What works in mental health and employment support? Learning from recent evaluation

/ jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Dr Jason Lowther

Alongside the growing evidence base in areas such as homelessness, local growth and skills, there is increasing attention on how local systems respond to the intersection of mental health and employment. This is a critical issue for local authorities and their partners, given the strong relationship between work, wellbeing and wider social outcomes.

The recent evaluation of Individual Placement Support (IPS) integrated within Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT), delivered through the Mental Health Trailblazers programme, provides a valuable contribution to this evidence. The programme was designed to address two linked challenges (poor mental health and unemployment) through a combined intervention offering both therapeutic and employment support. It was delivered across three areas (Blackpool, the North East and West London) as locally commissioned “growth deal” projects aimed at improving both economic and health outcomes.

An integrated approach to mental health and work

The overarching premise of the programme is simple but important: mental health and employment are interdependent. Traditional services often treat them separately, with employment support and mental health treatment delivered through different systems. The Trailblazers programme sought to integrate these approaches by embedding employment specialists alongside psychological therapy services.

The evaluation employed a mixed‑methods design, combining an impact evaluation – using a trial‑style comparison between IAPT alone and IAPT plus IPS – with a detailed process evaluation examining implementation, service design and user experience. This dual approach reflects the complexity of the intervention: it is not only about whether outcomes improve, but about how services work together in practice.

Findings on outcomes: modest but promising

On outcomes, the evaluation presents a cautious but broadly positive picture. While the evidence on impact is not definitive, there are indications that combining IPS with psychological therapies can support improvements in both employment and mental health outcomes compared to standard provision.

This aligns with a wider evidence base for IPS, which consistently shows strong performance in helping people with mental health conditions move into and sustain work. Employment itself is recognised as beneficial for recovery and wellbeing, reinforcing the rationale for integrated approaches.

However, the evaluation also highlights the difficulty of demonstrating impact in complex, real‑world settings. Data limitations, variation in local models and challenges in maintaining experimental control all affected the strength of conclusions. This is a recurring issue across many local public service evaluations: outcomes are shaped by multiple interacting factors, making attribution difficult.

What makes the model work in practice?

The process evaluation provides rich insight into the mechanisms behind the model. Several features emerge as particularly important.

First, the relationship between service users and employment specialists is central. IPS is explicitly client‑led, focusing on individual preferences, strengths and readiness rather than predefined pathways. This personalised, relational approach appears to be a key driver of engagement.

Second, integration between services matters. Embedding employment specialists within IAPT teams helped create a more holistic offer, reducing fragmentation and enabling better coordination of support. Where integration was stronger, services were better able to respond to the complex and fluctuating needs of clients.

Third, the model benefits from being less target‑driven than traditional employment programmes. The evaluation notes that a focus on client needs, rather than rigid job outcome targets, enabled more sustained engagement – particularly for individuals with more severe or complex mental health challenges.

At the same time, implementation was not without difficulties. Referral processes, administrative requirements and clinical wait times all created friction in the system. Experiences and outcomes  were inconsistent.

The system challenge: integration is difficult

Perhaps the most important learning from the evaluation is about the difficulty of integrating services across organisational boundaries. Bringing together health and employment support requires alignment between different funding streams, professional cultures and accountability frameworks.

The evaluation highlights challenges such as eligibility criteria, information sharing and differences in service priorities. These issues are not unique to this programme; they reflect broader structural barriers within public services. Even where the case for integration is clear, delivering it in practice requires sustained effort and coordination.

There were also challenges in engaging employers and navigating local labour markets. Employment outcomes depend not only on individual readiness, but on the availability and quality of jobs. This again points to the importance of seeing mental health services within a wider economic context.

What does this mean for local authorities?

The evaluation offers several implications for local government and system partners.

First, integration across services is both necessary and challenging. The evidence supports the case for bringing together health and employment support, but also shows that this requires deliberate design, strong relationships and ongoing coordination.

Second, personalised, relationship‑based support is critical. Models like IPS work because they focus on individuals, not categories. This has implications for commissioning and performance management, which often rely on standardised models and metrics.

Third, employment should be seen as a health outcome. The evaluation reinforces the idea that good work is not just an economic goal, but a key component of wellbeing and recovery. This has implications for how local systems define success.

Fourth, local variation matters. The programme was delivered differently across areas, reflecting local labour markets, service configurations and partnerships. This flexibility is a strength, but also makes evaluation and scaling more complex.

Finally, the evaluation highlights the importance of longer‑term thinking. Supporting people with mental health conditions into work is not a short‑term intervention. Outcomes take time to emerge, and services need stability to build the relationships and capability required.

As with other areas of local government, the evidence increasingly shows what works in principle. The challenge is less about identifying effective models, and more about creating the conditions – organisational, financial and cultural – that allow them to be implemented flexibly and at scale.

Labour must listen, learn and change if it is to regain trust

/ jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Ketan Sheth

After two decades as a Labour councillor in Brent, I was deeply disappointed to lose my Wembley seat in the local elections on 7th May —  serving our local residents has been a great honour and privilege, and I remain grateful to everyone who placed their trust in me over the years.

I do feel, though, that Labour needs to learn urgent lessons from these disastrous results. Again and again on the doorstep, people told me that they valued my work as a councillor and would happily vote for me again — but they simply could not bring themselves to put a cross next to a Labour candidate. There is a deep well of anger in Brent, and across the whole country — a feeling that the Labour government has let people down and failed to deliver the change they promised in 2024.

Make no mistake, voters reflected the national political picture rather than what is going on in Brent. People relate local grievances like the state of our roads, pavements and parks to a wider sense of hopelessness based on their view of where we are nationally, rather than voting specifically on local matters. Indeed, many people said they voted on issues like immigration or the economy which local government has no power to fix.

This is arguably always the case in local elections and I’m hardly the first local councillor to lose their seat due to people’s views on how well the national government is or is not doing. But this time felt different. The vitriol directed towards the government, and the Prime Minister, was stronger than anything I have encountered while canvassing in the past. Unless Labour changes direction quickly and radically, it is hard to see how future elections will yield a different result. Labour has made big mistakes in government — our first notable action was the winter fuel payments fiasco and we seemed to go on making mis-steps from there. The appointment of Peter Mandelson as US ambassador was a catastrophic error of judgement. The cost of living crisis remains largely unaddressed — voters do not see their lives or their crumbling public services getting any better. All of these things are exacerbated by our government offering no hope that things are about to improve. We need to listen to what the voters are telling us — and we need a sharp, fast change of direction.

Locally, addressing our collective challenges under a hung council will be difficult, as it is always easier for a Council to have a clear electoral mandate and we now have a position where there will need to be negotiation and trade-offs between the different parties. But I am sure all those involved will take their responsibilities seriously and work together to deliver for the people of Brent.

For my own part, I will hugely miss representing local people as part of Brent Council. I want to thank those who voted for me, the officers and colleagues who supported me over many years. I will continue to be active in local politics and to campaign for a better deal for the communities I was proud to serve.

Now is the time to refresh local politics

/ jlowther2015 / Leave a comment
Photo by Michael D Beckwith on Pexels.com

Phil Swann

The sad state of many neighbourhoods and communities, with their desolated high streets, has been identified as a significant driver of the rejection of politicians and political parties which lay behind the May 2026 local election results

As the shallowness of programmes such as Pride in Place demonstrates, this is not an issue that central government can tackle alone. It requires local action reflecting local circumstances. Yet local councils lack the resources and levers to secure lasting improvements. Meeting this challenge requires deep collaboration between central and local government at a time when changes in political control locally will make that more difficult to achieve than ever.

Is it too naïve to hope that engagement between local political actors, local people and local organisations and groups could inform new approaches to revitalise struggling local communities? Could the involvement of national politicians in the process secure the reform of local government finance and the provision of new powers necessary to enable localities to act?

Writing in 1939, when he was leader of the Labour Group on Oxford City Council, Richard Crossman, argued that one of the strongest arguments for local party politics “is that they do provide a method of creating interest and focussing attention upon the enormously important issues as stake.” Crossman, who went to serve as Harold Wilson’s Minister for Housing and Local Government, added that “the real basis of successful political democracy is not to be found in politics at all, but below the surface in the organisation of a whole network of popular interests into pressure groups.”

Writing just over 40 years later, when he was leader of Sheffield Council, David Blunkett also called for collective local action. He argued that politicians and communities should “do things together rather than having them done for us, to remove the conditions of poverty and dependence rather than trap people in them, and thus to develop a sense of supporting and being supported.” He made a similar point in 2004, when he was Home Secretary, recognising the importance of a partnership between local politicians and citizens “to revitalise democracy and strengthen citizenship and civil society, so that people are part of the process of reform and modernisation.”

Now more than ever it is important to follow the advice of Crossman and Blunkett and refresh local politics through collaboration with local groups and communities to deliver improvements locally and secure reforms nationally to enable that local action. Succeeding in doing this could also begin to restore trust in politics and politicians.

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD at INLOGOV in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, University of Birmingham, on the contribution of politicians to central-local government relations.

From democratic resilience to systems resilience – Perspectives from the Inaugural Conference of the European Network for Public Administration 2026

/ jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Dr. Elke Loeffler

The European Network for Public Administration (ENPA) is a newly founded independent learned society led by public administration academics for the theoretical and practical improvement of public administration.

I attended its inaugural conference, held at the top University ASE in Bucharest, in my role as co-founding Board Member and co-chair of the ENPA Research Group on Public Participation and Co-Production. There was also a strong representation of UKAPA – the UK Association for Public Administration. This event showcased a number of innovative formats, including a plenary in interview format on democratic resilience and a highly interactive ‘collaborative discussion’ session on systems resilience, as well as providing a highly-valued Conference Buddy Scheme for Doctoral Researchers.

During the conference it became clear that resilience is now a major emerging theme in public management research and practice. For many local councils this concept has so far been mainly used in relation to emergency response and planning. However, the LGA in the UK considers this to be a ‘whole council effort’, going beyond small emergency teams.

Moreover, the discussions at the ENPA Conference revealed that resilience is not just about sudden, extreme emergencies but about creeping crises such as democratic backsliding and and prolonged failures such as delayed access to public healthcare. While robust governance (Ansell, Torfing and Trondal, 2025, Robust Public Governance in a Turbulent Era) – the ability of a system to maintain its operations despite disruption – is important, resilience is more demanding – it is about the capacity for adaptation in the service system to recover to the same or high outcomes after a disturbance – or as a former UK Prime Minister expressed it “building back better”.

The keynote speakers also discussed the need for public administration scholars to strengthen resilience. Don Moynihan from the University of Michigan highlighted that rule-bound public administration and independent academic research often become targets for populist leaders. He suggested that, in times of democratic backsliding, delivering evidence-based descriptions of current situations and contexts may be more effective than sophisticated, time-consuming causal analysis. While not as analytically powerful, making it clear what is actually happening may make a greater impact on public attitudes, and eventually on public policies, than complex modelling. This argument gave rise to considerable debate in the coffee breaks!

The collaborative session in our Research Group demonstrated that local government resilience is not enough – we also need resilient communities, service users and markets. This brings in the potential role of user and community co-production in strengthening systems resilience. For example, Jan Dumkow from the Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg provided a current action-research project involving co-design of an app for and with people with learning disabilities so that service providers would be able to provide tailored information in the case of emergencies.


The ‘whole systems resilience network’ depends on each element in the network of user-community-provider-market resilience being sound and well-balanced with the other elements (Bovaird and Loeffler 2024). The resilience network constitutes a dynamic system, in which each of the stakeholder groups is always looking to learn and to improve, with the consequence that a weak link in the network reduces the overall capability of the system. However, a systematic literature review which I undertook with Sanneke Kuipers (Leiden University) and Marie-Christine Therrien (Ecole Nationale D’Administration Publique, Montreal), on the role of co-production in strengthening resilience in extreme crisis, revealed that user and community involvement is largely absent in current evaluations of crisis interventions. This is cause for concern and highlights the urgent need for more engaged research with local communities and local councils on how to strengthen all links in the whole systems resilience network. INLOGOV is well situated to work with local councils and communities on this issue, given its expertise on co-production and social prescribing.

Dr. Elke Loeffler is an Associate of INLOGOV and Director of Governance International. She undertakes applied research on local public services and has research interests in community co-production and resilience. Elke is Board Member of the European Network of Public Administration, Vice-Chair for Doctoral Research in UKAPA and Chair of the Public & Nonprofit Management Group at EURAM.

What works in local growth and skills? Learning from recent evaluations

/ jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Jason Lowther

Following the previous blog on homelessness and rough sleeping, this piece turns to another major area of local government activity: local growth and skills programmes. Here too, evaluation activity has expanded rapidly, with a mix of national frameworks, programme‑level syntheses and place‑based studies. Taken together, these evaluations offer a valuable, and still evolving, picture of what is working, what is proving harder, and what local systems actually need to deliver economic outcomes.

Four strands of evidence stand out.

MHCLG local growth evaluation

The MHCLG local growth evaluation programme is significant not just for its findings, but for its approach to evaluation itself. Rather than focusing on single programmes, it introduces a portfolio‑level strategy covering multiple funds aimed at improving sub‑national economic performance.

Recent work, including the process evaluation of the Local Growth Fund and Getting Building Fund, highlight both strengths and tensions in the model. Decentralised decision‑making and the “single pot” approach enabled locally tailored investment and stronger alignment with local strategies. Private sector involvement and local prioritisation were widely valued.  However, delivery was shaped by pressures to deliver “shovel‑ready” projects quickly, particularly in the Getting Building Fund, which sometimes limited strategic coherence and innovation. Governance arrangements, while locally responsive, were often complex, and approaches to monitoring and evaluation were variable. More broadly, the evaluation underlines the difficulty of measuring long‑term economic impact, particularly where interventions are diverse and outcomes unfold over many years.

Multiply deep dives (Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland)

The Multiply deep dives bring a skills and employability perspective, focusing on adult numeracy provision across the devolved nations. Multiply was a £559 million UK‑wide programme designed to improve functional numeracy, with flexible, locally designed delivery models.

The deep dives use qualitative case studies, interviews with delivery partners and analysis of monitoring data, focusing on one area in each nation and drawing on wider place‑level evidence. A central finding is that local flexibility enabled innovation, particularly in embedding numeracy in real‑world contexts such as employment, parenting or financial capability.

At the same time, the evaluations highlight familiar delivery challenges. Short delivery timescales, in some cases just a year, created pressure to scale quickly, often leading to adaptation of existing provision rather than genuinely new approaches. Partnership working across councils, colleges and the voluntary sector was essential but time‑consuming to establish. Engagement with target groups remained difficult, particularly where low confidence rather than low skill was the primary barrier.

Overall, the evidence suggests that contextualised, learner‑centred approaches are promising, but require time, trust and sustained funding to embed.

UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) interim evaluation synthesis

The UKSPF interim synthesis report provides perhaps the most comprehensive current view, drawing together 34 place‑based evaluations across the UK. It focuses on process learning rather than impact, reflecting the relatively early stage of delivery.

A clear headline is the importance of local autonomy. Across almost all areas, the ability for Lead Local Authorities to design interventions around local needs was strongly valued, particularly compared to the perceived rigidity of previous EU funds. This flexibility supported alignment with local strategies, more responsive delivery, and better integration across policy areas.

Other success factors included strong local programme management teams, continuity of provision (using UKSPF to sustain previously funded services), and the ability to combine funding streams to create coherent local offers. However, challenges were equally consistent. Tight central government timelines constrained planning and procurement, limited consultation, and created recruitment difficulties. As with other programmes, evaluation and outcome measurement remained underdeveloped.

The synthesis highlights a key tension: local freedom within central constraints. While devolution of decision‑making was real, the operating environment still imposed significant limits on what places could achieve.

UKSPF place‑based evaluations

The place‑based evaluations add depth to this picture by examining how UKSPF worked in specific localities. Using mixed‑methods approaches – including contribution analysis, surveys, interviews and case studies – across 34 areas, they explore how combinations of interventions interact within local systems.

These studies show that outcomes are highly context‑dependent. In some areas, UKSPF supported visible improvements in community facilities, local business support, and employability outcomes. In others, impacts were harder to detect, reflecting both the early stage of delivery and the complexity of local economies. What emerges clearly is that programme success depends less on individual projects than on how they are aligned and sequenced locally.

The evaluations also reinforce the importance of existing capacity and partnerships. Areas with mature governance arrangements, strong voluntary sector links, and prior experience of managing regeneration funding were better able to mobilise quickly and deliver coherent programmes.

What does this mean for local authorities?

Across these evaluations, several consistent lessons emerge.

First, local flexibility works, particularly when supported by capacity and stability. Both UKSPF and Multiply demonstrate the value of devolved decision‑making. However, the benefits are uneven, depending on local capability, existing partnerships, and the time available to plan and deliver.

Second, time is the missing ingredient in local growth policy. Tight delivery timescales appear across all programmes, driving a focus on “shovel‑ready” activity, limiting innovation, and constraining partnership development. Economic change, skills development and behaviour change all take longer than funding cycles typically allow.

Third, integration matters more than individual interventions. The strongest evidence, particularly from the place‑based evaluations, is that impact depends on how interventions fit together. Skills, business support and community investment are interdependent, yet funding streams and evaluation frameworks often treat them separately.

Fourth, measurement remains a weak spot. Across the local growth portfolio, there are persistent challenges in demonstrating impact and value for money. This is partly methodological, but also reflects the reality that many outcomes (productivity, employment, resilience) are long‑term and influenced by wider factors.

Finally, these evaluations underline a familiar but important point: local systems deliver national priorities. Where programmes align with local strategies, build on existing partnerships and allow room for adaptation, they show promise. Where they are constrained by short timescales, fragmented funding or complex governance, delivery becomes more transactional.

The conclusions from the local growth and skills evaluations strongly align with, and are reinforced by last month’s excellent report from the Institute for Government, Designing and delivering employment support.  The IfG goes further in diagnosing why these issues persist and what structural reform is needed. Both emphasise the value of local flexibility, integration and tailoring to place, with the IfG explicitly arguing that strategic authorities are best placed to design joined‑up employment support aligned to local labour markets and services. Likewise, both bodies of evidence highlight fragmentation and poor coordination across programmes as major barriers, with the IfG noting longstanding failures to “shift the dial” despite multiple national schemes, echoing local growth evaluations on disjointed funding and siloed interventions. The IfG report places significant emphasis on the limits of centralised systems and the need for multi‑year funding, capability and accountability frameworks.

In short, the local growth evaluations provide grounded evidence of what works in practice, while the IfG report offers a more explicit systems diagnosis: that without sustained devolution, integration and long‑term investment, the conditions needed for those “what works” approaches to succeed will remain constrained.

The Local Elections

/ jlowther2015 / Leave a comment

Preface

For years, Chris Game’s pre-election column in the Birmingham Post has followed a familiar, almost reassuring rhythm – beginning with Birmingham, moving across the wider West Midlands, and ending with a measured national overview. But this year breaks decisively with that tradition. The forthcoming local elections are anything but routine: they are unusually volatile, strikingly unpredictable, and potentially transformative in ways rarely seen in modern British politics. What might once have been a steady survey now demands a wider lens, as voters across the UK head to the polls in contests that could reshape not only local councils, but the broader political landscape itself. This post was first published in The Birmingham Post on 30th April 2026 and is available here: https://pressreader.com/article/281835765304023

Chris Game

The Post’s annual local elections column: it used to be, if not easy, at least formulaic, especially in a ‘Birmingham year’ – in the past three years in four, but now just one: which happens to be this year.  I’d start with ‘the Biggie’ – the City Council itself; then the other metropolitan West Mids councils with elections, focusing mainly on any that might possibly see a change in political control.

On then to any interesting-looking adjacent counties or districts, before concluding with a couple of national ‘round-up’ paragraphs. Informative, I’d hope; exciting, possibly less so. 

In total contrast, this year’s Thursday May 7th locals, both individually and collectively, are quite simply the most fascinating, intriguing, and, above all, potentially most consequential since, some reckon, the 1970s. There’s no remote chance of doing them justice in this single column, so my main aim is to stimulate your interest and thereby encourage you to catch the results as they’re published at various times during the ensuing couple of days.

You could stay up, but the only West Mids results you’re likely to catch are Redditch (est.1.45 a.m.) and Dudley (3.30 a.m.). The rest are mainly later Friday afternoon: Solihull 3.00 p.m., Sandwell and Walsall 5.00, Walsall and Birmingham, last maybe but absolutely NOT least, 6.00 – recounts permitting!

This column, therefore, will start by illustrating the exceptional scale and importance of next Thursday’s ‘big picture’, providing hopefully at least a sense of the hundreds of momentous electoral battles happening across England, before gradually ‘homing in‘ on some of those in the West Midlands.

Over 7 million voters in England, Wales and Scotland will elect over 5,000 councillors  – including almost a third of so-called ‘principal’/top tier council representatives – and are widely expected to produce a set of results the like of which the UK has rarely, if ever, seen before.

The English results could collectively, as Proportional Representation campaigners Make Votes Matter put it: “be the most chaotic yet, with power won on tiny vote shares and whole swathes of the country left unrepresented”.  Sounds bad, if exciting. However, serious students of these things reckon the Scottish and Welsh national results could “open the way” to the break-up of the whole UK, so it seems right to start with them.

All 129 Scottish Parliament members are up for re-election, 73 representing constituencies, 56 their respective 8 regions. Each voter casts two votes on separate ballot papers, deploying two different electoral systems, designed to make it harder for one party to secure a majority. The Nationalists just managed it in 2011, paving the way for the 2014 independence referendum (55% ‘No’, for those with short memories), and they’re going for a more successful ‘breakaway’ repeat.  

The Welsh Senedd elections are, potentially at least, equally consequential. In the biggest parliamentary change since powers began being transferred to Wales in 1999, Senedd Members will increase from 60 to 96, with parties able to list up to eight candidates per constituency. Voters choose a single party or Independent candidate.

In contrast to Scotland, though, no party has ever won a Parliamentary majority, and the new system seems unlikely to change that. Currently, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK and Welsh nationalists Plaid Cymru are neck-and-neck on an estimated 36/37 seats, with Labour some way adrift, prospectively ending a century of dominance in Welsh politics.

And so to the 5,000+ seats across England’s unitary, county, district and London councils – and, of course, the 6 directly elected mayoralties. Always difficult to summarise, this year’s hundreds (of contests) and thousands (of candidates) are clearly impossible. PLUS, this year – surely the most exciting, and utterly unpredictable, bit – many contests will have candidates from no fewer than five parties currently polling between 10% and 29%, and therefore in with least a chance.

Oh yes, and just a few weeks ago, 30 councils whose elections had been postponed to 2027 due to forthcoming local government reorganisation – including Cannock Chase, Redditch, Rugby and Tamworth – were told, following Reform UK’s legal challenge, that they must reinstate them on their original schedule. Affecting 4.6 million potential voters, if you were wondering – you could hardly make it up! 

And so, in this reverse-order column, we’re back in the metropolitan West Midlands, with room left for only the briefest of numerical overviews of PollCheck’s most recent (March 30th) seat projections; 2022 comparisons, though some were elections by thirds; as many as space permits. They are, I hope you’ll agree, fascinating.

Birmingham  101 seats. Current – Lab (2012- ); Projected – No Overall Control (NOC)

Cons 23 (+2); Reform 20 (+20); Greens 16 (+14); Lib Dems 13 (=); Lab 10 (-42)   Others 19 (+6)

Coventry  54 seats.  Current – Labour (2010- );  Projected– NOC

   Reform 22 (+20); Lab 21 (-18); Greens 6 (+4); Cons 5 (-5); Others 0 (-1)

Dudley  72 seats.  Current – NOC: Cons minority admin. Projected – NOC

  Cons 26 (-7); Reform 24 (+21); Lab 14 (-9); Lib Dems 5 (=); Others 3 (-5)

Sandwell  72 seats.  Current – Lab (1979- );  Projected – Lab

  Labour 53 (-7); Reform 17 (+17); Cons 2 (-2); Greens 0 (-1); Others 0 (-7)

Solihull  51 seats.  Current – Cons (2011- );  Projected – Cons

  Cons 27 (+16); Greens 13 (+10); Lib Dems 7  (-1); Reform 4 (+4)

Walsall   60 seats.  Current – NOC: Cons minority admin. Projected: Reform

   Reform 33 (+33); Cons 17 (12/20); Lab (5/20); Others (3/20)

Wolverhampton  21/60 seats  Current – Lab (2011- )   Projected: Labour

   Labour 38 (-6), Cons 11 (-1); Reform 8 (+6); Green 1 (+1); Others (2).

Chris Game is an INLOGOV Associate, and Visiting Professor at Kwansei Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan.  He is joint-author (with Professor David Wilson) of the successive editions of Local Government in the United Kingdom, and a regular columnist for The Birmingham Post.