Public Service Reform (PSR) right now is a collection of organisations and independent practice emerging across sectors, communities, and places. It captures a range of transformative systems and practices that share common features like collaboration and experimentation. It is happening organically and it is putting people at its heart.
These are all good things. But for real and consistent change to be felt, we need to move beyond pockets of energy to a movement that connects and amplifies.
Why does this matter? Because the emerging form of PSR represents a compelling response to the divisive nature of our times and the decline in trust in public figures and institutions. By centring on people, and making place the true unit of transformation, its actions – from relational practice, innovation, and human learning systems to place-based working, models of prevention, and whole systems design – signal a clear departure from the theory of New Public Management (NPM) and a largely structural focus on performance, contracting, and commissioning. The risk is that without scaffolding and deliberate connections, what is now emerging is vulnerable to dismissal as faddish and incoherent, an easy target for the powerful status quo that will move to protect existing ways of working, thinking and doing.
PSR is represented up and down the nation in UK wide programmes, regional interventions, and local responses. Some examples:
- Test, Learn, and Grow is a three-year government funded programme that aims to model and scale an approach to closing the gap between policy, delivery and service users while speeding up cycles of learning and improvement.
- Greater Manchester’s Live Well is a community-led public health and wellbeing programme with the goal of shifting support from crisis to prevention. It is setting up “Live Well Centres,” where people can get integrated support in their neighbourhood, as well as growing a “Live Well workforce” that includes community connectors and voluntary sector staff, alongside nurses and social workers.
- In Somerset, Local Community Networks act as a focus for community engagement and development, generating local plans that address priorities, and bringing together different partners to work jointly on local problems.
These and other programmes – from Asset Based Community Development in Leeds, to Marmot Estates in Camden, and ‘Cradle to Career’ in North Birkenhead – demonstrate a palpable energy for public service reform that is delivering observable change for local communities in a way that engages and strengthens, rather than diagnoses and fixes. These are programmes that all recognise that complex challenges require nuanced, multi-disciplinary, mutable responses that meet people where they are, understand the lives they lead, and the places in which they live those lives.
Now we must broaden the current coalition beyond the few to the many, galvanise action according to a clear and compelling common purpose, and provide a framework to embed change consistently. Replacing big structural, top-down policy and funding solutions with a movement of change requires a formation of roles and responsibilities that goes against the grain of traditional public service in this country. It needs national government to focus on its ability to catalyse, rather than to direct, control, and measure. And it requires government to think not only about how it exercises its power but also what it chooses to actively give away and how to support those who take on its role.
Devolution is only partly answering this call. Now everyone in the system needs to commit to a change of mindset. It is only by adopting a position of serving a better system, rather than directing the current one, that any of our organisations have a chance of success.
For PSR to embed and effect real change, national government should be constantly asking: where can we reallocate power, money and learning to where it will have most impact? Can we accelerate public service reform, its principles, and practice? What are the tests, levers, and measures of success? Regional and local government need to similarly recognise that their role in public service reform is open to communities, partners, and each other to drive success, and that they too must channel and build on activity rather than orchestrate or own it.
Equally, civil society must use its vast influence and capabilities to challenge funders to think and commission differently and to build communities of practice locally that are inclusive of public servants and communities, balancing the need to achieve organisational impact and performance with the need to see real whole system change. And private sector organisations that deliver public goods must make themselves accountable for delivering the good and not just the contract. This principle must be maintained, tested and evidenced whatever the commercial implications so that public-private partnership is possible without harming the goals of reform.
Finally, we also need servant leaders in all places and spaces. Leaders willing to put disciplines, specialisms, and egos aside who can celebrate whole systems succeeding, not just the organisations and individuals within them. Without a leadership that provides a believable, strengths-based counter-narrative to current public discourse – that talks about what is doable and achievable – we are left with the very real threat of populist movements who, by means of an entirely different narrative, are able to put real reform out of the reach of everyone.
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On December 2 we will be hosting Britain Renewed 2025, a one-day conference bringing together politicians, senior civil servants, community leaders, frontline public servants and business voices to build momentum for public service reform to take hold across Whitehall. You can find out more about the event here.
Britain Renewed 2025 is delivered in partnership with AWS, Inner Circle Consulting, the Growth and Reform Network and the UKRI (ERC) Relational State Capacity Project.
