In brief

David Robinson’s keynote address as delivered at the Stronger Things conference on 17th June 2026. 

Fifty two years ago this week a bunch of us at school together bought an old double decker bus. We sold the seats, bought some games, recruited volunteer drivers from the bus garage, because of course we were too young to drive, and began to run regular play sessions across our community in east London

Typically 120 – 140 young people would turn up, parents got involved, relationships developed.

I don’t know who would close us down first if we tried to do it now. The Bus was very “basic”,  but we learnt: success wasn’t about the thing. It was about the people that it brought together and the relationships between us.

I’ve worked on many issues since. Many things I thought I knew at 17 I find more difficult today but of this I am more certain:

Relationships are the foundations of everything that matters. Stable childhoods, safe and thriving communities, effective health care, successful education, just policing …  

Our relationships are the glitter and the glue. The cause of problems when they don’t work well.   The master key when they do, unlocking solutions, potential, trust, confidence – in the home,  across and within the communities in which we live, with and between the agencies on whom we depend. 

Focusing on building meaningful connection is not one more intervention vying for scarce resources. It is how we all do our best work, how we prevent problems or how we stop them escalating, 

And if that work involves, for example, multiple disadvantage or family breakdown, social unrest or social isolation, relationships are the work. There is no other way.

Progress is achievable, even in these tough times, because we are spending money and time on doing things which are at best, sub optimal. Reflecting on his career in government, DEFRA Permanent Secretary Paul Kissack said “so many of the public services we were working on were trying to patch up tears in the social fabric. We were building services where relationships should be.”

Of course, my mates and I knew none of this in 1975 – we were kids doing what came naturally – but we all know it now. We have evidence, we have experience, we have the wisdom of people like Paul. And yet still we work in a siloed world, inexplicably prizing part system efficiencies over whole society effectiveness. Hitting narrow targets but missing the point.

And too much hope is pinned on machines built to behave like people and people trained to behave like machines. Transactional protocols and all kinds of tech can, brilliantly and essentially, release the time we need for real relationships but they are enablers, not a whizzy alternative.

My point is this… our systems and our organisations are ill set to meet the needs of today, let alone the challenges of the next generation. And we could do so much better.

I know many of you need no persuading. Relational practice is increasingly valued, but still too much work on the ground – not all, but too much – is perched perilously on the edge. One term, one place wonders. Way more sophisticated, but little more deeply embedded than our old bus.

So the question for us, my question to you, is  “what would we do if we meant it?” 

We think that any serious attempt to centre relationships must both harness the power of the state and seek to reform it in fundamental ways. We must double down in 3 dimensions.

First, relational services. Enabling and cultivating effective relationships between service providers and recipients should be the common and central operating principle, across the frontline from social work to urban planning, health care to policing  

“Trusting relationships are the mechanism by which change is achieved”, says Russ Bellenie, Principal Social Worker in Barking and Dagenham. “They don’t just enable other interventions. They are the intervention”.  They should be the default.  

Second, relationship-centred policy  –  policy that supports relationships between people and within communities and that unleashes the power of social capital – our greatest natural resource. The Homes for Ukraine programme is a recent example, matching Ukrainian refugees with UK residents. 

Programme director Paul Morrison said, “a relational approach to public policy recognises that change happens through networks of people and organisations, not through issuing directives”.

We should ask of every policy: how does it contribute to, and draw solutions from, those networks?

Third, relational governance. Enabling collaborative decision-making between public servants and citizens draws on experiences and voices that would be otherwise unheard. Genuine relational governance arrangements in the UK are thin on the ground but the Pride in Place and Test Learn and Grow programmes, offer real promise.

These three – building relational services, cultivating relationships within communities, and anchoring our governance structures in mutual understanding and respect – are all important and not only at the points of delivery, but also, equally important, in the systemic drivers – in consultation and planning, commissioning,  reporting and audit,  recruitment, appraisal, training, especially training. Everything matters.

Do it all and meaningful relationships can change how we live together, how we work, care, learn, govern, organise and lead. They can become the means and the end of public policy, the root and the flower. This is where I want us to be! 

But, friends, we are on a slow train. I was there when Blair made the Aylesbury speech promising to “liberate funds from government silos” and talking about so much of what we talk about today. That was 1997. It’s time to accelerate 

We, in this hall, do many things, but the common thread running through community-powered approaches to service provision and decision-making, also to bridge-building and community mediation, youth work, faith organising, participatory democracy, neighbourhood-centred public service reform, community asset ownership and countless other forms of civic practice, the common thread is the deep seam recognition that relationships are not peripheral to social renewal – they are its foundation.

These ideas are not random, disconnected fads. And we are more than insurgents in a petrified system. Together we prefigure a time when relationships between people will characterise our statecraft, local and national, just as surely as relationships between people and the state characterised the post war settlement and then relationships between people and the market became the organising principle

We are the mavens, the architects of this third era. That’s what we should shooting for – to be the dominant orthodoxy, the soul of the system.

Can it be done? Can it be done now?

I’m a community worker and a community worker without optimism is like a plumber without a wrench. So yes of course I am optimistic. But I am also a realist. If many of our most pressing crises are the product of disconnection, distrust, and the hollowing out of collective life, then reknitting the social fabric must  surely be a central purpose in government, local and national and in the wider community.

I’ve spent a lifetime working out from the margins and this may be a heresy here, but friends I don’t want to be a rebel anymore. More importantly, it’s not what I want for you.

I want you in the mainstream. Living that central purpose. Services, policy and governance. Being the new soul of the system.

I work for the Relationships Project because I believe that in this time of fracture and rapid transition, this is the movement the moment demands.  

Along with many partners we are helping to share the skills we need  with the new Relational Practice Academy. Do talk if you’d like to know more.

My convictions are 52 years in the making. Nothing holds more influence or more hope, than our relationships with one another.  This is how we do our best work, how we improve lives.

And rather wonderfully, it is in the nature of the mission, that everyone of us, not just here in this hall, but everyone of us, has a part to play.

We can learn new practices, remodel protocol and context, put relationships first. 

We can embed the shift in our organisations and our systems. We have the knowledge, here in this room, the experience and the exemplars, to do all this.

We can change how we live together.

Lets get a wiggle on.

To stronger things.

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