Radical plans to change partnership working across Cambridgeshire approved

The Cambridgeshire Together Board have approved changes to partnership working across Cambridgeshire

The Cambridgeshire Together Board, a group of the county’s most influential decision makers, has approved an approach to radically transform how the public sector, the business sector and the third sector work together across Cambridgeshire.

The new approach, approved at the Board’s meeting in May 2010, will mark the end of static partnerships that cover everything across the whole county, to an approach where partner organisations focus on the right issues, at the right time and in the right way.

The Board has agreed to reduce the number of its meetings from bi monthly to bi annually and has commissioned the Cambridgeshire Public Sector Board (CPSB), which includes the Chief Executives and Chief Officers from Cambridgeshire's local public sector organisations, to take this work forward.

Developing a new approach

The CPSB will now develop a model, which encourages organisations to work together in a more streamlined, flexible and smarter way. It will free up time by reducing the hundreds of hours people from the various organisations spent in meetings, so their knowledge, expertise and initiative can be focused on delivering services and making Cambridgeshire an even better place to live.

The Board approved three key principles about how Cambridgeshire’s organisations will work together in the future:

• The new approach will be firmly based on a principle of subsidiarity - “doing things at the lowest appropriate geographic scale”.  Partners will only deal with issues on a Countywide basis where it makes most sense to do so, and will tackle key issues on a district basis amongst the relevant organisations.  Where appropriate, issues will be tackled at an area and neighbourhood level too. This will help address the desire of Public Sector leaders across Cambridgeshire to cut any unnecessary bureaucracy.  Inevitably many issues cut across Cambridgeshire’s administrative geographies and require different parts of local government to work together, often with other elements of the public sector, and with the voluntary and private sectors too.
• Central to this new approach therefore, is the principle that if one organisation can tackle an issue on its own, then all other partners step back and trust that organisation to do it. This will lessen the need for regular meetings involving 10-15 people from a number of organisations to look at an issue that one individual is accountable for in their own organisation
• This new approach would involve the right people from the appropriate organisations being commissioned to work together on the ground for a given period without the need for numerous partnership meetings.  Individuals would be given objectives to achieve, with clarity around the available resources, the targets to hit and the freedom and trust to achieve the outcome in the most efficient and effective way.  Once an improvement to service quality, a new service model is established or a target achieved, the group could be decommissioned, and resources allocated elsewhere 

The CPSB will present the proposed model to the Cambridgeshire Together Board for approval and implementation in September 2010.

Further information

View the report presented to the Cambridgeshire Together Board

For further information, contact Adam Speed, Cambridgeshire Together Partnerships Officer on 01223 699767