WRITTEN ON December 30th, 2004 BY Mike Bracken AND STORED IN Across the Board, Ideal Goverment - project, Political engagement

After a short-spell working with Local Authorities (LAs) in e-government units and with executive level management, it’s clear to me that the motivation of LAs in general, and specifically the back-office and executive employees, varies widely and needs to more clearly understood before across-the-board recommendations can be made.

For many authorities, particularly those in the CPA category rankings of ‘poor’, ‘fair’ and ‘good’, the executive is mostly driven by the desire to retain and/or improve its current ranking, as this will be the final judgement on performance. In this context, the e-government agenda has played an important role. In the five year cycle (ending in May 2005) LAs were regularly audited on a variety of e-government performance metrics, mostly set out in the BVP 157 category. Although a floor-lifting exercise rather than a process to promote innovation and user-demanded services as is recommended widely on this site, it has not been without merit in my opinion.

Unfortunately, two things have happened recently to undermine the motivation at LA level. Firstly, many LAs were informally informed, as part of the process to create a new set of CPA measurement criteria, that e-government would not be as important to their performance evaluation as it has been previously. Also, there are few effective penalties for not reaching the 2005 targets anyway. The overall effect has been to leave some LAs who strive for excellence in e-government (for instance West Sussex who have worked with the MySociety partnership to sponsor truly innovative outputs which can then be applied at local levels in the most appropriate way), many who see the e-government agenda as a necessary box-ticking exercise to achieve funding, and a selection where the executive and elected officials are so pointedly anti-technology that it will require a change of leadership to even begin the e-government process.

Understanding the motivation of any LA needs to be the first step in evaluating its performance so far. It also needs to be made explicit to external bodies seeking to assist or create user-demanded services, because if the LA thinks primarily in terms of auditing and performance rather than user support and innovation, then even the simplest proposals to change the nature of local e-government may be undermined.Motivation of public service employees has for some years been a source of much debate, not least by LeGrand, the IPPR and others. Conventional wisdom, that there are ‘knights’ who are motivated by the interests of the people they serve and ‘knaves’ who are motivated by their own self interest. While there are people contributing here more qualified than me to discuss public policy developments, it shouldn’t be too difficult to promote a series of polices which recognise the natural self-interest of LA executive branches while promoting user-demanded services. For instance, there is a great deal of emphasis placed on fixing back-office processes in LAs, but a great deal of tacit resistance because this challenges self-interest and, some perceive, existing jobs. A very simple proposal would be to allow the e-government unit in an LA to retain some savings made by improving back-office processes for future investment rather than return them to LA treasuries.