LGR? The real challenge is what comes next https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_the-real-challenge-is-what-comes-next-activity-7467470349996130304-APqB
A growing number of leaders in councils are privately saying the same thing about LGR: ‘We can probably get through vesting day. What worries me is what happens after.’
They’re right to worry. The visible programme risks, governance, finance, HR, ICT, and service continuity are well understood. But working alongside councils through this, we keep encountering a set of harder problems that sit beneath the programme:
– overloaded leadership systems
– fragmented decision-making
– weak organisational learning
– performance systems that distort behaviour
– local political cultures built for stability rather than adaptation.
These are generated by other pressures in the system – and reorganisation doesn’t fix those. In some places, it makes them more dangerous, because the organisation becomes larger, more remote, and more operationally complex.
The councils likely to emerge strongest from this aren’t necessarily the ones with the cleanest diagrams or the biggest projected savings. They’re the ones using this moment to ask harder questions:
– Where does demand really come from?
– What information is ignored or arrives too late?
– Which parts of the organisation adapt well under pressure and which freeze?
– How do we increase strategic capacity without weakening local responsiveness?
– How, if at all, do we actually achieve cohesiveness as ‘one organisation’ now?
That’s capability work, the kind that rarely sits on a programme plan but determines whether the transformation actually happens. It’s not glamorous. But it’s the difference between reorganisation as a temporary disruption and reorganisation as the basis for something more genuinely capable.
We’re having these conversations now with councils who don’t want to wait for the new structure to solve their problems, they’re using the disruption as permission to rethink how the whole system works. If that’s where your thinking is heading, we’d welcome the conversation.
Naseema Khan,
Managing Consultant LGR & Devolution Practice Lead naseema.khan@redquadrant.com
07879 896855
Benjamin P. Taylor
Managing Partner of RedQuadrant, Chief Executive of the Public Service Transformation Academy
benjamin.taylor@redquadrant.com
07931317230
Terry Rich
Chair of the Public Service Transformation Academy terry.rich@publicservicetransformation.org
chosen path 