Interview with Owen Mapley, Chief Executive of CIPFA

LGIU’s Chief Executive, Jonathan Carr-West, sat down with Owen Mapley, Chief Executive of CIPFA, to discuss LGIU and CIPFA’s joint project exploring the different paths towards a National Care Service in England, Scotland and Wales, and what each nation can learn from the others. They also unpack LGR, partnership working, and leadership in a period of complex challenge.

Owen Mapley has been the Chief Executive Officer of CIPFA since 2024. Prior to his current role he was Chief Executive of Hertfordshire County Council for around half a decade. Owen brings extensive experience in finance, operations, and leadership across a range of senior roles in local and central government. Owen has also worked in professional services for many years and has been an NHS integrated care system board member for the last five years.

Editor’s note: This conversation was recorded on 10th March 2026

Watch the full conversation on YouTube here.

Timestamps:

01:54 The greatest challenges facing local government
03:29 Challenges in a time of instability and volatility
04:46 The crucial nature of mutual respect
06:46 Maintaining pride in the face of challenge
09:37 CIPFA’s core mission
11:12 Exploring the national case service debate
13:47 Navigating social care reform in a political landscape
16:06 Removing barriers for improved services
17:39 Understanding the issue wholly before implementing change
19:56 Local governments’ role in social care
21:33 Building collaborative cultures in local government
24:25 Leadership’s role in community culture
26:01 Comparative insights from UK nations
27:19 Building consensus on the importance of social care
28:57 Balancing consensus building the urgency for action
31:16 Making the value of social care clear

You join us at an interesting moment. There’s a lot going on in local government, as people who work in and around the sector I feel like we’ve never been busier, we’ve never been trying to absorb more information or developments. What’s your sense of where we are right now? What do you think are the greatest challenges that we’re facing as a sector right now?

I think you’re absolutely right. Everybody I speak to is juggling a combination of both the operational BAU, big strategic changes and huge amounts of policy reform or mooted policy reform. So in terms of challenges, I tend to categorise them into a couple of areas. One, just capacity is really tight at the moment, really constrained. I’ll break that down even further.

We all know demand for many of the services is continuing to increase wherever you look, housing, road repairs, social care, SEND, etc. But the funding and resources to cope with them are constrained. And with funding, there’s a capacity issue as well. We’re looking to see how the recently announced results of the Fair Funding Review will actually impact on local places. We could debate all day about the impacts of that, but it’s clear that on its own isn’t going to fix things. Workforce we’ve got to touch on, that’s constrained. And of course policy, I think it’s a very busy area. So put all that together, capacity and prioritisation I think are a real challenge for many councils.

It’s really hard, isn’t it? And for people in leadership positions in those councils, you talk to many council chief execs, many leaders, as I do, you are a council chief exec. One of the things I hear is people saying it’s the most complex it’s ever been. People are going through reorganisation, saying this is a full-time job on top of my full-time job of actually running the council. I think when I look at it, I think that feels fair, right? This does feel like a uniquely challenging time for many of the professionals who are trying to.

I would agree and that combination of challenges we just talked about would be tough at any time but for them to happen at a time of such instability and volatility that clearly as officers or advisors we don’t comment on the party politics of it but in a world in an era where we are seeing significant changes at the ballot box where there’s uncertainty about what the outcomes are going to be.

All officers will pride themselves on working with whoever the electorate returns. But it just adds to that complexity where there could be significant swings, could be changes, there’s a growing number of new elected officials, there’s a growing number of first-time senior leaders stepping into the biggest roles. That just adds to that complexity, challenge and volatility.

Absolutely, that’s something I hear a lot. Senior officers say it’s not about party politics, it’s about churn. It’s about suddenly having so many new councillors all at once. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s a lot of change to manage. All of those people need support in those new roles. I have seen enough of councillors over the years to know that it’s a bit of a shock. You get elected as a councillor, and suddenly the learning curve is really steep.

Absolutely. It re-emphasises just the crucial nature of everybody involved really leaning into creating that culture of mutual respect where officers recognise respect and strain to deliver the priorities of those councillors who have a local democratic mandate and those councillors recognising that they can’t do it on their own. It’s got to be a mutually respectful partnership with officers who’ve got a really complex mix of both statutory and professional responsibilities to deliver.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s probably not too crude to say that councils that get that right give themselves the best chance of flourishing. Councils that don’t get that right are really tying one or both hands behind their back if they can’t get that mutually respectful working going.

I completely agree. Everybody respects that. They pride themselves on being councillor-run organisations, but it’s that partnership that can really make a council do well and do better than just coping in difficult circumstances. By really leaning into being the local convener and the local system integrator – there’s so much potential there.

That’s really interesting. I think one of the challenges is that you just get locked in a mindset that’s about coping, surviving and getting through challenges. What the public actually expects from councils, quite reasonably, is that they’re focused on thriving, on making places better. It’s quite easy to get sucked into the doom loop of always talking about the challenge and the problem. Always talking about how we are going to get through the next year? How are we going to make the finances add up? But actually, that’s a sort of necessary but not sufficient kind of condition.

I completely agree. I’ve got a real privilege at the moment that I’m involved in some of the judging for some of the national awards. I recognise that everybody bidding for those sorts of honours have their Sunday best on in their submissions. But absolutely, I see good practice, I see pride in place, I see people going above and beyond to deliver for their places. So we’ve got to be realistic about the challenges being faced, but not exclusively negative or reductive about it, because we have a responsibility to point out that no matter how hard the money gets, there are still billions of pounds being spent that have real benefit for local people. We’ve still got a leadership responsibility to encourage people to come in and work and stay in delivering services that matter for local people. Wide-eyed and clear-eyed about the challenges, but proud and celebratory as well.

You touched on how part of the challenge lies in those big, demand-led services, particularly social care and children’s services. In many upper-tier councils, 70–80% of revenue spending goes on these alone. That’s a real issue because, as our finance survey shows, people feel they’re paying more in council tax but getting less in return. To some extent, that’s true—so much funding is absorbed by statutory services. That’s why we need a serious conversation about making these services more preventative. Even if more funding were available, it wouldn’t keep pace with rising demand, so we have to focus on managing that demand.

Well, you’ve hinted at it, but CIPFA’s core mission is to help governments and finance practitioners ensure that public money is spent well. Why? To provide better public services for the benefit of us all. We do a financial resilience index every year in partnership with InfoShare, and that’s showing that on average 78% of net expenditure is going on children’s or adults’ social care. So, given just what a massive proportion that is, it’s vital that is spent in the optimal way, and because of the scale of it and the demographics, governments just need to grapple with this. They’re trying to do it worldwide, but we know we’ve been talking about this literally for years.

Now that it’s a manifesto commitment to look at how a care service can be provided better, it’s utterly essential that professional bodies, sector bodies, and the sector itself really lean into this and try to influence it to be as effective as it can be.

We’ve seen moves towards a national care service in Scotland and in Wales. It’s the sort of idea that’s floating around in English public policy, never quite pinning down exactly what it is. Why do you think that idea has been so attractive to politicians?

When Baroness Casey gave her first reflections last week, she recognised that there hasn’t been a founding event to define what adult social care is, or could be or should be, compared to some of the other things that Beveridge was looking at. So it’s understandable that the concept of a national care service should be attractive. We know there’s a lot of support, affection, and love for the NHS, which is there for us in our hardest times. It’s been a success story over decades for the way this country has done it. So I get the draw of something like that, but the fact that we’ve never actually defined what it is, I think, makes it problematic.

In the reports that we’ve done together with LGIU and CIPFA, we’ve seen that in Scotland, they were sort of looking at making it, removing the responsibility for social care from local government, reforming authorities and integration authorities and making ministers responsible for it. So it was a structural idea of it. In Wales, it’s more loosely defined, and they’re taking a more iterative approach to learning, improving, and developing.

Of course, Labour had a manifesto commitment to a national care service with national standards but local delivery. I think it’s absolutely crucial that, given those divergences, we actually have a debate about what we mean by a national care service. We don’t just think about it in structural terms or moving deck chairs, but we actually step back and say, what’s the nature of the need? What’s the way that need can be satisfied? What’s the optimal way of providing that? That’s what gets you into really interesting debating territory.

I think that is exactly the debate that we should be having. I read Louise Casey’s speech with interest, and I was both heartened and disheartened by it. She talked about the need for that foundational moment, that national conversation. But why haven’t we? It’s not because no one’s ever thought that we ought to. There just seems to be something that has prevented us from doing that. I wonder if we understand where that difficulty comes from well enough?

I talked earlier about the mutually respectful partnership, and I think we need to recognise that this has been difficult territory for every government that’s looked at this. We’ve seen the consequences of those who put their head above the parapet and said, here’s an idea. Because of the nature of the political machine, it gets shot down, and it’s labelled the dementia tax. So it’s understandable that there are political debates to have. But let’s face it, these issues are not going away. They’re not going to be solved quickly and easily within one parliament. Unless politicians of every hue can come together and have a debate about the principles and how to go about addressing those, we are consigning ourselves to decades more of make-do and mend. It in effect relies on the not far off exploitation of low-paid workers, of just choosing to ignore the catastrophic financial impacts it can have on some families, the unfairness between certain illnesses and certain aspects of aging and so on. It’s been said before, but I would hope that somebody of Casey’s influence can make an impact.

I agree with all of that. By the way, of course, it impacts local authorities, right? You will see this all the time, a debate about whether funding sits within the NHS or with the local authorities because it’s social care, can be a multi-million pound decision.

I’ve seen it. What we need to go back to time and time again is the user need and providing a service to those who need it. I’ve got a bit of a hobby horse that any resident or any citizen who uses public services, the providers of those services are all just ‘them’. They don’t care whether it’s a mental health trust or an acute hospital or a district council or a county council or a unitary. It’s just ‘them’. So there is an obligation in providing public service, for everybody to take their lanyards off, take down some of those barriers and say, how do we best organise ourselves around the needs of those who use those services? But of course, in that busy environment we talked about right up front, some of those presenting issues and pressures are encouraging individual public service organisations to look down and cope with their issues at a time we need them to be looking up and across to provide that more holistic, joined-up service based around user need.

We’ve got to be really cautious and careful about pooling issues in one organisation, but not actually addressing the issues they have to deal with. We’ve seen years now of demand outstripping expectation and resources, but those delivery bodies are still being held accountable through inspection regimes and others, as if they were fully funded to deal with those issues. Unless we get into the real root causes, unless we have that proper shift into preventionand that proper join up between different types of service. Really, I think you’ve nailed it, it is deck chair shifting rather than the national debate needed about what the issues are with ageing, what is fairness in terms of providing the funding to pay for that. That can’t be just at the whim of ballot box politics.

I think that brings us to the role of local government. I worry the conversation is too focused on integrating social care and health, important as that is, because it tends to address issues at one end of the machine. What we really need is to stop people from reaching the hospital in the first place, with a stronger shift toward prevention. That does require health and social care integration, but also deeper coordination with housing, leisure, streetscape, planning, and other local services that sit within and are connected by local authorities.

I think that is the perfect segue into why I think local government needs to continue to have a major role in how this is planned and delivered. We need to be clear about the value and role of social care within our societies. It cannot ever be allowed to become a reductive focus on just how quickly you can get people discharged from hospital. That’s, of course, an element of it, but it’s about helping people to live their best lives. It’s about giving someone independence and compassion, helping them keep their quiet dignity. That needs all of those sorts of concepts joined up. We’ve got to recognise that any reform of social care is a version of reform in local government. So we need local government players deeply embedded in the way that this evolves, discussing how best to contribute to all of those wider determinants of health and wellbeing that councils are so rightly proud of delivering.

You’ll be unsurprised to know that is very much the LGIU view. We totally agree with that. You’ve been on the board of an integrated care system for some years, what are the keys to making that work better, that level of kind of join up and putting local government in the mix as part of that conversation?

It seems to go through phases. There are times when the mood music, the mantra coming from the centre of government is encouraging, maybe facilitating, maybe requiring that sort of join up. ICBs and their sister organisations, the ICPs, were explicitly part of government policy to bring together all the local partners, the NHS, local government, emergency services, voluntary organisations and patient groups – bringing them all together. I think that was proving effective, but midway through implementation, it’s been thrown up in the air with the reorganisation of NHS England, redrawing of the boundaries of ICBs. You can’t rely on a central mandate to encourage those sorts of local partnerships. What you can do, though, is look to local leaders (be they elected officials, be they senior officers) because I think local partnership, local collaboration is an attitude, it’s a determination, it’s something that you do when you’ve got pride in place. It can be helped by central government policy, but it’s not required. So even though some of those factors are perhaps risking people looking down and protecting their silo, now more than ever, you need a breed of local leader, elected or employed, who are determined to work in partnership because they know that’s what makes place work best.

I guess you’re tweaking the old cliche that culture eats structure for breakfast, right? 

Absolutely right. The places that did best in the pandemic had built those sorts of collaborative local partnership relationships before they were truly needed and tested because of all the issues that we saw in 2020 and beyond.

So we’re changing the geographies of ICBs, there’s an aspiration to make them coterminous with strategic authorities. We’re doing local government reorganisation across 21 areas of the country. We are, in principle, doing devolution across the whole country. So everywhere we’ll have that, whether it’s a foundation strategic authority or a mayoral strategic authority. So we’re doing an awful lot all at once. My worry is that those places that you were talking about, where people did this really well because they had that culture of collaboration, in general, that was either good luck or it was something that had been developed organically over many years. But we don’t want to rely on luck or years and years of organic development. What do need to put in place to kind of shortcut to that collaboration? culture?

Well, I guess the government would say if they were sitting here, that’s one of the roles they see for elected mayors, that mayoral combined authorities over a bigger area provides the scaffolding, and with the right responsibilities, can put actual accountability, opportunity and responsibility into a role, into a place. But clearly that’s going to happen in different places at different times. Before we get there, some of the infrastructure we’ve talked about is just happening at different times. The ICB geographies were announced. We’re waiting to hear what the new LGR geographies are going to be.

Call me a gloriously naive optimist, but I come back to whatever is going on; some of that could just be noise, and you’ve still got the opportunity. A local authority chief exec, a local authority leader, the chair of hospital trusts or community trusts, the senior leaders absolutely can decide this is how we do things around here, and the borders may change, but the leadership behaviours don’t.

Opportunity and a responsibility. To vary it a bit, we’ll have people watching this Owen from England, but also some of our viewers in Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. Can we tease out a little bit more because obviously it does look quite different in Scotland, Wales and England. Where do you think the significant differences and important similarities are across the UK?

So I think that each country will need to find its own path. There are different ways of structuring things. There are different priorities around funding and whether CAP should be used or whether it should be completely free at the point of use. But the principles of what’s happening to the demographics are absolutely identical. So I think this is an area where people are at different stages of that policy development life cycle.

But reports like ours that bring out the importance, whether it be responding to challenges in these agendas. Like Scotland moving on from talking about a national care service, we think there are things that are still universal, despite that, around finance. You definitely need dedicated funding to promote sustainability improvements. Whatever the system, you’ve got to have clear accountabilities within whatever sort of integration is being set up.

Or governance; what are we deciding about standardisation of service requirements versus delegation of service delivery? In Wales, we were looking at the importance of again clarifying where the costs of the current system fall. Have we got sufficiency across different parts of the system? Again, governance, you’ve got to demarcate between what’s national and what’s local.

Really, from both areas, it was clear that there’s further work needed to build a consensus and build transparency about what it is we’re doing. I think we can learn from all of that in England, because whilst the pandemic raised the profile of adult social care, it was still too often focused on an ageing population or speed of discharge from hospital, rather than social care being about recognising working-age adults with some form of disability who need support. So I think all of them could start with even more work to build consensus on the importance of this work.

We’ve got to be realistic. We used to talk about the impact of global instability and geopolitics because of the situation in Ukraine. Well, recording this in mid-March (2026), who knows what the future is going to be and the impact of the price of oil or the return of inflation? So it’s not going to get any easier. But the way the demographics are marching on, there’s no excuse for any government not to make progress on these things.

It reminds me of the joke I use a lot, “When’s the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. When’s the next best time? Today.” So whatever the challenges facing or the presenting issues that need dealing with, the demographics are unquestionable. As a country, as a world, everybody needs to get to grips with what our approach is. I mean that across all the devolved nations as well. Being clear about what sort of support is appropriate to ask the state to provide, what is reasonable to expect families or communities to provide, and what is the best way of funding that, or the least worst way of funding that, because ignoring it and expecting any public service, in this case local councils, to just suck it up is sustainable for a while. I think it’s clear we’re starting to run out of road.

So, we’ve covered a whole range of issues there. A lot of what we’ve been talking about is very challenging because we’re trying to do complex things. And for many people in public service, this is the most challenging period of their careers. It’s also a once-in-a-career opportunity to do something. To reshape. With that in mind, what’s our advice to people who are struggling to kind of look up, you talked about looking up and out, how do you do that when it’s so difficult daily?

I think it depends, there are different ways of doing it at different times of the day, the week, the year. I know as a senior leader, one of the biggest impacts I could have was just ensuring that those people providing those services were seen and heard. That it’s clear they are valued. Spending time walking in their shoes, listening and understanding them to ensure you’re incorporating that into what you’re doing. Saying thank you. All of those sorts of things are important.

But I think also there’s an onus on organisations to keep telling stories. It’s rising in the consciousness, but where I came from, Hertfordshire, there are 1.2 million residents. Probably the majority of this funding went to a cohort of no more than 30 or 40,000 residents, and that needs to be explained, rather than excused and sort of apologised for.

Explain that as a community, you are coming together to provide these services for those who need them, and you never know when it’s going to be your or your family’s turn. I think we’ve got to do more collectively to raise the consciousness about the value and importance of some of these services to have that proper national debate.

Where I have been involved in public-facing discussions where this has been explained creatively, people are often surprised but broadly supportive. As you say, there’s strong consensus—no one disputes supporting vulnerable older people at home or protecting children at risk. The challenge is drawing the line.Our polling with Ipsos shows people see councils as having the biggest impact on their quality of life. But, as we touched on earlier, they’re much less aware of the link to the councillors they elect—or don’t elect, given turnout—because that decision-making isn’t visible. There’s clearly more we can do to bridge that gap.

Absolutely. But think any work on this, it’s got to keep the workforce central to it because we can’t do any of this without investing in supporting that workforce. I think we’ve got to clearly evidence the benefits to people who draw on that care and support. You mentioned earlier, we’ve got to find ways of prioritising prevention, whether that’s more community work or upstream intervention. Prevention is going to be absolutely central.

We know that social care happens within a wider system, a local system, so let’s not allow it to be reductive just about the delivery of daycare or aspects of it.

I guess that’s where you come in, that’s where I come in. CIPFA, like LGIU, is there to support the local government workforce, to help people understand what’s happening, to connect them with peers, connect them with ideas, and connect them with best practice as a way of trying to provide that support.

I totally agree. Because there are different definitions of what a national care service could be, I think the third and final report in our series is so effective in saying you can’t specify but here are some principles that we think would apply, however you go about reforming it. So some of the things I’ve already talked about are building consensus, having a realistic timeline, answering the funding questions, etc.

If anybody’s remotely interested from the conversation we’ve had, I’d really encourage them to just have a look at some of those briefings because they’re very edible, and I think they are excellent.

You can read the entire CIPFA/LGIU national care service series here.