The Improvement and Development Agency and the DTLR
1.1 Background
As part of its modernisation agenda the Government's Beacon Council Scheme has been initiated to identify councils which are centres of excellence from which others can learn with the aim of promoting best practice and innovation across a range of local government services. This is to be achieved through a nationally co-ordinated programme of dissemination in which the Improvement & Development Agency (IDA) has a leading role.
In order to identify the baseline of current best practice in the service and cross cutting service themes selected for the first year of the Beacon scheme the IDA and the DTLR jointly commissioned a series of projects. These are (with the relevant research organisation shown in parentheses):
- Community Safety: preventing local shopping & town centre crime & disorder (The Safe Neighbourhoods Unit)
- Education: helping to raise standards by tackling school failure (Centre for the Evaluation of Public Policy and Practice - Brunel University)
- Housing: improving housing maintenance (INLOGOV)
- Modernising Planning: streamlining planning decisions for business (Halcrow Fox, York Consulting with Boyer Planning, The DTLR Local and Regional Government Research Unit)
- Modern Service Delivery: improving housing & council tax benefit administration (The Centre for Research in Social Policy - Loughborough University)
- Social Services: helping care leavers (Centre for Housing Policy and Department of Social Policy and Social Work - The University of York)
- Sustainable Development: dealing with waste (AEA Technology)
1.2 The Research Papers and Summaries
The research papers present a critical literature review of the relevant service theme. They are based on academic reports and papers as well as published and unpublished policy papers journals and press articles. Some of the reviews include both British and International experience as appropriate in order to draw upon as wide an experience as possible. The reports should not be taken as necessarily representing the views of the funding organisations or of other Government Departments.
All of the papers have the same basic structure.
- Definition of the problem, by outlining its nature, scale and history and the factors that contribute to it;
- Identification of what local authorities should be seeking to achieve, in terms of overall aims or objectives, in addressing the problem;
- Outline the issues involved in addressing the problem which will affect the local authority's ability to develop and /or implement an appropriate response;
- Descriptive baseline of current practice based upon available quantitative and qualitative data;
- The essential characteristics of an approach that ought to constitute "Best Practice" based upon normative considerations as well as empirical observations.
1.3 Research and the Beacon Councils Advisory Panel
The reports will contribute to the process of dissemination and promotion of best practice but were also available to the Advisory Panel which made recommendations to Ministers on the selection of Beacon Councils.
Reports and summaries in MS Word
- Community Safety (*1)
- Education (*2)
- Housing (*3)
- Modernising Planning (*4)
- Modern Service Delivery (section A) (*5A)
- Modern Service Delivery (section B) (*5B)
- Social Services (*6)
- Sustainable Development (*7)
To download the reports and/or the executive summaries please save the self-extracting zip files listed below to a local drive (and then double-click on it in File Manager/Windows Explorer to release the Word files). These self-extracting zip files have been provided to ease the downloading process (NOTE: the report files total about 10mb, the summary files total about 8mb)
Package of Report files (Publ2*.doc):
PKZIP self-extracting archive (1020k)
Package of Executive Summary files (Publ3*.doc):
PKZIP self-extracting archive (650k)
For further information, please contact the Department's Research Contact in writing.
For more information on IDA Beacon Council Open Days, please see the IDA website
Published: 20 December 1999
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