This must be the place
Making the modern business case for place-based public service reform
Work in progress
Public service reform in England is increasingly understood to require more joined-up, place-based ways of working: services organised more coherently around people, communities and outcomes, rather than around institutional silos alone. Yet while this direction of travel is widely recognised, local authorities still face a stubborn problem. The case for reform is often accepted in principle, but difficult to convert into a form that is financially robust, operationally practical, and legible to central government.
This is not simply a question of political will. Place-based reform tends to produce benefits across organisational boundaries and over longer timelines, including lower demand, better prevention, fewer repeat crises, and stronger outcomes for residents. These benefits are real and tangible, but they are harder to capture within conventional business cases when costs sit in one part of the system, savings appear in another, and delivery must retain room for iteration and learning.
At the same time, the present institutional landscape can pull against integration. Funding streams remain fragmented, accountability is still largely siloed, and local government, the NHS and other public services continue to operate within different regulatory and assurance frameworks. Recent moves towards integrated settlements for strategic authorities and local outcomes frameworks for councils offer an important signal of direction, but they also underline the extent to which local flexibility is still conditioned by nationally set outcomes, controls and monitoring requirements.
It is as if the days of Gordon Brown’s Local Public Service Agreements and Local Area Agreements – a form of contract between central and local government originally designed to devolve greater power over public services to local communities – had never quite gone away, but also never been updated for the new local political economy and organisational realities of contemporary local government practice.
We are now also in the early days and weeks of Andy Burnham’s time as prime minister.
In his Manchester speech of 29 June setting out his approach and philosophy, Burnham berated the stark imbalance in resources between national and local government, venting frustration at ‘Whitehall turf wars’ and the adversarial waste of energy and resources trapped departmental silos.
Burnham further demanded that ‘place-based collaboration be the new operating principle for UK plc’, with all government departments and agencies required to support strategic and local authorities with staffing and resources. Stating directly that ‘the days of Whitehall fighting the devolution of power into the regions and nations are over, for good’, the clear diktat is that the entire civil service ‘will now be required to get behind our places and work together with them to make quicker, more joined-up decisions’.
Against this context, Localis is undertaking an in-depth study of how English local authorities can build credible business cases for place-based public service reform, focusing avowedly on local councils rather than mayoral strategic authorities, but factoring in interdependent relationships with these and other vital public service anchors such as ICBs and the blue light services.
The research will examine what councils can do now using their existing powers, convening role and partnership machinery, including the general power of competence and relevant pooled-budget or joint-working mechanisms, and from this propose what structural changes could reasonably be argued for nationally in order to go further.
Drawing on such an analysis, Localis will set out a suite of place-based, evidence-led recommendations, presenting a practical way forward for helping English local authorities make the business case for more integrated local public services in ways that are credible to HM Treasury and MHCLG, useful to senior council leaders and officers, and grounded in the realities of frontline delivery.
Research programme kindly sponsored by:
