The LGA has launched a new Remote Peer Support Offer to help councils with their vital work during the pandemic.
It is councils that have led communities through the COVID-19 crisis and that will continue to support them through the recovery, renewal and rebuild phases.
Our recent polling shows that 71 per cent of residents trust their council and three-quarters are satisfied with the way their local council runs things in their area.
The LGA is here to support you in your vital work protecting communities and maintaining services during the pandemic and beyond, including through our sector-led improvement (SLI) offer. As many of you know, this is a coordinated approach across local government to help councils improve collectively through sharing best practice.
Our recently published SLI report highlights our key achievements of the past year, including delivering 129 peer challenges and enrolling nearly 1,000 councillors on leadership programmes.
We have refocused our SLI support to councils to ensure our resources are best placed to help with the immediate challenges you face now and in the future. With this impetus, the vast majority of the LGA’s operation is now focused on supporting local government and communities to address COVID-19 and its consequences.
For example, our new Remote Peer Support Offer is designed to help councils with this vital work, providing them with opportunities to reflect on their responses to COVID-19 and to engage in open and collaborative conversations about their recovery and renewal plans.
Building on our well-established improvement support programme – which has been helping councils for nearly a decade – the offer will bring together peers from our unique pool of politicians and officers into a virtual panel, focusing on improving leadership, governance, finance and identifying any practice and learning to share with the sector.
There are two strands to this new offer. The LGA Recovery and Renewal Panel is a focused, two to three-hour remote session, facilitated by the LGA with a small panel of our member and officer peers.
This will give councils the chance to explore sustainable solutions to how they lead their communities and local economies to re-establish prosperity and resilience, while continuing to meet their statutory and political responsibilities.
The second strand extends this offer, offering Bespoke Remote Peer Support over a two to three-day period. This will provide councils with support to focus on specific issues or sets of issues that they want to review in greater depth and will again draw on the strong, peer-based approach.
I invite you now to sign up to the Remote Peer Support Offer by contacting your regional principal adviser (see www.local.gov.uk/our-support/lga-principal-advisers).
As our end-of-year report shows, councils can continue to use the LGA’s sector-led improvement offer to learn, share best practice and work together, to ensure they continue to deliver effective and efficient services for their communities.