I wrote the below in 2019 for the Local Government Chronicle, published 13 August. It does at least show that I am consistent. Just this weekend, I’ve seen
- news of the launch of ‘CustomerFirst’ cross-government (the same name we used for customer focus and eGovernment in Hammersmith & Fulham in 2003 – and the same spiel, too)
- news of the launch of a… school for government. As disestablished ten years ago… soon after replaced by – was it the Centre for Public Service Leadership? Ah yes, it was – there was a Taskforce, I remember meeting the chief exec once it was established – she was quite impressive, but absolutely hierarchical – “what’s the equivalent of SCS in school leadership? Heads of Multi-Academy Trusts, I suppose?”, “the reality is, with these senior people, the only way you get them there is to bribe them – you need the big names, Yale, Harvard…’
- further news of the disestablishment of Commissioning Support Units in the NHS (poor sods)
And of course there’s ongoing ‘devolution and local government reorganisation’ – that can’t be killed, could local government survive another body blow?
Meanwhile, thank God, actual progress on spreading the word – and funding – for real place-based and relational public services (but, meanwhile, we’re sleepwalking into recreating two-tier local government, with funding and service delivery in new Strategic Authorities.
My ‘old man shakes hand at cloud’ below
Position
Stop chasing paradigm shifts. They are recycling old ideas, swinging the pendulum, and quietly recreating the same failures in new clothes. Devolution, community power, insourcing, leadership academies, ‘CustomerFirst’ programmes. None of these are wrong. All of them become dangerous when treated as replacements rather than parts of a system. The real problem is not where power sits, but how it is mediated.
Insight
Public services fail when we erase the middle. We oscillate between ‘central knows best’ and ‘local knows best’, between markets and monopolies, between technocracy and romantic localism. Each swing flattens complexity. Each reform removes a layer that was doing useful work, even if sometimes badly. Commissioning, political mediation, and institutional intermediaries are not relics of a broken era. They are the only places where plural interests, contested values, long-term outcomes, and real-world constraints can be held together without collapsing into control or capture.
Devolution centralises as much as it liberates. Community power can exclude as much as it empowers. Insourcing can recreate producer capture faster than outsourcing ever did. And direct democracy, pushed too far, hardens positions and kills negotiation. The uncomfortable truth is that democracy works because it is mediated, not despite it.
The missing move is not another paradigm. It is synthesis. A deliberate, designed muddle that holds tension rather than resolves it. That means commissioning reimagined as a learning, democratic, system-shaping practice. Not contract management. Not market-making. Not a procurement afterthought. The place where political judgement, community voice, professional expertise, and delivery reality are forced to meet and adapt over time.
My call to action
Stop abolishing things before you’ve rebuilt their function. Reinvest in commissioning as a civic capability, not a commercial one. Make it explicitly political, relational, and experimental. Measure outcomes with citizens, but let elected members mediate trade-offs. Design for learning, not deals. Accept that in-house and external delivery both need the same disciplined, democratic commissioning or they will fail differently but predictably.
And finally, break the echo chamber. Translate the language. Broaden the examples. Test this in places that are messy, underpowered, and unfashionable. If this only works in perfect storms with heroic leaders, it isn’t transformation. It’s theatre.
Less disruption. More grown-up system design.
2019 article below (beneath the wonderful AI image which reminds me of those very early (dys)utopian scifi books)
I’m a little bit sick of paradigm shifts
Followers of local government twitter and press are offered a selection of paradigm shifts at the moment, mostly going in consistent directions, and mostly extremely insightful:
- Insourcing is the future – the failure of outsourcing is being heralded fairly widely, from the NHS moving away from the internal market to the travails and ultimate failure of Transforming Rehabilitation;
- Devolution is the future – an evergreen for local government, of course, and despite the near-total slowdown in ‘devo deals’, the argument for devolution continues unabated (and traditionally peaks in the run-up to elections and leadership contests, especially ones in which councillors form a significant part of the electorate); and
- The community is the future – the paradigm shift concept is headlined in the NLGN’s The Community Paradigm report[1].
I’ve been in support of most of these arguments forever; indeed, the PSTA’s State of Transformation reports last year[2] were full of thinking and examples along these lines. So, what are they missing? The role of critical intermediaries: politicians and commissioners. And the risks inherent in ‘paradigm shifts’, reacting against, and recreating, what they come to overthrow.
But… wait. We know commissioning belongs to the past, don’t we? After all, learned report after learned report has pointed out the failures of government management of suppliers and outsourcing.[3] I’m here to say three things:
- Commissioning is going to still be needed – in fact, it’s more important than ever.
- Mediated democracy is still going to be important – and the mediation is a valuable part.
- Revolutionaries, rebels, and paradigm-shifters are vital – they’re the ones identifying that the emperor has no clothes. But glorious revolutions quickly become Animal Farm.
Let’s start with that last point. Paradigms, we’re told, shift all the time. It might be true – but do we really need to adopt a teleological worldview – that the whole of human social evolution has brought us to just this point – to justify some good recommendations on public governance? The NLGN report even points out that every ‘paradigm’ is marked by over-focusing on current challenges and opportunities – ‘reacting against’ as much as ‘moving to’. The move to community and to devolution is subject to this just as much as any other. Both of these make the argument that self-reliance and local determination are the best way to achieve positive outcomes, and they do it in distinction to centralised direction from ‘elsewhere’ and disempowerment of people perfectly able to make their own choices. But directly elected Mayors – the interesting prerequisite of devo deals – and the power of community and codesign – bring their own risks.
Devo areas typically centralise power into a much larger area, putting some of it (actually not much direct control, but a lot of influence) into the hands of one directly elected individual. So devolution, viewed from these two perspectives, is centralisation. And it means a move from the rich complexity of councillors elected very locally at different levels to something much more easily understandable to central government. That legibility itself has implications.
And localism and communitarianism create the potential for dominance, exclusivity, and other patterns of intolerance, which very often boomerang into the means of control of the many by the few. It’s hard to identify the risks here, and the risks of codesign – I’ve long been a passionate advocate of both – but we have to accept that putting the citizen in charge will potentially challenge our norms and might lead to outcomes of which we disapprove.
So, by falling into the trap of ‘central bad, local good’, we end up with more power located in a single actor. And the trope ‘public services bad, community good’ risks future outcomes we never would have willed. As Professor Colin Talbot warns us, the stronger the rhetorical commitment to direct democracy, the greater the risk that we are bound to a single policy, position, or purpose through collective responsibility – undermining the working-through, negotiation, compromise, and collective discourse which is true democracy.[4]
Which brings us to commissioning. It’s clear that simplistic, narrowly proscribed attempts to ‘contractify’ and outsource complex, people-based services have failed. That government at all levels has disastrously failed to manage markets and look at the long-term consequences of delivery decisions. And that five-to-ten-year commissioning cycles based on cold data analysis and competitive market engagement to close a ‘deal’ to deliver on targets was always a bad idea, except perhaps in a few narrow cases. But government – investing in procurement and commercial capability – and those who are calling for an end to outsourcing and commissioning – are both partly right, and significantly wrong. Commissioning is about taking a long-term, whole system perspective, it’s about working collaboratively to identify real citizen and community outcomes, and it’s about thinking truly creatively about how to achieve them[5]. I can guarantee that simplistic, narrowly proscribed attempts to bring everything in-house will not only swing the pendulum back to the 1980s talk of ‘producer capture’, it will also replicate many of the failures to achieve outcomes and sustainability we are seeing at present.
It is true that we need new approaches to commissioning that encompass far more democracy and localism. We need outcomes to be measured by the citizens, the communities, and their elected representatives. We need commissioning which tests and learns and adapts and works with the providers, rather than creating a conflictual relationship.
Without this kind of commissioning, procurement and commercial can only be as good as the mistake brief their given and the contract they negotiate that’s not fit to deal with the complexity of the subject. Most importantly, we need this kind of commissioning even more if services are in-house, as the imperative to contractualise is taken away and lazy management norms can easily take over.
So, there are tensions between elected political responsibility (at various levels) and community engagement, codesign, and other forms of very local, personal, or community decision-making. There are tensions inherent in really learning and developing what’s needed in an area to help achieve outcomes, and all these tensions apply to both in- and out-sourced delivery. And polarisation – one approach good and new, the other bad and old – is a great temptation which won’t lead us to grapple with the true complexities.
Because we need the complexity – the muddle, if you will. We have to bring together technocracy (which should play its part again), local decision-makers, non-local decision-makers, individuals, communities, and politicians at all levels. We need to allow people to talk to people and make human decisions – at all of the levels.
What’s more, this is getting dangerously closed to an echo chamber. Wigan, Plymouth, Oldham, a few other councils, with NLGN, CCIN, Collaborate, and the PSTA too – we’re all in violent agreement with each other, and pretty close to talking the kind of language that will just not make sense to everyone else. The examples are thin on the ground, and they tend to get picked up by all of us in turn. Maybe that’s because they’re the emerging future. Or maybe it’s because it’s really really hard, and you have to get very lucky with a confluence of events, people, and circumstances to make these things happen.
‘Paradigm shifts’ are likely to just swing the pendulum, and leave us with the same old problems in a different flavour. So, can’t we just skip all of that and try to find a synthesis which eats away at the worst outsourcing, centralised, controlling, ‘we-know-best’ government without throwing out the baby with the bathwater? We must increase democracy and community voice and entrust politicians to use their own judgement to help mediate between conflicting demands for resource allocation and for cultural fit. And to do this, we need to start with commissioning – the mediating layer between policy and delivery. We need to engage communities and negotiate power shifts, we need to work actively with political systems. And we need to bring in experts and critical decision-makers where they can assist.
Footnotes below
[1] www.nlgn.org.uk/public/2019/six-reasons-our-public-services-need-a-paradigm-shift-towards-the-community/
[2] We produced two reports:
- think pieces: www.publicservicetransformation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/public-service-state-of-transformation-2018-report-from-the-public-service-transformation-academy-e-version.pdf
- case studies: www.publicservicetransformation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/2018-case-studies-public-service-state-of-transformation-from-the-public-service-transformation-academy-e-version-ALPHA2-1.pdf
- And our lead partner, RedQuadrant, produced a shadow report, State of Emergency: www.redquadrant.com/media/98355/state-of-emergency-the-redquadrant-state-of-transformation-shadow-report.pdf
[3] Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-administration-and-constitutional-affairs-committee/news-parliament-2017/carillion-outsourcing-report-published-17-19/
Work and Pensions and BEIS Committee: www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/work-and-pensions-committee/inquiries/parliament-2017/carillion-inquiry-17-19/
Public Accounts Committee: www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/inquiries/parliament-2017/carillion-17-19/ and www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news-parliament-2017/carillion-risk-assessments-report-published-17-19/ and www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/public-accounts-committee/news-parliament-2017/strategic-suppliers-report-published-17-19/
NAO: www.nao.org.uk/report/investigation-into-the-governments-handling-of-the-collapse-of-carillion/
[4] https://colinrtalbot.wordpress.com/2016/01/03/is-corbyn-turning-labour-into-a-democratic-centralist-party/
[5] See the forthcoming piece, ‘Commissioning is an approach to transformation’, by me and Garath Symonds for the Public Service: State of Transformation report to be launched at the helping each other out of the crisis conference on June 18 in central London: https://www.publicservicetransformation.org/event/helping-each-other-out-of-the-crisis-psta-public-service-state-of-transformation-conference-2019/
chosen path 