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Imagine fighting your way across Middle-earth, destroying the Ring, and finally coming home. Only to discover that the Shire still needs saving.
That may be the right metaphor for ‘Rewiring the State’ – and for the recent social care speech.
It’s fantastic. Real devolution, local fiscal power. Public services organised around places – many of us have spent years arguing for something like this.
But the people being asked to make it happen are not returning fresh from a pleasant walk for second breafkast. They’ve been through 17 years of austerity, the pandemic, backlogs, special measures, “Brexit”, the cost of living, workforce shortages, and restructures – oh, what restructures!
NHS commissioning? Abolished, reconstructed, abolished again, through PCTs, CCGs, ICBs. NHS England is now being abolished.
Police and Crime Commissioners arrived as a major constitutional reform – now going.
Local government is being asked to manage today’s services, redesign tomorrow’s institutions, and make further savings at the same time, with over 150 last-ditch desperate interventions every year to keep financial ruin out of the public eye.
Home itself has been stripped, damaged, and reorganised while we were away. And now it’s time to mourn the people and things we’ve lost.
‘It’s not the despair that kills you, it’s the hope’.
Despair can be managed. People narrow expectations, create workarounds. They protect their teams and the people they serve. They stop expecting the system to help, harden the shell of cynicism.
Hope asks them to become vulnerable again, to believe THIS structure will last, THIS promise is different, and that authority and resources – and a plan – will follow the announcement.
Some will be jubilant.
Some will say, ‘I’ve heard that before.’
Some just won’t have another campaign, transformation programme or heroic rescue left in them.
Obviously we need this. But we need to approach implementation differently. Not to treat exhausted people as barriers to change, but to ask what they have been protecting, and why.
Not to clear away the informal arrangements which have kept services functioning before understanding them. Don’t ask staff to build the new system (again) while targets, budgets, risks and permissions continue to enforce the old one (again).
And don’t assume that transferring responsibilities to a place gives that place the capacity to use them.
The Shire can be restored. But restoration requires more than defeating Sauron. It requires people to organise locally, recover their authority, rebuild what has been damaged, and decide together what kind of place they want.
The opportunity is not just to transfer powers, but to rebuild public services around people, relationships and places. So, we may finally be coming home – but we should be honest about what we are likely to find when we arrive.
What has kept your place going while the formal system failed – and how do we rebuild from that rather than sweep it away?
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chosen path 