About Local Partnerships
Local Partnerships is a joint venture between the Local Government Association and Partnerships UK, incorporating 4ps and all its current services. Local Partnerships mission is to enhance the quality of people’s lives by giving trusted, professional support to local public bodies to improve their ability to source and deliver high quality, cost-effective public services and infrastructure.
We provide a single source of active support for local public bodies in the delivery of improved services and infrastructure.
We work at a local level and ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ with public bodies to develop and deliver innovative solutions to new and emerging challenges. We do this by working alongside local public bodies to improve their sourcing and commissioning skills, programme and project management capabilities, procurement, negotiating and contract management capacity, and their delivery, funding and partnering abilities.
We promote knowledge sharing and take a particular interest in issues which have a sector wide significance.
The services we provide
• Direct support on individual projects and programmes
• Gateway reviews across all core sectors to improve project delivery
• Skills development training to build capacity and capability
• Best practice guidance and knowledge transfer
• Standard procurement packs
• Efficiency and asset management reviews
Our history speaks for itself
• We have been working with local authorities since 1996
• We have worked with 135 different local authorities in the past 12 months
• We have delivered over 1000 skills development training events to nearly 10,000 local government colleagues
• We have conducted more than 500 Gateway reviews across all sectors
• We are the sole authorised Gateway review provider for local government
• We have helped many local government PFI and PPP schemes
• We run network groups in various sectors including housing, waste, schools, transport, social care, CATSS, and leisure
• We supported the delivery of national programmes in waste, street lighting, and schools
Our core sectors
Asset management, housing, transport, highways, schools, waste management, corporate and transactional shared services (CATSS), health, social care, leisure, fire, police, and sustainability
Who we work with
We work with local authorities, primary care trusts, Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnerships (RIEPs), Government departments, third sector organisations, and other national and local public sector organisations.
Our work at the local government level: Local Government White Paper
The Local Government White Paper set out the government’s intention to rebalance the central-local relationship. It encourages a new relationship between local government and citizens and gives a stronger role for local authorities as place shapers and local leaders. The successful delivery of these policies will be via (LAAs) with their 35 agreed targets. Local Strategic Partnerships are the single overarching partnerships setting strategy and priorities.
A fundamental principle underlying all of these changes is a need to place a much greater emphasis on partnership working to help deliver greater efficiency savings and enable local authorities to shape services to meet local, regional and national needs and priorities.
Local Partnerships’ core business, has been shown by a recent study to yield greater efficiencies than any other type of partnering or outsourcing arrangement undertaken by local authorities.
Working with the LG Association, Local Government Improvement and Development, regional bodies and individual local authorities, we believe the tools, techniques and approaches we have developed to help local authorities successfully deliver Public Private Partnerships can be more widely applied to help enable a wider range of partnerships implemented under the LAA to be better structured and to deliver better outcomes for local people.
Implementing LG Association policy
Local Partnerships is a joint venture between the Local Government Association and Partnerships UK. We support and shape our service offering to help deliver against the LG Association's policies as captured in ‘People and Places’ and, most recently, in ‘Raising our Game’, whose five themes are:
• Building visionary and ambitious leadership which makes best use of both the political and managerial role;
• Leading trusted and effective partnerships across the whole public sector;
• Creating radically enhanced scrutiny holding to account the council, the wider public sector, and service and utilities suppliers;
• Devolving to residents and local organisations; engaging and communicating effectively, and enhancing the frontline councillors’ role;
• Ensuring outstanding improvement and transformation in service performance; innovation, value, efficiency, and public access and satisfaction.
Supporting LG Association policy, the White Paper and CSR 2007
Local Partnerships makes a strong contribution to the implementation of a number of policy themes in 'Raising our Game', the local government White Paper, the National Improvement Strategy and associated reports.
Local government as strategic leader and place shaper – stronger cities, strategic regions
Our expertise in delivering major strategic infrastructure and regeneration projects in the transport, highways management, housing, social services, and schools sectors, enables us to support authorities in their role as place shapers. Our experience of partnership structuring can be applied to help structure and deliver LAAs and targets, multi-area agreements and city development companies.
More efficient local authorities
Local authorities are under increasing pressure to deliver efficiencies. Local Partnerships has run extensive national, regional and local skills development courses on efficiency for some 10,000 members and officers to date, use of our procurement packs and standardised contracts leads to significant reductions in advisory and development costs, and the savings arising from Local Partnerships Gateway reviews, if implemented in full, can be approximately 4-5% of total project costs.
Partnership working across the public sector - new models of two tier working, new unitary bids and shared services
We are working currently with a number of individual and groups of authorities to transform their corporate, transactional and shared services and meet the resulting political and logistical challenges. Authorities appreciate Local Partnerships’ experience and our proven approaches to planning, structuring and developing such complex stakeholder partnerships.
Developing local authority commissioning skills and differentiating from procurement
Ministers want local authorities to become commissioners. We are well equipped to support authorities as they build the necessary ‘commercial’ commissioning skills and capacity, particularly at the strategic and operational level. In particular, we help them develop their expertise in options appraisal, business planning, negotiation, procurement, execution of transactions, performance and contract management.
Corporate property and asset management
Varney and Lyons have reconfirmed that efficient use of corporate property assets is a vital catalyst in encouraging joint local working between public sector agencies, the development of shared services, and the generation of jobs locally and regionally (including the transfer of central government jobs to localities). Local Partnerships has published new guidance for local authorities on the options available for managing corporate property, and following this we will be looking for a series of pathfinder projects.
Service and contract management
There is an increasing recognition that capacity building resources should be directed at effective service and contract performance management. Local Partnerships has recently published new guidance for contract managers, and is developing its service range to provide advisory services on all aspects of operational and contract management particularly for PPPs and PFI schemes. Local Partnerships launched a new skills development course on contract management, which will be targeted at both network groups and individual project teams. The OGC Gateway Review 5 has recently been re-badged as “Operational Review” and Local Partnerships, as the accredited provider of these within the local government sector.
If you’d like more detailed information on our structure and services, please visit the Local Partnerships website.- www.localpartnerships.org.uk