Local councils need a ‘Spotify revolution’

No one can look at what’s happening right now to public services and think that the answer is to keep doing what we’ve been doing before.

For those of us who have known this for some time, things have gotten so bad it’s almost good – because realisation is growing that we must grasp the nettle of full transformation.

For over 40 years, local government has been told to do more with less and even less, and this week’s autumn Budget is likely to brutally reinforce this message. Through efficiency drives, outsourcing, inspection, regulation, and more recently through austerity and Covid, council services have stretched past the point of elasticity and started to snap, with the most vulnerable bearing the brunt.

The cost of living crisis brings further strain to exhausted local services and their leaders for whom politically ideological answers are not answers. (Leaving a major trading bloc does not magically pay for public services. Neither does going for broke on liberalisation. Nor would a massive windfall tax.)

But transformation is a word overused and under-delivered in the public sector. In council-speak, it can mean anything from radical change to redecorating a reception area. So let’s be clear: there are two kinds of transformation. One is doing a better version of what you already do. The other is reimagining everything entirely.

Both are valid – but the difference is significant. Imagine the former is HMV, upgrading its shops to introduce CDs, barcodes, new tills and global supply chains. The latter is the invention in the mid-90s of Spotify – completely re-imagining how you meet a human desire to listen to music, own it and explore it.

There is a place for ongoing upgrades in existing public sector institutions. But we need to create some Spotifys, too. Here’s how.

We have to start asking questions. The key ones right now are: who are public services actually for? What do they need to achieve? Our post-war services were designed on an understanding that everyone just needs a bit of help from time to time. But if you ask what people need now, you’ll get a very different answer. We have to consider root causes, structural inequality, breakdown of trust, breakdown of family and community relationships and the importance of relationships between the public service institution and the person who has a need.

Then we have to create the right conditions to get the answers to those questions. The public sector currently suffers from top down, overly-professionalised, centralised decision-making that can feed organisational inertia. In that environment, people are more likely to think about incremental changes than create a Spotify.

To make space for thinking about the latter, you have to get accountability and responsibility for the design of public services as close as possible to the people who will shape and use them.

We can spark real transformation by, for example, getting health services closer to and co-designed by their communities – and the same for employment and skills training and the design of welfare and benefit schemes too. All of those services need the intimacy and local knowledge that’s impossible in a national regime.

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Then, as all good activists know, we must create a movement to build momentum around the need for new design, and make it happen. That means bringing together like-minded politicians, public servants, community activists, service users, individuals and families who can explain what’s not working and what needs to change – and be part of the day-to-day grind of working out the answer.

One story says that the last time this happened, the Labour government of 1948 created the NHS. But actually, for decades before, academics, social activists, trade unionists, philanthropists, church leaders and community-based organisations had argued, deliberated over and compared notes on the post-war settlement that made up big parts of both the Labour and Conservative manifestos from 1945-52.

Today, none of the major political parties have the answer, but they have people within them agitating for change – a similar mix of people who have very similar positions and understandings and aspirations. No academic or campaigning organisation has yet claimed this movement as theirs, either.

The people who do this convincingly and authentically will get to reset the deal with the British public for the next 50 years at least and redefine what public services are about. I’m in. Are you?

Chris Naylor is a director of public service reform consultancy Inner Circle and a former chief executive of Birmingham City Council and Barking and Dagenham Council