term investment plans to drive growth and prosperity through this sector, following a strategy of driving more overnight stays through an improved accommodation offer. Major capital investment plans have continued to advance through the pandemic, supported by Town Deal funding.
Shropshire is pushing ahead with ambitious investment plans, building on the Shrewsbury Big Town Plan and has acted to fill a gap in provision of affordable homes through the establishment of a housing initiative – Right Home, Right Place - with a clear aim to increase affordable housing in the area.
Hull are looking to drive recovery through green growth, building on the successful investments in the green energy sector that saw Siemens invest in a wind power factory at Green Port Hull. That investment built on the natural assets of the Humber estuary, but was supported by effective skills-matching enabling the local workforce to directly benefit.
In delivering on your investment plans you should ask yourself:
- Does the investment meet the long-term needs of your strategy and priorities: is the investment driven by financial returns; place shaping, or both?
- In an existing pre-pandemic investment plan, does the investment still make sense given the impact of the pandemic, future prospects, and recovery priorities?
- Do you have the right capabilities and capacity in place to enable you to take advantage of investment opportunities and to accept a higher tolerance of risk in your investments, for example:
- investment and risk management expertise
- multi-disciplinary expertise, to support holistic investments
- capacity to develop future pipeline of investments
- capacity to rapidly respond to funding opportunities to support investment (e.g. future Government programmes to support town centre and community renewal and levelling up).
- Are you taking a partnership approach with the private sector and other local anchor institutions in delivering investment to support local recovery?