GO staff have a crucial role to play in supporting partners to deliver  national and local outcomes, in order to create better places everywhere and an improved quality of life for all communities.

GOs are being transformed at the moment. The new emphasis is on places, delivery and upping the skills and confidence of GO staff to  engage strategically with stakeholders – local authorities, LSPs, partners and other local and regional agencies.

The GO role in supporting delivery can be summed up as:

“Using knowledge and skills to help partnerships at whatever scale to make robust, evidence based investment decisions to meet their outcomes”

Where does this new emphasis on ‘delivery’ and ‘place’ come from? It goes back to the Comprehensive Spending Review 2007 (CSR07), which challenged government at all levels to deliver on an ambitious and stretching set of public service improvement targets for the period 2008 – 2011. These targets are set out in 30 national, cross-departmental Public Service Agreements (PSAs) and are reflected in Departmental Strategic Objectives (DSOs). The PSAs address fundamental long-term challenges, such as climate change, affordable housing, community cohesion and educational attainment.

The PSAs form the basis for the new set of indicators which local authorities and GOs use to identify the most relevant improvement priorities for each area. These agreed improvement priorities are the core of the 150 new LAAs which the GOs signed off with every principal local authority in England in summer 2008.

So GOs support the delivery of these outcomes by:

• Strengthening national policies - by agreeing priorities with national government, and providing feedback on progress
  
• Integrating regional strategies - by collaborating with regional and local partners on shared priorities
  
• Driving local delivery - by engaging strategically with localities on the negotiation and delivery of LAAs, challenging under-performance, articulating national priorities and spotting and sharing good practice

These three roles make up the “GO Offer” to national and local partners.

The aim of the Handbook is to enable GO staff to support local delivery.

Although many GO staff have been doing this for some time, there is now a feeling of a ‘step change’. The focus on localities and meeting local outcomes has to be combined with delivering against the PSAs from the region.

This can be challenging and means that all GO staff are now working more closely with localities, whether you are a thematic or PSA outcome lead, or a Locality Manager. In turn this will need more cross-cutting work between different GO staff and also more reliance on using evidence – with increasing input from analytical staff to the delivery agenda.

Working in a more analytical, evidence based way means liaising with GO analytical staff – they are a great resource, so use them – and also having more confidence to use some of the relevant tools and techniques yourself. If nothing else, this additional knowledge will help you ‘ask the right questions’ – whether of partners, in your GO challenge role or of GO colleagues to draw on their specialist analytical or thematic expertise.   

The Handbook is not designed to delay or add bureaucracy to an already difficult process. The process is designed to ensure the best possible decisions are made making it more likely that the right outcomes are met.

The Handbook is designed to help you to find and use different tools and techniques to support partners to deliver change on the ground. It is organised in four sections, reflecting the key elements of the delivery cycle:

• Analysis - what is the problem?
• Planning - what are we going to do about it?
• Delivery - how are we going to do it?
• Performance - how are we going to know we have we done it well?

Although it is ordered in four sections, the delivery cycle is a continuous cycle where each element feeds into one another. Good delivery depends on being able to draw upon each of these four elements.

The Handbook is for all GO staff who work with places, whether that is in a locality management role, as a theme-lead, in a policy-focussed role or as an analyst. It has been designed to support all GO staff in locality management – rather than just being for Locality Managers. It should help GO staff with different roles to work better together around ‘place’ as a GO priority – as well as with particular places in your region.

One of the main audiences is likely to be theme leads in GOs, as the Handbook will help you to work more closely with your colleagues with localities and on the GO place agenda. However, it doesn’t duplicate specialist thematic data sources or other information which you will either know about or know who to contact in the relevant Government Department. Other GO staff who are interested in this type of information should contact their GO theme lead.

Although the Handbook is for all GO staff, there is a particular link with other GO resources for Locality Managers in that it can help you develop the skills set out in the Ladder for Development which sets out a framework for continuous, professional development in locality management.

As well as being for all GO staff, the Handbook can be used by people with different levels of knowledge and experience. The main text doesn’t assume previous knowledge of the tools and techniques though so it can be used by new staff or people who have taken on new roles and responsibilities. For users with more knowledge there are places you can click for embedded documents and links to external documents and sites for more in depth information and additional resources. This design should also mean that you can use the main text in one section, drill down to more detail in another, and maybe skip a third all together if this covers your main specialism.