King's College London

As anyone who has sat through any of my classes, or had dinner with me can attest, I am a local government enthusiast. This enthusiasm is heartfelt, but it is also hard won. I began my career in the Cabinet Office, practically as far from the frontline of policy delivery as it’s possible to get, and spent the early part of my career flitting around Whitehall departments and universities. I was (and remain), however, not a great fit in lots of ways – restlessness, impatience, and argumentativeness not being excellent traits in a civil servant (as I have written elsewhere, I am deeply appreciative of David Halpern for indulging me in them).

Over the years, I came to realise that most of the levers we were pulling, or trying to pull, in Whitehall, were connected to something local – a town or county hall – and to a legion of teachers, social workers, and local authority bureaucrats trying to deliver services locally while responding to the latest missive from London and, very often, funding cuts. I realised I understood very little about how that world works – except second hand, through my wife (then a child protection social worker) and her friends.

That changed when the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) spun out of government, and one of my first partners in our new world was Somerset County Council, with whom we worked to support their “Somerset Challenge” – a programme to improve their schools. My part in this was small – helping boost university attendance by bright young people from the county in which I was born – but I got to meet with people across the county, and realised that delivering policy in a large rural authority, where schools were sometimes hours apart, was quite different to how I’d imagined it. Simon Faull, the Director of the Somerset Challenge, corralled and convened the heads of 38 secondary schools, many of them academies, behind a common purpose using a combination of shoe leather, persuasion, and relationships spanning decades – a very different reality to the “Lazy Susan” of the civil service that sees particularly ambitious officials circulate regularly.

If I was impressed by Simon and his colleagues – as well as others I’d worked with while at BIT – this did little to prepare me for what came next. In 2019 I became Chief Executive of What Works for Children’s Social Care, and my entire focus pivoted to local government. My first chair of Trustees was Sir Alan Wood, the former Hackney Director of Children’s Services (DCS). Alan was, and is, unlike anyone I’ve worked with before or since – an attitude of “Just f****** do it” radiating from him.

Not everyone was as supportive as Alan – and many were actively hostile to what the Centre was trying to achieve. One influential DCS thought what we were doing was so unethical he publicly condemned it. But he took the time to sit down with me over coffee for an hour, and we had it out – he changed his mind a bit, and so did I. My current research agenda around unconditional cash transfers is inspired by him.

Elsewhere, I’ll always remember the first trial we managed to get up and running – in Bolton, where the former DCS, Bernie Brown, is another force of nature and a leader who gives loyalty and earns it from her team. It’s also where the principal social worker came up with a new way to support school Designated Safeguarding Leads and wanted to find out if it would work, and where a senior social worker drove us out to schools in his daughter’s Mini and was welcomed with warmth and affection by teachers. Then there’s Chris McCloughlin, the DCS in Stockport, who called me up to ask how she – one of the busiest people I know – could help the centre. Chris, who is a qualified nurse, a qualified social worker, who has seen it all over the course of her career, and who can relate deeply to the work being done by her colleagues.

Now back in a university, many of these relationships have been sustained, and I’ve been lucky enough to teach a course for local councillors for the Local Government Association – people who might not have studied maths for decades, giving up their evenings to learn about data – and courses of aspiring leaders in local government for the Staff College, who come up to me afterwards to ask for help in finding out if what they’re doing is making a difference to the people they’re there to serve – very much living the “Test and Learn” mantra that Pat McFadden wants in the Civil Service.

The Prime Minister wants a nimbler Civil Service – one that takes risks, and one that does “more with less”. Local government might be a good place to look for people who can do this – after all, the last 15 years have been a lesson in rising demand with shrinking resources. There is also a willingness to take calculated risks. With very little coaxing, 10 local authorities have agreed to be part of a new basic income study we’re running with families. The risks here are calculated – both political and substantive – but the willingness to try things, and to take those decisions quickly, is very different to the risk-averse attitude that most MPs believe characterises the Civil Service.

There are challenges in local government, just as there are in national government. Not everyone is as innovative, as brilliant, as empathetic as the people I’ve mentioned here, or the countless others I’ve met in my journey who have inspired my love of local government. But across the country these inspiring people exist at all levels, and make brilliant partners to policy innovation. So I’d encourage enterprising officials nationally – elected or otherwise – to really get to know the bits of local government that are relevant for their work. You’ll certainly gain insight into the way policy works in practice, and you might even fall in love.