What does England’s Test, Learn, Grow programme mean for local government in Northern Ireland?

April 1st 2025 marks 10 years of the formal operations of the 11 “super council” model. Created both to amalgamate the previous 26 council structures and usher in wider public sector reform as part of the Review of Public Administration, this article sets how public sector reform approaches in England exemplify the original vision of strong local government in the RPA.

The Review of Public Administrations terms of reference was to “review the existing arrangements for the accountability, administration and delivery of public services in Northern Ireland, and to bring forward options for reform which are consistent with the arrangements and principles of the Belfast Agreement, within an appropriate framework of political and financial accountability” (Colhoun 2007). For local government, what emerged was an ambitious vision underpinned by four principles: subsidiarity, equality and good relations, co-terminosity and strong local government.

As such, the vision of local government outlined “councils at the heart of the local community providing civic leadership; ensuring the provision of local services, locally delivered; and working with local interests to develop their areas, addressing social, economic and environmental issues that will ensure vibrant, sustainable communities for future generations”.

Much can be said about the RPA process and what it did not achieve. But what concerns this article is how England’s test, learn, grow programme underscores the potential empowered local government does and can offer NI’s public sector.

What is Test, Learn, Grow?

In December 2024, Pat McFadden, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster stated that “if we keep governing as usual, we are not going to achieve what we want to achieve”.

Launching a new £100m Innovation Fund to deploy new test-and-learn teams the approach is simple; “Test it. Fix the problems. Change the design. Test it again. Tweak it again. And so on, and so on, for as long as you provide the service. Suddenly, the most important question isn’t, ‘How do we get this right the first time?’. It’s ‘How do we make this better by next Friday?”

What does Test, Learn, Grow actually mean?

As outlined in a webinar and this slide, the programme is about a continuous improvement process to drive policy outcomes. Illustrated in the above image, it conceives four factors that are outlined in the webinar slide deck:

1. Designing in partnership with a multi-discipline team of users, practitioners, policy advisors and third and private sector actors.
2. Iterative testing with “lower-fidelity interventions” and increasing scale as confidence grows.
3. Supporting scalability by identifying “active ingredients” to balance standardisation and localisation, with central-local governments a forum for support.
4. Working in the opening with open communication about what is happening and inviting ideas from outside the usual policy circles.

Operationalised on two projects across Manchester, Sheffield, Essex and Liverpool from January 2025 the focus is applied to tackling two challenges: family support and temporary accommodation. As Molly Bishop puts it from Future Governance Forum, “using randomised control trials or other approaches, test and learn provides space to innovate and be disruptive”. For local government, there is a unique role in its proximity to communities and its partnership working through ‘scaling deep’ and the impacts on culture to change relationships, cultural values and beliefs and “scaling up’ with impacts on policy locally, regionally and nationally and across institutions.

We know this is what we need in NI. The draft PfG was remarkably clear that “the strain felt by services in recent years cannot be fixed simply, even with funding at a level of relative need.” For example, in 2011, DoH was allocated 41% of the Executive’s budget; this has risen to 52% today, and yet waiting lists rose 216% between March 2014 and March 2023.

What does it mean for NI and local government?

The point of the above diagram is not to import a model or framework for policy design. We’ve seen how importing new policy designs, whether it be outcomes-based accountability in the 2016 PfG, or the mission-oriented governance in the latest draft PfG, will not radically alter mindsets or change outcomes.

New policy frameworks and designs will now drive impact. Instead, what test, learn and grow shows offer local government in NI is two things.

1. First, a public sector reform response to broken models of service delivery. McFadden’s December announcement shows how recognising that something is broken is not enough. You need to change, adapt, import new ideas and alter mindsets. NI’s current draft PfG does recognise that accelerated transformation and reconfiguration of services is required. But, there is a scant indication of genuine partnership and recognition of the local government in actually delivering PSR. Instead, the risk from NI’s draft PfG is what James Mitchell identifies in Scotland as a recourse to “headline grabbing speeches than serious policy making“.
2. Second, the level of ambition needed for PSR. James Mitchell in Scotland notes how PSR in Scotland suffers from “only more words, talk, strategy documents, speeches”. For NI, it’s not about producing an action plan. Instead, it is a realistic assessment of the incremental innovation approach and a frank admission that we do not know the answer to all our problems.

The ambition of the RPA was an empirically grounded assessment of what “strong local government” can offer for public service delivery. It is about building on the understanding that Councils in NI are at the forefront of innovative and joined-up service delivery. While the 11-council model and the RPA process require serious debate on what form of local government we currently have, the starting point of this article remains that parallel public service reform journeys in England serve to underscore NILGA’s response to the potential for empowering local government. Or as Alison Bennington, NILGA President, puts it, “while local government recognise the scale and complexity of the challenges facing our public services… we strongly believe that meaningful transformation cannot happen without fully unlocking the capacity of local councils”. And NILGA’s five principles offer a fresh approach to start the conversation on local governments’ role to actually deliver “a better tomorrow”.

1. A true whole-systems approach
2. Equal partners in transformation
3. Councils as custodians of place
4. Sustainably resourcing missions
5. Whole-systems accountability.

Going forward, April 1st 2025 should offer a point of serious self-reflection on how we envision empowered local government in NI. A true whole-systems approach.