The 'go to' organisation for Local Government improvement in Scotland

The world is transitioning fast, as society faces a cascade of changes affecting every aspect of our lives - our health, the economy, politics, our children’s education, social care; from an ageing population to the effects of climate change - structural shifts are reshaping the world as we know it. The challenges this presents for local government requires a need to be radical and to lead the charge towards reform, working with Scottish Government, partners and communities.

Our role

We have a critical role to play in supporting the design and configuration of services in ways that are truly transformative, sustainable and digital, focus on prevention, are designed around the needs of people and communities and generate financial savings.

How we will deliver

We will:

• Work with local government and partners to deliver reform, including innovative and transformative models of service delivery and ways of working, focused on improving outcomes where achievable and supporting the sustainability and resilience of the sector. This will involve working with Solace to translate our think piece on ‘Delivering a Future for Scottish Local Authorities’ into tangible action.
• Manage and coordinate the delivery of the programme of work on transformation agreed with Solace, through our Transformation Programme Management Office.
• Bring local authorities and partners together to develop collaborative, cross-sector and outcomes-focused approaches to service delivery.
• Provide support on service design to local authorities and partners, to ensure that services and systems are collaboratively designed with service users, people and communities.
• Develop capability and capacity for delivering transformation across local authorities.
• Publish and share case studies evidencing innovative, preventative and person-centred approaches to service delivery from across the UK and internationally.
• Deliver development opportunities for elected members as they navigate the changing landscape.
• Develop and promote the use of our national shared service applications and technology platforms, creating new digital public services to underpin new service delivery models.
• Develop expertise and capability within local government to unlock the potential of the vast quantities of data held by local authorities, to support preventative action.

What we aspire to achieve

By March 2027, there will be examples of transformative and preventative approaches to service delivery in place between local authorities, and between local authorities and their partners, and we will be able to evidence our contribution to the delivery of these. Through our Transformation Programme Management Office, we will be making huge strides in working with Solace to translate our think piece on ‘Delivering a Future for Scottish Local Authorities’ into tangible action. We will be able to evidence increased resilience and sustainability within the sector and savings/efficiencies arising from our work.

Sector-led improvement is typically based on the underlying principles that local authorities:

• are responsible for their own performance and improvement, and for leading the delivery of improved outcomes for individuals, families and communities;
• are accountable locally through their democratically elected representatives;
• have a sense of collective responsibility for the performance of the sector as a whole, not just their own local authority; and
• are responsible for determining their own future, individually and collectively as a sector.

Our role

We have a critical role to play in supporting individual local authorities with their own improvement journeys, providing a range of products, services and support as highlighted in our core improvement architecture. We equally have an important contribution to make in supporting the sector as a whole to improve in critical policy and service areas.

How we will deliver

We will:

• Continue to develop and evolve our core capacities and capabilities to support local authorities to improve individually and collectively.
• Deploy and flex our core improvement architecture to support sector-led improvement across different policy and service areas.
• Explore with Solace and COSLA the appetite for the IS to redevelop and relaunch its peer review framework, to support local authorities to learn from each other as they consider ways to improve and transform services.
• Facilitate and coordinate peer networks across our existing and emerging work programmes, to support local authorities to share knowledge, practice, learning and skills.
• Continue to deliver and develop the Local Government Benchmarking Framework (LGBF) to support Councils’ own improvement journeys through access to rich and timely comparative data and analysis, bespoke support for Councils, and peer events to share practice and learning.
• Use LGBF data to work with Solace and the LGBF Board (and professional associations) to identify and agree areas where there could be an opportunity for Local Government as a sector to focus its improvement on, and where our improvement support could therefore be targeted
• Continue to develop, deliver and embed our approach to self-assessment and improvement planning in local authorities and partnerships.
• Develop creative, targeted and engaging ways to share learning across local authorities and partners to support sector wide learning and improvement.
• Source, develop, publish and share good practice case studies from Scotland, the UK and internationally, and help local authorities and the sector apply relevant learning from elsewhere as part of its improvement journey.
• Deliver guidance, tools and other support mechanisms to help develop capability and capacity for improvement within local government.
• Work with the Accounts Commission, as part of our Strategic Alliance, to continue to explore how our sector-led improvement work can inform the Commission’s work programme and help deliver the aspirations of ‘The Crerar Review: the report of the independent review of regulation, audit, inspection and complaints handling of public services in Scotland’.

What we aspire to achieve

By March 2027, the burden of scrutiny, audit and regulation on local authorities will have reduced, as a result of the continued development of approaches to sector-led improvement which we are actively involved in delivering. We will be better able to evidence the contribution our work has made in supporting improvement in individual local authorities and in the sector overall.

The pandemic exacerbated poverty and inequality, which has been further compounded by the cost-of-living crisis. This is impacting negatively on individuals’ and families’ life chances and opportunities and increasing demand for council services, in an environment of contracting budgets.

As part of the transformation of local government, it is crucial to focus on those who live with poverty and inequality, developing holistic family support services that break down silos of service provision between organisations, sharing data and information within organisations to ensure the right packages of support can be provided across services and meaningfully engaging with all the different communities of place or interest.

Our role

Given the range of improvement work that we deliver in interlinked policy areas, for example Covid-19 recovery, child poverty, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), The Promise, the Whole Family Wellbeing Fund, early learning and childcare expansion, trauma and gender-based violence, employability, economic development, climate change, planning, place and advice services, we are uniquely placed to work with local government to tackle poverty and inequality.

How we will deliver

We will:

• Support local authorities and their partners to deliver whole systems, place-based and rights-based approaches to tackle inequality and prevent poverty, using our strong relationships with local and national networks and organisations.
• Promote innovative and creative approaches to addressing poverty and inequality and embed good practice across our work programmes.
• Work with local authorities to mitigate decisions being made in one policy area (e.g., climate change) having unintended consequences in another policy area (e.g., child poverty).
• Ensure that our strategic decisions are viewed through the prism of reducing poverty and inequality.
• Deliver development opportunities for elected members to support them to continue to take action to address poverty and inequality.
• Identify opportunities to use our data and intelligence services and expertise to enrich local and national understanding of poverty and inequality, and work with local authorities and partners to design solutions that work to address it.
• Ensure that we design and deliver digital public services that are inclusive, ethical and resilient and uphold people’s digital rights.

What we aspire to achieve

By March 2027, there will be reduced inequalities in local populations, across service areas, as reported in the Local Government Benchmarking Framework. There will be examples of whole-systems, place-based and rights-based approaches in place to address inequality and prevent poverty, which we will have contributed to delivering. We will have embedded innovative and holistic approaches to tackling inequality across our work, including ensuring that we uphold people’s digital rights when designing and delivering our digital public services. We will have a clearer idea of how to use data and intelligence to target families who are vulnerable or experiencing poverty and have more examples of automation of support and benefits.

Local Government and Scottish Government are committed to working together to deliver Scotland’s Digital Strategy. Local government and the Improvement Service has experience of delivering national shared digital services, and over the next period it will be important to consider which other services are ripe for digital enabled transformation.

Data and intelligence are equally important levers for enabling transformation. High quality data, evidence and intelligence are fundamental to informing local decision-making, service-design and ultimately transformation. The last few years has shown us that, when faced with significant and unprecedented events and crises, data and evidence becomes crucial to the decision-making process and guiding us to a better place.

Our role

One of our key roles is to deliver digital public services and products to councils and their partners. This can take the form of delivering fully managed digital public services, from initial scoping through development and delivery to support and aftercare, or managing and supporting a pre-built or existing digital public service.

We also have a critical role to play in supporting councils in their efforts to develop the culture, systems and processes to unlock the insight and full value of their data to better understand citizens, improve services and drive efficiencies.

How we will deliver

We will:

• Identify and deliver new use cases for our existing national shared service applications and technology platforms.
• Continue to develop and evolve our digital public services infrastructure and capabilities in response to opportunities emerging from the Solace/IS transformation work.
• Secure a role for the IS in the delivery of Scotland’s Digital Identity ecosystem.
• Develop a digital National Entitlement Card, enabling citizens to access a range of public services through their mobile device.
• Work with the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government, COSLA, Solace and Public Health Scotland to deliver our ambitious plans to create one Data Platform for Scottish local government.
• Support local authorities to develop the tools and architecture needed to collect, store, manage, move, analyse, report and use data.
• Work with Solace and COSLA to ensure that our research, evidence, data and insight services are targeted in areas that will help to inform local government policy-making and sector-led improvement.
• Explore opportunities around the development and potential for a shared research, data analysis and evaluation service for Scottish local government.

What we aspire to achieve

By March 2027, we will be delivering an increased range of digital shared services/resources to local authorities and we will be able to evidence the cost-savings these are achieving for local government. We will be able to provide examples of our digital shared services/resources increasing the resilience and sustainability of the sector. We will be delivering an increased range of digital public services once for Scottish local government. We will have secured a key role in the delivery of Scotland’s digital identity ecosystem. Local government will have successfully launched a data platform that we will have been integral to developing. We will be able to evidence how our research and data analysis services have informed local government policy-making and sector-led improvement.