Chamberlain Lecture 2022: Councillor Georgia Gould

Last month, Cllr Georgia Gould, Leader of the Council and Chair of London Councils, set out her vision for the future local government at the annual Joseph Chamberlain lecture. Spoken on the eve of the Local Government Association (LGA) conference, the lecture celebrates the power of local government to change lives, and Georgia’s speech embodies the borough’s vision through We Make Camden. Whatever change we make — from the re-design of the Council’s approach, to how it allocates social housing, or the way it thinks about how it uses citizens data, to the way we think about the future of workforce — all flows from the vision of relational public services that Georgia sets out in her lecture. We’ll be writing more about some of the themes she outlines in the coming months, including municipal imagination and what ideas like ‘imagination activism’ might mean in practical terms for councils.