Institution-proofing: how to make things happen when everything is about to change (maybe)
Director of Policy and Research
We spend quite a lot of our time complaining about lack of movement in policy. We ask, “why can’t somebody just do something?”. And as a thoughtful post from Anthony Finkelstein recently pointed out, the desperate urge to be seen to take action – any action – can produce its own set of problems.
Nobody can accuse MHCLG of sitting on its hands these days. In the space of a couple of years it has brought forward the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill and White Paper to build an England-wide network of Strategic Authorities; launched major planning reforms that shift more power to mayors; kicked off a programme of local government reorganisation in every remaining two-tier area; consulted on a new Fair Funding Review 2.0 and wider changes to the local government finance settlement; toughened its approach to intervention and standards in failing councils; and set out plans for a new Local Audit Office to address a massive audit backlog. Running alongside all this is work exploring the future of devolution to London, the best pattern for neighbourhood-scale governance, and more besides.
Taken together, this is the most ambitious attempt in decades to redraw the rules of English local government. If every one of the ambitions entailed in the above list comes to fruition, the local state will become a very different beast in the space of just a few years. And for councils on the ground, that means trying to plan for growth and stability on a map that refuses to sit still.
At the recent County Councils Network conference, I was struck by the impact of this uncertainty. There are swathes of the country where local government councillors and officers cannot say with any degree of confidence whether their institutions will still exist in a few years’ time, what size or shape the successor organisations might be, whether a new strategic authority will in fact be organised in their area, or whether that authority will involve a directly elected mayor.
But of course institutional change means very little, in the short term at least, for the economies, places and communities that are served by local government. The council may change, the mayor may come, the strategy may shift. But the local economy will still have the same footprint, and will still need to grow. The communities will still live in the same streets, with broadly the same needs and pressures.
This calls for a distinctive form of policy design: plans that are, at least to some extent, ‘institution-proof’: capable of surviving, and even shaping, the institutional churn that surrounds them.
That could take several forms:
- Cross more borders. Design programmes that are explicitly collaborative across jurisdictional boundaries, and built around real economic geographies and service systems rather than current lines on the map. Work that starts from functional labour markets, health systems or supply chains may be more likely to ‘lift and shift’ intact when borders change.
- Anchor more at smaller scales. Embrace community- or neighbourhood-level ownership and co-production, so that it is the relationships, assets and habits of collaboration which endure, whoever ends up holding the formal powers. Where possible, insulate these projects with funding streams and governance arrangements that are less vulnerable to a single reorganisation.
- Mitigate the system-switch lossiness. Treat institutional change itself as a design problem: deliberately protect institutional memory, key relationships and core capabilities. That means shared evidence bases, open data rather than private spreadsheets, joint boards and networks that span organisations, and conscious planning for handover rather than hoping that knowledge and trust will somehow survive the reshuffle.
In other words: if the map will not sit still, the task is to design work that belongs to the place, not to the latest wiring diagram of the state.