The very useful 4 Nations Child Policy Network have let me know that the government - who have been consulting on the roles and responsibilities of the Director of Children's Services and the Lead Member for Children's Services - have published the guidance.

They say that the role of the Lead Member (LM) must assume:

political accountability for the effectiveness, availability and value for money of all local authority children’s services

leadership within and beyond the local authority to engage and encourage local communities in order to improve children’s services, and to ensure that services, both within the local authority and across partner organisations, improve outcomes for all and are organised around children and young people’s needs; and;

a particular focus, with the Director of Children's Services (DCS), on safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children across all agencies.

I think its worth quoting at length the responsibilities the government have laid on Lead Members in terms of leadership and accountability:

The Lead Member will provide leadership across the range of local authority children’s services and through engagement with partners.  The LM will champion the cause of effective integration.   The LM’s role differs from the DCS role insofar as the LM’s leadership responsibility is political rather than professional.  In the context of the LM’s role as an elected member of the council, the LM will develop the strategic direction of local authority children's services and bring leaders of partner organisations together in a shared vision; the DCS in turn will lead partners in embedding the strategy and in delivering the vision.  The Lead Member will work with the DCS to develop and implement the Children and Young People’s Plan.

The Lead Member will also exercise his or her leadership function by ensuring that the monitoring, performance management and financial audit systems support the effective and efficient targeting of resources to meet the needs of children and young people and that outcomes improve as a result. This will involve ensuring that sufficient resources are made available to support the effective discharge of the authority’s statutory children’s services functions.  As a member of the local authority executive, the LM will be in a position to ensure that chief officers across local authority services are held to account by the chief executive and elected members for the contribution made by the services for which they are responsible to improving outcomes for children and young people. The LM will also be ideally placed to ensure that other members of the authority take account of children's service issues in exercising their functions. fficeffice" />

 

The LM cannot exercise decision-making functions in relation to other agencies in the public, private voluntary or community sectors, as each separate agency or body will retain its functional responsibilities, and will remain ultimately accountable for those functions if they are exercised by other authorities – NHS bodies, for example, are still accountable for their functions even when a section 31 agreement is made.  However, the Lead Member should work with other agencies through partnership arrangements so that, taken together, services effectively improve outcomes for and address the needs of children and young people in the local area.

The Lead Member should ensure that children and young people, their parents and carers are able to make a real contribution to the development of services by their active involvement in service design and through seeking their feedback on the effectiveness of services.

Its almost enough to make me rethink my position on full time councillors.

I don't think that the motivations of people who want to be involved
in politics aren't substantially different from those of their
predecessors and I'm not sure that the expectations of the electorate
are hugely different either.  However, the nature of the
conversation between politicians and electorate is very definitely
changing.  David Yelland, writing in the Observer last weekend says:

We live in a cynical age - an era in
which few believe anything and it has become fashionable to regard our
political class as a bunch of liars and chancers. Actually it has
become more than fashionable - it has become accepted. The default
position of the average British voter (or non-voter) is that any
individual with power, whether in politics or in business, is almost by
definition corrupt.

The reality is that, with few exceptions, British politics and
British business is not corrupt at all; but voicing such an opinion has
become socially unacceptable.

So what to do to change the zeitgeist. Tom Bentley from Demos has a plan:

"The decline of deference is not a bad thing, but
when it sweeps away all kinds of public legitimacy we have a
fundamental problem. That’s why I say that we get the politicians we
deserve, because our opt-out from politics inevitably reduces the
legitimacy of leaders. In an age when people feel they have better
things to do, we need to work out how to set public rules that allow us
to live good lives together."

Bentley says that we need a new type of political leadership, which:

identifies problems and challenges for which there
are no easy answers, and communicates powerfully our need to share
responsibility for them

acknowledges the limits of existing solutions without retreating from the problem or abandoning it to private interest

mobilises people to participate in creating
solutions, and includes diverse participants – insiders and outsiders,
enthusiasts and resisters – in the construction of a solution

uses authority to create a ‘holding environment’ in
which solutions can emerge from different sources, rather than
demanding instant, comprehensive, answers

distributes power and resources to those places and people who can most effectively solve a problem

sustains a focus on the issue over time, refusing
to be diverted by distractions or opposition, and shows itself capable
of learning from failure and partial success

models honesty and clarity in a way that seeks to encourage others to practice the same.

And he says we need a new compact to renew and change democratic institutions, which he suggests could include:

- creating a local government financial settlement
which localises a significant proportion of tax-raising power and
matches powers to responsibilities

- embracing a fully fledged vision of neighbourhood governance which delegated management and budgets across key areas

- embedding public deliberation in cycles of
institutional development such as trade negotiations, scientific
research and innovation programmes, land development and so on

- reshaping public services and careers to make
coproduction by citizens as important as professional knowledge and
performance management currently are

- initiating co-governance arrangements in local
government so that citizen involvement and deliberation was factored
into the annual budget-setting processes undertaken by local and
neighbourhood government, as in Porto Alegre.

Personally I think there is a lot to all
this, but I wouldn't underestimate the challenges we'll face in making
any of it come into being.  The bureaucracies that surround us
(which are pretty conservative) and the culture of mistrust are going
to be hard to change.

But small steps, small steps...

Update - Go see what Will Davis and David Wilcox have to say about the report.

This isn't half bad via The Ragged School Blog who says:

The result is a context rich search which shows how such establishments are represented electronically when they have no website themselves. What can we learn from this about the future of the web and the choices the local community need to make about representing themselves using their own voices ?

Google are slightly more prosaic:

Sometimes the information you are looking for is related to a particular place – like the all-night chemist that is nearest to your house. Google Local locates neighbourhood stores and services by searching billions of pages across the Web, then cross-checking those results with Yellow Pages data to pinpoint the local resources you want to find.

The fair is up at Blackheath at the moment. 

If that's not your thing there's still plenty of tranquility to go round.

has a suplement on recycling that may be of interest, including this chart of what you can put in your green box if you have one.

I've spent this afternoon at the London Green Lifestyle Show in Greenwich Park.  Towards the end I dropped in on the Lewisham stall and was pleased to hear that they'd been doing brisk trade all afternoon.

I was also pleased to hear that next Saturday - at the opening of Telegraph Hill park - those who want one should be able to get a free compost bin from us.  We're ordering 1,000 to start with and if you'd like one let me know and I'll see what can be done to reserve some.  We can't deliver so you'll have to come, either to the opening of the park or to the Wearside Depot to pick it up.

If you want to know more about composting you can find out more here.