In brief
As political life resumes in earnest after the Summer break, Rich Bell explores – in a three-part series – the possibility and pitfalls of relational reform under the new Burnham government.
In this, part two, we discuss how the government’s emerging public service reform agenda could make a guiding focus on the power of human relationships a core feature of how the modern state works.
In the first blog in this series, we argued that devolving power to combined and local authorities can enable more relational ways of working. This is as bringing decision-making closer to communities can give public servants greater scope to work with people in ways that reflect their lives and circumstances and harness the assets that already exist within communities. But we also observed that this is a necessary but insufficient condition for relational reform – making these approaches the rule rather than the exception would require more fundamental changes to the way power is distributed in modern Britain.
Rewiring the state relationally
This speaks to a broader point regarding the limitations of devolution as a response to the challenges of this moment: there is no guarantee that it will not lead simply to ‘more local’ state institutions applying the same ways of working and approaches as those currently being practiced by a beleaguered Whitehall.
To some extent, this is simply the nature of the beast. After all, the whole point of devolving policy powers related to public services is that local leaders should be able to exercise discretion in shaping them to meet the particular needs of their places.
Equally, if the government is serious about building preventative, whole-person services, designed and delivered with people – as Andy Burnham has repeatedly argued it should be – then it will plainly need to put at least some parameters around the power that will be transferred to combined and local authorities through the devolution revolution. One way for it to give effect to what New Local have described as “devolution with direction” would be to combine the transfer of funding and power to Mayors and councils with the development of a national public service reform strategy.
Whereas the Starmer administration seemed content to pursue a number of different approaches to public service reform at once, indications are that the new government is intent on charting a different, more coherent course – with a cabinet statement or white paper rumoured to be in the works. That is a positive thing for the effectiveness of Whitehall. More importantly, it represents a significant opportunity to advance the relational reform agenda.
During the lecture to the Theos think tank referenced in part one of this blog series, Burnham asked his audience to imagine “a state that prioritised direct, compassionate human interaction… that worked on the principle of names, not numbers,” and that created the “connection [that] makes change possible,” contrasting that vision with the “indifference and judgement” that people “feel they receive from impersonal, top-down public services.”
One way in which this change could be brought about, he suggested, is for more public funding to flow to and more service provision to be led by organisations “rooted in the communities they serve” and that “are already trusted.” “Trust,” he said, “creates connection. Connection makes change possible.”
Indeed, this is a key facet of the flagship Live Well initiative which he introduced as Mayor of Greater Manchester. This work has led to millions of pounds of combined authority and NHS investment being redirected to neighbourhood-based systems of support, enabling a joined-up and community-led approach to the provision of health and employment services.
More generally, a commitment to unlocking community capacity and strengthening the relationships through which people support one another is perhaps Live Well’s most important design principle. In these respects, it shares much in common with the Test, Learn and Grow public service reform programme introduced by the Starmer administration.
A national public service reform strategy drawing on the philosophical foundations that unite and animate these initiatives could be truly transformative – through rewiring public services around relational practice, the Burnham government could change not just how they work and are managed but what they value and make possible.
Consider, for instance, the neighbourhood health agenda. Its current emphasis on data-driven population health management and formal services risks producing a more integrated but still fundamentally technocratic model of health provision, in some instances at a geographic scale that bears little relationship to neighbourhoods as they are understood by local people. But, if the government was to bring forward a public service reform programme aimed at tapping into the power of human relationships, it could yet be turned into something much more ambitious. An agenda aimed not simply at reorganising existing services around different administrative geographies but deliberately building the capacity of communities to cultivate the social bonds, habits, and norms that sustain health and wellbeing.
The risk of a false dawn
Equally, no single strategy could be equal to the task at hand. Whitehall, even more than local government, has come to conceive of public services as a form of machinery: a matter of inputs, outputs, transactions, and processes. Overcoming these deeply engrained assumptions and norms will require a proactive drive to build the capacity of the civil service to work in ways that reflect and recognise the value of human relationships.
This must mean both equipping frontline workers with the skills needed to build trust, navigate difference well, and convert conflict into fuel for change and actively supporting policymakers, managers, and commissioners to design systems, policies, and processes which foster bonds of trust. This work should, we would argue, be a central focus of the new National School of Government and Public Services.
Moreover, the urgency of this task should not be underestimated. As the discussion of neighbourhood health above illustrates, the new government has inherited a number of live public service reform initiatives which it will need to put its stamp on rapidly if it is to bend them towards its own ambitions and priorities. Its commitment to rewiring the state relationally, however, will perhaps be put most sharply to the test through its approach to a service area whose reform it has actively accelerated: social care. This will be the focus of the third and final blog in this series.
Read the final blog in the series:
