Neighbourhoods as engines of change

On the need for bridges from the edges to the centre

How do we combine the intelligence and innovation that exists in neighbourhoods with the capacities of the central state?

This question has been on my mind since attending an event in Leeds yesterday on neighbourhood health, with the Cabinet Office Test, Learn and Grow team. The event brought together a fantastic room of people with expertise in neighbourhood health, across central and local government and civil society. I spoke on a panel about the thinking behind Test & Learn — what it means, where it comes from, and how we’ll know if it’s working.

The day underlined the depth of insight that sits in neighbourhood-level work. It was also a reminder of the historically clumsy way in which the central state has interacted with local and community work, and the need for a more bottom-up approach to reform. There was also a healthy discussion about why the centre acts the way it does — there are some defensible reasons, and some not-so defensible reasons.

Overall this left me feeling a funny mix of (a) more energised about the need for a bottom-up approach to public service reform but also (b) more aware of how challenging this will be.

This makes me think the Test, Learn, and Grow initiative is aiming at exactly the right target, that it will be hard to hit, but that the effort is worth it. Indeed, given the pressures now facing our governing institutions, I’m not sure there’s an alternative.

1. Neighbourhood-level intelligence

Hearing people talk about their work in neighbourhood health initiatives reminded me of that old adage — decisions should be made by people working closest to the problem.

There is more depth of insight at neighbourhood-level — richer and more nuanced — than there is, and can ever be, in the central civil service. This richness comes into its own when working on the complex, context-dependent issues that now dominate healthcare — living well with chronic conditions, or living healthy lifestyles, or supporting mental well-being.

Hearing people talk about community health initiatives also reinforced my belief that work at the edges of the system — e.g. in community-led projects — tends to be more contemporary than work at the centre. Community work is more directly in touch with today’s environmental conditions, and it has an innovativeness borne of pragmatism. This means it has moved early in adopting new ways of working (e.g. ways to cope with complexity, or relational ways of approaching intrinsically human challenges like chronic conditions.)

An example came from Howard Bradley, who runs a community project called LS14. He described how their work is:

• Asset-based (“Start with what’s strong, not with what’s wrong”)
• Relational (“It’s not about delivering services, it’s more about strengthening relationships”)
• Rooted in local insight (“Residents know their street better than any dataset”)

Howard also described how their work is structured — it’s not a hierarchy, but a network. LS14 is a community trust, which sits in a network called We Are Seacroft, which is a ‘community anchor’. This then sits in a city-wide network called the Leeds Community Anchor Network. This is a far more agile, organic, and contemporary institutional form than the functional hierarchies that still dominate Whitehall.[1]

Together this is a useful reminder that the edges of the system are closer to the future than the centre, and that frankly the centre has more to learn from the edges than the other way around. Hence the need for a model of reform that is more centripetal than centrifugal — pulling ideas and insights into the centre from the edges, not pushing out endless initiatives.

2. The clumsy relationship with the centre

As well as being impressed by neighbourhood-level work, events like these are always a painful reminder of how dysfunctional the relationship between the centres and the edges has been.

Here are some examples that came up in the discussion:

• The limits of a centralised model of intelligence, in which policy-capacity sits at the centre and delivery capacity sits at the edges. This reflects the idea that government has a central brain that passes instructions out to limbs to do things. This reflects the deeply historic mechanical principle of separating thinking (central) from doing (local). It contrasts with a more distributed model of intelligence, like an octopus, in which intelligence is spread throughout the body.
• The centrifugal nature of information flows. The way information — instructions, guidance, policies, funding criteria — flow out from the centre to the edges. These outbound channels have historically been far busier with traffic than inbound channels, or indeed lateral channels — sharing ideas and information from the edges to the centre, or across the edges. (This is despite many years of effort to improve lateral channels, in particular.)
• Going beyond information, there is the question of emotional intelligence — how does it feel to work at the edges of a system like this? The typical experience of someone working in a community-level initiative is still essentially that they work very hard, year after year, and become ever deeper experts in their domain, only to spend most of their time trying to interpret and comply with a flow of initiatives designed by someone far away at the centre. Many of these initiatives will make their work harder, or will be the thing they were doing ten years ago, or will need to be patchworked together to keep the lights on.
• Short-termism and the pattern of 12-month contracts. Someone in our discussion group at the event gave a familiar example of a government contract that had been commissioned as part of the UK government’s work and health agenda. Everyone at our table strongly supported the goals of this work, but heads were in hands that the work had been commissioned as a 12 month contract, with an evaluation expected at the end ‘to see if the intervention had worked’. The person pointed out that it takes six months to ramp up a new programme and longer to get into a groove. They had seen this pattern repeat year after year, over the 30 years they had worked in the sector.
• The narrowness of procurement mechanisms, that often give the illusion of value for money when really they are depleting capacity. Someone shared the example of a public sector tender that had required the winning organisation to start delivering within two weeks of winning the contract. They explained that this ruled out small third sector providers, because they could not scale up fast enough. The contract was eventually awarded to Reed, and after winning they called all the local charities to ask if they could employ a debt adviser on a salary near the minimum wage. The charities had to explain this was far below the salary of any qualified debt adviser.

What this adds up to, overall, is a painful reality in which lots of the layers of the system, between central government and neighbourhoods, add value mainly by protecting neighbourhood-level work from ill-conceived ideas sent out by the centre.[2]

It also adds up to a persistent sense of crisis at the edges. The capacity that sits in communities — which is the home of most of the system’s intelligence, and which could be seen as vital civic infrastructure — is funded by a patchwork of small, time-limited contracts and grants pieced together from organisations like the National Lottery. And this perilous state of living hand-to-mouth runs on year, after year, after year.

Finally, however, I was struck in the discussion — which included people from all levels of government — by how poorly this all serves people who work at the centre. Indeed a lot of the push for reform I’ve seen in recent years has come from people who work in central government who are tired of the dysfunctional bureaucratic game they’ve become locked in. So there is a hunger for change not just from people on the receiving end of this dynamic, locally, but from a growing movement reformers in the centre.

3. Why it’s complicated

You can see from all of this why there was a call from attendees at the event for a more ‘permissive environment’. There was a sense from people working in communities of ‘just give us the money and let us get on with it’.

It’s important to end, then, by acknowledging why this is complicated. And indeed it was great to see these complications discussed honestly at the event. Yes, there are lots of bad reasons the centre has historically behaved in the ways described above, but there are defensible reasons too.

Matthew Taylor posed a version of this challenge at the event. He explained how the task, ultimately, is to find a way to integrate, or bridge, the two worlds. On the one hand, there is neighbourhood-level work with a good claim to holding much of the answer to holistic and preventative healthcare. On the other hand, there is a centre of government that has some good reasons for its deliverology mindset (e.g. politicians are accountable to voters, and have to deliver concrete outcomes like shorter NHS waiting lists, and have to balance the public finances).

What we need, ultimately, then, is a model of bottom-up reform that bridges, rather than ignoring, these more justifiable tensions between the centre and the edges.

This, to say the least, will be difficult. And yet I left yesterday’s discussion feeling positive, because I think we can see the outlines of a system that would simply be better than the clumsy approaches of the past.

I think it’s possible to imagine a system that:

• Saw its intelligence as distributed, and set itself up to reflect this (e.g. by mixing policy and delivery at the edges)
• Used insights from the edges to drive change up and through the system, not from the middle out (e.g. by building communities of change-makers across the layers and siloes of the system)
• Saw civic capacity as essential infrastructure — to be invested in as enduring capacity, around outcomes or problems, not a patchwork of projects and services commissioned in short-term contracts
• Used outcomes or missions as its organising logic, and built sharp accountability around this, based on rich and holistic measures, while being permissive about how outcomes are achieved
• Used purpose, or missions, as a way to motivate strong relationships across the system, so that people working on an issue in neighbourhoods and at the centre felt like part of one team

I also see the politics and change management of this aligning. Which is to say I see an alliance falling into place of people hungry for change both in local areas and across the centre of government.

This all circles back to the Test, Learn, and Grow programme, which I should say can’t solve all of these challenges. Indeed a common risk with reform initiatives is that everyone pins their main gripe onto them, and then everyone ends up disappointed. I do think, however, that the central idea behind Test & Learn is spot on, and indeed urgent.

(If you’re not familiar with the programme, these principles shared recently by Nick Kimber, the Director overseeing Test, Learn & Grow from the Cabinet Office, give a good sense of the model.)

Finally, the event left me feeling really hopeful about the promise of this work. We heard early accounts of the Test & Learn work that has started in Sheffield, and it was exciting to hear how fast they are moving — seeing meaningful outcomes in 12 weeks — while building a strong sense of team spirit that spanned local and national, and policy and delivery.

One person captured the heart of this model much better than I had in my comments:

We must stop seeing neighbourhoods as the end users of policy, and see them instead as the engines of change.

Amen to that.

Footnotes

[1] Notice how this undercuts the silly idea that neighbourhood- and community approaches don’t scale well. This is only true if what you mean by ‘scale’ is ‘replicate’. Neighbourhood and community work spreads and grows, rather than scaling via replication. Think of it more like fire than like a machine.

[2] This relates to a nerdy debate I got into a while ago about whether metis exists in bureaucracies, and the role bureaucrats play at making rules more sensible. The point is that bending rules is, to some degree, an essential function of bureaucrats; it’s the reason it’s valuable to have human beings working in these systems, and not robots. (It is also why things go horribly wrong when we fully automate decisions.) But still, even taking this point into mind, the extent to which people have to spend their time mitigating the impacts of daft rules seems indefensible.)

I’m a writer and strategic consultant working with a range of organisations looking to adopt more human and contemporary ways of working. There’s more context at the bottom of this recent piece on the energy at the edges of the system. Or see this post on policies as medicines. Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to work together. You can follow my writing on Blue Sky, Medium, or Substack.