Kia ora koutou katoa, welcome everybody along to this webinar. My name is Craig Griffiths and thank you very much for joining us today as we look to talk about some of the ins and outs and hopefully provide some tips on the long-term planning process in particular as it relates to local government. Okay, so before we go any further, I'd like to introduce you to my colleague Wayne Murphy who's our resident long-term planning expert.
Welcome Wayne. Do you want to give us a little bit of a rundown on, introduce yourself to the team. Thanks Griff.
Well, I've been in the local government, worked in the local government sector for 17 years and since moving to Wellington, I have been working in a number of different central government agencies, spent quite a bit of time in Parliament and have worked at MPI, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Education until coming to Eleanor Clark just over a year ago. And as I said, my name is Craig Griffiths. Unlike Wayne, I'm not an expert in long-term planning, but what I do bring to the table is a background in what we call design thinking, which is essentially a problem-solving technique, but I also bring a number of years in working in community relations and stakeholder engagement roles in the private sector.
So I'm going to add a few thoughts about some of the engagement components which I talked about people were being challenged with a little earlier. Okay, so we'll kick off, we'll get into it. Wayne, would you like to tell us a little bit about, explain what is a long-term plan and an annual plan and what's the difference between the two? Sure.
Well, they both have quite a lot of commonalities. They're both planning documents. They've been around a very long time.
The LTP side of things, the long-term plan process, was put into the Local Government Act 2002. A number of councils, a small number of councils, did their first LTP in 2003. My first LTP was in 2004, and since 2006 they've been part of the tri-annual activities of councils.
So as we look ahead into 2024, I think just about, if not every council in the country, is thinking about doing its next LTP. They're a core function of local government, and some people are really, a number of people that registered for this webinar just wanted us to cover the basics because they're not sure where to start. We're going to touch on that in a minute.
And they can be pretty daunting. There's a lot of information that goes into an LTP. Pulling that information together and working out what is the right level of detail, that can be pretty daunting when you've not done it before.
But there's actually a lot of strengths or positives in the whole process, and local government has been doing this work for a very long time, as I've said. The other thing that local government is, in my experience, really good at is its engagement with communities. So I don't think people should be put off by what's in front of them.
I'd just say embrace it and run with it. They're very important documents, so it's not, you know, mince words around that. They create a really accessible place for describing the community outcomes that the district or the city or the region is involved with, and they draw out particularly what the council is going to be doing or undertaking with respect to those outcomes.
And as I see it, the way I see it work is that the community outcomes part of it, the council has regard to those, but they're not necessarily bound by them. But the LTP actually articulates what the council is going to be doing and is responsible for. They have a 10-year outlook, of course, the LTP.
That in itself can be challenging at any time, but as we're about to touch on later, right now is a particularly challenging time. There's a lot of change happening in the sector, and that creates a heck of a... In fact, I would say, and I hadn't seen anything in terms of the level of uncertainty, I haven't seen anything quite like it in the last 20-odd years. And the other part of the LTP is that while they have a 10-year timeframe stamped on the council, councils have to do them every three years.
So, you could argue that they really have a three-year life, and it's that first three years that people expect to see the most detail and have the greatest amount of detail available to them. They have a lot of overlap between an LTP and an annual plan, and I've mentioned the community outcomes already, so they cascade out of community outcomes, and it kind of cascades down from there. So, you get that 10-year take on things, you have a bit more information about the next three years, and then the annual plan focusses on the next 12 months, or the first 12 months, I should say.
They're really important in another respect, as they provide a basis for the council's accountability to the community. Both documents have a role in that regard, and as the timeframe shortens, you can get a greater degree of specificity. They provide a space, the LTP provides a space for the decisions and activities of the council over the three years, and the annual plan logically focusses on the funding implications for the upcoming year.
The content from the LTP flows through to the annual plan, and indeed the first year of an LTP is the annual plan for that first year. And the annual plan, the really important thing about the annual plan is it enables the council to set out how it will fund its activities over the year ahead, that is its services and those sorts of things, and that comes in terms of meaningfulness to the council that enables it to set its rates and set out what its fees and charges might be as well. Is there anything that's specific to the LTP that's not in the annual plan? Any kind of specific things that remain the purview of the LTP? Yeah, there's a couple of things.
You'll typically find a lot more information in an LTP anyway, because the LTP sets out all the activities that the council might be involved in and planning to undertake. It's also really important in terms of articulating what changes in services and service levels and new things that the council might be planning on doing. And that's a really important thing because the Act says that there are a couple of things that you can only have in an LTP, and that's where if you're looking to significantly change a particular activity that could be ramping it up or perhaps scaling it back, then that needs to be covered in an LTP.
And the other thing that the Act requires is that if you're looking to transfer the authority, that must be done through an LTP as well. That said, bearing in mind that you're supposed to do them every three years. If something crops up, let's say you finish an LTP for 2024 and then something crops up afterwards, you can still do an amendment to an LTP for those sorts of things.
So Griff, as I mentioned before, the sector's facing a lot of uncertainty. What's your take on that? Yeah, well, I've got a little bit of an insight on this because recently Alan and Claire have been doing some work on a couple of aspects as they relate to local government. And there's no question there is a lot of uncertainty and potential disruption coming down the pipe.
It could result in some potentially significant changes for the way in which councils focus on the activities that they run. And then you add into that, actually, we're in an election year, so nationally there's going to be some potentially significant change at the end of the year. And then the local government elections from last year meant that there's quite a change in terms of the faces and the experience around the table.
So that's another component of change which will need to be accounted for over the next period. But there's one or two particular things to note, I think. First of all is the future of local government report.
As I said, we recently assisted with some aspects of that work. And while that won't be properly kicked off until post-election, the panel suggested that there were some recommendations that should be put into place and the steering committee established to put those recommendations in place. And a couple of the highlight recommendations that pulled out were around legislating the purpose of local government and being to focus and promote on community wellbeing, which is quite a change in terms of its elevation.
So changes will be around resetting the focus of local government, shifting some of those roles and functions to central government to make the space for local government to concentrate on that community wellbeing focus. But also shifting some of the funding systems to ensure that local government has that space to actually do that and deliver on that ethos. The second one is around local government being a Te Tiriti partner and having the systems in place in order to give effect to Te Tiriti partnerships.
A strong Te Tiriti partner is essential for local government going forward. In fact, the report makes a recommendation along those lines and that embracing Te Tiriti and te ao Māori will be really important. And the panel actually said that embracing tikanga, and I'll close, is a service woven into the fabric and way of doing things will be really important.
And then thirdly, this move for more alignment between local government and central government. And that's still to be worked out. And we don't know what that will look like quite yet, but that'll be no doubt another driver of some uncertainty and change.
So there's plenty happening on that front. And then you add in resource management reform. So again, ANC, we've done a little bit of work on this with the various parties.
And the reforms have variously been described as a once in a generation opportunity to make significant change. When you consider the National Policy Framework, NPF, the RSS or Regional Spatial Strategies, the RPCs, Regional Planning Committees, they're all going to come in. They're all going to create considerable change.
And they're all aimed at ensuring that we have a sustainable natural environment. But they're also charged with looking at how keeping an eye on accommodating things like required infrastructure. So we're going to need and require some new and really different approaches to working out how that's going to actually happen and sit alongside each other.
So another thing to be aware of. As part of those reforms, councils will be able to pool resources, which is potentially great, but also there's going to be a requirement to actually figure out what that looks like and impacts across those councils that will be part of those regions. And the process of those reforms will be an iterative one.
So it'll be a constant change. There'll be a constant aspect of change associated with those. And as part of those changes, councils are being encouraged to be really brave to kind of challenge the status quo and to push boundaries.
And that in itself will require some different thinking. And last but not least, climate change and adaption. Unfortunately, we can see North Island, Northland, North Island, Northland, Coromandel, Hawke's Bay, et cetera, East Cape, really affected by weather-related events of late.
And we can see just how those changing weather patterns are really impacting on the way in which councils happen to think about their responses and how we adapt. And wrapping our heads around that and what that means for our communities will be another aspect of the LTP. So that kind of helps set a bit of the scene, doesn't it? What's an LTP? What does it mean? And what are some of the changes? So, mate, we'll start to pick your brains here and just say, what are some of your thoughts around, what are your top tips for a successful long-term planning process? Well, Griff, I think I mentioned already that a number of people that registered just wanted to know the basics.
And often the question that came through was, where do I start? And in my experience, and when I think about this kind of an issue, I think about the LTP and my past experience in doing that work. But actually, it's quite similar to a lot of other work that I've done, business planning, budget setting, and those sorts of things. And I've been doing that kind of work now for, I think, 30-odd years.
And to keep it really simple, it's a plan. Doing the LTP or anything like that, it's a project. And I develop a project plan accordingly.
And part of that work involves educating the decision makers. And I think of the decision makers as sort of in a stakeholder group. So the decision makers will be the leadership team of the organisation that I'm working with.
And the other group of stakeholders that is very close to that, in this case, is the elected members as well. So start out, before you actually get into trying to draw anything up, look at the resources that you've got available and the resources that you think you need. It's all about the how and working out, in the time that you've got, how you're going to approach things, gather the information.
And part of the success of doing this, or my particular thing right now, for anyone that's looking at this that's actually going to be doing this work, is the local government elections were only held last year. There's a really good chance there'll be a lot of people sitting around the table with the decision maker side of things. And it might even also be true of your leadership team, who haven't been involved in this before.
So spend a bit of time giving them a bit of an orientation around the LTP and then just try and deal with any knowledge gaps that there might be in that regard. The other thing around it in terms of resourcing, think about resourcing in terms of, once again, casting the net a little bit wider in terms of your stakeholders, who are the people in your organisation that are going to be helping you pull this information together. So in my experience, what I did when I did my first LTP, I had two main stakeholder groups.
I had an elected members working party, so as I was dealing with issues, I would take them to the elected members working party, and then from there we'd go to council, and issues would get ticked off one by one, and it would kind of go into the LTP bucket, so to speak. And that worked really well, so that didn't pre-empt any final decisions, but it just meant that you knew you were making progress all the way through. And the other thing is I had a small, it was essentially me and one other person doing most of the work, but outside of ourselves we had a bunch of really critical people in the organisation in terms of the administration side of things, helping pull the information together.
So that's really important in terms of making sure you're clear about the resourcing, and you're clear about the timing of everything, which is why you need a plan. And once you've got that kind of, once you work out how to, how I'm going to do this, and you get that plan put together, get it adopted by the ELT, get it adopted by the council even, and that gives you the standing for everything that needs to flow from there. And everyone's clear about this is the game plan for doing this thing, it's not pre-empting anything to do with the content, it's just focused on how we're going about getting the work done.
The other part of a critical thing of this, and I know you're going to come to it next Griff, is it's about the engagement side of things. So with the LTP, particularly anyone who's on the local government side of things will understand to make an LTP you've got to go through the special consultative procedure. But I think if you were, it would be a mistake to just rely on that to be your only vehicle for engagement.
A number of people that have registered for this actually want to engage with councillors before the draft document goes out. So think about that, and you've got a bit more to say on engagement, haven't you Griff? Yeah, engagement's a real two-way street. We've got an internal component and an external component to long-term planning, but engagement is a two-way street.
And I guess the key thing is it's about helping people understand why they should care and how they can engage and get involved if in fact they want to. And I guess that you were talking about having to engage people internally in terms of EOT and others that you need in order to get the plan across the line, but also the external communities, understanding what their key things are, what they're concerned about, what they need to know. That's really important.
And this will become even more important with all that sheer number of change, or amount of change that's coming down the pipe, the stuff that we talked about earlier on, will mean that that engagement and that communication will be really key. I mentioned the resource management reform and the future of local government report. If for nothing else, these will really increase the need for engagement alone.
So if you think about the RM reform, there's consolidation of 100 RM plans, resource management plans, down to around 16 RSSs across the country. So that means that the RPCs, regional spatial strategies, and then the regional planning committees will need to engage with and consider the impact on those councils that are forming to those regions. And the communities will also need to ask themselves questions such as, what do we want our region to be? Or alternatively, what do we want our region not to be? So what are some of our natural advantages, and what are some of the gaps we might need to address in terms of our long-term planning? Then there was the future of local government report, which talks about this focus on well-being, and particularly what that looks like for each community will differ significantly.
So councils will need to bring communities along with them, develop participatory processes in order to give the communities a voice to their thinking. And what that might look like for them into the future. And the report talked about this importance of becoming a Te Tiriti partner, so engagement with mana whenua will be incredibly important.
So with all that in mind, what are some of the tips that I have for good engagement? Well, there's no right or wrong to engagement. It'll be a horses-to-horses approach, but some of the things that have worked really well for me over the years, include the absolute imperative to define your audience. So really knowing who you should talk to, and it's very different to who you need to talk to.
Who you should talk to is often a bigger group, and what you need to talk to them about, and why it's important to them. And there are lots of really different ways of defining what that audience is. One of them is stakeholder mapping, and it's a very useful tool for mapping proximity to an issue, and by that I mean the impact that someone is experiencing for being close or affected by that issue, but also potentially around mapping influence.
So what is someone's influence on that problem or that issue, in a positive or a negative way? And often overlapping those two makes for a really interesting way to map your audience. If you think about the analogy as if you drop a stone into a puddle and you get the ripples out, you can map people's influence and impact like ripples in a puddle, and it gives you a really useful visual to help you get a sense of who you should talk to. The second thing is to define the need.
What is that problem you need to solve? So a really important thing here is to resist the urge to jump to solutions, because solutions are only as good as the problem they're pointed at. So it's critical that that problem is nailed first. Interestingly, often the problem that we start out with is not the one we actually need to solve for.
So the importance of asking questions, listening to those responses, and using that information to formulate the problem statement before jumping into solutions is really, really vital. Interestingly enough, just a couple of days ago, I came across this thing called Parkinson's Law of Triviality, which kind of piqued my interest. And basically what it talks about is that essentially people engage, for engage read, hone in on things that they know about and that they trust, things that they don't know about.
People will work on those and sort those out. But often what that ends up looking like is people focussing on trivia. So an analogy that's often used is the bike shed behind the nuclear reactor.
So people will debate the cost of the bike shed and gloss over the fact that the cost of the nuclear reactor, and clearly the bike shed is not the problem. So how do you get them to focus on what actually is the problem? So to combat that, I like to use these things I call compelling stories. So compelling stories are short story format outlining why your audience should care about an issue, what they can do about it, and how they might meaningfully engage in that issue at a level that's appropriate for them.
If I could just give you a quick example about that. One of my other clients that I was working with recently had this problem where she was trying to deal with things called fugitive gases, which are essentially gases that escape into the atmosphere. Not great.
And so she was having a bit of trouble getting traction for that and I said she should write a compelling story. And she did that and in the compelling story she actually included a statistic about how exponentially worse than CO2 this particular gas was. And despite that she got the resources and time and kind of focus that she needed from people because they clearly understood the problem and what was required.
And then last but not least is to engage early and often. There's this old adage around engagement and communication of information is that in the absence of information people will fill the void with their own. And unfortunately we saw a lot of that happening around COVID.
So engaging with stakeholders early and often helps avoid that issue. But it's also when it's used in a conjunction in a co-design approach, what it actually means is that you can increase access to different and new perspectives and innovative ideas, which when it comes to eventually implementing the solution to those ideas, people feel like they've had skin in the game and it leads to a much more likely chance of acceptance. So Wayne, we've kind of talked about what it is and how we might engage it.
So any kind of key tips on pulling it all together? Yeah, as I mentioned before, having a plan is my starting point. So the project planning side of things. Be clear about the scope of the work.
As I mentioned before, community outcomes is a good starting point. But when you're really clear about the scope, you can say, right, these are the things the council is going to be tackling. And either expressly or implicitly, you're also saying these are outside of scope.
And I think that's really important. And then understanding the inputs, the information inputs, the dependencies, and also a particular thing that the Act gives councils quite a lot of scope over is what level of detail is going to be provided is important. So you're establishing, I suppose, you're looking for some sort of consistency in the end product around that sort of thing so that people have enough information, but they're not sort of overloaded with it.
Develop a timeline. So that comes back to the planning side of things again. Your people that are involved in this work will understand that you're going to be having lots of council meetings over the period.
So mapping those out and understanding when things will be going to those meetings for decisions and any other key milestones that there might be. People that are involved in this work will understand that they've got to get the draft plan audited, so they'll have to build that into their planning approach as well. And when you develop a timeline, you should also allow for any problems.
You won't know what the problems are at the start, but rest assured something's going to happen and make sure that you make some allowance for that. Part of having a plan is also monitoring your progress against that plan. So it's also a really useful tool or technique for managing scope creep and enables prompt and remedial action if it appears something's going off track, falling behind, or something new comes in that is potentially a disruptor.
So if that sort of thing happens, if you have something new coming in, go back to the plan, work out, don't try and just do it on the fly. It's going to be part of your LTP. Go back to the plan and make sure it's part of the plan properly.
You mentioned it before, but I can't say it enough, communicate. So along with monitoring, communicating is really, really important. Share with the leadership team, share with the council how things are progressing.
This is not so much about making decisions about content, but it's actually, you've gone to the trouble of developing a plan, you should then also be following up with those people that have endorsed that plan how things are going. Resources, I think I've covered that enough already, but having a plan, of course, involves being clear about what resources are going to be available. It's a big commitment to make sure that people aren't overloaded, I think it's really important, and otherwise you burn people out and that then becomes a major risk to getting to the end of the project.
I think we've covered engagement enough, but one of my things around how to go about it, or one of my tips, if we can call it that, is watch out for optimism bias. What's going to happen when you're developing your long-term plan? Lots of people are going to come to you and say, I want this in the plan, and you can get to the situation where the plan itself is no longer a realistic indication about what the council's going to do over a three-year period or even a 10-year period. So one thing I think about in regards to managing this is just look at past plans and think about, was the council able to do everything that it said it was going to? That's a really good realistic test about managing what was arguably historical optimism bias.
Now, sure, we've gone through a pandemic, we've gone through other major issues, as you mentioned before, councils, some councils have had major weather events affect them, so we're not talking about those kinds of disruptions. We're looking at, taking a big step back, what the council said it was going to do versus what it actually achieved, and the issue about optimism bias and the problem with it is that if you bake too much into your plan, the end result is, if you're not able to do that, you're tying up resources for something that doesn't happen, so potentially the council could be funding or rating for something that it isn't actually able to deliver. That's an issue.
It potentially has an impact on the community as well. If the community has promised that some work is going to happen in this particular area and it doesn't happen, that's an issue for anyone that's affected by that. So yeah, that's probably my big tip is just watch out for optimism bias and whether, particularly if there's an activity or a function of council that's promising to just do certain things, if they're actually unable to do everything on their work schedule, then is it reasonable to keep adding to that in the plan? Maybe pare it back a bit.
Nice. Okay. Thanks, mate.
That's great. As I said at the outset, we do have some, we did have a number of people put forward what some of the challenges they were dealing at work with and we did a little bit of a looking and digging into those and we came up with a few things outside of the how to do a plan and engagement in particular. The first of those was around integrating or addressing climate change in a long-term plan way.
Have you got any thoughts about how you could weave climate change or the relationship with climate change in a long-term plan? One of my things I would say about climate change is it's a massive issue and I go back to what I said at the beginning. The LTP should be about what the council is actually planning on doing over the foreseeable future in relation to that. So it's not about, you know, climate change could be part of your community outcomes but not everything that's happening in the climate change space is something the council needs to be responsible for doing.
An example would be Upper Hutt City Council has a sustainability officer and that person is responsible for looking at the council's carbon footprint and looking at whether there are more energy efficient ways of doing certain things that the council is involved in. And that in its own way is a climate change response. Another climate change response that would be quite reasonably within the scope of an LTP would be retreat from erosion prone areas or anything like that.
If the council has got a road that needs to be moved and I've experienced this in my own local authority down south that's part of their plan then that's fine. But if the council is and there could be other things that potentially could be covered within the plan that are within the council's domain. Regional councils might have something there could be air control there could be certain policies.
But there are other things because climate change is so big there are some things that are not the council's responsibilities. So the council's long term plan shouldn't really be straying beyond what the council is indicating it's going to be doing around that. And potentially what initiatives are going to be involving in terms of funding implications.
Great. Speaking of funding implications the next thing was around financial issues. So have you got any thoughts about incorporating thoughts around finances as a whole in terms of their relation to the LTP? Yeah, that's a really tricky one at the moment because the financial issues and there's a lot of detail around the funding implications of the council's activities in an LTP.
When you actually start thumbing through them there's a heck of a lot of information there. And as councils are looking at the uncertainty in front of them it makes it really really difficult for them to come up with the numbers. But it really comes down to in my view is the council going to be involved in this? And you can make it really clear in your LTP what your assumptions are and then proceed from there.
And then there's also an issue as to budget prioritisation. So another issue with the LTP typically is council's going to be changing something. So the council often with an LTP is asked to do something more or is telling its community it's intending to do something new or increase the service level, undertake a new activity.
It's what in central government terms is typically called a new initiative. And so routinely because you're doing this for a draft LTP, you're going to go through a budget prioritisation approach. And there's a couple of ways you can do that.
Typically in what happens in central government approach, the government looks at cost pressures and says these are all the activities that we're going to do. It costs this much money and in the period ahead, the outlook is it's going to cost a certain amount more. When I did my first LTP, I had to go through every single activity of the council from the very beginning to actually understand the cost profile of everything.
And now you've got so many more LTPs that have been done since then, so you've got quite a weight in the background of knowledge. But the issue around this kind of thing is if the outlook is trending upwards, is it sustainable? And then coming back to the purpose of the LTP, is the council going to be contemplating changing those service levels in order to manage the costs of them? So that's part of the whole conversation about agreeing to some parameters. The council may even have a policy.
Some councils do when they go into their LTP indicate that we don't want rates to increase by any amount above X percent. So there are some tricky things around that and every council will have their own unique circumstances. Well, thank you everyone.
We'll probably leave it there. Just to suffice to say, thank you very much for joining in today. We really hope that you found this useful.
Of course, if you have any follow-up questions, we'd be more than happy to answer those. There'll be an email and contact details available at the end of the webinar. If you have any specific questions for Wayne and I, we'd be really happy to answer those and obviously if there's anything else we can do to help, please let us know.
Otherwise, thank you very much for your attendance. We've really enjoyed it and we look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you.
