Disaggregation doesn’t have to mean total separation!

Following the announcements last week of the shape of local government arrangements in various areas, I’ve had to rethink things a bit. The move is clearly towards merging and empowering districts over centralising into unitary counties.

This means an increase in disaggregation. Take the county I reside in, Norfolk, as an example: it is being split into 3 unitaries, which means that services currently delivered by the county (social care, education, highways etc) will in future sit with the new unitaries. Thus these services – with their people, processes, and technology, will need to be split into three. In Essex, they will be split into 5!

This can, though, be made a lot simpler if the councils involved decide to continue to work closely together in the future. On the tech side, this could mean keeping the county digital services as they are – either for a period of time or in perpetuity – as a properly constituted shared service.

LGR does not mean that the new councils can’t share services, capabilities, people or assets. Given the huge amount of change that LGR entails, it might well make sense in some cases for things to be left as they are for a while, because they work as they are, and can be returned to when the dust settles elsewhere.

There’s a danger that if folk get too focused on separation, opportunities to reduce the levels of change, and therefore risk, are missed. It might well be that there are things which aren’t broken and don’t need to be fixed.