Promoting effective internal co-production – strengthening the officer-member partnership – Sunderland City Council

Sunderland City Council’s Community Leadership Programme has underpinned this transformation with a series of small, practical and no cost interventions which have helped to galvanise the internal ‘team’ within the Council. The Programme has been described by the RSA 2020Public Services Hub, which evaluated Sunderland’s approach recently, as the ‘glue’ which holds wider transformation together. The Communities and Local Government Select Committee on the Role of Councillors in their Communities visited Sunderland in 2012 to witness this approach first hand.

At root, the Community Leadership Programme represents a belief that Councillors must be at the heart of Sunderland’s strategy for social and economic renewal, but that to fulfil their potential as community leaders, they need a new type of support and capacity building, and a new set of tools to lead.   The Community Leadership Programme therefore incorporates a variety of support interventions and development initiatives under three broad strategic directions:

1. Engaging councillors more effectively as community leaders – creating new support structures that  empower councillors at the ‘front line’ (working with Councillors to re-define their role, understanding satisfaction, measuring it, customising support including individual ‘Account Managers’ to support each Councillor, improving IT and wider capacity in new, more creative ways) .
2. Engaging councillors in the development of Responsive Local Services (RLS) – creating new governance and engagement mechanisms that support council services that get closer to citizens and are more directly responsive to the needs of people and place as described above.
3. Engaging councillors as partners in local economic growth – developing the means to engage councillors in the City’s Economic Masterplan growth framework, particularly around the potential of citizens and communities to develop new SME’s and public service spin-outs.

Four years after inception, the Community Leadership Programme remains a focal point for much of the Council’s strategy for public service reform and community wellbeing and a vindication of the Council’s focus on the role of councillors as key agents of change.  Although the Council does measure Member satisfaction on a regular basis – and this has improved dramatically over the lifetime of the Programme – the Programme’s true importance in strengthening trust between Officers and Members cannot be overestimated.

Read Sunderland’s case study on responsive local governance here.

Read Sunderland’s case study on bringing services closer to the communities they serve here.