Beyond zero-sum: Can Mayoral Strategic Authorities help create abundance in public services?

Mayoral Strategic Authorities are the principal component of the government’s Re-wiring the State Cabinet statement – but are they the key to breaking out of the zero-sum mindset which has become prevalent in public services?

As financial and demand pressure builds, public services tend to retreat to service silos - more focused than ever on their own KPIs, regulator requirements and the presenting conditions that they are responsible for addressing.

The working assumption has become that as one service gains budget, resource or priority, another must lose. If more money goes to the NHS, there is less for councils. If children's services need additional investment, then adult social care must give. Or – and this is particularly insidious – if one organisation or service can transfer demand or cost elsewhere, then that is seen as a success.

Obviously, there is a finite amount of public money. Difficult choices are unavoidable. The problem is that we have fallen into the habit of having a zero-sum mindset.

Finite resources do not necessarily require zero-sum behaviour. In fact, organising public services in this way is contributing to the very demand pressures which are keeping senior leaders up at night.

The alternative is not pretending money is unlimited. It is asking whether we can move from endlessly allocating seemingly scarce resources between services towards creating an abundance of the things that actually matter to people and places.

This is where Mayoral Strategic Authorities could become increasingly important.

We optimise organisations and services rather than places

Councils have budgets. NHS organisations have budgets. Police forces have budgets. Government departments have budgets. Each is held accountable for how it spends its money and each seeks to protect its own financial position. This is not new news – but it’s also not a situation which many people think is leading us to brighter future.

Housing, health, employment, skills, family circumstances, mental health and community safety interact constantly. What appears as demand in one service may have its origins somewhere completely different. This was one of the strongest themes from our recent Radical Reformers series on “Manchesterism”.

Warren Heppolette argued that public services should start with the population being served and the place they are trying to make successful, rather than the organisational boundaries of councils or NHS bodies. The Greater Manchester experience has long connected economic prosperity with health, housing, skills, employment, transport and other public services.

Thomas Johnson made a similar point. Places are inherently plural. They contain multiple organisations, professions and communities. The task is not to eliminate that complexity, but to make those different elements work together so they become greater than the sum of their parts.

A system built around organisational accountability creates perfectly rational reasons for organisations not to invest in things which may benefit the wider system or be too far off in the future. Why should a council invest in an early intervention if much of the financial return appears several years later in NHS expenditure? Why should any organisation make an investment in a prevention programme today if the immediate pressure is balancing this year’s budget? Everyone believes in prevention - but everyone is under pressure to protect their own organisation.

The expensive consequences of scarcity and zero-sum

We all know the biggest challenges rarely sit neatly within organisational boundaries - yet we still respond to them through organisational lenses. Of course there are exceptions but these are exactly that – exceptions. It is not the way the system is set up.

Over time, that pushes councils and other public bodies towards becoming providers of last resort. Resources become increasingly concentrated on statutory intervention once problems have become sufficiently serious, while the capacity to intervene earlier gets squeezed.

That is where the zero-sum mindset becomes particularly damaging.

This doesn’t just create arguments over who pays, it structurally favours late intervention over early intervention, which, in turn, make the scarcity problem worse.

What would abundance mean in public services?

This is where Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance offers an interesting challenge.

Their argument is primarily about America’s difficulty in building enough of the things it needs, including housing, infrastructure, clean energy and technological capacity. Their wider argument is that government needs to become better at creating, building and enabling rather than simply managing increasingly scarce resources.

What if we asked how public services could help create more of what people actually value -rather than defending the status quo and existing resource allocations?

Seems obvious doesn’t it? But it requires everyone to recognise that money is not the only resource a place possesses. Places contain relationships, knowledge, community organisations, businesses, universities, physical assets, professional expertise and, crucially, the capabilities of citizens themselves. Places can also attract investment, develop assets, create jobs and unlock economic value that was not there before.

An abundance mindset in public services therefore is not simply “spend more”. Many of these forms of value are not zero sum at all. Value can multiply across a system rather than simply move from one budget line to another.

Why Mayoral Strategic Authorities could be the game changer

The value of MSAs is that they operate at a level where more of the system can be seen and convened together.

The government’s new Place-based Budgets programme is a particularly interesting development. Five pilots are testing whether local partners, working through MSAs, can pool budgets, align governance and redesign services around groups of people rather than around the organisations that fund them. The Government’s own diagnosis is that fragmented funding contributes to duplication, late intervention and people falling through the gaps. This is a perfect manifestation of the zero-sum problem.

Integrated Settlements push in a similar direction. Greater Manchester and the West Midlands began receiving them in 2025-26, with five further MSAs joining from 2026-27. But simply pooling existing budgets will not be enough. The more interesting question is - can an MSA create the conditions in which organisations stop optimising themselves at one another’s expense?

This could look like:

• Agreeing shared outcomes for a population.

• Understanding demand across organisational boundaries.

• Creating invest-to-save arrangements where the costs and benefits fall in different institutions.

• Holding a longer time horizon than individual annual budget cycles allow.

• Providing the convening capacity to sustain collaboration when organisational interests do not perfectly align.

In our Manchesterism conversations, Warren described successful collaboration as organisations coming to the table asking “What can I bring?” rather than “What can I get?”. Thomas talked about collaboration that survives “whatever the weather”.

That is ultimately a cultural shift, not simply a financial one.

From dividing the pot to growing the opportunity

There is another reason MSAs matter to the abundance argument. They are not only mechanisms for coordinating existing public spending. They can expand the resources available to a place.

MSAs now sit at the intersection of transport, infrastructure, housing, skills, economic development and investment. They have responsibility for developing long-term growth strategies and investment pipelines for their regions. The Local Growth Fund reinforces this role, providing selected MSAs with long-term funding focused on infrastructure, business support and skills. Add in newly attracted private investment and you can start to see how this relatively new tier of government could be a game changer.

From managing budgets to managing demand

I don’t intend to teach anyone to suck eggs here…. We all know early intervention and preventative activity which leads to reduced demand is where we need to get to.

However, I don’t know that many Directors of Children's or Adults' Services who are yet giving serious thought to how their existing or emerging MSA can help them manage their future demand. GM and Liverpool are ahead of the game on this, which you would expect as they have had a head start!

One of the most important roles MSAs could play is helping places develop a much more sophisticated understanding of the economics of demand. Asked at an MSA level, the following questions could reveal more valuable information for a place than if limited to a council footprint:

• Which people are interacting repeatedly with multiple public services?

• What circumstances tend to precede expensive crisis intervention?

• Where are different organisations spending money on different manifestations of essentially the same underlying problem?

• Which early interventions genuinely change people’s trajectories?

• If we invest in [insert intervention or test here], where does the benefit appear?

This could shift the focus from service-level cost reduction to place-level demand management.

Devolution must continue downwards

The answer to organisational silos cannot be creating one enormous regional silo.

One of the strongest lessons from our #RadicalReformers Manchesterism conversations was that devolution should not stop at the MSA.

Eve Holt described communities and civil society as part of the “scaffolding” from which different public services can be built. Warren described preventative models rooted at neighbourhood level and involving community organisations and local social businesses.

So the role of the MSA should not be to own or control the system. It should be to enable the system.

Beyond zero sum

If we keep going the way we are going then there will never be enough public money. We have become extraordinarily sophisticated at dividing finite resources between institutions.

The next stage of public-service reform should be about becoming equally sophisticated at creating abundance in the things people actually care about.

Mayoral Strategic Authorities provide the architecture - not to replace councils - but to properly enable them.

Their growth and investment role gives places the opportunity to attract and create additional resource rather than simply dividing the existing pot. And their convening role potentially allows us to think about demand, prevention and investment across the whole place rather than through the lens of individual organisations and services.

But none of that will be enough if the underlying mindset remains one of zero-sum - If you gain, I lose.

With the right abundance mindset, there really shouldn’t be a limit on the value which can be created within a place

Andrew Laird

Chief Executive, Mutual Ventures

If you would like to discuss any of this further, please drop Andrew a message at andrew@mutualventures.co.uk.