Deloitte slams local government carve-up as it calls for efficiency through cooperation

Global accountancy firm Deloitte has waded into the debate raging over local government reform by slamming Holyrood proposals to redraw the councils map as too simplistic and symptomatic of a risk averse culture.

Angela Mitchell, a partner at Deloitte in Scotland, has said an overhaul of Scottish councils should not start with either expanding or reducing the current number of 32 authorities.

The “Big Four” firm has produced a new report the findings of which have been put to Scotland’s top local authority leaders accusing them of “tinkering around the edges of the challenges faced by local government”, which it states have now reached a crisis point.

Rather than redrawing maps, Ms Mitchell has called for the rebooting of attempts to share systems and infrastructure across local organisations.

She claims the stalled or abandoned efficiency measures would provide a more sophisticated response than the altering of local boundaries, a scheme which is now expected to be enacted within the next few years.

Ms Mitchell said the alternative of cross-boundary cooperation “would cut costs, create resilience and … deliver better outcomes across the public sector” and that previous attempts to bring such multi-authority inefficiencies to local government had been crippled by a fear of failure possessed by senior officers and a risk aversion prevailing amongst political leaders.

Such a culture is compounded by worries over the possible backlash within the electoral cycle caused by job losses, she claims.

Writing in the Herald newspaper, Ms Mitchell said concerns over job security and “pay-flat-lining” were key factors affecting local authorities’ ability to undertake change and modernise services.

She added: “Anything that is not continuing with ‘business as usual’ comes with personal and organisational risks. The risk-averse culture within local government means people do not want to take a chance of failing. Local politics get in the way of change and we’re also caught in a perpetual electoral cycle in Scotland. But time has moved on. Councils are at a crisis point and there are more and more pressures on services. Issues like elderly care will not be going away.

“In England we’re even seeing some authorities cutting services rather than collaborating with other councils. Scotland can’t get caught in that trap.”

However, Deloitte’s intervention was dismissed as outdated, by the the body representing most of Scotland’s councils.

Claiming that many of the ideas outlined in the Deloitte report were already being put into practice, a Cosla spokesman said: “It would be wrong to think that many of the ideas put forward here have not already happened. This is an often quoted, simplistic and slightly outdated approach to reform. The idea that shared services etc is the silver bullet is simply wrong.

“Councils are up for reform. For a long time we have advocated the need for change and for reform to happen. But we would push for the scope of sharing to go wider.”

Meanwhile a senior local government source told the newspaper that Deloitte’s report was “looking like a fairly crude sales pitch”.