From crisis response to long-term resilience: a new research programme for local government

Local government has weathered pressure before, but rarely has it faced so many different pressures converging at the same time. Rising demand, falling public trust, a workforce in transition, fast-moving technology and sustained financial strain. These are not separate problems to manage; they represent one interconnected challenge.

That is the backdrop against which LGIU and Commercial Services Group are launching a new piece of sector engagement. Following recent conversations with senior local government officials, we heard a strikingly consistent story across very different councils and communities. Social care is consuming an unsustainable share of local budgets. A growing number of authorities anticipate needing Exceptional Financial Support in the coming years. Leaders describe being constantly pulled into crisis management today, with little time or resources left to plan for tomorrow.

We want to understand that pattern properly, not just observe it 

LGIU’s longstanding role convening the sector, paired with the practical, operational view of councils’ day-to-day functions that Commercial Services Group brings, means this work can move beyond diagnosing the problem and towards something more useful: a genuine sense of direction.

Early scoping for this project suggests broad agreement that prevention, not crisis response, is the only route to a sustainable long-term model. And while appetite for devolution and place-based leadership is real, there is genuine uncertainty about whether central government will follow through with planned reforms.

Underneath all of this sits a harder question about what local government leadership itself needs to become

We are interested in what a more distributed, networked model of leadership could look like, and what would actually allow innovation to move from isolated pilots into something the whole sector can learn from and scale. The debate is no longer whether local government needs to change. The real challenge is whether we have the courage, leadership and long-term commitment to create a model designed for the realities of the next 20 years, not the last 20. The additional challenge will be how the sector is sustainably funded to enable this.

We will be exploring this in a series of roundtables with council chief executives and other senior leaders in September and October. The events will be chaired by Jonathan Carr-West, Chief Executive of LGIU, and supported by the teams at LGIU and Commercial Services Group. We will be exploring:

1. Leadership – what kinds of leadership enable innovation and collaboration to take root?
2. Innovation – what conditions allow innovation to move from pilot to scale?
3. Collaboration – what collaborative models are most effective for place-based innovation?
4. Sufficiency – even at scale, is locally driven innovation sufficient to meet the systemic challenges?

We want you to join the conversation. A report based on this engagement will be released later in the year, and we will share further insights at the Solace Summit.

Please contact our programme coordinator, Jon Gleek, Head of Research and Policy at LGIU.

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