What’s it like to set up a new council with the clock ticking?
Frenetic would be one way to describe the past 12 months.
However, the opportunity for real transformational change, and the impetus for it, doesn’t come around too often. That’s not something you turn down.
When you’ve got deadlines set by others (central government in this case), it makes life more difficult.
What we’ve achieved in the time available is to create two new councils – largely splitting in two the services run by Cumbria County Council, and amalgamating services from three district authorities into each.
I think it was a more difficult process than many other local government reorganisations, but we weren’t given any more time or resource to carry it out.
A lot of challenges for members and officers were unique. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we were given, so we have encountered issues and possibilities that none of us have come across before.
The past year was a strange one for councillors elected to the shadow authority in May 2022. Cabinet members were working absolutely flat out towards vesting day; in future processes, if there was a way of involving the wider membership more it could benefit other councils.
In a shadow year, ideally you want to explore everything possible in terms of transforming services. The reality is, we couldn’t do as much as we wanted because of the need to deal with the issues to get across the line ‘safe and legal’. That’s one of the frustrations.
However, it’s really good to see we have transitioned well. We wanted it to be as seamless as possible and we have delivered that.
If you were to ask most residents ‘have you noticed any difference since 1 April?’ they’d probably say no, and that’s what we wanted to achieve.
We cleared a huge hurdle on vesting day by laying the foundations, but the next stage of the process is the exciting part: how we transform those services.
The opportunity is to achieve joined-up services.
When you have different tiers in local government, any process is better for having fewer handovers from start to finish, so we have a chance to significantly redesign council processes. That’s an obvious win.
This rewiring of public services across traditional sector boundaries is also something we must embrace. It is bigger than just the council – it is about place shaping.
There’s a lot of good practice, innovation and collaboration out there, and it is an opportunity to create a team, culture and vision to have a very clear agenda for the next four years.
We have a fantastic offer already, with our natural capital and significant industry, and there are opportunities to transform our local area.
With a wider footprint as a unitary, we can work in partnership to harness all the elements in a way the previous structure couldn’t.
We have all the building blocks: we have the council plan, a constitution, and our organisational structure; and we have largely recruited the senior management team.
Now we need to consolidate the culture of the new organisation and prioritise those areas on which we are going to focus.
We know we can’t do everything at once, so we must be very clear about our transformational journey.