Public institutions and governance

Rewiring Local Government for Citizen Engagement

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Jason Lowther

The Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) has published a new report, Rewiring Local Government for Citizen Engagement, which sets out a compelling case for reimagining the relationship between local authorities and the communities they serve. At a time of structural reform, fiscal constraint and lower public trust, the report argues that citizen engagement must become fully embedded local governance, rather than a peripheral activity.

The report identifies three interrelated conditions that are essential for effective engagement. First, local authorities must convene inclusive democratic spaces that enable deliberation, dialogue and collective decision-making. These spaces, whether in the form of citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting or neighbourhood forums, can help to rebuild trust and foster more responsive policymaking.

Second, councils must invest in building community capacity. This involves supporting citizens, particularly those from groups whose views are often neglected, to participate meaningfully in public life. It also requires sustained investment in community infrastructure, such as local venues, networks and organisations, which provide the foundations for civic engagement.  The report recognises that 15 years of austerity since 2010 has significantly reduced the availability of community meeting places such as libraries, neighbourhood offices, youth and community centres, and cultural and leisure services.

Third, the report highlights the importance of co-producing public services. By involving service users in the design and delivery of services, councils can ensure that provision is more closely aligned with the lived experiences and priorities of local people. Co-production also fosters innovation and strengthens the legitimacy of public institutions.

The report draws on a wide body of academic research and practical experience, both in the UK and internationally. It shows that democratic innovations are already taking root in many councils, despite the challenges posed by austerity and institutional inertia. Examples include digital engagement platforms, youth-led initiatives, and the devolution of powers to neighbourhood and parish levels.

However, the report also acknowledges the barriers that councils need to address. Organisational cultures, limited resources, the need to develop new skills in officers and members, and legitimate concerns among elected members about the implications of participatory approaches can all inhibit progress. The report calls for leadership, reform and investment to embed engagement in the everyday practices of governance.

We pay particular attention on the vital role of councillors, who are well placed to act as facilitators and mediators between communities and institutions. Supporting councillors to develop these roles is essential if engagement is to be sustained and meaningful. The report also emphasises the need to engage young people and to make appropriate use of digital tools.

In conclusion, Rewiring Local Government for Citizen Engagement offers a clear and evidence-based framework for strengthening local democracy. It argues that by embedding citizen engagement in governance structures and practices, councils can foster trust, improve outcomes and build more inclusive and resilient communities.

We will be discussing our findings with councils, central government and related think tanks and sector organisations over coming months.

The full report is available here:

Rewiring local government for citizen engagement_WEBDownload

The Treasury’s Long Shadow: Why Local Government Needs Its Own Barber

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Philip Swann

The extent to which the Blair government’s delivery unit became the focus of tension between No 10 and the Treasury is a key theme in Michelle Clement’s fascinating history[1] of the unit. It was a product of Tony Blair’s ambition to reform public services and was seen by Gordon Brown as a threat to his dominance of domestic policies generally and his planning mechanism, public service agreements, specifically.

There are striking similarities between the Treasury’s “not invented here” attempted dismissal of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit (PMDU) and the treatment of the government’s missions in the recent spending review.

Prime Minister Kier Starmer announced in February 2023 that five missions would form the “backbone” of Labour’s election manifesto. In October 2024 the Cabinet Office announced the establishment of a “mission board” for each mission chaired by the relevant secretary of state.  In December 2025 the government complicated things slightly when it published its Plan for Change: Milestones for Mission-led Government. It set out six targets which, “guided by our missions” would “set clear milestones[2]” to track the government’s progress.

The milestones were: raising living standards in every part of the UK; rebuilding Britain with 1.5m homes in England and fast-tracking planning decisions; ending hospital backlogs; putting police back on the beat; giving children the best start in life; and securing home-grown energy.

The missions were largely ignored in the spending review. Only one of the missions was referred to in Rachel Reeves’ speech and there were only 14 cursory references to missions in the core spending review document. This must mean that the missions were not central to the discussions about the government’s public expenditure priorities. This is so far removed from the way in which missions have been deployed elsewhere, such as by Camden Council. There missions were central to the council’s strategic planning and were used to engage partner organisations and the community in a concerted drive to address the challenges facing the borough.

It is clear from Clement’s book that the first head of the PMDU, Michael Barber, managed to keep the Treasury on board. His unpublished diaries are a key sources for the book, and Clement argues convincingly that, as one of the few senior figures who were respected by both Blair and Brown, he was instrumental in keeping the No 10-led show on the road.

In retrospect it is clear to me that local government suffered as a result of the differences of approach to delivery advanced by No 10 and Treasury. At the time the LGA, where I was director of strategy and communications, made a series of attempts to secure a more collaborative approach with government to the challenges then facing the country.

Local public service agreements (the name gives the game away) and their successors, local area agreements, became entangled in the Treasury’s target-laden bureaucracy and did not benefit from Barber’s more thoughtful “deliverology” which Clement refers to as an art rather than a science. Similarly the LGA’s “shared priorities, an earlier version of missions, got little traction beyond the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister and the then Audit Commission.

I do not recall any significant engagement with Barber, but I am not sure we would have made much progress. Clement refers to local delivery but not to local government and all the evidence suggests that Barber would have shared David Blunkett’s antipathy to the perceived lack of ambition of local education authorities (Barber worked with Blunkett in Blair’s first term).

It is not clear whether the absence of any significant reference to missions in the spending review was an oversight or a reflection of a bigger split between the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. If there is a serious divide we do not know where the Prime Minister stands. What we do know is that local government faces an urgent task in getting the Treasury to give more energy and political capital to the fundamental reform of local government finance. It is also fair to argue that, if taken seriously, the missions provide a good basis for a discussion why that should be a priority for central as well as local government.

One clear message from Clement’s book is that people matter. Local government needs to find its Barber.

[1] Clement, M. 2025 The Art of Delivery. Biteback Publishing

 

Phil Swann is studying for a PhD on central-local government relations at INLOGOV.

Win an election and implement your manifesto – that’s novel!

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Image: Emily Sinclair/BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c367lry5ypxo

Chris Game

First, a reader alert. What follows is in essence an only marginally revised column written for and hopefully published in this week’s Birmingham Post, to which for many years now I’ve been a regular contributor. Thanks, at least in part, to the “many years”, I’m permitted a wide scope of subject matter, but for obvious reasons local government in some form or other is what I tend to resort to most frequently – not least around local election season.

With the Post’s Thursday publication date, this is a mixed blessing, knowing that most readers interested in these matters would very likely have learned the results of the elections before they read one’s prognostications and predictions. What follows here, then, is my third column focused on this year’s local (County/Unitary Council) elections, which were, of course, limited to just 24 of England’s 317 local authorities (plus the Isles of Scilly) and precisely none in, never mind Birmingham, the whole metropolitan West Midlands.

Faced with the alternative option of ignoring the topic altogether, I decided to focus on the four West Midlands County Councils: three with biggish, if declining, Conservative majorities – Shropshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire – plus STAFFORDSHIRE: Labour for decades, but Conservative since 2009, and, until the May council elections, with 55 Conservative councillors out of 62, almost as Tory as they come.

However … since last July, when the county’s parliamentary constituencies all went Labour, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party had been energetically hoping to build in Staffordshire on what statistically had been among its most promising performances. And indeed it did: Reform UK: 49 of the 62 County Council seats, leaving the previously controlling Conservatives with 10, and Labour, Greens and Independents 1 each. The Lib Dems, along with UKIP, the Workers Party of Britain and others, failed to score.

It typified results across the country. On what nationally was an exceptionally quiet election day, Reform UK increased its nation-wide base of just two councillors (both on Hampshire’s Havant Borough Council), to a relatively massive 677 (39% of the total seats contested) and gained majority control of no fewer than 10 of the 23 councils.

One can only speculate at some of the results that a fuller involvement of, say, the 130 unitary authorities, metropolitan districts and London boroughs might have produced. I concluded that Election Day column, though, not with any numerical predictions, but with Farage’s most publicised campaign observation/pledge: “We probably need a DOGE for every single county council in England”.

Which could have sounded a touch presumptuous from the Leader of a party who had approached that Election Day holding just two of the 1,700+ seats ‘up for grabs’ – but not from Farage.

I did wonder, though, what onlookers would make of that DOGE acronym (or, in some versions, D.O.G.E. – that’s how novel it is). Indeed, even Reform candidates, who probably knew at least that it stood for the love child of President Trump and the recently very departed Elon Musk’s Department Of Government Efficiency, trod carefully.

Created, they could possibly parrot, to “modernise information technology, maximise productivity and efficiency, and cut wasteful spending”, but did they have any real idea of how the function and office might work in a UK political context? Or did they possibly assume that, like so many campaign pledges, even if, rather incredibly, a DOGE majority did emerge, it would find itself, at least for the present, on the ‘too hard just now …. we’ve only just elected our Leader’ pile?

Certainly I, while having at least some idea of what county councils having an English DOGE might entail, would definitely NOT have predicted that, within just one month of those county elections, one of England’s biggest and traditionally most Conservative counties, KENT, would be preparing to face an ‘Elon Musk-style’ DOGE audit by a team of technical experts assembled specifically to analyse its £2.5 billion-plus budget spending and assess its financial efficiency.

Since the past weekend, the ‘Elon Musk-style’ bit will possibly have been played down, but not, seemingly, the ongoing implementation. With LANCASHIRE – £1.2 billion budget – already announced as next on the list, this just could prove insightful and potentially serious stuff.

Until May 1st, Kent County Council comprised 62 Conservatives, 12 Lib Dems, 4 Greens, 0 Reform UK.  Since then, it’s been 10 Conservatives, 6 Lib Dems, 5 Greens, and 49 Reform UK. If dramatic change is to be the agenda, Kent seemed an apt and attention-guaranteeing choice. 

By any measure, and almost whatever happens next, that – in my book, anyway – is an impressive achievement. There’s been, predictably enough, ‘Establishment’ outrage – “a superficial response to the deep problems of local government” … “initiating a review of local authority spending misunderstands the circumstances facing local authorities … All councils have been caught in an iron triangle of falling funding, rising demand, and legal obligations to deliver services. In that context every local authority has had to make difficult choices to cut services …” (Institute for Government).

On the other hand, win an election and implement your party manifesto! – a demonstration that turning out and voting in local elections, even in our exceedingly non-proportional electoral system – can produce policy action.

Or, rather, especially in our exceedingly non-proportional electoral system. Two of the new Combined Authority mayors (outside the West Midlands) were elected on under 30% of the votes cast, and obviously a much smaller percentage still of the registered electorate.

This follows the recent ditching of the Supplementary Vote in favour of ‘First-Past-The-Post’, where voters pick just one candidate, and the one with the most votes wins – even if, as this time in the West of England, that percentage was under a quarter of an already very modest turnout.

To me, anyway, it’s arguably even more important in these local/Mayoral elections than in parliamentary ones – for us, the elected Mayors, and democracy generally – that voters can indicate their first AND SECOND Mayoral preferences, thereby ensuring that, however low the turnout, the finally elected winner can claim the support of at least a genuine majority of voters.  Which means electoral reform – but that’s another column/blog.

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.

Do we need yet another body to help local government harness the potential of AI?

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Dr Caroline Webb, Dr Stephen Jeffares, and Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner

Does local government need a devolved AI service to help the sector successfully harness the transformative power of AI? A new paper from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) thinks so.

In their recent report “Governing in the Age of AI: Reimagining Local government” TBI make the case that local government faces several significant challenges – there’s a growing backlog of people seeking support coupled withdwindling resources and two thirds of funds must be spent on social care. Satisfaction is declining. Over £1.8bn is spent by the sector on technology, but innovation is stifled by a patchwork of legacy systems. The solution TBI suggest is the universal embracing of AI tools, but which is orchestrated, curated, supported and (one day perhaps) exploited via the establishment of a Devolved AI Service (DIAS).

The adoption of AI by councils continues to accelerate. Vendors of these tools extol the positive outcomes of AI, suggesting that “the day-to-day tasks of local government, whether related to the delivery of public services or planning for the local area, can all be performed faster, better and cheaper with the use of AI” (p3).  The UK, they argue, could save £200 billion over five-years though AI related productivity improvements (p7).

Whilst AI undoubtedly has the potential to increase the efficiency of some public services, we must pause to ask is it really the panacea that it is being marketed as, and are some public services being unfairly targeted by technology firms looking to promote their products and capitalise on an emerging market?

There is a clamour in the social care sector for example, which accounts for 64.8 per cent of the total budget for local government in England, to develop AI tools that can offer significant time savings, with the rationale that workers can spend more quality time with clients and less time on completing paperwork.  TBI cite Beam’s automated note-taking tool Magic Notes, that aims to transform social workers’ productivity by saving them s up to ‘a day per week on admin tasks’. Yet without external scrutiny and verifiable evaluation, such figures are little more than marketing claims.

As these technologies are capturing and summarising meetings to support some of the most vulnerable members of society, there is a need for local councils to interrogate these marketing claims critically before committing to such AI tools.  Despite safeguards such as ensuring a ‘human in the loop’, if these claims are not thoroughly examined there is a danger that these technologies may serve to reinforce and perpetuate existing biases, pose risks to clients’ data privacy and safety, strengthen process-driven systems which undermine person-centred decision making, and erode the relational foundations on which these services are built.

Of course, AI has numerous applications beyond reducing the cost of resource intensive casework. It has the potential to address some of the most despised and most intractable local policy problems (potholes, mould, chronic pain, mental health waiting lists). But the desirability of these innovations should not cause us to forget that these technologies themselves are not neutral, and just as they can lead to positive outcomes, if they are misused or implemented without proper ethical considerations, then adverse effects are just as likely to emerge.

The proposed introduction of a Devolved AI Service may go some way to ensuring a set of standardised safeguards, allowing for a coordinated approach to AI adoption within public services.  This collective approach could reduce duplication, provide practical support for the implementation and evaluation of sector-specific AI tools and facilitate a collaborative approach to working with technology providers to improve their products.  However, is it necessary to impose another central regulator on Local Government? There is already considerable piloting and evaluation of AI tools being conducted at the local level. These sector-specific evaluations are facilitating opportunities for shared horizontal learning across organisations. But it is vital that these results are shared, and that the evaluative measures and methods being employed are not imposed by the vendor of the tool, but rather determined by the needs of the organisation and the people they serve. Such evaluation should also consider more than value for money or accuracy, but also the experiences of frontline staff and citizens.

Ultimately, irrespective of how we chose to oversee the integration of AI tools, we must not lose sight of the fact that these tools should only be viewed as ‘part’ of the solution to providing effective public services, not the ‘whole’ answer as some technology companies may lead us to believe.

Dr Caroline Webb, Dr Stephen Jeffares, and Dr Tarsem Singh Cooner are academics at the University of Birmingham exploring how AI is reshaping frontline public service. Combining expertise in social work, public policy, and digital ethics, they develop training and research that support practitioners to engage critically and confidently with emerging technologies. Their work champions ethical, human-centred innovation in public services.

The etymology of quangos – and academic self-effacement

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Chris Game

Initialisms (abbreviations pronounced as individual letters) are obviously necessary and useful, but acronyms, properly defined (abbreviations pronounced as words), are surely more fun. That’s always been my rule of thumb, anyway. Actually, fun’s perhaps not the best word, especially as examples I’ve occasionally used include HIV/AIDS: HIV – initialism for Human Immunodeficiency Virus; AIDS – acronym for Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.

I suppose “seem cleverer” is what I really mean, because, in politics anyway, most of the big acronyms, while undoubtedly worthy, are so familiar as to be almost boring: NASA, NATO, OPEC, WASP – though I quite like POTUS, as I imagine President Trump himself does. And at least they’re easier to remember or work out – easier than certainly some initialisms like, say, LGBT, LGBTQI, or is it LGBTQIA+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, all other)?

In modern-day UK politics there are only two acronyms I can think of offhand, unless you count voting for RON – the rather pleasing democratic mechanism, largely confined to Students Union elections, allowing voters to choose not to elect any candidate in an election, but instead to vote for ‘RON’ and then, if ‘he’ wins, for a Re-Opening of Nominations and the process to start again, until one candidate achieves at least half of the votes and is elected.

As nearly happened this year, incidentally, for the Presidency of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union. Not quite, though, and, while the eventual winner reckoned she had “no actual words to describe” her feelings, she most certainly found a few for her acceptance speech, which I equally most certainly won’t repeat here.

My Acronym No.2 is UKIP – the Eurosceptic, right-wing populist UK Independence Party, founded in the early 1990s and so labelled in 1993. All of which is leading to precisely … ? The Government’s promised/threatened abolition of all Acronym No.1s, of course: QUANGOS – Quasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations. OK, I know it’s not perfect, but it’s surely the best-known example.

You’ll doubtless have seen the various, and by no means co-ordinated, media announcements over the past week or so: that “Ministers could introduce legislation to abolish a swathe of quangos [nice concept in itself: a swathe of quangos!] in one go, as part of the Government’s plans to restructure the state and cut thousands more civil service jobs …. [and are] considering a Bill that will speed up the reorganisation of more than 300 arm’s-length organisations that between them spend about £353bn of public money.”

It’s apparently not quite as arbitrary as some of the early reports made it sound. As reported in The Guardian (April 6th): Pat McFadden, the Cabinet Office minister, has written to every Whitehall department, asking them to provide “compelling justification” for the existence of each ‘quango’ or risk [it] being closed, merged, or having its powers brought back into the department.

Just like NHS England, possibly the world’s biggest quango, whose 15,000 staff were judged collectively to have failed the self-justification test, as it was the first to be scrapped, and that, “under the control of ministers, [will apparently] avoid duplication, bring greater accountability and save [unspecified amounts of] money”.

There’s an enormous amount to be studied and written about these developments, but not here. The sole purpose of this blog is precisely that set out in the title: to remind readers of what, to the best of my knowledge, is the etymology of ‘Quangos’ – not least because it involves an erstwhile academic colleague of mine.

When I first started ‘studying’ UK Government in the 1960s, at the Universities of Manchester (undergrad) and Essex (post-grad), Quangos simply didn’t exist – or, rather, they weren’t labelled, categorised and studied as such. That evolution took place during the 1970s, by which time I’d moved on, eventually to Birmingham and INLOGOV.

Leaving behind, inter alia, a former colleague who, by his own, invariably self-effacing, admission, was the actual author of our Quango acronym: Anthony/Tony Barker – though he, accurately, if pedantically – called it a near-acronym. If you need confirmation, though, just try Wiki-Quango-History: “The term ‘quasi non-governmental organization’ was created in 1967 by the Carnegie Foundation’s Alan Pifer …The term was shortened to the acronym QUANGO by … Anthony Barker, a Briton, during one of the conferences on the subject”.

It’s something to be rather proud of, you might think. If it had been me, I feel I’d regret it if, say, a whole week passed, at least during term time, without my somehow managing to ease it into some lecture/seminar/casual conversation or other. “I’ve just paid my TV license – £174.40! Outrageous – it’s just another Quango, you know”. “Did you see that bit in the papers about how they’ve found a way of possibly eliminating HS2’s ‘sonic boom’? It’s actually a Quango, you know?” “Yes, as it happens, I did invent the name.”

Yet Tony Barker, almost from the outset, was dismissive of something that he felt was overused, thereby misused, and “as useless as it is inelegant”. He goes into more detail in his 1979 book, Quangos in Britain, comprising mainly the papers delivered at a conference he convened on ‘The World of Quasi-Government’, describing the “near-acronym which I derived from a rather roundabout (and originally American) technical term ‘quasi-governmental organisation”.

But here’s the thing. Even in these early accounts, while not actually disowning the term and his authorship, he was his own severest critic – seeming almost to blame himself for creating a term that others have stretched to the point of near-meaninglessness – “they may be talking about any kind of body which has a definite relationship to the government or to local government”. I can’t help wondering what he’s thinking now, as the Government’s abolition programme gets underway.

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.

Tackling social problems: why don’t we do ‘what works’?

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Jon Bright

One of the most significant problems in public policy has been the persistent failure to draw on evidence of “what works”—and, perhaps more crucially, what doesn’t.

Despite a growing interest in evidence-based policy, we still have a long way to go in identifying and scaling up successful practice. Take, for example, the findings from Nesta’s 2013 report, which revealed that only three out of seventy programmes implemented by the Department of Education were well evaluated (1). Sadly, this gap in evidence was not confined to education and still applies today (2).

Public sector managers need to know what works, what doesn’t and where they should experiment intelligently. However, until the late 1990s, there was little emphasis on evidence as a basis for policy and we haven’t moved as fast as we should have since then. As a result, we have been slow to innovate, evaluate, and scale up new ideas that add value.

What have been the consequences?

That’s not to say there haven’t been some stellar examples of innovation. But these have usually been down to exceptional people or circumstances. In most public organisations, knowledge of best practice is either lacking or hard to access. Public sector managers, particularly outside of professional disciplines, often lack the skills to assess evidence or adapt successful policies to different contexts. In some cases, even when they are aware of evidence, politicians may override advice in favour of projects shaped by political pressure, ideology, or personal interest.

As a result, we keep reinventing policies rather than refining and improving them over the longer term. This makes it much harder to tackle persistent social problems. What’s worse, some policies have been introduced despite evidence that they probably wouldn’t work (3). And even when successful programs are found, we struggle to replicate or scale them up in different contexts.

The Challenges of Policy Transfer and Scaling

This is the core of the problem. A good example is the attempt by English police forces in the early 2000s to replicate a successful gang violence reduction program from the US. Unfortunately, they ignored the detail underpinning the most important components of the US model and the results were largely unsuccessful (4).

In contrast, Strathclyde Police in Scotland carefully adapted the model and successfully reduced gang-related violence. Between 2004 and 2017, the murder rate in Strathclyde halved, and the rate of knife crime dropped by 65%. This example underscores the importance of understanding not only what works, but why it works and how it can be adapted to local contexts (5).

Scaling up successful interventions presents additional difficulties. Long-term success depends on increased funding which is rarely guaranteed. Family Nurse Partnerships (FNPs), for example, have been shown to be effective but have only benefited a small fraction of eligible children in the U.K., despite their positive impact on school readiness and early education outcomes (6). There must be a better way.

Why Is This Still a Problem?

There are several reasons why doing ‘what works’ is a difficult nut to crack. not least of which is the political environment in which decisions are made. Politicians may also reject evidence-based proposals for understandable reasons: cost, public opposition or concern about how they will land with colleagues and the media. Sometimes the timing’s just not right.

Moreover, public sector organisations are often risk-averse. Innovation requires a supportive culture, special funding, expertise, and incentives—elements that are frequently absent. On the plus side, the requirement to produce a business case for new policies does encourage the search for evidence.
The most common objection to evidence-based policy is that we often don’t have the evidence. I deal with this below.

Finally, until recently, there have been too few organisations charged with bringing evidence to decision-makers.

The What Works Centres

The good news is there has been some progress. Ten independent ‘what works’ centres have been set up in recent years to provide evidence-based guidance to policymakers. These centres, covering areas such as health, education, crime, homelessness, ageing and children’s social care, help to bridge the gap between research and practice (7). Their role is to provide unbiased, rigorous, and practical advice to help public services become more effective (8).

However, the work is far from complete. While the centres have made significant strides, there is no agreed, systematic way of incorporating ‘what works’ into the development of policy and delivery of services. Additionally, there has been no independent review of the centres’ overall impact on public policy in the 10 +years since they were founded.

What next for What Works?

The Centre for Public Impact (CPI) argues that a lot of evidence simply isn’t robust enough as the sole basis for social policy (9). It suggests we should use the term ‘evidence-informed’ alongside ‘evidence-based’ and proposes a combination of evidence, expertise, and experience as the best bet for designing policies that will work in most places.
Evidence-informed practice – Centre for Public Impact

To progress the evidence-based policy agenda, five points need to be addressed:

  1. Government Commitment: Government should invest more in research and development. While private companies like Volkswagen allocate a substantial portion of their budget to R&D, most government departments spend less than 1%. Senior civil servants must also be better equipped to understand and apply evidence-based policies (10).
  2. Local Government Involvement: Much of the ‘what works’ conversation takes place at the national level. Local government and civil society must be more involved to ensure better policy and bigger impact. The Welsh Centre for Public Policy is thought effective because of its close working with the devolved government.
  3. The Limits of Evidence: Often, evidence is incomplete or not easily applied to specific contexts. Furthermore, while the Centres are good at synthesising evidence, they don’t take account of the politics of policy making. Local policy makers often query the relevance of evidence when it doesn’t address their main policy questions (11). Evidence often needs to be combined with professional expertise and local experience to tailor policies to local needs.
  4. Scaling Up Good Practice: Public sector organisations need better systems for integrating successful new approaches into their mainstream services. This reduces the need for special funding. Similarly, successful programmes should be repackaged in a form that makes them easier to replicate at scale (12).
  5. Support for Local Managers and Practitioners: User-friendly, evidence-based information is crucial. For example, the Education Endowment Foundation assesses interventions based on evidence strength, cost and impact. This helps schools make good decisions. Other centres also provide ‘what works’ toolkits (13)

During 2024/25, there have been developments in the Network. For example, the Centre for Local Economic Growth has advised local authorities and emphasised tailored interventions that consider local contexts and needs. The Centre for Children’s Social Care has been recommending practices to improve outcomes for children in care. There has been greater collaboration among the Centres including a unified digital platform to disseminate findings. Looking ahead, new centres on climate resilience and digital inclusion are anticipated. The UK government has renewed its funding to the Network.

The ‘what works’ movement is a major step forward in improving public policy. To maximize its impact, its leadership needs to be refreshed, local government and civil society better engaged, and systems created to incorporate successful practice into mainstream services.

Jon Bright is a former civil servant who worked in the Cabinet Office and Department of Communities and Local Government between 1998 and 2014.

References

  1. Cited in The What Works Network (2018) The What Works Movement Five Years On. P15.
  2. Mulgan. G and Puddick. R, (2013) Making evidence useful- the case for new institutions, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA).
    See also Institute for Government event in October 2022 ‘What works’ in Government: 10 years of using evidence to make better policy. At this event, David Halpern commented that only 8% of sample of Government programmes had evaluation plans in place.
  3. Wolchover. N, (2012) Was DARE effective? Live Science 27.3.2012; and College of Policing (2015) Scared Straight Programmes, Crime Prevention Toolkit.

4. Knight. G, (2009) How to really hug a hoodie. Prospect. November 2009. See also, Tita. G, Riley. J,
Ridgeway. G, and Greenwood. P, (2005) Reducing Gun Violence Operation Ceasefire. National Institute of Justice (USA); and Braga. A. Kennedy. D, Waring. E, Morrison Piehl. A, (2001) Problem-oriented policing, deterrence, and youth violence: an evaluation of Boston’s Operation Ceasefire. National Institute of Justice.

5.Big Issue (2020) How Scotland’s’ Violence Reduction Unit breaks the cycle of crime, Big Issue 11.9.2020;
Craston. M, et al, (2020) Process evaluation of the Violence Reduction Units Home Office Research Report 116, August 2020; O’Hare. P, (2019) How Scotland stemmed the tide of knife crime, BBC Scotland news website, 4 March 2019; and Batchelor. S, Armstrong. S, and MacLellan. D, (2019) Taking Stock of Violence in Scotland, Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research August 2019.

  1. National Institute of Health Research (2021) Family Nurse Partnerships Building Blocks 5-6 study.
  2. Gov.UK (2013, updated 2022) What Works Network, Evaluation Task Force. https://www.whatworksnetwork. org.uk/
  3. The What Works Network (2018) The What Works Movement Five Years On.
    See also Breckon. J, and Mulgan. G, (2018) Celebrating Five Years of the UK What Works Centres, NESTA.
  4. Snow. T, and Brown. A, (2021) Why evidence should be the servant, not the master of good policy Centre for Public Impact.10.8.2021
  5. Halpern, D presentation at an Institute for Government (2022) event op cit.
  6. Private correspondence with Jason Lowther, Head of INLOGOV.
  7. Little. M, (2010) Improving children’s outcomes depends on systemising evidence-based practice… Demos
  8. Education and Endowment Foundation – Teaching and learning toolkit. An accessible summary of education evidence https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/