On rewiring the state — join the conversation on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/antlerboy_at-last-rain-after-years-of-public-service-activity-7489605926317023232-urox?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAACuq-oBecVFDW6PCf3lkoG-peMeuLBeoho
At last, rain! After years of public service drought, the announcement of real devolution – and social care hope – is – just – bloody brilliant!
More local power and fiscal freedom. Public services organised around place. A smaller centre. More space for prevention, neighbourhood working and relational services.
Hoorah!
But rain falling on damaged land doesn’t produce a harvest overnight. The soil has been depleted. Austerity. Backlogs. Burnout. Damaging restructures. Moral injury. Lost institutional memory. Massive distrust.
In the NHS, people have lived through successive models of commissioning, each presented as the answer to fragmentation, each then torn down with scorn. NHS England is being abolished. Local government staff have carried expanding responsibilities while services, capacity, and financial resilience have been stripped back across 17 years.
Some roots are still alive.
Some people have nothing left to give.
‘It’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope’.
Drought teaches survival; we narrow our expectations, stop planting. We protect what little remains.
Rain asks us to believe in growth again.
So, welcome announcements can produce relief, grief, anger, and suspicion at the same time.
We need the rain, however much it reminds us of all that is lost. We also need to rebuild the soil. That needs stability, time, authoritym and resources. It means protecting – rebuilding – relationships and local knowledge. It means creating conditions in which staff can use judgement, learn from citizens, and alter the system around them.
It also means recognising that workforce recovery is not separate from implementation; it IS implementation.
Burnham can’t offer security, he does offer hope, Now he needs to nurture the soil.
What would need to change, where you work, for people to risk planting again?
chosen path 