Cllr Lorna Fielker: reflections on the past, vision for the future

We recently interviewed Cllr Lorna Fielker, the previous Leader of Southampton City Council about her next move as she looks to become the first regional mayor of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. 

In our conversation, Cllr Fielker discussed her journey into the sector, the importance of the ‘Cllr’ title, and her vision for a more equal Southampton. She shared her insights on overcoming various challenges and highlighted the need for honest self-assessment, external expertise, and a joined up approach to transformation.

Can you tell us about your journey into local government?

I worked at Exeter City Council for just over a decade. My Dad was a conservative councillor for a very long time. I knew what local government was about, but I had no ambition to become elected. Then, I moved to Southampton in 2014. I didn’t really know anybody, but I had a Labour Party membership. I went to some meetings, started knocking on doors and then somebody said to me, “Have you thought about being a councillor?” I wanted to do something in my community.

Local government is a place for change. When I got elected the first time, it was great. Of course, the done thing is to say nothing and sit back, but I knew that I wanted to work in a policy position. I put myself forward to be chair of governance and scrutiny. I had no expectation of getting either of those roles, but if you don’t say that you want to do something, nobody’s going to think about you for it. There was a vacancy created, and I filled it. It was probably not a popular move for the leader at the time, but it was great for me to just be in the right place at the right time.

“So much of what happens in life can be skills and abilities, but there is also being in the right place when the opportunity is there and saying that you are there for it.”

I became a Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care, then they tacked health onto that. At another point, they tacked leisure onto it. Then leisure came away, and I had housing tacked on. So, I’ve had pretty big portfolios, but that doesn’t really prepare you for being leader of a council. That’s a whole different beast in itself, but one that’s very enjoyable – and stressful.

Was Southampton City Council as you expected, or were there things that surprised you?

It wasn’t as I anticipated because I came from a district council, which runs very differently from a unitary. What surprised me wasn’t really the politics but the organisational issues, particularly around setting budgets. I also don’t think I prepared myself for no longer being called Lorna Fielker. That’s something you have to get over because culturally it’s really important, and it took me many years to understand the importance of the word ‘councillor’. People have gone to the ballot box, put an X against your name. It’s about recognising the power of that position. That’s why the word ‘councillor’ is very important – it opens doors that Lorna Fielker wouldn’t open, which enables you to do something to help your community.

Can you tell us about your vision for Southampton?

Southampton is a city of great wealth, but we’re also the 55th most deprived local authority in England. If you are a man who lives in the most deprived area, you will live on average 6.3 years fewer than those living in the best areas. For a woman, it’s 4.3 years. Of course, it’s not just shorter lives; it’s lives that are in poorer health and quality.

For me, there’s something about Southampton – we are a place that celebrates the diversity of our culture and population. The people here are so generous in sharing their backgrounds, and that’s really wonderful. But in reality, many of those people are living in deprived areas, and they’re not accessing the good jobs and opportunities. We’re taking something away from those people rather than rewarding them for doing what we seek as a port city: to come and stay. That’s the nature of Southampton’s city sanctuary model as it is today.

“My vision has always been that as a city, we are just more equal. So when we grow, we grow in a way that benefits everybody, and they can access the opportunities that we have now and in the future.”

The council can’t do it all on its own. It’s about convening all the main stakeholders to work on collective missions that improve residents’ lives. If we do that, we become more than the sum of our parts. A really nice thing for me to end my tenure on is that we are launching our city plan – created with our partners in the universities, hospital, police, football club, port, and shopping centre. All these people are signed up for collective missions. We’re aiming to get greener, healthier, safer and more prosperous and crucially more equal. That to me says something to residents that, as a city, we care for their future outcomes.

Southampton has got loads of great stuff, but it’s really disjointed in how it does it. Everybody’s been working in their little silos, doing their own things rather than coming together. In February, we developed a city centre master plan, a vision that everybody signed up to, where there’s no duplication. For instance, we now all know where a new arena is most likely to go after  years of discussions. For a council to deliver on whatever its vision is, it’s about the power of convening. We shouldn’t presume that because we’re the council, we should be doing all these things. That’s not actually our job. Our job is to help bring people together, and we have very specific things to do.

Can you tell us about the transformation journey you’ve led at Southampton City Council?

When I became Leader of Southampton (18 months ago), we were a council that was in crisis. Our predicted budget gap was over £40m, and we had a £52m equal pay claim liability. With these massive numbers, the only way we could set the budget was to get permission for exceptional financial support – and it was one of the biggest packages given, totalling £121m. What we did with that money was begin our transformation journey, because you can’t transform without spending cash.

I began to work with Southampton’s Chief Executive to address siloed working. This sort of thing is a big issue for all large organisations, but particularly for local government. The council did not believe in our ability to change and had no appetite or courage to do that either. We also lacked clarity about who we were as an organisation. We were lurching from one thing to another with too many strategies and policies and not really doing much.

To be effective, we needed to have a clear idea, a clear vision, and then we needed to get people to work with us on that. We worked very closely with our officers on this because they are the doers. We also needed to look to others outside of the organisation. The first action really was the admission that we as politicians and officers were part of the problem.

“You can’t be transformed unless you actually do that honest bit of work first, or you’ll just keep failing. You won’t recognise what the issues are in the system.”

We had established a Voluntary Improvement Board four months before I became Leader, but we had not been engaging with their advice. I worked closely with the Chair and asked her to step in and work directly with the senior management team for a short period of time and show them how things could be different, which I know can be really, really hard for officers. This gave them a belief and an understanding. We all emerged from a darkened place, not looking so frightened anymore, and actually being a really strong team who could work together and achieve. Some of it is about luck and having the right person there at the right time, but the key thing is about creating conditions for success. Not everybody has the opportunity to do that, but I did, and I took it.

What we did was develop a transformation plan to enable us to adapt to the new world that we live in. We recognised that there really is no money left down the back of the sofa, despite what everybody believes. We saw the need to do things very differently while also aiming for long-term success. You’ve got to do the two. The budget that we set was the first balanced budget in over a decade. It predicts growth, and we can only meet that if we grow our income.

Do you have advice for anyone finding it hard to balance short-term transformation with long-term strategy?

It’s about having belief and creating the structures – allocating the right resources and believing that you can deliver. It is hard, and you have to ask, “Why are we in this mess?” We’re in this mess because we’ve not managed to modernise our core services , we have also failed to grow the city, and we just kept taking out reserves.

“You have to go back to the root of the problem and you have to spend money – that’s the key to successful transformation”.

It all comes down to recruiting the right transformation partner who understands and knows you.

If you get the right transformation partner, they will deliver for you. We haven’t gone with the big four consulting names. We’ve got an organisation called Newton. They come in and look at how you work and what it is that you need to do, and they’ve given people the skills and knowledge to work differently, particularly in the social care space. Not only have we already saved £9 million in the six months they’ve been working with us. They are really transferring skills, and I saw a lovely piece of evidence for it last week.

One of the main consultants working in children’s was leaving to go travelling. The team wrote a book of poems about the work that he had done and how it had not only changed them as a team but also the outcomes for residents. That’ll stay with him for the entirety of his career. By coming in and helping us work with data in a way that we’ve never done before, looking at social care practice in a different way, it’s really created benefits.

The other real challenge that people need to think about when they’re moving into this space is that you have to work at speed. Working at speed means you’re not necessarily taking people along that journey with you. Firstly, are you bringing in the officers or your cabinet members? Are you creating the space so they can explain that to their team, particularly if you have to make decisions related to service change? If you don’t do that preparatory work then you’re not going to get the decision that you need.

There’s an important thing that I’ve learned: this council has fundamentally changed so much about how it works. Change is difficult, and if you don’t bring everybody along, you might not get the change that you need, and you can’t underestimate the power of that.

How does local government reorganisation and devolution fit with this transformation journey? Is it part of the process or a distraction?

Let’s consider local government reorganisation first. It’s a question of capacity and prioritisation of difficult decisions relating to service changes.

One approach could be to wait until you’ve created something different and then defer a difficult decision. Instead, my view is that we should remember that we are a unitary authority that will become bigger and that the transformation skill set we are learning will help us to do that. We’re going to have a lot of different systems in place and a number of different contracts, but we can tackle these if we instil a more intelligent way of using data.

I understand local government reorganisation as a process rather than an existential crisis; we view it as just another piece of work that needs to be done. But a problem at the moment is that everybody is focused on maps. Once we know what the map is, then you’ve actually got something to transform.. With devolution, we already work well with the other authorities across the region, the Mayoral Combined Authority gives us the opportunity to do that on steroids, it’s a great opportunity for us to do more to positively impact the lives of residents in our region.

How is Southampton working through a prevention agenda?

Prevention is not about stopping people from going to the GP or hospital; it’s about enabling people to live their best lives, whatever that looks like. As I mentioned earlier, there are great inequalities in Southampton, and we are not going to crack anything on prevention until we crack something around housing, which is a major issue for us. Unless people actually have a secure, settled and safe home, they’re just not going to engage in those things that enable a good life. As a landlord, the council is currently not  good. People are living in homes that aren’t decent, our waiting list is high, and our private rented sector is poor quality and very expensive. It’s really hard for people to access the homes that they need in order to do school properly, to work well, and to not have to send their kids all over the city to get to school

It’s wonderful we have a Labour government that’s really focused on house building. It’s a big target they’ve got, but I’ve got no worries about having a big ambition because if you don’t reach for it, you’ll never get anything. For me, the worry is that we focus on a numbers game rather than the right homes for the right people. For example, family housing can’t just be a small box. You need to have somewhere where kids can do their homework, where people can gather together, and environments where you can work from home. We’ve been doing loads of great stuff in this city for a long time, but we have not moved the indicators very much in terms of our health inequalities. Housing, for me, is at the core of that.

Reflecting on your time as leader, are there any missed opportunities or things you feel you would have liked to have done differently?

I think it’s that we dithered for months and didn’t move as quickly as we could. But how do you shift that? It’s a cultural thing. I think that with more councils struggling, the more we can look to those who demonstrate transformational programme success, it will help people get to that headspace quicker.

Our story from adapt | grow | thrive is extraordinary because of what we have achieved, and I’m going to take some credit for it because I have been the Leader for that period of time. Nobody can replicate our story because every local authority is different. It does show that it can be done, but only if you go to that transformation partner, recruit the right person, and know exactly what you want from them.

As you transition into a different relationship with the sector, what are your reflections on how the sector is approaching transformation?

Ultimately, when you look at transformation, you need to transform your whole council, not just a service area. You need to implement a programme that will transform everything. Everything has to work differently, or it won’t be successful.

The reason for this goes back to why local government reorganisation is necessary – you need to work on every level and area of an organisation to drive change. There is no point in doing anything in adult social care if you’re not addressing your housing stock. It’s actually about ensuring more people have access to it, because your housing stock is inadequate.

“Another important reflection is to be honest with yourself. We’re not always very good at that because we’re politicians. We don’t like to admit that we might’ve got it wrong.”

It’s about moving to become a sector that actually embraces risk at all levels and plans for it, including in your meetings. If you’re a leader of the council, you’re going into a meeting and admitting that parts of a transformation programme might not work. That honesty is what creates space to try, test, and maybe fail.

Looking for more interviews? Check out what others in the sector are saying to LGIU right now about the key issues facing local government