Public institutions and governance

When accountability fails to bite: governance, democracy and the 2026 Tower Hamlets elections

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Dr Gulay Icoz, Visiting Research Fellow, Middlesex University London

In theory, the 2026 Tower Hamlets local elections should have been a test of democratic accountability in action. The borough entered election year under active statutory intervention. A Best Value Inspection published in November 2024 had documented serious governance failings under Mayor Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire administration: weak internal controls, a culture of concentrated executive authority, poor transparency, and slow responses to statutory recommendations. A further written ministerial statement in January 2026 confirmed ongoing failures and deteriorating financial governance. In March 2026 — just two months before polling day — the Secretary of State escalated the intervention, granting ministerial envoys enhanced powers to step in directly if the council continued to breach its Best Value Duty.

Then voters went to the polls and Aspire won 33 of 45 council seats. Lutfur Rahman was re-elected as Executive Mayor for a third time. Labour was reduced to five seats — its lowest total in the borough’s history.

I stood as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green West in those elections. What I observed — during the campaign and in the results — reveals a deeper tension between statutory accountability and community-level democratic legitimacy: one with implications that reach well beyond Tower Hamlets.

The structural picture

The results reveal a distortion that deserves wider attention. Aspire secured 73 per cent of council seats with just over 32 per cent of the vote. Labour and the Green Party each received just under 23 per cent of the vote, yet each won only 11 per cent of seats. In ward after ward, the combined Labour and Green vote exceeded Aspire’s total — yet the block voting system used in multi-member wards — where each voter casts as many votes as there are seats and the top candidates win — converted vote fragmentation into a decisive seat bonus for the incumbent. This is sometimes called plurality block voting, and it rewards coordinated slate-voting, which incumbent parties with strong voter loyalty are structurally better placed to exploit.

The ward-level picture sharpens this further. In Bethnal Green West, Labour entered polling day with an estimated core vote of around 540; Aspire’s coordinated bloc was already three times that size, with split votes running into the thousands. Green candidates who had run no sustained local campaign outpolled every Labour candidate standing — a pattern repeated across wards throughout the borough. The block voting system had no mechanism to reward breadth of engagement or effort: it simply rewarded the most organised and unified voting bloc.

It is worth distinguishing block voting in multi-member wards from single-member first-past-the-post. The coordination premium is structurally higher: a cohesive 32 per cent bloc can sweep three seats simultaneously in a way that would not occur in a series of individual contests. The question this blog is asking is not primarily about proportionality per se, but whether the electoral system can transmit accountability signals when a council is under active statutory intervention for documented governance failure.

This points to a question the electoral systems literature and the local democracy literature have rarely addressed together: when opposition parties are structurally disadvantaged by electoral mechanics, what additional tools does a democratic accountability framework need?

The accountability paradox

A long line of research — from Fiorina’s retrospective voting model through Powell and Whitten’s clarity-of-responsibility framework — establishes that electoral punishment for governance failure is neither automatic nor uniform. Recent scholarship sharpens this further: voters weigh integrity against perceived competence and community delivery (Breitenstein and Hernández, 2024); punishment weakens when opposition is fragmented and alternation unclear (Otjes and Stiers, 2022); and elections are in any case a blunt accountability instrument compared to courts, oversight bodies, and civic challenge (Papadopoulos, 2023). The established literature identifies three conditions that must be met for punishment to occur: voters must have clear information about failure; they must be able to attribute responsibility to the correct actor; and accountability must not be crowded out by competing loyalties or trade-offs. Tower Hamlets 2026 illustrates the failure of all three conditions simultaneously.

Yet the Tower Hamlets case also points to a fourth condition, largely absent from the existing retrospective voting literature: the accountability mechanism itself must be seen as legitimate by the communities it is meant to protect. This is the accountability paradox at the heart of the 2026 result — and it is a contribution that the standard retrospective voting framework is not equipped to capture.

For intervention to function as a democratic corrective, it must be perceived by the electorate — and particularly by the communities most affected by governance failure — as rational, impartial, and operating in their interests. Where that perception fails, intervention becomes politically legible as external imposition, and voting for the incumbent becomes an act of community solidarity rather than an endorsement of governance failure. This dynamic is not accidental: it is actively constructed through political framing, and incumbents with strong identity-based bonds with their electorate are structurally well-placed to construct it.

Recent research on statutory intervention in English local government proposes a five-stage model — crisis revelation, delegitimisation, imposed reforms, capacity building, and restoration — and argues that interventions must be carefully designed to appear rational rather than political if they are to maintain rather than undermine faith in local democracy (Lowther, Joyce and Whiteman, 2025). That model’s second stage — delegitimisation — describes central government’s work to undermine the legitimacy of the council being intervened in. What the Tower Hamlets 2026 election reveals is that delegitimisation can also operate in the opposite direction: the incumbent successfully turned the intervention itself into the object of delegitimisation in the eyes of the electorate, making the accountability mechanism the thing that lacked legitimacy rather than the council it was designed to hold to account.

Conversations on the doorstep revealed the depth of this reframing. Many Aspire supporters had not engaged with the contents of the Best Value report because they had already concluded the report itself was politically motivated — a tool of mainstream parties who disapproved of what Aspire represented rather than a genuine accountability mechanism. More striking still, when specific governance failures were raised — including nepotism and unqualified appointments — some voters had internalised a counter-narrative in which such practices represented community protection rather than misconduct.

It would be reductive to dismiss these perceptions as simply the product of misinformation. Communities with long experience of political marginalisation may have genuine historical grounds for scepticism toward central government intervention, and those experiences shape how accountability claims are received. What the Tower Hamlets case illustrates is the extent to which this pre-existing disposition was mobilised and amplified through deliberate political communication — producing not political apathy but the successful reconstruction of what accountability itself means.

This is not unique to Tower Hamlets. It is a dynamic that researchers of democratic resilience and local governance are increasingly attentive to, and it raises important questions about how accountability mechanisms are designed, communicated, and embedded — questions that are as much about institutional culture and civic trust as they are about statutory frameworks.

Tower Hamlets in context

Tower Hamlets did not stand alone in 2026. The elections produced historic Green gains across inner London — in Hackney, Waltham Forest, Lewisham and Southwark — and a significant realignment of the progressive vote away from Labour. What makes Tower Hamlets distinctive is that this regional realignment intersected with the specific dynamics of the Aspire incumbency, the governance intervention, and the structural incentives of block voting, producing an outcome more disproportionate than anywhere else in the capital.

Understanding whether Tower Hamlets represents an outlier or an advance indicator requires systematic comparison. Several English councils have been subject to statutory intervention in recent years — including Birmingham, Croydon, Slough, Sandwell, and Thurrock — yet the relationship between intervention, governance accountability, and subsequent electoral outcomes has received little comparative attention. Whether the accountability paradox identified here is specific to Tower Hamlets or reflects a broader pattern in how statutory intervention interacts with local political culture is a question that future comparative research must address.

The stakes

What the Tower Hamlets elections confirm, above all, is that democratic resilience is not reducible to electoral outcomes. The borough’s communities — residents navigating overcrowded housing, fractured services, and the cumulative pressures of one of England’s most deprived urban environments — continue to engage, organise, and hold their representatives to account through multiple channels. That engagement, not any single election result, is the foundation on which accountable local governance must ultimately be rebuilt.

What forms of accountability can work when statutory intervention loses legitimacy in the eyes of the very communities it is meant to protect?

Dr Gulay Icoz is a Visiting Research Fellow at Middlesex University London and stood as the Labour candidate for Bethnal Green West in the May 2026 local elections and Former Councillor in Hackney (2006–2014). She researches democratic resilience, local governance, and progressive voter realignment in inner London.

References

Academic sources

Breitenstein, S. and Hernández, E. (2024) ‘Too Crooked to be Good? Trade-offs in the Electoral Punishment of Malfeasance and Corruption’, European Political Science Review. doi:10.1017/S175577392400016X

Fiorina, M.P. (1981) Retrospective Voting in American National Elections. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lowther, J., Joyce, P. and Whiteman, P. (2025) ‘Intervention 3.0: Designing a Responsive Model for Local Government Support in England’, INLOGOV Blog, 4 November 2025. Available at: https://inlogov.com/2025/11/04/intervention-3-0-designing-a-responsive-model-for-local-government-support-in-england/ [Also published as ‘How not to damage democracy’, Municipal Journal, 16 October 2025.]

Otjes, S. and Stiers, D. (2022) ‘Accountability and alternation: How wholesale and partial alternation condition retrospective voting’, Party Politics, 28(3), pp. 457–467.

Papadopoulos, Y. (2023) Understanding Accountability in Democratic Governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Elements in Public Policy).

Powell, G.B. and Whitten, G.D. (1993) ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37(2), pp. 391–414.

Government documents

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2024) Best Value Inspection Report: London Borough of Tower Hamlets. London: MHCLG. November 2024.

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (2026) Written Ministerial Statement: Tower Hamlets Best Value Intervention. London: MHCLG. January 2026.

Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (2026) Enhanced Intervention Powers: Tower Hamlets. Ministerial Announcement. March 2026.

From top-down diagnosis to co-design: what youth‑led evidence adds to the Government’s review of Young people and Work

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Sonia Bussu

The government’s Young People and Work interim report presents a stark diagnosis. Nearly one million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training (NEET), and the problem is structural, longstanding and getting worse. The report describes a system failure spanning education, labour markets, health and welfare, and it concludes that the UK lacks a coherent “participation system” to support transitions into work. It is a powerful diagnosis of a system that no longer supports young people. But it is also striking that much of what the report “discovers” has already been articulated vividly by young people themselves, many times over!

The INSPIRE programme in the West Midlands offers exactly this missing perspective: lived experience. Through participatory research and legislative theatre, a diverse group of young people aged 14–17 from across the region identified specific barriers, staged a play to reflect on these barriers with the community and policymakers, and co‑designed policy proposals to address them. Set alongside the government’s diagnosis, this youth‑led evidence helps move from description of problems to concrete and youth-led solutions.

Structural barriers are visible in lived experience

The government review highlights three major structural issues: reduced entry‑level jobs, fragmented systems and unequal access to support. The INSPIRE young co-creators showed us how they encounter these issues day to day. Their play, You’re Fried! The realities of youth employment, depicts a system where career guidance is rushed and superficial, where broken weblinks and empty words replace meaningful support, where opportunities are inaccessible, in a cycle of “entry‑level” roles that always require prior experience.

You’re Fried! The Realities of Youth Employment
Scene One: “What Should I Do With My Life?” revealed how love, when bound by fear, could become a cage. A young apprentice’s dream was crushed beneath the weight of parental expectations, where university was seen as the only safe route to independence.
Scene Two: “It’s All on You” exposed the hollow machinery of career guidance – rushed advisors offering broken links and empty words, leaving hope behind in the rush to tick boxes.
Scene Three: “Link Not Found” brought a computer to life, its customer-service smile masking the cold indifference of digital systems that fail those who need them most.
Scene Four: “This Isn’t What I Signed Up For” pulled back the curtain on the myth of ‘real-world experience’ – a McDonald’s shift where understaffing and blame replaced training and support.
Scene Five: “It’s Your Fault” returned to the family living room, where systemic failure was rewritten as personal shame, completing a devastating circle.

The government review links NEET risk to socioeconomic background, race, disability and geography. The INSPIRE young people described the same dynamics of discrimination and constrained expectations. Systemic failures are often reframed as individual shortcomings, reflecting a system that assesses young people but does not adequately support them, placing the burden of navigating complexity on individuals.

While employers face uncertainty and capacity constraints, young people also reported the limited support on accessing valuable work placements or apprenticeships, as they suffer from limited training, little supervision and weak protections. In these situations, responsibility again falls on the young person to adapt. The issue is not a lack of motivation from young people, but a lack of fit between systems and the realities young people face. Young people want to work but are navigating fragmented and often inaccessible pathways.

Youth‑led proposals provide concrete solutions

One of the most innovative aspects of the INSPIRE project is its methodology. Legislative theatre allowed young people not just to describe problems, but to stage them, rehearse alternatives, and co-create policy responses. We co‑designed  proposals to improve access to work experience and employment through creative and structured dialogues between young people, policymakers, employers and communities.

Several of these proposals directly address the issues identified in the government review.

1. Earlier and family‑centred career support
The review highlights the importance of early intervention, noting that disadvantage accumulates over time. The INSPIRE young people proposed starting career conversations at primary school level and involving families, recognising that aspirations and knowledge about career pathways are shaped early and collectively.

2. Accessible and community‑based careers guidance
To address fragmentation and inequality in provision, participants proposed delivering career support also through community organisations and the voluntary sector.

3. Reform of work experience and employer engagement
In response to declining entry points into the labour market, young people proposed structured work experience, mentoring and exposure to workplaces through site visits and flexible placement formats. They also highlighted the need to prepare employers to support young people effectively. Working with local schools, we are now co-creating standards for youth‑friendly employers.

4. Cross‑sector coordination
The government review identifies fragmentation across institutions as a core problem.
INSPIRE proposals include the creation of a cross‑sector alliance on youth employment in Birmingham bringing together young people, education, employers, public bodies and community organisations to coordinate action.

5. Youth‑led evaluation and accountability
Young people know best what they need. They proposed mechanisms for evaluating careers services and employer practices, embedding youth perspectives into ongoing policy development. A youth-led evaluation of career and employment support is now being implemented, co-led by Birmingham City Council and the University of Birmingham.

Rethinking policy: from programmes to relationships

A recurring criticism in participation is the lack of follow-through from policymakers. Young participants expressed frustration with commitments that are vague or delayed, or carelessly forgotten, which deeply undermines their trust in institutions.

INSPIRE suggests that the answer is not simply better engagement programmes, but different relationships between institutions and young people, where trust depends on feedback loops, transparent commitments, and long-term engagement rather than one-off consultations. It’s not simply about redesigning systems but redistributing power.

Young people do not need to be fixed or made “work-ready”. They need systems that recognise their knowledge, respond to their realities, and involve them as partners in shaping policy that affects them.

Sonia researches and teaches public policy. Her main research interests are participatory governance and democratic innovations, and creative and arts-based methods for research and public engagement.

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

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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?  Local Government is Finding Out

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Jason Lowther

At last month’s Smith Square debate, we had an interesting discussion (among other themes) on how innovation spreads.  I mentioned that I was frustrated at the lack of traction that many evaluation reports seem to get, and that so many basically say “we don’t know so probably do more research”.  However, over the last 18 months, government has released a wave of evaluation evidence across multiple themes that are priorities for local government.  Partly in answer to my challenge, over the next few weeks we’ll be looking at what each of these can tell us about “what works” in their area: homelessness and rough sleeping, local growth and skills programmes, mental health and employment support, the Community Outcomes Fund, and the London Vanguards project on supporting young people affected by violence.

This week, I’ll have a go at seeing the story the collection as a whole might be telling us about the pressures, strengths and future direction of local government systems. They reveal a landscape where councils are doing a great deal right, but also where structural conditions, funding models and capacity constraints limit what even the best local practice is able to achieve.

A shared diagnosis: rising demand, systemic pressure and fragmented delivery

Most of the recently published evaluations echo the same system‑level diagnosis: demand is rising faster than capacity. In homelessness, systems‑wide analysis shows local authorities facing increasing crisis presentations driven by housing shortages, welfare constraints and cost‑of‑living pressures. In UKSPF and Multiply, compressed timeframes and short‑term funding cycles created operational strain and restrict innovation.  The Community Ownership Fund interim evaluation suggests that without the fund many pubs, community centres, sports facilities and heritage buildings would likely have been lost from community use, but also highlights long lead‑in times, complex project management demands, and volunteer burnout as recurring challenges.

Prevention consistently outperforms crisis response, but funding architectures still favour the latter

Across homelessness evaluations, the conclusion is clear: prevention is more humane, more effective and delivers better value for money than crisis response. Yet central‑local funding arrangements often reward short‑term, visible ‘rescue’ rather than long‑term preventative investment. Skills and economic development evaluations show similar dynamics. Multiply deep dives find that providers would benefit from multi‑year cycles that allow them to embed contextualised numeracy provision and build trusted relationships. Instead, annualised funding introduces uncertainty and forces a focus on quick (rather than effective) delivery.

The COF evaluation also surfaces a version of this problem. It shows that community ownership has deep preventative value, protecting assets before they disappear, strengthening social infrastructure, and avoiding long‑term local decline. But early rounds of COF were more accessible to groups with high pre‑existing capability, meaning communities most at risk were sometimes least able to prevent asset loss. Later rounds have improved this, lowering match‑funding requirements, widening eligibility, and offering stronger pre‑application support to disadvantaged communities. The lesson resonates across sectors: preventative systems require accessible, stable and equitable funding frameworks.


Local flexibility and community empowerment are major drivers of success

One of the clearest conclusions across the recent evaluations is that local flexibility works. UKSPF’s devolved decision‑making has been widely praised for enabling councils to design interventions aligned to local priorities. Multiply’s flexible design allowed councils to embed numeracy learning in real‑world contexts that resonated with learners.  The COF interim report finds that COF has been “uniquely positioned” to meet community needs, enabling groups to save valued assets and renew pride in place. Communities report increased participation, stronger local identity and early signs of improved social cohesion following COF‑supported interventions.

Workforce, capacity and governance: the quiet constraints shaping outcomes

A recurring thread across the evaluations is the impact of workforce shortages and operational capacity. Staff churn, fragile volunteer bases, rising caseloads and short‑term contracts constrain delivery, limit innovation and prevent organisations from embedding learning. Investing in capacity (skills, governance, leadership and organisational resilience) is critical for successful place‑based policy.

Partnerships make the biggest difference, but they need careful stewardship

From rough sleeping multi‑disciplinary teams to UKSPF delivery partnerships with VCSE organisations, strong collaboration emerges as one of the most important influences on success. Evaluations show that where councils act as effective system convenors (aligning partners, coordinating case management, sharing data and creating shared goals), outcomes improve.

What does all this mean for local government?

Three big implications stand out across the evaluations.

First, councils are increasingly system‑shapers, not simply programme‑managers.  The evaluations underline that successful outcomes depend on how councils orchestrate local systems (such as housing, economic development, VCSE partners and community groups) rather than on the quality of any single programme.

Second, stable, long‑term funding is essential for prevention, equity and innovation.  Short‑term cycles undermine prevention, limit strategic planning and exhaust delivery partners. The COF findings show how programme design changes can increase equity, but also how instability can disadvantage the communities most in need.

Finally, capacity‑building is central to reducing inequality, even when the policy focus is capital investment.  Across the board, councils, community groups and VCSE partners need investment in skills, leadership and organisational resilience. It’s essential that as a sector we develop systematic and accredited processes to deliver the necessary education and training.

The emerging picture is of local government doing extraordinary work under extraordinary pressure. But the future of place‑based policy will depend on giving councils and communities the tools, stability and capacity to shape local systems, rather than firefighting the consequences of systemic constraints.

Next time I will be diving in more detail into what the evaluations tell us about “what works” in tackling homelessness and rough sleeping.

Rewiring Public Spending: Why Place-Based Budgets Are a Game Changer

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Jason Lowther

Today’s announcement of five new pilots of place-based budgets is to be welcomed, particularly if we are able to learn the lessons of previous incarnations of this approach.

For at least two decades, reformers have argued that public money should be organised around people and places rather than the siloed lines of departmental spending. The Total Place pilots at the end of the 2000s offered an early glimpse of what a whole-area approach could achieve: count everything that is spent in a place, identify duplication and misalignment, and then redesign services around users and prevention instead of institutions and costly reactive services. The initiative was short-lived, but it started a body of learning that has grown through subsequent programmes and analyses (Kings Fund 2010; Leadership Centre 2010).

The case for place-based budgets is if anything stronger than in the 2000s. Despite recent increases in funding, local government finance is under intense strain, with parliamentary scrutiny concluding that the funding system is perilously complex and increasingly dominated by mandatory, high-cost services. As demand for social care, homelessness support and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) has accelerated, councils have had less fiscal room for prevention or early intervention (Public Accounts Committee 2025). Contemporary policy analysis likewise contends that austerity-era dynamics have created a ‘doom-loop’ of short-term firefighting, and that pooling budgets locally and focusing on shared, place-level outcomes offers a realistic route to break it (New Local 2024).

What, then, does the available evidence on place-based budgets demonstrate? I would highlight three key lessons.

First, integration pays. Total Place’s ‘high-level count’ and service ‘deep dives’ gave leaders a common picture of spending, surfacing duplication and transactional costs that fall between organisational boundaries. That visibility enabled local partners to experiment with redesign, supported by cultural work and customer insight, pointing to improved value and user experience, even though formal causal evidence remained emergent due to the initiative’s brevity (Leadership Centre 2010; Kings Fund 2010).

Second, place-based approaches work best as portfolios, not isolated projects. Evaluations of ‘single-pot’ style funding, such as the Local Growth Fund and Getting Building Fund, found synergistic effects when local partners curated integrated suites of interventions, although capacity constraints, time pressure and administrative burdens often limited impact (MHCLG 2025).  To quote: “A place-based approach, underpinned by joined-up strategic planning and strong partnerships, enhanced the effectiveness of interventions, while the flexibility of funding design encouraged innovation”.

Third, process quality matters.  For example, the UK Community Renewal Fund evaluation recorded achievements but highlighted design and delivery lessons, especially around streamlining and enabling local capability (DLUHC 2023).

Each of the service areas targeted in the new pilots have clear potential benefits from place-based budgets. For SEND, with demand surging and statutory duties paramount, money gravitates to crisis responses, while coordination across education, health and care is hampered by mismatched rules and timelines. Fragmentation and pressure are crowding out prevention, strengthening the argument for pooled, place-level budgets with shared outcomes that enable early help (Public Accounts Committee 2025).   For young people at risk of offending, short-term cycles and centralised decision-making weaken continuity and trust (ICON 2025). For adolescent mental health, prevention depends on integrating multiple local services around a common, place-based outcomes framework.  For adults facing multiple disadvantage, evidence from the Troubled Families and similar programmes showed how place‑based, whole‑family approaches can more effectively support adults experiencing multiple disadvantage.

The literature suggests five practical design features. First, begin with a whole-place account of spending, including deep dives where duplication and hand-offs are greatest, then use that map to re-route resource into prevention (Leadership Centre 2010). Second, fix governance and outcomes before money moves: agree a small set of shared, population-level outcomes and decision rules that prevent old silos from re-emerging inside pooled funds (New Local 2024). Third, commit to multi-year settlements; the stop-start rhythms of competitive funds correlate with weaker delivery, thinner partnerships and lost learning (MHCLG 2025; DLUHC 2023). Fourth, invest in local analytical and commissioning capacity. A systematic review of 134 place-based business cases found surprisingly low rates of SMART objectives and limited place-sensitive value-for-money analysis (University of Birmingham 2025). Fifth, align central missions with local flexibility: national outcomes frames can be compatible with local choice on delivery (University of Liverpool 2026).

When budgets follow place and purpose rather than departmental programme labels, partners collaborate more, duplication falls, transaction costs reduce and services are redesigned nearer to the lives they intend to improve. The empirical evidence base is not fully robust since few initiatives have enjoyed the time and design stability that gold-standard evaluations require, but the direction of travel is remarkably consistent across evaluations, parliamentary scrutiny and academic commentary. Building in proper evaluation this time round could really help strengthen this evidence base.

The new pilots are a chance to “stand on the shoulders” of all the hard work local and central governments have done to date, learning the lessons so that this time we can genuinely change the system.

References

Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) (2023) UK Community Renewal Fund evaluation. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-community-renewal-fund-evaluation-report (Accessed 17 March 2026).

ICON (2025) Mapping the Landscape of Place‑Based Initiatives. Available at: https://www.neighbourhoodscommission.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/10957-Mapping-the-Landscape-ICON-Report-V2.pdf (Accessed 17 March 2026).

Institute for Government (2025) The case for Total Place 2.0. Available at: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/total-place-2.0 (Accessed 17 March 2026).

King’s Fund (2010) Place‑based approaches and the NHS: Lessons from Total Place. Available at: https://assets.kingsfund.org.uk/f/256914/x/74928b3392/place-based_approach_nhs_total_place_event_write-up_2010.pdf (Accessed 17 March 2026).

Leadership Centre (2010) Total Place: A whole area approach. Available at: https://www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/total-place/ (Accessed 17 March 2026).

Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) (2025) Local Growth Fund and Getting Building Fund: Place‑based case studies – Executive summary. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/local-growth-fund-and-getting-building-fund-place-based-case-studies/local-growth-fund-and-getting-building-fund-place-based-case-studies-executive-summary (Accessed 17 March 2026).

New Local (2024) Place‑Based Public Service Budgets: Making Public Money Work Better for Communities. Available at: https://www.newlocal.org.uk/publications/research-reports/place-based-budgets/ (Accessed 17 March 2026).

Public Accounts Committee (2025) Local Government Financial Sustainability. Available at: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cmselect/cmpubacc/647/report.html (Accessed 17 March 2026).

University of Birmingham (2025) Business Cases and Place‑Based Funding. Available at: https://blog.bham.ac.uk/lpip/2025/11/26/business-cases-and-place-based-funding/ (Accessed 17 March 2026).

University of Liverpool (2026) Place‑based policy. Available at: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/media/livacuk/publicpolicyamppractice/innovationsinpublicpolicy/place,based,policy.pdf (Accessed 17 March 2026).

Understanding Mayoral Accountability: Insights from Japan and the UK

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Jason Lowther

What makes a directly elected mayor genuinely accountable to the public? How do contrasting political and administrative systems shape the conduct, choices, and leadership styles of those entrusted with substantial local authority? These questions were central to a recent Inlogov seminar led by Akinari Takehisa, former mayor of Setouchi City in Japan, and as part of his PhD studies at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan, visiting researcher at Nottingham Business School. Drawing on a rare combination of long mayoral experience and rigorous academic research, Aki offered a compelling comparative exploration of how accountability is constructed and enacted within Japan and the United Kingdom.

Aki’s work centres on executive mayors, leaders who uniquely embody both political and managerial authority. Unlike council leaders or ministers, who operate within more layered decision-making structures, executive mayors face the dual responsibility of providing political direction and ensuring the effective, lawful, and ethical delivery of public services. This dual role offers the promise of coherence and visibility in leadership, while simultaneously demanding a careful balance between responsiveness, organisational discipline, professional values, and legal boundaries.

Why Compare Japan and the UK?

Although Japan and the UK represent different political traditions, their local government systems share notable similarities. Both countries are advanced democracies with historically strong central oversight of municipal administration. Both have grappled with questions of local leadership and experimented with models aimed at enhancing the authority and public visibility of mayors.  Japan has adopted the directly elected mayor model across all of its 1,718 municipalities, embedding it deeply into local governance. The UK, by contrast, has applied the model selectively, introducing executive mayors in just 13 principal local authorities since 2002. This contrast creates a rich basis for comparison: one system fully institutionalised, the other still evolving.

But the most significant insights emerge from how each country structures accountability. Japan’s governance arrangements involve vertically layered responsibilities shared between national, prefectural and municipal governments. This can foster helpful coordination, but it can also confuse responsibility when things go wrong. The UK, meanwhile, relies heavily on arm’s-length accountability mechanisms, with statutory roles such as Section 151 Officers and Monitoring Officers acting as key guardians of financial integrity and legal compliance. These institutional safeguards create clearer boundaries around mayoral authority.

Three Core Questions

Aki’s research explores three interrelated questions. The first concerns how institutional environments in Japan and the UK shape mayoral accountability. The second looks at how personal characteristics (leadership styles, professional backgrounds, and the use of performance information) influence accountable behaviour. The third examines the behavioural traits that support or undermine accountability, identified through interviews and narrative analysis.

To address these questions, Aki conducted extensive fieldwork: interviews with 15 mayors and six key stakeholders in Japan, and with six mayors and six stakeholders in the UK. This qualitative evidence was supplemented with a literature review and advanced comparative techniques, including fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), which allows researchers to understand complex relationships across multiple cases.

What the Early Findings Reveal

A first major insight concerns the impact of institutional contexts. In Japan, accountability reforms have unfolded gradually since the 1990s, driven by incremental devolution and efforts to improve transparency. The use of performance information has grown, though its uptake varies significantly between municipalities. In the UK, accountability has evolved in more dramatic cycles. Reforms associated with New Public Management in the 1980s, followed by the Best Value regime in the late 1990s and 2000s, significantly expanded performance oversight before many national requirements were rolled back during the austerity era after 2010.

A second key finding arises from the fsQCA analysis. Mayors who demonstrated consistently high levels of political, hierarchical, professional and legal accountability were far more likely to sustain long and stable careers. By contrast, those whose professional or legal accountability was weak were more likely to experience short or troubled terms, particularly in Japan where mayors enjoy substantial personal discretion. Interestingly, extensive use of performance information did not necessarily correlate with stronger accountability. Its effectiveness depended on how thoughtfully and transparently it was applied.

Aki also found that behavioural characteristics play a decisive role. Inclusive leadership, transparency, ethical judgement, and constructive collaboration with professional officers strengthened accountability in both countries. Conversely, secrecy, impulsive or populist decision‑making, and blurred boundaries between political campaigning and administrative neutrality frequently undermined it. Japan and the UK each demonstrated examples of positive “synergies” between political and managerial roles, such as the ability to commit to long‑term policies or communicate strategy clearly to the public. But both also exhibited negative synergies when these roles clashed or overlapped in unhelpful ways.

Conclusions

Aki’s emerging conclusions highlight the importance of recognising accountability as a multidimensional and dynamic practice. Japan continues to advance its approach through gradual decentralisation, while the UK contends with the legacies of shifting reform agendas. Yet in both countries, the success of directly elected mayors rests not only on the formal powers they hold, but on the quality of leadership they exercise and the institutional structures that guide and constrain them.

The research offers valuable lessons for policymakers, practitioners and scholars. It suggests that accountability must be intentionally designed and continuously reinforced. Clear institutional roles, better training and development for mayors, and stronger professional support structures can all contribute to more effective local leadership. As debates about mayoral systems continue in both countries, the insights from Aki’s work provide a timely and thoughtful contribution to understanding what truly makes local democratic leadership accountable.

You can view the whole (50 mins) seminar here:
https://bham.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=76530fc7-ce2a-4884-964a-b3fd00c80704&start=1315.148058

Jason Lowther is director of Inlogov, the Institute of Local Government Studies, at the University of Birmingham