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Maybe at my age I ought to be more hard-bitten and cynical. Yet when I’m presented with what seems like a new way of doing things in the public sector, I still think first of the potential and possibilities. So let me, in a spirit appropriate to a New Year, come over all dewy eyed about Local Area Agreements (LAAs).

My first LAA encounter was as chair of a Neighbourhood Management Pathfinder. It wasn’t completely love at first sight as it inserted the county Local Strategic Partnership into what was a complex enough relationship between central government as funder, ourselves as catalyst and local residents as those whose aspirations and needs set the particular objectives we enable mainstream service providers (police, housing, Sure Start, health, education etc) to deliver.

It was my second LAA moment that convinced me here was something worth trying to get right. This time it was a meeting of housing professionals and civil servants looking at the way forward for the Supporting People regime. Government is seriously trying (and making some progress) to join things up, and wants to devolve more decisions about how money is spent to the local level. Ring-fencing pots for particular purposes runs counter to that. However, allowing local authorities to vire at will risks service provision being skewed away from higher need groups towards the much larger number of lower level recipients, who are both more likely to turn out and vote and are favourably regarded by the rest of the electorate. Maybe an LAA offers the way forward.

There’s a tricky balance. National government has to ensure that its priorities, especially around the cohesion and inclusion agendas, are met. Service providers from the statutory and voluntary sectors (and maybe even some private ones too) need to be brought into a relationship as partners rather than simply delivery agents. Local people, at levels much smaller than the large boroughs, districts and counties required to ensure efficient public services, must be in the front seats. And local authorities are challenged to find a revised role as keepers of the public purse, watchers over the political realities and honest brokers between all the parties involved.

My guarded optimism comes from knowing that most of the service providers and deliverers I come into contact with see the benefits of working closer together and listening to local voices. It lies for example at the heart of the National Housing Federation’s In Business for Neighbourhoods agenda. I’ve seen it working at the most local level in our Pathfinder project.

The unanswered question is whether local government will consider the prize of seeing more major decisions made locally worth the price of moving away from the inherited “command and control” mentality that still blights many relationships with LSPs and other multilateral forums. Or will ministers be able to wield an appropriate mix of carrot and stick to win them over?

For now I’ll stay the optimist, and hope that 2006 will be the year of the LAA.