The primary role of EVERY level of government should be to empower the next...

In this article, Andrew Laird argues that each level of government should have to justify why they aren’t passing power down to the next.

It's a deliberately provocative title... of course it's not true for everything. But I'd love it if we started with that.

I think it’s probably fair to say that every level of government over estimates its own importance and ability to effect positive change. There is a cultural reluctance to pass power, resources and responsibility to the tier below.

How can we possibly trust them with our budget?

This is most apparent in Whitehall. It seems the famed “levers of power” know no bounds.

Even the Treasury admits this. Back in 2020 Dame Sharon White, who was then the Second Permanent Secretary, admitted that the UK was “almost the most centralized developed country in the world”.

This isn’t a badge of honour!

And whilst things have got a little better – there is still a very long way to go.

A couple of recent experiences to illustrate this:

Louise Casey’s Social Care Commission team recently visited the amazing social enterprise PossAbilities CIC, a northwest based provider of day services, residential care and lots of other things. PossAbilities is an amazing organisation. It is bucking the trend by not only delivering outstanding services but consistently achieving financial success. I’m a Non-Exec on the PossAbilities Board and I was disappointed to hear that the Commission was not really interested in the “secret sauce” which makes PossAbilities a success: the small, innovative, courageous, all-female executive team; a very thin middle management tier; and not constantly wasting resource on assessments. The Commission were mostly interested in national issues like funding flows, and how adult social care can support the achievement of NHS targets. It all felt very focused on “what can Whitehall do to fix this?”.

If success is the “sum of the parts” then the truth is most of the “parts” are local and contextual and do not require big sweeping national changes.

Over the past few years, I was a Commissioner on the Poverty Strategy Commission. It was an amazing experience and I am proud of the final report and the recommendations. But the thing which constantly niggled me, was the focus on the action Whitehall can take to solve poverty. Unsurprising as the Commission target audience were Central Government Ministers and Senior Civil Servants. A belief that the centre can pull the levers of power to alleviate poverty is not new. Gordon Brown was apparently obsessed with making tweaks to nudge people’s income to a level where they moved out of relative poverty. In my experience of working at a local level with councils and their partners in the third sector, the things which make a genuine and sustainable change to a person’s life experience are local and human-to-human, not national.

A long list of programmes and pilots have proven this beyond doubt. Most recently the Changing Futures programme has demonstrated this - but we have a  history of taking great ideas and then overestimating what can be driven directly from Whitehall.

In “Radical Help”, Hilary Cottam provides some examples of where central efforts to drive delivery have not always worked. The experience of the Troubled Families programme is informative. It was born out of a Radical Help experiment called “Life”.

However, the central government instinct was set it up as a market place with incentivisation. What should have been grown in a modular way which allowed that local nuance, was packaged up into “a linear programme with outputs that could be measured and controlled” and reported on at a national level. 

You might argue that of course government needs to set and manage targets . After all  “what gets measured get managed”. Everyone knows that!... right?

Would it shock you to know that this famous quote from Peter Druker is usually taken hugely out of context..? The full quote is:

“What gets measured gets managed – even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation,” Peter Druker.

This is very (VERY!) different sentiment to how this quote is usually deployed. Could it be that New Public Management is largely built on a misquote?

The consultancy industry (I’m a consultant) needs to take a large amount of the blame for this. I dread to think of the cumulative cost over the years of developing systems to manage and monitor targets and metrics which have actually driven unhelpful behaviour and counter-productive action.

A lot of this perverse behaviour is driven by attitude to “risk”. We can’t possibly expect Whitehall to take more risk if it’s too far away to understand the delivery/local variables. The further away you are from where the delivery rubber hits the road, the less able to understand and accept the risks you will be.

For a Whitehall Civil servant, allowing so much variation and experimentation at a local level, whilst still holding onto accountability centrally, would feel similar to allowing the development of a sub-prime mortgage market and all the collateralised debt obligations and credit default swaps that went with it. I've never fully understood what all of that meant - but essentially no one had any idea what risk was being taken where!

This is what leads to national programmes often over standardising and codifying things which should really have a lot of local variation. New Public Management fills the space where relational working should be.

Risk needs to be “owned” at a level (geographic proximity and scale) where it can be properly understood, accepted and managed.

I go back to what Polly Mackensie said in her article “It’s the despair that’s going to kill us” – it a more positive piece than it sounds!…

"Progress doesn’t have to start with grand consensus but with modest, imperfect action: testing small interventions that shift the field enough to open the next possibility. It’s a strategy of movement, not mastery: start where the energy is and keep going." Polly Mackensie

Central government cannot possibly own and drive this. It CAN enable it though…

We are seeing some moves in the right direction. Some of the key influential think tanks are taking up this agenda. Dr. Simon Kaye has long understood this and Re:State’s Reimaging the Local State programme has devolution and pushing power down towards real people at it’s core. At Demos, Amy Gandon and Anna Garrod are leading a piece of work on “Powering Public Service Reform”. I had a great time at a round table on this a few weeks ago.

There definitely seems to be a growing appetite for these influential think tanks to start telling Whitehall it is not the “be all and end all”, that it’s famed levers often don’t connect to anything useful.

I think it might be a fact of life that the bigger the organisation, the greater the “compliance burden”, the focus on "failure avoidance" and maintaining a “defensible position”. People are forced to ask “How do I ensure that it’s not my neck on the line when this doesn’t work?”. This doesn’t get public services to where they need to be.

Devolving resource, accountability (and politics) to a level where context can be understood, explored and managed would be a start. We are already on this road with the Government's devolution programme. The purpose of each level of government, Whitehall, Strategic Mayoral Authorities, Integrated Care Boards, Councils, Parish Councils, Neighbourhood Area Committees or Growth Boards, should be to empower and enable the next. The end game being as much power in the hands of communities/citizens/residents as possible.

At the end of the day, everything government does in the realm of public service reform and delivery is about improving the life chances and life experience of an individual person or family. And for those that need the most support, the best person to help is person who is right there on the ground in the community, on the street and in the front room holding the person’s hand. They understand the context and the risks much better than some distant lever puller in Whitehall or a strategic planner at an Mayoral Strategic Authority or Integrated Care Board.

For sure, the different levels of government can set the priorities appropriate to that level, ensure there is sensible regulation to ensure minimum standards and allocate budgets. But ultimately most of the work that has real impact is ultra local.

Some in government really get this. The Cabinet Office “Test, Learn and Grow” programme has local empowerment and permitted variation at its core. The children’s social care teams Mutual Ventures work with at the Department for Education have long acted to empower local areas through national programmes.

But it’s not the Whitehall norm.

In other parts of government, we are seeing some conflicting action e.g. having an agenda for neighbourhood health where decisions can be taken much closer to communities - but the centre continues to micromanage some very specific outcome targets around waiting times etc.

The closer you get to real people the better you will be at determining what is actually important and makes a real impact. There is a growing wave of enlightenment taking us away from New Public Management towards more relational ways of working.

Wouldn’t it be great if the onus was on each level of government to justify why it isn’t passing power down to the next rather than the argument having to be made by the less powerful lower tiers.

We all have to do our bit to keep the momentum up!

You can read more about Mutual Ventures wider work and thinking on #RadicalPlaceLeadership here.

If you are interested in the topic of this article, this by Mark Smith and I  on the  roles of Central Government, Strategic Authorities, and Councils in prototyping and proliferating public service reform may be of particular interest:

Beyond the Test Drive: Turning prototypes into sustainable public service reform Fiscal risks and sustainability