In 2011 the Williams Commission was shouting from the rooftops about the urgent and pressing need for the radical transformation of Welsh public services. In the Welsh Government's (2018) Green Paper, 'Strengthening Local Government in Wales' the Leader of the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) is quoted as saying,
"Services are wearing down to the point of collapse and the public are rightly growing frustrated in terms of paying council tax and yet seeing key community functions cut or closed … The whole position is unsustainable. Local authorities cannot go on to be expected to make the harshest of cuts whilst continuing to provide the same breadth and level of service; in short, something has got to give.“
Elsewhere in that paper we see reference to local government reform being about cultural change as well as structural, and to the future of local democracy being dependent on local councillors having a meaningful role at the heart of local government and communities. Around the same time retiring Auditor General Huw Vaughan Thomas complained that Welsh public services had not responded to austerity beyond simply cutting costs. He urged public services in Wales to think more radically with emphasis on outcomes rather than structures, and aired his frustration that clarion calls for urgent reform had not been heeded: how could it be right for Wales to have 22 Councils delivering education services for 3.1m people while Kent County Council delivered the same services for 1.5m people?
Time to be Radical? aims to take such comments seriously, and considers what can be done to realign services and communities to meet future demands. This paper, which might cause a few traditionalists to fall of their chairs, looks at the idea of the radical transformation of public services from a community perspective. It considers the role of national and local government, alongside grassroots community action, and it concludes with a practical, prescriptive business model to realign how public services re designed, delivered and measured.
Available by the end of the summer 2025, unless my garden projects take longer than expected.