A Hundred Origin Stories – an Unfinished History of Relational Public Services – Parker, Dove, and Taylor (2025)

[This is the end point of a phase of a journey that start for me with having time on a Friday night to dig in to a dynamic twitter thread asking for ‘a decent accessible history of relational practice/thinking/leadership (ideally short form)?’ – my responses summarised here:

Nick Kimber on LinkedIn: “Hello. Can anybody point me to a decent accessible history of relational practice/thinking/ leadership (ideally short form)?”

And a more reflective piece here:

How to move to relational public services

Nick asked Becca Dove, Simon Parker and me to write the piece below, and it has really been a pleasure – tempered with guilt that I never quite had time at the right time to make the contribution I wanted, so my collaborators deserve the lion’s shared of the credit!]

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/news/2025/dec/hundred-origin-stories-unfinished-history-relational-public-services

Simon Parker, Becca Dove and Benjamin Taylor explore the history of relational public services, ahead of Britian Renewed 2026, a major one-day conference exploring a more place-based approach to public service reform.

On the face of it, it was a simple question. “Can anybody point me to a decent accessible history of relational practice/thinking/leadership (ideally short form)?”, asked Nick Kimber, Director of Public Service Reform in the UK government Cabinet Office, in a Linkedin post in October 2025. 200 comments and 14 reposts later and it turns out the answer is no. No one has this. In fact, not only did no one have it, everyone had a different interpretation of what the question even meant.

But the contributions to Nick’s post certainly provided something: a glorious insight into the braided lineage of relationalism in public services. An illumination of its scattered roots across a multitude of practices and systems, ideologies and ideas, political histories and philosophies, cultural traditions, and academic ontologies. As Benjamin Taylor pointed out, relational public services never got a canon. There is not one origin story. There is a weave of many. It belongs to everyone and no one.

We are used to thinking about public services in terms of big theories. The new public management of the 1980s appeared as a coherent set of principles for public sector reform that dominated the UK debate for nearly 40 years. Is there now another grand theory waiting to step forward? Are we simply moving into a more plural phase where a wider range of ideas and perspectives are valued? Maybe relationalism is the theory, or maybe it is one strand of a bigger story. Whatever the case, we believe it is an important – perhaps defining – idea.

Fixing a meaning to something as inherently fluid, contextual, and emergent as relationalism is something of a challenge. But needs must. For now, we’ll settle for a definition of ‘services provided by governments for the public good, that prioritise strong relationships with and between people’.It’s government work that makes relationships the primary means and object of value.

A few of us wondered if we could curate the contributions in that social media post into something. Perhaps an outline sketch of the rich history of relationalism in public services in the UK. What follows is our first attempt. It doesn’t pretend to be complete or definitive. Many traditions and strands of thought can lay some claim to relationism, and we do not have space to capture them all here. We’ll apologise now for all the gaps and ask you to help fill them.

At least two things are clear. Relationalism and relational practice have firmly entered public service vernacular. The ideas of relational public services have something to offer to those in search of bridges for a divided nation.

Building a sense of where those ideas came from, and why, might be a good thing to do.

Deep Roots and Early Days – 19th and early 20th Century

The roots of relational practice in pre-modern societies hints at the idea that being in deep relation to one another is simply what people do, but that we have to keep re-learning how to do it in the context of new social, economic and technological systems. While it is tempting to assume that relationalism is some sort of state of nature – the behaviour we would return to if only the state or market didn’t get in the way – the reality is much more complicated.

The earliest forms of public service in the UK were founded in the charitable work of the church and the poor laws. These emphasised a commitment to duty, obligation, and mutuality (the role and influence of religious organising in public administration and social policy could have an entire article of its own and we will only scratch the surface here, but for now Michael Little’s series on this topic is worth a listen and this by Ongaro and Tantardini worth a read). While both were by their nature highly relational – personalised support given to the poor by people of the same parish of perhaps a few hundred people – they were also highly conditional. Only those judged deserving by their communities could hope for alms.

This points to a tension at the heart of our history – between a bureaucratic, rules-based system that promises universal rights and fairness, and a relational one which prioritises warmth and care, but is also more contingent. Edmund Burke was surely right in his defence of local civic institutions and in pointing to the importance of the little platoons of family, community and faith. But there are reasons we no longer solely rely on them for welfare.

The roots of our modern settlement lie in the industrial revolution and the creation of an urbanised public whose vast new needs overwhelmed the old institutions. From the Rochdale pioneers to patriarchal figures like Robert Owen to subscription libraries and self-help societies providing forms of healthcare and unemployment benefit, the earliest proto-public services were often inherently localised and relational, though they could also be deeply paternalistic and wholly inadequate to modern eyes.

The later 19th century was a great era of utopian writing as people marvelled at the potential of science to reshape society, and two of those novels dramatise the debate between seeing society as organic or mechanical. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward provided an example of a utopia where people’s material needs were abundantly met through the application of scientific socialism under the rule of a class of experts. It became wildly popular and was plainly a huge influence on Fabians such as Beatrice Webb, who helped transmit the spirit of Bellamy into Labour politics.

But this was a world patterned on machines, not people. Among the many rejoinders was William Morris’s News From Nowhere, which imagined a world in which people turned away from industry altogether and built an anarchist utopia where people chose where they went, how they lived and where they worked. The twin spirits of Morris and Bellamy remained alive in British politics well into 1945 and beyond – was the goal a scientifically organised society that met material needs, or some form of deeper transformation of working people’s spirit?

A wealth of other thinkers and doers were scaffolding ideas of relational public services in this period. Simmel’s work in the relational sociology school of thinking proposed a conception of society framed in relationships. In organisational development, the ‘mother of modern management’ Mary Parker Follett was defining relationships as the basis of effective leadership and organisational life. During the earliest days of what would become the social work discipline, Mary Ellen Richmond and Jane Addams were using relationships as a primary mechanism for change, albeit open to criticism for moralisation practices. The burgeoning concept of youth work had, by necessity, relational engagement and participation in its guiding principles. Social reformists, including the Settlement Movement were laying foundations for the community development tradition, itself steeped in relationality. And through a philosophical lens, Buber’s intersubjectivity theory and the notion of ‘I, Thou’ positioned dialogue and relationships as the catalyst for growth and transformation.

A Post-War Relational Boom

Labour’s 1945 settlement is often seen as the wholesale arrival of a new welfare state. It would be more true to say that it completed a journey that started at least 35 years previously with the People’s Budget and the huge developments of welfare and public service systems at local government level. Experiments such as the settlement at Dartington Hall in the 1920s and 30s and the Salters’ pioneering work to create a proto-welfare state in the unpromising soil of industrial Bermondsey showed communities coming together to experiment with new forms of social relationship. Indeed, the NHS itself was initially a way of providing public funding to the system charities, communities and councils had already built.

The new systems introduced by the Attlee government did not always have much time for the more relational experiments of the interwar period. The Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham is a notable exception. Founded in 1935, it attempted to take a holistic approach to healthcare, recognising that it was not merely the absence of illness that would help local people to live well. Local working class families paid a subscription and alongside a clinic was a swimming, gym, theatre and recreational spaces which ran a family-centred approach to wellbeing. Relationships in such a space had a chance to thrive. Advances in medicine and statistics cast doubt on whether the Pioneer was the best way to address local challenges, and it was a casualty of the new NHS, but the idea still feels startlingly modern – a tantalising glimpse of a road not (yet) taken.

A relational critique of the new welfare bureaucracy emerged almost immediately. The social entrepreneur Michael Young famously held the pen on the 1945 manifesto, but it is less well known that he subsequently wrote a number of reports for the party that strongly questioned the New Jerusalem. Young wanted a compromise between Morris and Bellamy based on the family and social attachment. “The family is small and intimate…” he wrote, “the family is mine: The State belongs to someone else, belongs maybe to itself.” Echoes of this disillusion can be found in writers ranging from RH Tawney to GDH Cole, who had hoped that transforming material conditions could also lead to a more fundamental rejuvenation of national spirit and culture.

Young would go on to develop his critique of the welfare state into a series of dazzling reports – most notably his famous Family and Kinship in East London – and eventually into a string of social enterprises, institutions and training opportunities. It would find echoes in the New Left of the 1950s and 60s, especially as researchers like the LSE’s Brian Abel-Smith clearly established that the welfare state had not, in fact, solved poverty.

The backdrop to Young’s critique was a postwar explosion of the social sciences and psychology that were foregrounding relationships. From the mid-1940s at the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, pioneers like Bion and Trist were exploring social organisation and the interaction of the technical and the social in the workplace. Menzies Lyth was furthering the concept of organisations as emotional systems. Bateson’s seminal work in systems thinking and communication laid more intellectual foundations for relational practice in a range of disciplines including family therapy. Design Council was founded, signalling the beginning of the discipline’s (eventual and significant) contribution to more human-focussed ways of thinking.

In 1957, Biestek’s ‘The Casework Relationship’ informed social work’s interpretation of relational practice, accentuating empathy, dignity and purposeful engagement. Over in health, by the time the NHS emerged in 1948 the cottage hospital movement was already championing connection and sustained relationships of trust between medical professionals and patients. Community development was foregrounding the social justice side of relational practice (activist and Quaker Tony Gibson deserves honourable mention as does the incomparable David Robinson). Community Librarians are underpriced in the relational public service story: few can claim as they can to have used civic infrastructure to weave relational practice with participation, capability-building and social change.

As with religious organising, the contribution of the feminist movement to relational ideas deserves more than the paragraph it’s getting here. Miller’s relational cultural theory upended individualistic models of development, instead centring relationships and connection. The body of work on ethics of care (Gilligan, Tronto and Noddings among others) offered a moral theory around caring relationships, which would (if not in name) find its way into social pedagogy and inclusion practices in health and education. Around the same time, family group conference imported to the social work system from Māori communities in New Zealand and restorative approaches in youth justice began their influential rise in the British relational practice space.

This was a rich period of creativity and ideas for relational public services. And it would be hit hard by what came next.

The 80s, 90s and New Public Management

The new public management, or NPM, was a response to what was seen as the increasing ungovernability and inefficiency of a radicalised public sector. It reimposed control by trying to set clear performance metrics for public services modelled on the leveraged corporate buy-outs of the 1970s. Just as businesses now laboured primarily for profits to service gigantic debt burdens, so public servants would have clear output goals that could be measured and managed, through competitive tendering to bring in the private sector if necessary. This clarity by its very nature left little space for relational working.

NPM was a reaction to producer capture and opaque, unaccountable bureaucracy, using some of the effective lenses of market economics. It tried to make services legible and dependable, and therefore manageable: basic transparency, standards, consumer voice, value for money. It professionalised procurement and finance, spread simple service guarantees, created some comparability across places, and gave the public a way to complain and be heard.

None of that is the arch enemy of relationships.But it certainly revisited the ‘machine patterning’ of a previous age that did not encourage nor particularly welcome relational thinking. Under this weight, relational practices struggled to maintain momentum. Public service workers became deliverers of predefined services, not relational agents of change. Relationships didn’t matter too much as long as targets were met and procedures followed. The counter-tradition of relational practice didn’t vanish. It went to ground. It echoed in the halls of community libraries, in the streets of youth work, and in the Tavistock School’s unwavering attention to the emotional life of organisations.

By the turn of the century, the design and digital worlds were reintroducing a disciplined way to listen and iterate. Figures such as Geoff Mulgan and Charles Leadbeater emerged from the pages of Marxism Today and into the ranks of New Labour fascinated with the way the Post-Fordist economy had brought an end to mass production and instead enabled goods and services to be personalised to the individual. Researchers were starting to reframe performance as learning. System thinkers were rediscovered after being memory-holed in the late 70s. A corner turned? Maybe. But this most difficult of periods for relational public services left a residue that is still visible today.

The 2000’s and the Relational State

A new, or at least galvanised, narrative for relational public services began in earnest in the early 2000s. Graen and Uhl Bien’s work on relational leadership challenged traditional leader-centric ideas, instead putting relational processes over individual authority. From Wheatley to Weick to Gittell to Wenger-Trayner, scholars began saying publicly what practitioners had muttered privately for decades: organisations are living systems in turbulent environments, not controllable machines. In other words, relationships might rather matter to the insides of public services as well as to their outside interactions with citizens. It was time to re-learn what had been lost in the NPM era.

One of the most successful strands of relational thinking from this period was service design. In 2007, the Design Council DOTT programme in the North East and their new inhouse RED Team started to apply human-centred innovation approaches to public service reform, bringing communities together with designers and service providers to find solutions to problems. The DOTT idea of ‘less stuff, more people’ frankly said it all. These ideas were amplified by the think tank Demos – notably in its 2006 Journey to the Interface report – and at least somewhat tested in Whitehall through the Government Digital Service and the creation of Policy Lab.

There is a sense in which much of this is simply recovering older ways of knowing and dressing them in ways that are acceptable to post-NPM bureaucracies. Video ethnography, for instance, is in part a way to make lived experience into an acceptable form of evidence for a senior civil service steeped in the Treasury’s economistic language. Behavioural economics provided a similarly respectable way for the dismal science to re-engage with messy human reality.

Post-2008 financial crash, the Public Services Commission focussed on the value in the relationship between citizen and state with its proposed new social contract. Social work began its renaissance in relationship-based practice after a long period in the shadow of NPM (special mention to the influential work of Harry Ferguson and Gillian Ruch). Leadbeater’s public service innovation ideas in the New Labour years, notably Personalisation through Participation in 2004, had a firm nod to the relational. The Cooperative Councils movement from 2010, with its emphasis on participation, shared power and trust, certainly encouraged some fresh thinking about relationships in local government. In 2012, the Institute for Public Policy Research published a provocative collection of essays in ‘Government with the People: The Outlines of a Relational State’: the contrasting visions from Mulgan and Stears are well worth a read.

By 2015, pioneering work by Toby Lowe and colleagues on Human Learning Systems was shifting the boundaries of relational practice further. Cottam’s 2018 critique of the welfare state articulated an argument for a state centred on human relationships and capability-building (and subsequently tested by Participle). In 2021, Demos continued their long interest in relationalism with ‘The Social State’, calling for a system of public services that could bring together local communities and make it easier for people to build relationships with services and with each other. Whilst there was still no single story of relational public services, perhaps there was now a coherency to the stories as a whole.

This work developed in parallel with more communitarian ways of thinking about public services. David Cameron’s government, for instance, made the Burkean argument that a ‘Big Society’ should take up the slack from a smaller state. An influential post-liberal strand of thought has since made the case for stronger enforcement of social obligations and reciprocity, suggesting that relational public services must sit within a clearer set of rules, identity and belonging. This is hardly a return to the Poor Law, but it does pose some of the same questions about who belongs to the community, and re-emphasises that troublesome tension between rules and relationships.

For all this entanglement, in 2025 relational practices in public services at local level appear to be coming of age once more. Neighbourhood health models, collaborations in serious youth violence, restorative work in schools, open dialogue and recovery college in mental health, Buurtzorg community nursing, local asset-based community development, child-friendly alliances in urban development, place-based approaches, even devolution. All are using relational moves in different public service dialects. All favour bridge-building between different world views. All are about people trying to do things together.

A striking feature of most if not all these examples is political leadership. From Georgia Gould in Camden and James Lewis in Leeds to Jo Platt and Peter Smith in Wigan and Andy Burnham in Manchester, visible local political commitment to the ideas of relational public services plus enduring relationships between politicians and public servants (so often ruptured by turnover of one or the other) are a hallmark of whether it flourishes. And early research would seem to indicate it is economically and socially good when it does.

Weaving the Threads – And Adding New Ones

If you’ve made it to the end of this, you’re probably wondering whether you’re any clearer on the history of relational public services. It’s messy. Multiple origin stories, a mix of ideas and practices, each one developing over different time horizons, each with its own identity and language, constantly learning and re-learning, resurfacing in new forms wherever people try to make public life more humane. And that means relationalism in public services often struggles to find its voice or make itself understood.

But as perhaps that Linkedin post showed, being owned by everyone and no one is not a weakness of relationalism in public services. It’s the signature. For well over a century, across different political landscapes, relational ideas and practices have spread in public services the way culture spreads. From elected councillors to practitioners, from trade union halls and chapels to libraries and school classrooms, people learn it, live it, contextualise it and defend it, often in defiance of the systems they work in. Because they believe it is better for society than the alternative.

We hope this curation of replies to a social media post, plus a bit of our own readings, offers a small window into (some of) the threads of relational public services’ rich history. Its future will be as complex as its past. The account of it must be added to and improved. You could write a book on it, and we hope someone does.

The idea of relationalism in public services is at once intriguing and compelling, and in many ways, that is its promise to the current political moment. It’s malleable. It’s helpful. It’s a counterweight to division. And it never stands still.

Afterword: a klaxon-sized acknowledgement and thanks to everyone who commented on Nick’s original thread. Making a coffee and reading through the 200 contributions is well worth some minutes of your time.

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/news/2025/dec/hundred-origin-stories-unfinished-history-relational-public-services