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I should like to thank you, all my colleagues across the sector, for consenting to me being President of SOLACE. I will try my best to repay your trust in me by carrying out the responsibilities of the role with enthusiasm and passion. I would also like to thank my Council and in particular my Mayor , Steve Bullock for giving me the support and encouragement to undertake this role.
It is a genuine privilege to be given the opportunity by one's peers of speaking for professional management in local government. I am really pleased that there are so many people here today at our AGM. Obviously I know a good many of the people here today, but some of you may not know me at all. In a sense I feel a little like Bilbo Baggins on the event of his birthday when he said .
"I do not know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve"
If you think into this quote quite deeply you will realise that it is a compliment even though on first hearing it doesn't sound it! As chief executives and senior managers we need to recognise that we what we do is not all alike. Let's face it, we are all very different people with very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in different ways in different places - but we have one common cause: improving the character, quality and professionalism of public service management in local government. And I believe that successfully carrying out our roles as chief executives and senior managers is crucial to the success not just of our Councils but also of our localities. In my view it is the talent, dedication and professionalism that you bring to your jobs that makes local government work well in our country.
We also need to recognise here at the Local Government Association's annual conference that local politics really matters. Local politicians bring commitment to a cause, authentic connections with local community and a facility for deciding issues in the wider public interest. They bring a dynamic democratic impulse to change for the better; but as managers we bring something different, we bring the capacity to realise change - to actually make things happen. In short, politicians invoke change our job is to generate it.
Generating change requires us to be absolutely clear about our values as professionals. And it is to these values that I would like to turn. In particular I should like to take the opportunity to remind you of three things about our role as professional managers in local government.
First, we must never forget the unique character of localism and place - localism is not something that can simply be appropriated by national politicians in a few disarming phrases.
Second, we must acknowledge that service excellence is but one purpose of local government, it is not the only purpose - above all else we should help communities to live in harmony together.
And third, we should never forget our personal responsibilities as managers to develop and nurture our staff and in particular the next generation of public service managers.
FIRST LOCALISM - I am a strong localist: I am a Londoner . and with the announcement three hours ago that London has been awarded the 2012 Olympic Games, what a superb day this is for London , for the country as a whole and for British sport. I know well the importance of local ties, local attachments, local sentiments, and local connections for helping people build a strong sense of belonging to places and to communities. Locality matters; and locality is unique.
But while we are all localists we shouldn't be romantic localists. Let's be honest. Localities can trap people; localities can fore-shorten peoples horizons; localities can constrain peoples life-chances. That is why we spend so much time making our localities better - trying to improve both the quality of life experienced in them and the quality of life-chances on offer locally. However, our managerial focus is forced more towards processes than places.
As managers we spend a lot of time benchmarking, chasing best practice, standardising processes and generally ensuring that managerial order is brought to what would otherwise be a form of chaos. Our role as managers is to ensure convergence across local government, to minimise the dispersion of practice, to reduce the variation in processes, outputs and outcomes. But we need to acknowledge that all this effort and energy could inevitably leads us into a managerial drive towards uniformity.
And yet a very key aspect of our job is to help uniqueness thrive - to build unique organisations for people to work in and to make these organisations work to build unique localities.
My message is that we must never let the inevitable drive for uniformity crowd out the desire for uniqueness . So my first point is build preserve, restore and re-build uniqueness in the places, the localities and the communities where you work.
SECOND, OUR COMMITMENT TO PUBLIC ACTION IS MORE THAN DELIVERING EXCELLENT SERVICES
Modernising services and ensuring excellence in the design and delivery of service (in terms of effectiveness and efficiency) is a key object for us all.
But service delivery is one facet of our Councils role. We also need to help our localities function as healthy, secure and dynamic communities - where difference is respected and embraced rather than feared and avoided.
In my view we have spent too much time focussed on how to call for "more freedoms" and we have spent too little time articulating what exactly we want these freedoms for!
Many years ago Isaiah Berlin spoke about what he called - the two dimensions of liberty. He said that it was not good enough simply to struggle to have "freedom from"; you also need to know what you want "freedom for". I think that we focus so much on freedom from central constraint we think too little about what we want freedoms for .
Surely it is the freedom to help communities to solve local problems themselves and to modernise themselves in the way that helps them compete better in the fast paced world of the 21 st century. This is not a question of the degree of excellence in service delivery. Instead it is a question of the degree of openness to change in the wider community.
But what is the purpose of this wider public action if not securing ever higher standards of public services?
For me this was answered by Bobby Kennedy in 1968 on the night that Martin Luther King Jr was killed. Speaking just two months before he himself was assassinated he said that at root the purpose of public action and public life was .
"to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world".
We should dedicate ourselves to achieving this deep and noble purpose in our communities before and after we have focussed our energies on service design and delivery.
THIRD, I should like to conclude by saying something about our duty to those who we manage .
As professional managers and managerial leaders I believe that we owe a strong duty to those over whom we were appointed to have managerial authority. We all know that authority decays if it is not exercised fairly. And we all know that we manage only with the consent of our staff and their consent only comes if we manage them well. People want to work in an organisation which allows them to accomplish something personally; people also want their personal accomplishments to be connected to some wider organisational goal; and finally they want to know that their accomplishment and their connections is bound together in a sense of progress. In short, people need a sense of accomplishment, a sense of connection to others and a sense of being involved in progressive change.
I believe that the responsibility we have to nurture a new generation of managers to craft a modern public service ethos in keeping not with the traditions of the 1960s (when my outlook on life was being crystallised) but the emerging values of the 2020s.
Thus my overall message today is that when developing the local government managers of tomorrow we need to enrich their sense of localism and place; nurture their commitment to public action over private action; and deepen their faith in democracy as the best means available to helping people live in harmony with each other.
Only then can we say that we have meet our responsibilities not just to the unique localities we serve, not just to the public values that our jobs demand of us, but also to the younger generation of people who follow us and whose views about management is shaped by their experience of our management.
Each and everyone of us here knows that there is no avoiding personal responsibility. And each of our Councils have entrusted us with enormous responsibilities in our managerial roles - we should therefore as a society of professional managers in local government dedicate ourselves to carry these responsibilities with considerable care and with as much knowledge and wisdom as we can muster.
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