The LGA's submission to the Government's Civil Society Covenant Framework consultation

Councils work closely with civil society, in both its formal and informal forms, as vital partners in delivering services, shaping places and supporting residents through crisis and hardship. In many varied parts of the country, effective and enduring relationships have been formed between local government and civil society that are based on trust, parity of esteem and innovation. In many places, this has included the use of covenants and compacts to provide formal frameworks, to set out expectations and provide accountability between the sectors. The LGA welcomes the government’s move to update and revitalise its own relationship with civil society through the proposed covenant. 

It is important that the covenant recognises: 

• that councils have substantive engagement and relationships with civil society, and that this role should be reflected in the covenant;
• that policy decisions from central government can impact significantly on those local relationships and that local government is an important source of feedback and experience in what works locally;
• that like central government, councils have to balance the roles of being commissioners of services from, grant-awarders to and strategic partners of VCFSE organisations.

Local government relationships with VCFSE organisations and civil society more broadly have been through several decades of substantive change. Both the previous Labour government and the subsequent Coalition government moved to encourage greater use of the VCFSE sector as a delivery agent for public services, albeit with a greater emphasis on strategic partnerships with both local and central government under the Labour administration before 2010, and a move towards emphasising granular community activity and localised development of ways of working after 2010. In both these periods, compacts between central government and civil society were created, and councils have been encouraged to develop their own compacts locally.

Many civil society organisations are now key public service delivery partners for councils, with service provision becoming the dominant relationship between councils and the VCS, a move away from the traditional relationship based around the award of grants. This was accelerated by the severe pressures on council budgets and the move towards a competitive approach to providing local services. This is a shift that has also been experienced in the health and social care sector, with councils engaged in the commissioning of services through Integrated Care Boards and Integrated Care Systems.

The impact of both wider public spending cuts and cost-of-living issues has seen a greater onus on the VCFSE to support residents in need where state capacity at a central or local level has been reduced. 

The COVID-19 pandemic had a further impact in reshaping relationships between local government and civil society, with joint working to enable the rapid establishment of systems and infrastructure to support communities through the crisis. This period brought both sectors into a different, less transactional relationship, towards one based more on joint working and on the sharing of intelligence and knowledge. While the period of councils being able to draw largely unrestricted and un-ringfenced central government funding to the neighbourhood level is in itself clearly not directly repeatable, this was a period that allowed trust between local government and the VCS to grow; which allowed innovative and locally-tailored solutions to be tried, tested and developed.

Unsurprisingly, this was most notable in areas where there were existing resilient relationships between the sectors, including those that had successfully employed compacts to mediate and develop those relationships. The reset and reinvigorated relationships that emerged from Coronavirus have in many cases informed and strengthened the abilities of both councils and the VCFSE sector to respond to subsequent crises and challenges, including flooding, riots, refugee arrivals from Syria and Ukraine, and most notably the challenges around the cost of living. In this instance, the freedom granted to councils through the relatively unrestricted Household Support Grant funding often enabled effective co-production and delivery of policy responses to the pressures faced by local residents, effectively employing the unique insights and reach of local VCFSE ecosystems.

It is important that the government’s covenant reflects the reset of relationship that arose from the COVID-19 crisis and subsequent challenges; the learning from those periods of the importance of joint working, co-design and delivery, and that a resilient local government/civil society relationship, empowered by trust and a high degree of financial autonomy, can be a crucial driver in delivering many of the government’s missions.

The proposed four key principles of the covenant – recognition, partnership, participation and transparency – reflect the local government sector’s experience of the basic underpinnings of an effective relationship with civil society. These are not dissimilar to the four principles of effective strategic relationships identified in a study undertaken by the LGA and Locality in 2022, which took evidence and examples from both councils and the VCFSE sector around good practice and barriers. Many of the key elements and good practice identified through this work are transferable to the central government/civil society relationship:

• Shared foundations – i.e. clear, shared understanding of purpose, valued and role; based on a commitment to partnership working.

Key elements of this:

• Rebalancing power, though collaborative partnerships, parity of esteem, trust and mutual respect. This includes recognition of the disparities of power between government (local or central) and civil society, and redesigning processes to recognise this, for example changing consultation models so that VCFSE organisations are invited into the policy design process at the outset of the decision-making process, rather than responding to a proposal that has already been designed. There are many areas of government policy where the input of civil society at an early stage of design would be valuable in shaping effective and workable policy.
• Recognition of value – building a resilient strategic relationship means understanding the value of what civil society can deliver and offer. 
• Transparency – ensuring that processes and decision making are decomplexified as much as possible and that information and data flows in both direction.
• Consistency – in the local government/civil society relationship, ensuring that all parts of a council respect, understand and value the relationship is at the heart of building resilient strategic ties. It is important that the VCFSE relationship is not a ‘silo’ within the council, managed and understood by a few officers, but something which is valued across the full range of council functions. Enlarged to the central government scale, this is a vital part of ensuring that the ambition of the covenant are fulfilled – the commitment to and investment in the relationship must be consistent across all departments and functions, not a relationship which is managed solely with DCMS. 
• Relational culture – both parties giving generously to the process of collaboration and being open to receiving feedback.
• For councils this has meant seeing their role as a collaborative enabler of action, rather than simply providers and commissioners of services – something that can translate across to central government. Risk aversion is a natural trait within governmental organisations, but the collaborative and experimental nature seen during the pandemic can set a tone for a new form of future collaboration. This is based on an understanding that the scale of the challenges facing communities and the wider nation are of a scale that no one sector can possess all the answers and capacity, particular when resources are severely constrained. Central government has a role in enabling freedom to experiment and innovate, both through how it conducts itself, but also through how it empowers councils and civil society in how funding and resources are awarded and controlled.

• Effective structures – resilient strategic relationships need to be built on clear and effective structures that are fit for purpose and enable innovation. The experience of councils that have implemented compacts is that structures that enable key stakeholders to come together and which enable information-sharing, creating relationships of trust and provide for accountability have been crucial to the success of these documents. For the national covenant to work effectively, clearly understood structures, with investment from senior political and civil service leadership, will need to be in place and to have longevity. Returning to the point above on consistency, these structures need to incorporate leadership from across the relevant delivery departments, not to be shunted off to a self-contained silo.
• Capacity and resources – while funding is clearly a crucial part of government/civil society relationships, ways of working and understanding the capacity constraints of civil society organisations are also important in creating effective strategic relationships. Time is a crucial constraint on many civil society organisations which hampers their ability to engage effectively with governmental structures and processes – councils that have build resilient strategic relationships have recognised this, along with wider capacity constraints, and have ensured that, for example, consultation and engagement processes are designed with those constraints in mind. This includes bringing in civil society organisations at the earliest stages of policy or solution design; ensuring that the burden in terms of commitments of staff or volunteer time to meetings is appropriately managed with understanding of the constraints of capacity under which civil society organisations operate.

The key barriers to successful partnership working with civil society at a local level which councils have identified include the impact of competitive commissioning, the reduction in budgets, short-term time horizons in terms of budget setting and policy-making; a centralised approach to policy making that does not have civil society at its heart; and lack of long-term investment in the infrastructure necessary for VCSE organisations - particularly smaller and specialist organisations - to thrive. A shortage of support and expertise for, and within, the civil society sector in areas such as financial management, auditing, workforce management or making grant applications can lead to key parts of local civil society ecosystems being under-utilised or moribund, whether in terms of assets, skills, volunteers or other resources.

These are major strategic challenges at both a local and national level, and will require substantial time, energy and resource to resolve. However, the covenant can begin to address these, and underline commitment to building strategic relationships based on transparency and trust. It is vital that the covenant:

• Acknowledges and commits to building on the vital role that civil society can play, as a partner with all tiers of government, in achieving the government’s missions;
• Recognises the central role that the local government/civil society relationship plays in the delivery of services, building strong communities, shaping places and delivering economic growth; acknowledges and leans from best practice in this relationship and does not cut across existing covenants and similar arrangements at a local level;
• Ensures that the importance of a genuine partnership with civil society at all tiers of government is embedded in work on devolution in England;
• Sets out how government will ensure that civil society is engaged in co-designing policy at an early stage;
• Commits to providing the financial freedoms that local government and civil society need in order to build effective strategic partnerships, pioneer innovative solutions and deliver policy responses that work for their local area, and that this be part of future devolution processes and agreements;
• Acknowledges the importance of consistent, long-term funding for civil society to play its full role; and that this includes local VCFSE infrastructure as well as direct delivery organisations, and that multi-year funding settlements for local government can help to provide financial security for the VCFSE sector;
• Sets out clearly how sections of civil society that provide representation, services and support for people, groups and areas that might otherwise be excluded will be guaranteed a voice and a place at the table;
• Provides clarity of how ministers and officials will be accountable for the delivery of the covenant and how its impact and effectiveness will be monitored.

Contact details: Jo Kibble, Policy Adviser (VCFSE, Democracy & Equalities) [email protected]