Rachel Joyce on reorganising local government for the better

Our interview with Rachel Joyce explores her extensive experience in local government, focusing on her role in North Yorkshire’s unitarisation process. She highlights the benefits and addresses the challenges of LGR, emphasising the importance of local focus and community engagement above all else, even in a bigger structure.

Watch the full conversation here

01:14 – Rachel’s journey into local government

03:57 – Initial reaction to unitarisation in North Yorkshire

08:45 – Navigating political views

11:58 – Lessons learned from the reorganisation process

13:34 – The role of Assistant Chief Executive Local Engagement

16:36 – Balancing size and local engagement

19:33 – Investing in local communities

21:19 – Flexibility across teams for local delivery

23:45 – The importance of relationships in reorganisation

26:48 – Key advice for local government staff

29:17 – Avoiding the pitfalls during reorganisation

32:24 – Reimagining local government for the future

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

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey in the local government sector? 

I used to do a lot of voluntary work with a homeless charity at university, so when I left, I began working for them. Then I was talking to some close friends, and they said about local government. I’d never considered entering the sector before, but they said one of the best ways to make a difference to people’s lives is to join local government and influence policy and activity on the ground. That led me to join Nottingham City Council when I was about 22 as a trainee housing advisor, and that’s where my local government career began. I loved it, and I loved working in housing and with all of the teams.

I worked my way through to being a housing advisor, then I worked in homelessness advice and prevention. I went on to work in revenues and benefits before joining a council in Cornwall, then Kennet, a district council, which again no longer exists. Eventually, anywhere I’ve been has been reorganised. While I was in Cornwall, I ended up working in corporate policy, so setting up their local strategic partnership and working on things like the council plan, neighbourhood renewal funding and corporate policy.

Then I moved up North and joined local government in North Yorkshire in corporate policy and partnerships. This was before going to Durham, where I worked as an assistant chief exec for a district council within Durham. I worked on their local government reorganisation programme at Durham County Council before moving to Harrogate Borough Council as assistant chief exec about 15 years ago. After four years, I became their corporate director. So it’s been sort of varied, mainly within the corporate policy functions over the last 20 years.

You ended up back at North Yorkshire where you saw reorganisation up close. Can you then talk us through what your initial thoughts were when, Robert Jenrick, then Secretary of State, invited proposals for unitarisation from North Yorkshire? 

Well, to be honest, I was really pleased. One of the reasons that I moved up to Durham was that North Yorkshire wasn’t successful in the first round of unitary proposals. I’ve always been a firm believer, despite working for district and borough councils for the majority of my career, that unitary councils and the ability to join together services would be a good thing for local communities. It was quite disappointing that North Yorkshire didn’t go through at that time. There’s always some trepidation because I knew the amount of work that it would involve and trepidation on a personal basis, which we all go through when we’ve all got mortgages to pay and everything else. That personal ‘what does that mean for me’ is always going to be there and that’s always going to be a concern for people. We shouldn’t forget that when we’re going through these big change programmes.

But generally, I was excited. North Yorkshire is a challenge because it’s geographically so large – how that unitarisation would take place and what shape that would be was the challenging question. Being part of Harrogate Borough Council at the time and joining together with the other districts and boroughs within North Yorkshire and helping develop that business case was the first challenge. Then obviously, moving into once the decision is made and how you take that forward was the second challenge. But I was excited I was not put off by that.

Having gone through it, you have a firm view that the advantages of unitarisation outweigh any disadvantages. Can you tell us a bit more about where you see those advantages lying?

I’ve always worked in partnership in my career and there’s always a level of frustration and a level of having to get people around a table to try and agree through different governance mechanisms to actually affect change on the ground and do things to improve outcomes. Unitarisation allows services from across one council to be brought together under a single leadership to tackle critical issues. It does work, so you know it is something that I think can really make a difference.

That’s not to say that district or county councils are not working well, but they’ve sometimes just got a slightly different way of working, and it just doesn’t necessarily align with what you’re trying to achieve. If it were up to me and I could have anything, then I’d like all of the boundaries to be aligned so that the NHS, the police, etc., have a single footprint and are empowered to work for our communities. I think there are a lot of efficiencies to be gained by bringing teams together.

There is a lot of trepidation about becoming a unit and what that’s going to mean for individuals and teams. But by bringing seven teams together within North Yorkshire, the capacity within that now one larger team means that you can have specialist posts that concentrate on delivering in particular ways. So in our housing service now, we’ve got specialist posts that are working with migrants. Well, that didn’t happen before. It gives that greater concentration and capacity to be able to deliver the day job, but also to create specialisms. I think that’s really important.

You were keen on unitarisation, but presumably, that was not a universal view. People had different views and political priorities about how it should be done. How did you, as corporate director, navigate through those conflicting points of view and political priorities?

From a Harrogate Borough Council perspective, we brought together the seven district and borough chief execs and leaders to form a group to develop the district council business case. From an officer point of view, it’s a bit like any decision, you’re presenting your business case and the options based on the evidence. That’s your job, to put what you think the preferred way forward might be.

All of the chief execs and leaders didn’t necessarily always agree. One of the critical things I think is that we brought on board KPMG to support the process. KPMG were really helpful with bringing all the leaders together to have those political discussions to be able to determine what option was going to be taken forward. I think that would have been really tricky for an officer to do because there were seven quite different views in the room. We can only really put forward what the evidence shows in a non-political way.

I think it was really helpful that we brought together the evidence base and that was done at an officer level across all seven district and borough councils. This makes sure that your officer team are deeply embedded, which a) reduces cost, b) we know the local area and we know the intricacies of North Yorkshire and how some of those things would or wouldn’t work around communities. So, being able to get all of the teams really involved in bringing the business case together was critical. Everybody’s at different places and everybody’s quite concerned. So by bringing teams together to really work on that is part of that journey and bringing people along with you is so important.

Were there any challenges that came up during the process that you hadn’t thought about? I mean, you obviously had the advantage of having seen it before, but I guess there are similarities, but also differences every time. 

Yes, during the bid writing process and up to the point where we submitted to government, we probably didn’t give enough attention to briefing and our external communications around local leaders. So having a really strong communications plan and giving some thoughts about community leaders and leaders within the patch and what their views are. We could probably have done more, and we didn’t really think about that in a huge great detail until probably quite late in the day.

I think that once the decision was made and then we moved into the transition year. The challenges were probably more around the change process for the district and borough staff that were going through it who felt that it was going to be a takeover because our bid obviously was unsuccessful, and the county council bid for single unitary was the one that government approved. There was a definite need to have a very big focus on staff and the change process. I think we could have given more thought prior to the announcement on what that might need to look like rather than sort of starting again from that initial when we got the announcement.

What drew you to the position of assistant chief at the new unitary?

Once it was announced that it was going to be North Yorkshire Council and I worked alongside Robert Ling as co-directors of the LGR program, I was spending half the time at Harrogate and half the time in the program office. I suppose the one thing that’s always driven me throughout my career, as I said at the beginning, it was the reason why I started, having that impact on the lives of people who live and work wherever you are.

One of the ambitions that was set through the transition year was that we wanted North Yorkshire Council to be the most local – the largest but most local council. They created the Assistant Chief Executive Local Engagement role as part of that vision. The thing that really struck me about that was they were going to put the capacity into making that vision a reality. And also having some free rein to be able to do some real thinking around what that meant and what those teams would do. I have capacity in a number of my teams now to be able to actually deliver on that and be the glue across the council that tries to make sure we’re delivering on our promises. That was really appealing to me to work across an organisation of over 10,000 staff across all of the services.

It’s interesting that you’ve found there’s an advantage from the increased size to be more local, can you share a bit more abot how large unitary councils, potentially intended to serve 500,000 people, maintain a strong local focus and engagement?

Yeah, so we developed this idea of being a very local but really large council. We tussled throughout that transition year quite heavily with what that meant, what you could actually do, and what we could commit to. As an authority, we’ve committed to our locality team. So we’ve got our community development and stronger communities and migrant programmes, and town and parish council liaison within my area. Obviously, we’ve got other services such as community safety and CCTV, but what we’ve set ourselves up as is what I’ve just said, it’s the glue for the council. So, when we’re working within communities, and we see issues and things that we can tackle we then bring services together. To make a difference on the ground and be able to bring in services when we’re talking about prevention. For example, we’re looking at pilots within a number of areas where we’re bringing in housing, adult social care, community safety and other partners to trial different ways of working with groups of residents to improve their outcomes for them as individuals, but also for the community who see that they’re causing antisocial behaviour and all of the other issues that individuals can cause in communities.

We have a strong focus on prevention and working across the council. A strong focus on enforcement but with support services. So enforcement was something when I worked at the Borough Council that we struggled with because we didn’t have the capacity to do a lot of enforcement. Now, we have the ability to bring staffing from other services to be able to work with individuals, so we’re not just enforcing, we’re actually also supporting. For example, just before Christmas, we had a number of rough sleepers in tents in North Bay Scarborough. We had 14 tent encampments set up, and obviously, the community weren’t keen on the encampment. We engaged with the individuals by bringing all of the services together and we drew up a new policy for how to work. Within three weeks, 13 of the 14 had entered into housing and only one enforcement needed to go to court. So, it’s just that ability to draw from different services and the services having more capacity.

But you do need to invest in it. And I think that’s what attracted me to North Yorkshire. We’ve invested in our communities and localities team to be able to bring that together and to life. We’ve committed to 30 community partnerships, we’ve committed to 30 town investment plans. We’ve committed to do town and parish council liaison and we’ve got a small team now working with them. We’ve got a double devolution programme looking at devolving services and assets to local town and parish councils or community groups. We’ve got a big programme of work, and we’re working heavily with adult social care on a prevention pilot. But you’ve got to be intentional and invest in some staff that can do this, who are outside of the BAU (business as usual) and can go in, bring that together and make that work.

Do you think the the sheer size of North Yorkshire geographically forced you to think about balancing scale, capacity and local delivery? And is this a lesson applicable still to even smaller areas?

Yes, because communities identify at their level. It’s about being able to tailor and think about your local communities and being visible out there and being able to show that you’re putting in the work within that area, it’s really important. We have been able to look at the whole of North Yorkshire, so within my localities teams, we don’t have the same amount of people in each place. It’s flexible depending on what’s happening.

I think it’s really important that you have a very locality focus. One of the benefits of reorganisation is the economies of scale. You can’t argue with that. So one of the things that we tussled with for some time was, do you restructure your teams around localities so that we’ve got the same sort of locality structures per team, or do you utilise the economies of scale and do locality working in a different way? It’d be much easier if we’d gone down the route of restructuring everybody around these various localities, but that wasn’t the right way of doing it because, actually, we wanted to bring out those efficiencies of economies of scale to be able to put back into services.

We’ve created virtual local area teams. So all of the services that work in each of the areas that we’ve identified are now part of a virtual network. We come together in person every three months to talk about the issues in an area, where we can align ourselves and how we can support each other if there are tricky issues. We’ve got six key areas and six local area teams. They’re virtually connected all the time, but every three months, we come together to talk about that.

It’s key to focus on your communities and localities and build those relationships. That’s a key learning point around reorganisation: relationships are king. It’s about building those relationships across the council so that they’re really strong. It means people will teams call somebody and ask for help in adult social care or housing or wherever who wouldn’t necessarily have done that prior to being a unitary. Being able to have those personal relationships and sit down and have a coffee and talk about the issues mean that people are much more comfortable about asking for help or asking for input or just working together and it starts to break down those boundaries.

How do you build those relationships in a new organisation? Because often those relationships are the product of long histories. So, how do you kind of turbo boost that relationship or speed up that relationship forming?

We started doing that through the transition year. One of the key things that we did when we set up the local government reorganisation program was to determine all of the work streams. I think we had around 11 work streams, which seemed quite a lot at the time. We essentially brought people together – we just invited staff that worked in those areas to come to an initial kickoff workshop, meet each other and talk about reorganisation and what was going to need to be done before vesting day and beyond. It was really to start them on the journey and for them to make connections and conversations. Then as those work streams progressed, obviously, there was a smaller project team developed, but we did keep running bigger events to bring people together.

It is more difficult when you go from vesting day because there are lots of changes, lots of job title changes, and lots of people from districts and boroughs are landing in new teams. The restructures haven’t happened, so you kind of have a landing place, and that might not necessarily be where you end up. Anything where you’re bringing people together, anything where you’re encouraging interaction, building relationships. We did lots of in-person stuff, webinars, meet and greets, things like that. It’s a tricky first year because of roles changing.

Could you distil one or two pieces of key advice for those who are setting off on this journey? What are the things they really must do, and maybe a couple of things they should try and avoid?

With my district borough hat on, I would say to all district and borough staff to put yourself forward for work streams and projects and not feel that you shouldn’t go and do it. Talk to your chief executive and manager and put your hand up to get involved in shaping it from the very beginning because we all go to work, we’ve all been frustrated with how you do things and processes, and this is a time to take a step back and design a new service around what you need to do. It’s also a time, I think, for people to shine. So loads of people shone in these projects and work streams from the district and borough councils. That was really amazing and lovely to see and I’ve gone on to do really, really well. The second thing would be that it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

If I could do it all again, my key learning point would be that we’d set out the safe and legal on day one, then there would be a couple of years of convergence and then moving into transformation. I think where we could have been smarter and better as a program office would have been to keep some capacity to one side, to do more of that transformational thinking alongside the work that we were doing on the safe and legal prior to day one. But it was sort of everybody’s heads down trying to get over the line for the first of April.

It almost needs to be separate because there’s no way anybody has the brain space. It’s all-encompassing, getting through day one and that first sort of six months. There’s a lot. So I would say a small team of people thinking more about the future and the potential. You’ll get there in the end, as we have, but just to be a little bit more on the front foot.

Any pitfalls to avoid? Things to make sure you don’t do, or you shouldn’t get too sucked into thinking about? 

I think our one big learning point was that we tried to bring everybody onto new North Yorkshire Council terms and conditions for day one, and that wasn’t achievable. That had been spoken about in webinars, so there was kind of an expectation, and those terms and conditions were often slightly more advantageous than some of the district and borough terms and conditions. There was a level of disappointment and frustration amongst staff. So, trying to do too much for day one. That wasn’t always going to be achievable because not all district council jobs slot in very easily because they are multifaceted. If you were, we were a continuing authority, that made it easier. It’s better to not over-promise and under deliver because then you set expectations too high. Whereas nobody would have expected to be on new terms and conditions on day one if we just tupied everybody over and did it that way. That was probably the one thing that didn’t go as well as planned.

Something that did go really well, though, and I would suggest to everyone, is onboard all of the district and borough staff into the payroll system way prior to April. From sort of October we brought the districts into the new payroll system because I think the critical thing is that everyone got paid. I’d suggest doing it at least by the February so that you know that whatever happens, everybody’s going to get paid and the rest of it is fine.

Lastly, If you had a magic wand, what’s one thing you would change about local government or the public sector system?

If I was in charge, I often think about this. I think we’d all say, wouldn’t we, that if we had a blank sheet of paper, we wouldn’t design the public sector how it currently is. I think that you would design it so that public sector organisations had more co-terminosity of boundary so that the focus was on a locality and unitisation across the piece. And flexibility within our funding regimes that allowed more empowerment in local areas. I would get rid of the majority of ring-fencing, and I think that particularly with relationships with the NHS, who have been reorganised even more so than local government over many years, I think really enabling empowerment of local NHS leaders to work better with partners at a local level and affect change. So, not much really, just like completely tearing it all up and starting again.

The reason we’re here is we’re public servants, and we’re delivering to place and community, but we tie ourselves in organisational knots and governance. I think there’s more empowerment to really deliver at a local level and when we’re very much based around place.