Intervention or Persuasion? Strategies for Turnaround of Poorly-Performing Councils

Towards a model of the intervention process

“…staff departures, depressed morale, psychological resistance: Bullock 1986), most interventions are less dramatic (Turner et al 2004). Any requirement to more closely monitor an organisation or transfer best practices can be fraught with difficulties..…”

“…Various patterns of different service delivery problems and/or systemic governance concerns can initiate an intervention (or indeed interventions) and the subsequent processes can also vary significantly in scope, duration and conclusion. From informal guidance and requests for amended plans for example through to the mandatory use of external consultants (Glass 1998), introduction of new programmes (Rose and Haynes 1999) or imposition of external monitors to oversee changes (Turner et al 2004) or even assuming full control of a local service or council (Coe 2008, Beeri 2013. It is this variety that motivates and bounds the paper.…”

“…Although the research clearly builds upon and seeks to contribute to the broader literature on public service improvement (e.g. Lewis and Hartley 2001, Boyne 2004a, 2004b and 'turnaround' in particular (Turner et al 2004, Jas and Skelcher 2005, Boyne 2006), the specific details of different intervention processes remain under-explored. The paper seeks to make both a practical and conceptual contribution by 3 addressing the following research question: What are the characteristics of an (successful) intervention process?…”

Building the next model for intervention and turnaround in poorly performing local authorities in England

“…This paper builds on studies of corporate intervention, turnaround and recovery in local authorities, many of which focussed on the early years of CPA (Turner et al, 2004;Boyne, 2004;Jas and Skelcher, 2005;Turner and Whiteman, 2005;Wilson and Moore, 2007). Writing later, Beeri (2009Beeri ( , 2012Beeri ( 2013b Unsurprisingly there is less academic literature evaluating the current SLI regime because of its contemporary nature.…”

“…Given that a key finding of most of the earlier studies (Turner et al, 2004;Jas and Skelcher, 2005;Turner and Whiteman 2005), is that poor councils initially fail to recognise the need to engage with comparative exercises and do not perceive themselves to be poor (something which changed in councils during CPA), demonstrates this was a key strength of CPA. Clearly only a small minority of councils were failing and to some other councils CPA was considered an unnecessary burden but the question remains, without the external and independent scrutiny offered by CPA, would there have been an increasing scope for poor councils to slip through the net, only coming to light when it was too late?…”