Case Study: Brent Radical Place Leadership

Client: Brent Council

Date: August 2024 – January 2025

Challenges faced by the client:

Brent is a vibrant borough in north-west London, known for its young and diverse communities, but facing significant challenges stemming from poverty and inequality, including homelessness and health disparities.

During a series of strategic partnership meetings facilitated by Mutual Ventures, partners from across the borough, including the council, police, health services, and VCSE organisations, there was a strong consensus across the partnership on the need for change how public services were delivered and a shared enthusiasm for taking leadership of Brent as a ‘place’ to the next level. Partners agreed:

1. No single organisation can tackle the interconnected challenges the borough faces alone. Collaboration is essential to address these issues effectively.

2. Public services should focus on the people who receive them and the communities in which they live, rather than the organisations that provide them.

3. They need a more joined-up experience for residents, where residents don’t have to repeat their story through repeat referrals but are supported through a talking and solving approach. This requires better joint working between organisations that goes beyond signposting and referrals.

4. There is a need to shift the focus upstream, from crisis response to prevention and proactive measures that address the underlying causes of social issue. Shared local intelligence can be used to identify people showing early signs of need.

5. There needs to be an emphasis on experimentation, innovation, and learning, moving away from risk avoidance and bureaucracy. Empowering frontline staff to make decisions is crucial.

6. They need to be better at co-producing solutions with the public and the third sector to ensure actions are not done to them but decided with them. This requires building strong relationships and a new type of listening.

7. This new way of working will require them to embrace a more radical and courageous approach to leadership.

8. Working in this collaborative way will lead to improved outcomes for residents and cost savings in public service provision.

Support offered:

Mutual Ventures was commissioned to support the council and its partners in its journey to adopting a ‘Radical Place Leadership’ approach. This approach emphasises partners working more closely together and thinking more radically about how to better support residents.

Mutual Venture’s approach has been shaped by learning from successful place-based working in other places, including the Greater Manchester Model and The Liberated Method. Professor Donna Hall, the former Chief Executive of Wigan, was part of the Mutual Ventures team and brought invaluable expertise from the “Wigan Deal”.

This approach also appreciates that there are sustainable savings to be found in the spaces between organisations and siloed services, such as the repeated assessments, the passing of people from service to service, and unnecessary support duplication.

Baselining exercise to understand Brent’s starting position as a place

Mutual Venture’s baselining exercise involved reviewing key documents, including vision statements, ambitions, and strategies of the council to understand the current direction of travel and ongoing programmes of work. Publicly available data was analysed, and leadership interviews and staff surveys were conducted to gain a better understanding of perspectives on the system and current ways of working. This enabled a shared understanding of Brent’s starting point, the challenges they faced and the strengths they already have.

Establishing a shared vision & identifying priorities

A working group from across the partnership came together discuss the key findings from the baselining exercise and define a realistic yet radical vision for public service collaboration in Brent, and as well as agree a clear set of priorities to focus on in the short term.

Prototyping a new way of working with residents in a specific geographical area, through an Integrated Neighbourhood Team, was discussed as a logical first step to test and refine a new radical approach to public service delivery. This was based on lessons from other areas suggesting it is beneficial to test and learn from implementing a new relational way of working in a smaller geographical patch before attempting widespread changes.

Design and Development of a Neighbourhood Delivery Model

Integrated Neighbourhood Teams (INT) bring different services together under one physically co-located team with shared values and goals. Organising frontline staff in this way, with an INT based in each area of the borough, offers the opportunity to integrate services and improve the support provided to residents, especially those with complex needs and the highest number of interactions with services.

Mutual Ventures worked with partners to develop a neighbourhood delivery model that worked for Brent, shaped by learning from successful place-based working in other places. This operating model illustrated how a range of public services can collaborate differently using a specified geographical footprint as the anchor point.

Alongside this, Mutual Ventures supported partners to identify three key priorities for the INTs to begin to explore as well as the most appropriate analytical tools and approach for identifying individuals they should support. Mutual Ventures developed a prioritisation framework which set out the practical steps for getting started with this work.

Implementation Planning

Mutual Ventures developed an implementation plan to identify the critical path required to implement Brent’s new ways of working.

Impact

Brent Council’s ambition is for the new INTs to begin identifying and supporting individuals in a more relational way, and testing these new ways of working, by April 2025.

“We have found Mutual Ventures' support invaluable and have appreciated how they have flexed their approach as the work developed. Workshops and sessions have felt co-produced and tailored to our needs. Partner colleagues, including those from a range of voluntary and community organisations, have engaged positively in activities which is critical to the success of this type of work. I know from feedback at key events that the style of facilitation and the energy the MV team have brought into the room has been welcomed and the outputs produced from the work have been well-received.

I have also greatly appreciated the learning they have brought from other places, both to enhance our thinking and help bring to life new, very different ways of working. We are now moving to implement this model and I would be very happy to recommend Mutual Ventures to other areas looking to explore similar place-based approaches.”

Rachel Crossley, Corporate Director Community Health and Wellbeing, Brent Council

Read more about our Radical Place Leadership approach.