This article was originally published in the MJ, on the 27 February 2025
Devolution and local government reorganisation are about re-thinking how local government can be fit for the needs and challenges of today.
The creation of new institutions of public service across the country – unitaries and strategic mayoral authorities – offers an opportunity to design organisations that work with the complexity of current social challenges, to make the most of the assets in each place and to deliver with and for residents and communities.
One of the first tasks for the new authorities will be to agree a new vision and mission for their new geography. We know authorities cannot deliver public outcomes alone so it is critical that this process goes beyond just organisational priority setting. Instead, it needs to reflect the role authorities have to play in stewarding the collective priorities of their whole place.
Plans will only answer the demands and needs of local communities if they are co-designed with partners and residents. There are great examples of places putting this into practice already, including Camden’s Missions, Sheffield’s City Goals and the evolution of Wigan’s New Deal into Progress with Unity.
A lesson I draw from all three of those examples is the importance of creating time and space for honest, collaborative and sometimes contentious conversations that attend to the different priorities, perspectives and power of the people involved.
The new authorities are being created at pace, so it is important to remember change moves at the speed of trust and establishing a shared commitment from the outset will save time and resources later on.
As more policy-making is devolved to strategic mayoral authorities, harnessing the opportunities for bespoke local innovation will require strong partnership between public, private and voluntary organisations. Last year’s Local Government Association peer review of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority highlighted that its success was ‘built on a long history of decades of collaboration… Mature and highly effective partnership working is evident at both political and managerial levels’.
Without the luxury of decades of collaboration to build on, new geographies need to invest in forging trusting relationships quickly, alongside working out the practicalities of creating partnership infrastructure and governance. Creating tangible connections through joint teams, co-location and communities of practice, will help to build networks.
Sadly, in many cases people are not used to working collaboratively, as it is not encouraged by our siloed, competitive, target-driven cultures. So, new authorities should invest in developing collaborative behaviours in their people.
We will need leaders – both officers and politicians – who can work across boundaries and negotiate through differences, with curiosity for experience beyond their expertise and an openness to being wrong.
Essex CC and London Councils have created leadership programmes for officers that develop these skills. System leadership programmes for politicians are rarer, but are likely to be a worthwhile investment in this transition.
Adaptation and agility need to be core tenets of the new organisational design. In our changing world we need public services to be able to continuously learn and respond to the evolving context and emerging insights. And yet our financial planning, performance monitoring and contracting are often rigid and our politics unforgiving of getting things less than right, first-time.
We need to build learning organisations. We see the possibilities for this at service level in Plymouth Family Hubs, Changing Futures Northumbria and Thurrock Integrated Care Alliance. But one early opportunity for new authorities to embed a learning approach is through shifting to collaborative commissioning.
This new approach being adopted by places across the country deliberately blurs traditional divides between commissioners and providers to enable collective problem-solving, drive progress on outcomes – not just outputs – and to maximise value.
Lastly, it will be essential these new authorities look beyond public sector partners, into the communities and neighbourhoods they serve. The White Paper speaks of ‘strengthening communities with greater rights to be involved in their local issues’ with welcome changes to ownership of community spaces. But we have to go beyond that if we are to ensure people feel they have control over the things that matter most to them.
New unitaries cover large areas. This creates a risk people will feel less connected to power and less able to hold decision-makers to account.
We have observed when working on health integration that even neighbourhoods of 50,000 people are still sometimes too big for services to understand and respond to the variety of needs in their place.
So unitaries will need to double down on place-based working, building strong mechanisms of collaboration with residents and community organisations to shape outcomes that affect their lives. Listening to marginalised voices, valuing lived experience and co-producing outcomes needs to become the norm across services.
And community and voluntary sector partners need to be supported and enabled to play an active role in acting as the bridge between residents and authorities as trusted providers and speakers of truth to power.
By embedding collaboration in the purpose, policy- making and practice of new authorities they can not only deliver on the promise of devolution, but have the best chance to deliver for the people and places they serve.