In brief
As political life resumes in earnest after the Summer break, we explore - in a three-part series - the possibility and pitfalls of relational reform under the new Burnham government.
The challenge is formidable, but the opportunity is real. Let's make the most of it, together.
Explore the series
- Part 1: Devolution – a winding path towards relational reform
- Part 2: Public service reform – a chance to build a more relational state
- Part 3: Social care – a critical test
We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Please leave a comment or send them directly to rich@relationshipsproject.org
Rich Bell is a social policy researcher, policy adviser, campaigner and adviser to the Relationships Project.
Originally from Scotland, he now lives in London with his young family. Rich began supporting us in 2024, helping us to lay the groundwork for the Relational Practice Academy.
The heat has broken, and the long nights of summer have begun to fade. The suspended animation of parliamentary recess has now lifted, and political life has resumed in earnest. As the seasons shift and a new government begins its work, almost everyone who observes politics closely is seeking to get to grips with its plans and priorities.
Its full policy agenda, it’s fair to say, is still coming into focus. At the Relationships Project, though, we believe that there are several reasons to be hopeful about the change that the Burnham administration might bring to Britain.
Last year, Andy Burnham gave a strikingly bold but little remarked upon lecture to the Theos think tank. In that lecture, he argued that a central task of politics and political leadership in the present moment must be to build a “culture of encounter.” Invoking Pope Francis, who coined that phrase, the then-Mayor of Greater Manchester described such a culture as one “that prioritises direct, compassionate interaction and relationships over indifference and judgement.”
“Pope Francis described a culture of encounter as a societal approach that prioritises direct, compassionate interaction and relationships over indifference and judgement.
Indifference and judgement are often exactly what people feel they receive from impersonal, top-down public services.
Imagine instead a state that prioritised direct, compassionate human interaction.
Imagine a state that worked on the principle of names, not numbers. A state that looked at the individual standing in front of it and asked:
‘What is the one thing weighing most heavily on your life—and how can we help lift that burden?’
Imagine a state built around that principle.”
– Andy Burnham at at the Theos annual lecture in 2025
Politicians and policymakers, he argued, must not simply deliver things for people but work to nurture and revive the relationships and bonds of reciprocity that allow people to lead lives of meaning and exercise power together.
This would, in turn, make possible “a fundamentally different way of governing” centred on ”a return to trusting people” and giving them ”the opportunity to solve the challenges facing their own neighbourhoods and their own lives.” The ultimate destination of the devolutionary journey on which the UK had already embarked, Burnham suggested, should not be the Mayor’s office or town hall, but local communities themselves.
The challenges facing Britain, he said, demand nothing less than a “new vision of the local state: one built around trust, community, faith, belief, and connection.” A distinctively porous and participatory one, in which the boundary between the state and civic life would become markedly less rigid and the two would draw strength from one another.
This is heady stuff. It is a long, long way from both the way political leaders usually talk and the way government is done in modern Britain. It is also a single lecture, though Burnham has made the case for a substantially more community-centred politics through other essays and speeches in recent years too.
In this series of three blogs we explore different dimensions of the new government’s emerging agenda, and the extent to which they may give practical expression to the new Prime Minister’s ambition to create a culture of encounter.
We will ultimately argue that the question is not whether Burnham is personally convinced of the case for putting human relationships at the heart of how the state works. Rather, it is whether, and how fully, his belief in the need for relational reform will survive contact both with the pressures of government and our national political debate.
After all, much of the machinery of the modern state is designed to standardise, manage, and control, rather than to foster trust, connection, or agency; and the Labour Party’s political imagination affords little space to the institutions and relationships of civic life.
Despite this – and as these blogs will set out – we see real reasons for hope in the new administration’s direction of travel on devolution, public service reform, and social care.
Explore the series
READ PART ONE
PART ONE
Devolving power to combined and local authorities can enable more relational ways of working by bringing decision-making closer to communities and giving 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 devolution is a necessary but insufficient condition for relational reform. Fundamental changes to the way power is distributed in modern Britain are required.
READ PART TWO
PART TWO
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. But relational design and delivery approaches go against the grain of ways of working within Whitehall.
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.
READ PART THREE
PART THREE
The approach that the government takes to overhauling our creaking social care system in the coming year will provide vital insight into whether it will in fact pursue a meaningful project of relational public service reform.
Social care reform is not about whether the government creates a new institution or succeeds in making the existing system more efficient. It is whether it can forge a system that enables people to live with greater independence, exercise greater agency, and build and maintain meaningful connections with those around them – and puts relationships at the core of how care is understood and delivered.
Keep reading
To rewire the state, we need relational policymaking
As the Burnham government aims to 'rewire the state', Koen Bartels, Associate Professor in Public Administration and Policy at the University of Birmingham, argues this will only be achieved if it embraces relational policymaking.
