Interview with Cllr Eamonn O’Brien, leader of Bury Council

In this interview, we spoke to Cllr Eamonn O’Brien, leader of Bury Council. Cllr O’Brien was born and raised in Bury, and was first elected to the council back in 2014. He became leader in May 2020 at the age of just 28. He also leads the Technical Education and Skills portfolio for the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, while sitting on their executive board and on the Greater Manchester Integrated Care Partnership Board, he’s a player across the city region. In addition to all of that, Councillor O’Brien works for a national charity and set up the UK’s first student-led food bank in central Manchester. We spoke about Bury Council’s transformation journey as it works towards a goal of becoming a borough with higher than average economic growth and lower than average levels of deprivation.

Key to reaching that target is a focus on neighbourhood-based public services, on town centre regeneration, carbon neutrality, investment in digital infrastructure and skills – a whole range of things right at the cutting edge of what councils are doing to implement transformation. We explored some of the motivations, some of the challenges and the impact of this strategic shift across Bury’s neighbourhoods.

Watch the full conversation on Youtube here.

00:00 Introduction to Councillor Eamonn O’Brien and Bury’s Transformation
01:48 Cllr O’Brien’s journey into local government
04:43 Vision for Bury: Building blocks of a good life
06:47 Bury Council’s transformation journey
10:28 Understanding transformation: Key elements
13:15 The role of community in transformation
15:53 Leadership and political responsibility in local government
18:26 The ongoing journey of transformation
19:52 Bury’s 2030 Strategy: A vision for the future
21:33 Addressing deprivation and growth in Bury
24:15 The ‘Let’s Do It’ narrative
28:50 The Mockingbird Model in children’s services
31:45 Lessons learned and future opportunities
35:50 The role of local government in public service reform

A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

This interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness. 

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey into local government? What led you at quite a young age to put yourself forward into local government?

Well, I was always interested in politics from about the time I was in college. And I don’t come from a political family, but I was interested in talking politics and studying politics at the time at my local college. And I’d always kind of thought that I’d have an almost solely academic interest in politics, not really ever putting myself forward, not really standing for anything. I didn’t get involved in student politics, but I was a member of the Labour Party and I was a campaigner and I was out there. When you’re a student, especially during the coalition years, it was quite a political time, and there was lots of change happening and lots of things that I didn’t necessarily agree with. But it was really my involvement in setting up and running one of the first Trussell Trust food banks. Obviously, now there’s lots of them, but back in 2012, 2013, it was a relatively new and unknown concept, this idea of food banks. And because we were doing it in the centre of Manchester, pretty much one of the poorest parts of the country, we were dealing with issues that were very complex, but were all about how very vulnerable people dealt with the state. And that was the trigger for me to get involved because I realised that lots of people were being let down by a system that was not particularly responsive to their needs, that was actually probably in my view getting further away from their needs and what they required to have a good life and have a good job.

And whilst there was lots of complexity in it and there was lots of reasons for people coming to food banks, for me I thought I can have the academic interest in it and I can try and do what the food bank does, which is get people out of a crisis. But it was not going to try and fix the problem. It was not going to try and solve it at its root cause. And so after a few years of being a campaigner and an activist and helping out in local elections and general election, I was finally asked, well, have you thought about standing for your local council?

I must admit that at the time, I knew very little about what that meant and what it would lead to. But it all came together just as I was finishing my undergraduate years and thinking about what to do now. It all came together as a result of those different experiences and ultimately somebody asking me to do it.

With your background of tackling social problems and need, what’s your vision for Bury?

Yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to how we’re trying to change people’s lives, it is trying to recognise what the building blocks are to a good life. And for me, the building blocks are when you start with somewhere to call home. So back in the day when I was in the food bank, we were dealing with lots of people who were not necessarily street homeless, but they were in temporary accommodation. They were sofa surfing. They were really unsure about where they were gonna live, where they were gonna sleep that night. And that is a pretty fundamental thing. So for me it’s about starting with decent place to call your home, and that can take shape in lots of different ways. It doesn’t mean everyone gets a nice, big detached bungalow up in the hills of Ramsbottom, but it does mean that you have a safe and secure place for you and your family, and especially if you’ve got children, it’s really important to give people that. So for me, it starts with getting that. And then you think, what’s the next building block there? Well, the next building block is having a good job. So we’ve done a lot in our council about promoting the idea of good work, of the real living wage, of good terms and conditions, of supporting people to have flexibility around work, because we’ve got a good home and a good job. They are two pretty good foundations for being happy and being healthy and ultimately I think passing that on to the next generation. So for me, I think it starts with a good home, a good job, and then you can start to build on top of that many, many other things. So they are things absolutely as a council that we can play a really key role in. And also I’m seeing it from a Greater Manchester level as well, when trying to look at all those different levels we’ve got now. But it starts with getting those basic building blocks of a good life in place.

Regarding the council’s role in establishing those building blocks, how has that changed in Bury? What’s been the transformation journey for the council? How would you say that’s different now from when you first came into the council back in 2014?

Well, I think traditionally, Bury was a place that was in the middle. Someone described it as a little microcosm of Britain. It’s got areas of wealth, it’s got areas of poverty, but it’s not defined by either of them. It’s kind of defined by the population in the middle. It’s got areas where we have a lot of diversity, but it’s also got areas of fairly traditional white working-class communities. It’s got a little bit of rurality up in the north of the borough, where you’ve got these nice Lancastrian rolling hills, and yet it’s also got suburban city centre fringe places, looking towards Manchester rather than Bury. So it’s a place that has, I think, a little bit of everything.

And in that sense, when times were probably more stable for local government, I think Bury just ticked over. It was a nice place to live. It was a relatively well-managed council. It never had any particular crisis. And I think in that regard, when it did enter a period of real challenge, so when austerity started to really hit and when it looked like it wasn’t just a case of belt tightening, but actually we were going to have to really transform what councils did, the problem for Bury was I don’t think it was massively prepared for that mentally, and so far the culture of an organisation. So I think if I was being really honest, by the time I joined the council and started to get into the cabinet and other things, I think the council was quite slow to adopt a transformation plan and quite reluctant to engage.

What were the challenges then? What were those cultural barriers to transformation? How did you start unpacking some of that and breaking down some of those barriers?

I think what we noticed was a lot of people had said we’re used to being a pretty lean council so what we’ll do is we will balance the books for the next year by cutting the salami slicing approach, and that will get us through it because there was a perception, I think, on reflection, that we didn’t really need to change because we were already in terms of value for money managing things. And as I say, nothing was out of kilter, we were in the median, and that that would probably mean we could survive.

And there was a view back then that things will go back to quote unquote normal, that it’s a lean couple of years with the salami slice approach, and then things will go back to how they’ve always been.

Absolutely, and to give them a bit of the benefit of the doubt, I think if we had been told in 2025 you’re still going to be making cuts, pretty substantial cuts every year, it probably would have drastically changed the conversation. But instead we were told it’s a bit of belt tightening, it’s a bit of austerity, and basically the deficit will be gone in a few years and we’ll be in a new normal.

But you’ll just do slightly less than you used to do. I think if we’d been probably more alert to the risk that 15 years of cuts was going to be the reality and the only way of managing that would be quite radically transforming the organisation, it would have changed. So I think the culture was very much get through the next few years, and then as you say, we’ll be in the new normal and we will do slightly less, but we’ll still do it okay.

Now, as it turned out, clearly that was not the case. Austerity years continued. We were slow to transform, which then led to challenges in some of our children’s services. You throw in the pandemic and then you suddenly realise you’re in a position where we have to rapidly pick up the pace of transformation. And I think we have started to do that.

We’ve used the word transformation a lot. What does that mean? What are the elements of transformation? Transforming what, how, and where does it take us?

So fundamentally, you start from a position about what is driving the costs for your council, what are the biggest demands on your service? And as is typical of most places, it’s in our social care services, it’s starting to appear in our part of the world in housing, I know in many other parts of the country, especially London, housing is already a major challenge. We’re now starting to see that kind of come through. So what are your big demand drivers?

And how does your organisation work to address those? In that traditional approach, you would say that’s children’s services’ job to deal with children’s services and adult social care. Well people get older, they live for longer. We’re just going to have to accept that we do more of that. And instead now what we’ve recognised is our transformation journey is much more about recognising how do you intervene as early as possible? How do you prevent as much as possible? And how do you recognise that the council itself cannot do that alone? Fundamentally, to achieve that, the council has a very central role, a leadership role, but it has to rely much more on the voluntary and community sector, on our residents doing more for themselves, and on thinking a lot more about how we deliver services and where we deliver those services.

And so our transformation journey is much more about doing things locally, much more in that neighborhood setting or in that most appropriate location. It’s about doing things in an enterprising way. So trying to do it in a creative way. Forget that “we’ve always done it this way” attitude. Let’s think about how we could do this differently. It’s about doing it together with people. So very much in partnership, co-producing solutions, often asking people how they can deliver some of those things with us. And I think crucially the last one is about being strength-based on it, recognising that actually people out there, residents, community groups, have a lot to offer and have a lot of agency to deliver this themselves.

And the paternalistic nature of public services can often get in the way of that. So I think we need to find ways of drawing out the strengths that people can offer and the things that they can do for themselves, maybe with support and with a safety net, so we pull all that together to say, what does that mean for our council services? How does that mean we deliver them? And then there are lots of internal things we’ve got to do around that, which are probably actually the biggest challenge. But we’ve set out what that transformation looks like and it’s quite radically different from when I joined the council.

I’m really interested in how the council delivers services and the strength-based approach. Does that sometimes mean having the courage not to do things? We think we’ve seen examples where people talk about things, but then continue to do all the other stuff as well, because there’s risk in that. How do you manage those risks?

I think it’s a massive risk and I think if we’re being honest, I think it’s very difficult for councils to truly let go and say we’re not going to do that anymore. And I think there’s lots of reasons why that’s the case. Not least actually because I think the instinct of lots of people, residents, community organisations, partners, is that’s the council’s job, so why are you asking me to do it?

Sometimes the blunt answer is well we just can’t afford to do it but that harder argument to make although I think the better one is that it’s not always best that the council does it and I’ll give you a couple of examples: When we’re in the pandemic and we were trying to encourage our communities to get vaccinated, we had several communities where there was a real vaccine skepticism and reluctance around it. And we could have, as a council, tried to lead those efforts to  encourage it. And we were encouraging people alongside the NHS to get vaccinated. But actually, what we found was engaging with people from those communities, having them be the voice of that campaign, communicating to people in either a language that was their own or a way that was their own, fronted by people that they recognised and trusted, meant that we had a very, very significant uptake in our vaccine rates as a result of that.

And it was a recognition to me that if we’d have taken the traditional council approach, we would have failed and actually, what people want to see sometimes is things done much closer to them and them and their daily lives and the way that they work. We try to apply that lesson now on a lot of our council services. It’s still a journey. There’s still much more we can do in that space, and there is an expectation gap still, but that is the plan.

There have to be councillors who lead that conversation about what the state can and can’t do, what the expectations are, what the mutual responsibilities of citizens, communities, and the council are. That has to be politically driven, doesn’t it?

Well it does because we can often find ourselves in position where politically you end up just being spokespeople for the bureaucracy of the council, and I think that’s something really worth avoiding because whilst inevitably you have to communicate things that the council does and that’s not always popular and it’s not always positive, it’d be much easier just having a comms team of 51 people and having them go out and say what the council’s doing. Instead, I think what we have to do is constantly challenge and constantly remind the bureaucracy of the council that it is there to serve the residents, not itself. Now, I think in Bury, because we’re a relatively small metropolitan council, we have that benefit of actually being a place where it’s quite easy to get to know everybody and to get to know partners and our communities and there is a there is a recognition actually that we’re all in this for the residents.

But it’s inevitable that you get into processes and things like debates about casework, on how this is easier for us, this is how we’ve always done it, and we’re going to make our lives easier. And I think we just have to be that check and challenge to say, ultimately, our residents put us here, our residents fund these services, and we need to make sure that they’re brought into the conversation much more than they have been in the past.

You’ve talked a lot about transformation as a journey not as a destination. You have to constantly keep moving forward, keep making the case, keep checking. So there’s something about building in that permanency of the approach.

There is, and that is one of the challenges because people get exhausted by the change and they get burnt out by almost a constant sense of efficiencies and workforce restructuring and the next budget round coming up. Obviously, that is exacerbated by the fact that we’ve had no certainty around budget planning for more than a year for a long time. So just moving to a three-year budget settlement, as we’ve often argued, which will make a little bit of a difference because it will just give a bit of certainty for people to work around and start planning their futures. So there is a real challenge in the workforce of councils generally consisting of people being exhausted by constantly having to zero base budget and constantly having to go back to their drawing board for for more cuts and efficiencies and other things like that.

But at the same time, I think that’s why it’s really important that we have a really clear and ambitious and positive vision for the place so that we can remind people, yes, you’re ultimately having to make a saving. Yes, you’re going to have to look at changing, doing a restructure and losing jobs, but it’s all contributing to making people better off. It’s contributing to that idea that we’re going to reduce deprivation and drive up growth at the same time.

And I know that you’ve set a strategy through to 2030 around that. Tell us about that 2030 strategy.

So 2030 originated pre-pandemic. Right at the start of the decade, we thought, in 10 years, let’s create a sense of certainty about Bury. That didn’t start very well.

That’s a great start. You’ve foresaw all of that, I’m sure.

Yeah, exactly. So that was a few years of trying to figure out whether the thing we’ve just spent a lot of time on was worth it. But it was because ultimately, despite the pandemic, the mission hadn’t really changed. And whilst the pandemic definitely made it tougher, it also in some ways, actually made it a little bit easier to make some of the changes because it forced people to work very differently. It forced people to break down the silos.

Yeah, that’s something I’ve heard from lots of councils. The silver lining, if there was one, was that it did move us into a fence.

And whilst you can’t work in that environment 24/7 for 10 years, it also showed what we can achieve if we have a really clear driving force and mission behind our work. At that time, it was responding to the pandemic and all of the things around it. But for us, 2030 is still our aim for what we want to be by the end of the decade. It’s not one of those strategies ultimately, which is about making Bury perfect by 2030. But it’s a recognition of what’s the journey we want to be on? What’s the trajectory we want to be on? Well, ultimately we want to be a place that is delivering inclusive growth, that is growing, that is delivering economic growth, housing growth, creating more jobs, but good jobs and good housings to such an extent that it’s reducing deprivation at the same time.

We think the two are very much hand in hand. They have different areas, but they are very much interconnected. And it’s a recognition that if we can say Bury is a place that’s going in the right direction, that is, know, because plenty of places don’t, plenty of places go backwards or they deliver growth, but it’s uneven growth and it’s concentrated in one particular place and it’s nice and shiny, but next door to it, you’ve still got places that are very, very deprived. We’re hoping to be a pioneer in that sense of how a town or a borough of towns flip that story of decline, which has sadly plagued many parts of the North of England in particular.

So if we can be a place where you can see deprivation going down, which means basically life expectancy is improving, school readiness is improving. The quality of our education is better. Jobs are increasing. And at the same time, we’re building houses, we’re creating jobs, we’re improving our transport system. Our skills system is much more open and accessible to everybody. Those are the measures through which we’re trying to say, in 2030 if we can say over the past decade, despite all the challenges that have come our way, we are growing and at the same time reducing deprivation, then I think we can be pretty proud of what we’ve done. We won’t have solved every problem and it probably, well it definitely won’t be a linear journey but it will be better than it was, and there’s a preventative kind of agenda at the heart of all of that, isn’t it? essentially that’s about building, this goes back to your earlier point, it’s about building resilient, capable communities who need less support because they’re doing well for themselves, because they have those foundations, those building blocks, those things that enable them to get on in life and stay healthy and prosperous, and self-actualised.

We had one resident say they were doing a piece of work, working with some of our most deprived areas. And the headline from the piece of work was a quote: “I was born poor and I’m going to die poor”. And we use that as a bit of a rallying cry to say nobody should have that as their prospects in life.

There will be people born poor, there’ll be people being raised in poverty, missing out on huge amounts of opportunities, but we need to be able to identify that and intervene effectively enough so that they can actually then succeed. For us, that was a wake-up call that even in parts of Bury, which is generally seen as not too deprived, there are still communities within Bury where that is their reality. We’ve got to try and fix that.

Tell us about the LET’S do it narrative. How does that unfold and how does that relate?

So LET’S do it. So it’s a bit of a nod to one of our daughters of Bury, which is Victoria Wood. You had her slightly risqué kind of let’s do it song. But we thought fairly deliberately that because Bury had been quite a traditional place and because it had been one of those places that kind of kept its head down and quietly got on with things, we needed something to kind of almost energised the discussion around this. I think if we’d got in and said we’re going to have a transformation plan and it’s going to set out a series of behaviours and principles, I don’t think it would have particularly excited anybody. So we wanted something that was a little bit out of the ordinary for Bury, something that was going to make you pay attention to it. But crucially was also going to have something at its heart, so its not just a meaningless phrase. And LET’S do it is ultimately as it says, it’s a call to action. It’s got the apostrophe in it, it’s about let us do it together. It’s trying to encompass all of what that is. And it pulls together those principles of local enterprising and strength, LET’S do it. So we’re trying to establish, what are those principles? Why are they important? What do they ultimately mean for you and your role in the council? And then the crucial bit is the doing it, so let’s go and do it. So we spent a lot of time in those early years just defining what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. Because the temptation is to rush straight into the doing it. If you do that, I think the risk is you do put the cart before the horse and you don’t necessarily bring people along with you. They just kind of carry on doing the day-to-day job. And honestly, that’s kind of what we found initially, that people didn’t necessarily buy into it. It was a strategy that existed and there’s a bit of branding here and there. And it took us quite a number of attempts to figure out how we really got people engaged in this.

As I say, it wasn’t a linear journey. It didn’t start and finish smoothly. We had to constantly come back and look at it and refresh it. We found some pretty innovative ways of getting our staff, frontline staff in particular, managers, and partners to understand what it meant. One of the things we actually did was we took over the fire training centre, which is in Bury for the summer. And we physically walked people around this mock-up of a street which they use for fire training. And we talked about the place and we articulated what it really meant, what Bury 2030 was about, what LET’S was about, and it was a sort physical thing that people did for a few hours and we got a couple thousand people there, staff and partners. A really big effort.

It’s interesting that after five years of really trying to get LET’S do it in people’s mindsets, when we had our peer review, they reflected that everybody was talking about LET’S do it and people knew what it meant and they could articulate examples of what it meant in their in their daily life. And it, you it can apply itself in so many different ways, but it’s took a long time.

It captures that transition between taking your time, working out what you really want to do, but then moving into action. At the end of the day, it’s the do it, and it’s the let.

It’s trying to pull it together and it’s a recognition that I think we would have all preferred just to have said, this is what we’re going to do. Now let’s go and do it. But the truth is you’re working across a complex organisation. People have worked a particular way for a very long time. In Bur, we’re blessed with having lots of people who’ve worked at the council for a long time. The challenge with that is that to then offer a new way of working and a very quite radically different way of doing things naturally creates a reluctance and a sense of unease and almost a bit of scepticism, actually. So as I say, actually did what most people don’t do instinctively, which is spend that time with people, working it through, embedding it as genuine call to action, rther than as a branding exercise for a strategy. And it took time and it wasn’t linear, but we did learn a lot from it and it helped us actually develop our thinking on it as well. And I think we’re now in a position where, okay, we’ve got five years left to deliver on 2030, but we’ve spent those first five years sharpening the axe, so to speak, which is going to make the job I think a lot easier for the next five years.

Yeah, what was it Abraham Lincoln said? You gave me six hours to cut down a tree, I’d spend the first five sharpening the axe. It’s slightly terrifying to realise that we are only five years from 2030 now.

So I also know you’ve been interested in the Mockingbird model. Can you explain that for us?

So we had an inadequate children’s services and that was largely because we had allowed a drift and delay in our services over time and it crept up on us. That’s sometimes the case in an inadequate organisation for children services. It was not a basket case or meltdown, but it had drifted almost kind of slowly into this overreliance on agency.

Our numbers were not kind of wildly out of step, but we had ultimately got to a point where we had tried to do more with less and it just didn’t work. So part of our response to all of this was to really look at our complete setup of children’s services. And one of those key areas is clearly our fostering service and fostering adoption. And what we had kind of recognised was that we’d ticked along and hadn’t probably kept up with the trends nowadays and some of the pressures in the system. And of course, the competition, which is ultimately what it is, comes from private providers. So it was a, again, if it had a silver lining, it was that it afforded us the opportunity to quite radically think differently about what type of models we would work. And we’ve done that in a variety of different ways. And the Mockingbird model set up is ultimately about establishing networks of foster carers and parents, utilising the fact that we have some really great and very experienced foster parents out there, who have a lot to offer and very much as I was saying earlier about that idea of strength based working, local working, know, the council can deliver things but who’s best to deliver support and training to other foster carers and parents? Well, people who’ve done it for decades, people who’ve been there, done that, they’ve seen the challenges, they understood what it meant. So the idea is we utilise those networks of foster parents and carers and use them as a resource to establish training, to establish recruitment. And it works really effectively when you get that right, when you get that set up. And so it’s a hub and spoke model. It’s  again, it’s people who’ve got something, they’ve got something at stake in the system already helping one another.

It’s great to see so much of this recognised in the recent LGA peer review. Are there any opportunities you think you missed or things you didn’t do? What would you advise other leaders who may be earlier or at a different point in this journey?

So I certainly think that it’s never too late to start. So we had to make up for a bit of lost time. And we I think we’re now in a position where we’re doing some really good, innovative stuff around this agenda. And you think I wish we’d have started this five years earlier, but we are where we are. There’s no point kicking yourself too much, it’s never too late to start it, but crucially, I think the important thing is you’ve got to bring everyone along with you on that journey. And I think one of the earlier, I won’t say mistake necessarily, but one of the earlier challenges we faced was we thought we would establish it at the council and everyone would follow it. Well, the truth is that’s not really how it works. People work in their own organisations, their own ways, even within the council people do. So you have to spend that time bringing people together, pulling it all together, having people genuinely buy into what you’re doing. And I think you’ve got to you’ve got to recognise that that’s quite a crucial part of it. You’ve got to have something compelling at the end of it.

That’s the other thing, I think, really giving people a clear sense of why they’re working in this quite stressful environment, why they’re giving up their evenings and weekends sometimes to do their job, why they’re putting up with ⁓ grief and challenge and scrutiny. Well, they’re doing it because it’s contributing to something compelling and inspiring. So you’ve got to bring everyone together around that.

And you’ve got to just stick to it. You’ve got to be willing to reflect and adapt, but never give up on it.

I think what I’m hearing is an emphasis on the fact that this is a journey with multiple stages, where you need to be focused on where you’re going, but you also need to spend time building the foundations properly. And the risk is if you focus on any one of those parts and neglect the others, you don’t get the momentum. You have to be constantly thinking and you have to have all those stages of the process in mind.

Yeah, somebody described it to me the other day as, you’ve got to be able to fix the plane whilst it’s flying. And I think that is the challenge because we don’t just stop for six months and say we’re not going to do council services anymore because we’re doing our own internal reorganisation. You’re expecting people to still deliver high quality services, very, very public, very accountable. In some cases it’s high risk. -, it’s dealing with very vulnerable people.

You’ve got external scrutiny from agencies, you’ve got public scrutiny from councillors and residents and you’ll try to do this all as well from my perspective in a very interesting political decade we’ve just gone through. So let’s hope the next decade’s not as interesting.

Yes, that’s one way of describing it. Where do you think we’re going in the sector and what are the key challenges and opportunities over the next year? What are your hopes and fears for the sector over the next few years?

Well, I do think the new government is a clear opportunity to try and address some of the quite, I would say, existential threats facing local government. There’s no doubt about it. That is a huge task to do. And it’s not something that can be done very quickly or easily or very cheaply. And therein lies the problem. But it is an opportunity and we have some very, very strong ministers at the heart of this now who do understand local government, who do value it. But I think what we can’t do is simply say, well, we’ll sit back and let them fix it. We’ve really as a sector got to be in there, in the thick of it, coming up with the solutions, being open to innovation and new ways of working. Being a bit patient, but also still being clear about the fundamentals that need fixing.

Being real partners in how we do public service reform. You we haven’t talked about it today, but a huge part of what we’re going to have to try and fix is the health side of things, the NHS, because if we don’t fix that well, we, well, put it this way, you’ve got to fix that alongside fixing adult social care. They are two enormous things to fix. And I think ultimately if we’re not, as a sector, if we’re not open to those conversations if we’re not part of the solutions on those challenges. -, we will find ourselves five years from now still scratching our heads about how you fixed some of these big problems and challenges in local government. So we’ve got to be we’ve got to be out there not with a begging bowl, but with a hand, an open hand and a sense that we are willing to very much work with the government on this.

And I think we’ve got a lot to offer because we’ve done a lot of this, know, but what we’ve got to do is pull it together and remain ambitious. And I think obviously devolution is part of that.

That’s right, our offer to government is a helping hand, not a begging hand. We often say at LGIU that national success has local foundations. Central government needs local government as much as the other way around. It’s a partnership, as you say.

Well that’s argument we’ve got to win that the only way the national government will deliver on its objectives is having a strong local government, local foundation. know, is a great example of that. know, governments can do big schemes, big projects, but what’s really going to drive growth in this country is those local communities, those local high streets, those local town centres, getting the skill system right.

And we could make the same argument. We could make the same argument about wellbeing, about child poverty, about any number of other things. So interesting. We are, as always, defeated by time. Eamonn, I’m so grateful because I know that our members will find that and others will find that really, really useful. So thank you for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

For more on Bury Council’s Transformation Journey, see their transformation strategy and a copy of their presentation on the LET’S Do It approach. Find more resources and interviews with local leaders on the LGIU website.