Join the conversation on Linkedin: https://lnkd.in/p/eEenf4Sn
If the rule, funding dispute, or hand-off remains intact, the next family can find itself starting again. Knowing somebody who knows somebody can become an unofficial eligibility criterion.
Solace and Collaborate CIC‘s new Leading for Place draws on nine chief executives’ experience – real voices of experience, from experts who are still learning.
Jonathan Stephenson describes the hidden influence of relationships: quiet conversations that help people work through differences and get things moving. This takes time, judgement, and trust.
There are examples of those relationships changing how the work is organised. From Kate Josephs CB, listening to residents in Sheffield meant rethinking what a regeneration plan was actually for. In Lancaster, Mark Davies shares how an informal partnership acquired agreements, funding, and a structure intended to carry the work through reorganisation.
The report ends by calling for ‘real decisions and real budgets’ to pass to communities. I welcome that: people need authority and resources to change arrangements that aren’t working for them. I also welcome its call for Whitehall to accept local evidence that challenges a policy already drafted.
I’d add a specific obligation to respond: when people’s experience exposes a recurring barrier, name the person or body with authority over the rule, funding, or division of responsibility. Require them to say what they’ll change, what they won’t, why, and by when.
Apply that obligation to councils answering communities, partners answering each other, and Whitehall answering councils. Otherwise we can keep learning about the same failure while each new family encounters it afresh.
Some situations will still need personal judgement, some will be politically overruled. Wider changes may require public debate and democratic authorisation. The obligation is to bring the evidence to those decisions, with an answer owed to the people affected.
The report asks whether a family being failed would notice a difference. Give that family a part in judging the answer, and a way to challenge it when they’re distinctly unimpressed by our account of success.
Where has residents’ experience changed a decision, rule, or funding arrangement your organisation had already settled? What made that possible?
