What is the ‘new local’? Power, prevention and place

As the parameters of the Government’s national agenda for local government, devolution and public services takes shape, Jessica Studdert sets out how renewal should also be led from the ground up. There is a ‘new local’ emerging, built on the principles of power, prevention and place, which should be recognised, nurtured and enabled as part of wider reform.
The moment for a new local
Amidst the unpredictability and complexity of life in 2025, the modern British state is in something of an existential crisis. Trust in government is at a historic low. Many think the ‘system’ is broken. Deep inequalities are increasingly factored in as inevitable. Where alienation and apathy fester, populists are ready with simplistic answers.
The Government recognises these challenges and is responding. The Prime Minister expressed frustration with the slow pace of change at Whitehall, setting out six core missions which will focus activity, combined with milestones to demonstrate progress. Meanwhile devolution will spread across England. And a renewed productivity drive is intended to squeeze out more efficiencies.
Yet change is also emerging from the ground up. Across the country, public servants and communities are leading new ways of working that question inherited assumptions. Using the advantage of proximity to deeply complex and interconnected challenges, they are showing how it is possible to secure better outcomes and more tangible impact.
This ‘new local’ is increasingly widespread and a growing force for change. It relates to a diversity of approaches which vary according to circumstances but share common characteristics. The new local combines:
- The power of communities (their insights, capabilities and assets)
- A strong focus on prevention
- Place-based collaboration across multiple partners.
The promise of these approaches is not just that traditional delivery goals are met, but that by actively seeking people’s participation, relationships of trust can be built on the foundations of meaningful involvement and efficacy.
This article explores the dynamics of the new local in turn – power, prevention and place. It draws on insights from our network of innovative councils who share a desire to pioneer, learn and embed new ways of working. Across Westminster and Whitehall, the lessons from those working at the intersection of the state and people’s daily lives should inform a renewed statecraft that enables generative reform to develop and spread, instead of viewing change as something that must be imposed from the top down. Local public services that are pioneering new ways of working with communities also need to push this new local agenda further and demonstrate impact. And for New Local ourselves, these principles inform our programme of peer learning, practice and research to deepen and share understanding of how community-led public service transformation can have impact despite extremely challenging circumstances, which in turn make sustainable change all the more urgent.
Power
How can power be shared beyond formal governing institutions so that communities feel tangibly in control? This has been one of the defining challenges of modern British politics for nearly a decade. Since the 2016 Brexit vote shocked the establishment, the question of how to redistribute power from the centre to redress regional inequality and left behind places have been stated goals of different administrations, from Levelling Up policy to the evolving devolution agenda.
The recent English Devolution White Paper sets out the most comprehensive plan yet to establish devolved governance nationwide – notably an expansion of mayoral strategic authorities, combined with plans to abolish two-tier local government. Yet the focus is largely on what the new structural arrangements of sub-national governance will look like, less so the how of new ways to open out decision-making to people. While the task of creating new institutions is likely to consume much energy in the coming months and years, there needs to be a focus beyond simply what structures suit Whitehall’s preferences. As new arrangements take shape, core design factors that underpin impact must be purposefully addressed, including organisational culture and mindset, building in active community insight and designing effective locality-based working.
Given the opportunity of a more comprehensively defined system of devolved governance, how should institutions emerge and shift to share power and better enable people to participate in decisions that matter to them? This question is one already being answered locally, where local governments are seeking practical routes to redressing power imbalances that exist: shifting from the institution to the community; from the service to the service user; and from the professional to the individual.
Many local authorities are supplementing traditional democratic representation with ongoing deliberation and participation. Camden’s Health and Care Citizen’s Assembly established principles that guided the borough’s health and wellbeing strategy, Wakefield trained staff to hold inclusive community conversations in an open engagement process which informed priorities, and in Test Valley citizens assemblies and open engagement have underpinned plans for housing and town centre developments. These examples are moving beyond traditional one-off consultation exercises, to actively pursue and build an ongoing dialogue with residents as a core component of strategic decision-making.
On a service level, new models are being created which move beyond co-production to give power directly to those who use the service, recognising their expert insight into what works. The Essex Recovery Foundation oversees the budget for drug and alcohol services in the county and is led by people themselves in recovery, and in Liverpool City Region, Juno children’s homes are designed and shaped by care experienced young people.
On a more direct one-to-one level, traditional power imbalances between the professional and individual are being redressed through strengths-based practice such as the Liberated Method pioneered in Gateshead and Northumbria. In this approach, frontline workers have shifted away from traditional case management to focus on building relationships first with people experiencing chaotic life circumstances: the emphasis is on supporting the intrinsic motivation of the individual and working at a pace that suits their recovery path, empowering them more meaningfully along the way.
These examples blend the insight of communities into the strategy, service design and practitioner method of the local state. This process of systematically shifting institutional power out and drawing community power in is still underway, but is a core aspect of the new local we are seeing emerge.
Prevention
The challenge of shifting to prevention across many public services including health, homelessness and social care is well rehearsed. We spend too much reacting to problems, which is increasingly at the expense of our ability to invest in stopping them emerge in the first place. Demand pressures facing public services have deep roots in demographic changes such as ageing, are increased by structural challenges such as deepening inequality, and have been exacerbated by years of austerity forcing cuts to early intervention support. The outlook for the public finances leaves limited scope for increasing investment without tax increases within existing fiscal rules. Yet the complexity of the socio-economic challenges confronting the state cannot simply be resolved by spending more money: a deeper reorientation of the system is required.
Government announcements have noted the need for “prevention and reform”, but this side of the Spending Review, a detailed strategy is yet to emerge. The emphasis thus far has been on finding productivity gains and reducing waste, within separate departmental spending lines. There are also calls to more formally identify and track preventative spend in public accounting practice. Building on this national action, the innately local and relational qualities of effective prevention – built with the active participation of communities themselves – should be more fully recognised as a core enabler of change.
Stories of successful locally-led prevention are often anchored in the community rather than a single service specialism. In North Birkenhead, an area that has high levels of deprivation, the Cradle to Career approach was borne out of frustration with persistent poor outcomes for local children and young people. Recognising the complexity of the challenge was beyond the scope of any single agency, the initiative began with a phase of deep exploration across the community, VCS and local public agencies about what would shift the dial. The ideas that emerged shaped a range of activity working towards the collective goal of improving life chances, with notable results. Inter-school collaboration combined with parental support has rapidly improved literacy. Social work practice has adopted a more relational, community embedded approach which has seen more formal interventions reduce.
In the health sector, flipping the starting point from a medicalised to a community approach is demonstrating how it is possible to secure better outcomes and relieve pressure on the system in the process. In East Sussex, a physio team invited everyone on their 16-week waiting list to a Community Appointment Day – in which asset-based conversations combined with a range of local community groups offered more tailored support to people. Following the event, the waiting list reduced by a third, as people were matched with networks or groups that met their needs. In Lancashire, the GP-led Healthier Fleetwood approach conceives their role to be as much about supporting community capacity and networks that promote connection and activity as about responding to ill health presentations in the surgery setting – with reduced A&E attendance rates from their population as a result.
These examples illustrate how in practice sustainable prevention is being led in creative partnerships between public services and communities which are highly attuned to the context and circumstances they work within. They are built on relationships, developing organically rather than in response to a predetermined service specification – yet they still can demonstrate notable demand reduction on more formal, costly provision. These relational and community anchored prevention initiatives should be recognised within national strategies and this local, lateral working should be encouraged to develop and grow.
Place
The convening potential of place is a common theme across the examples of active prevention. Instead of being unilateral responses of a single service, they reach beyond traditional institutional “remits” to draw in the assets and capabilities of a wide range of actors and organisations who share the same locality.
The limits of a service-first, place-blind approach are being increasingly recognised across Whitehall, with many departments beyond MHCLG also pursuing strategies which enable greater adaptation to the different circumstances of places. DWP is devolving employment support, the Cabinet Office has initiated new test and learn sites and DHSC is pursuing a shift “from hospital to community” via a neighbourhood health service . Despite this direction of travel, there is not yet a shared Government-wide “place-based” approach, with not all departments actively participating in devolution plans. Mission-led government creates some momentum to corral the system at the centre behind six core priorities – to date the focus has been Whitehall architecture being organised around cross-cutting mission boards and setting delivery milestones.
The opportunity now is to enable mission-led approaches to grow, mobilising capacity and energy beyond the institutions at SW1 and across the country foster stronger collective approaches in places. Many councils themselves are pioneering mission-led approaches locally, such as Stockton-on-Tees whereby five missions across colleagues, community, partnerships, transformation and regeneration are focusing resource and capacity in an outcome-focused way. In Wigan, the council has co-developed with community partners two missions which underpin its new era approach – to create fair opportunities and to ensure all towns and neighbourhoods flourish. These missions are not just for the council but borough-wide with partners, and the approach is intentionally iterative to build in participation and support.
Community-anchored place-based collaborations across local government and other public services including health are emerging, recognising that greater impact can be secured working together rather than in siloed isolation. For example, in North East Sheffield a new £1m community fund called This Is Us is being funded through a partnership between NHS South Yorkshire and Sheffield City Council, working with the local voluntary and community sector. Focused on four neighbourhoods which face inequality and deprivation and informed by active community engagement to design it, the fund aims to support longer term prevention by building community networks and connection. Place-based collaboration extends to other partners too, for example anchor institutions including in the private sector. This is a focus of Islington’s community wealth building approach which is building financial resilience of local communities in a borough where significant wealth and poverty coexist.
The big potential for missions is not simply to be predetermined targets, but to evolve and grow over time as partners build trust and momentum. The experience of Ambition Lawrence Weston demonstrates the positive ‘mission-creep’ of neighbourhood level community action. What began as a community coming together to address the lack of affordable food in the estate, supported as a Big Local project, has evolved into a community now owning a solar farm and getting energy from an onshore wind turbine.
So: a new local is emerging from the ground up, which is as much about relationships for impact as it is about structures: with communities and between partners to create new opportunities that respond to population needs. But how do we catalyse it to develop further, taking on new forms and deepening its impact? Existing reform measures should be more explicitly focused on reorienting how the state relates to communities. Devolution and reorganisation are massive agendas: they should be about more than just changing structures and are opportunities to embed the principles of power, prevention and place more deeply in new institutional design and operating models.
There is a pressing need to develop a more coherent public service reform agenda, using the missions framework to mobilise energy and purpose across the formal system and beyond to communities, to work together towards shared outcomes. The building blocks are there. Key figures like Georgia Gould in the Cabinet Office and Jim McMahon in MHCLG bring practical experience of the new local to Whitehall, having themselves grown community-led change as council leaders. There is real promise in initiatives like Cabinet Office’s four new Test and Learn sites in which multidisciplinary civil servant and local teams will experiment with new approaches to reducing temporary accommodation costs and how family hubs can better support families experiencing disadvantage. This holds the possibility of identifying and disseminating deeper understanding of the ‘new local’ role of central government in enabling local innovation more systematically.
Ahead of tough Spending Review, there is growing momentum across policy and practice communities behind the bold but achievable policy proposal to improve the impact of existing spending through renewed Total Place style place-based public service budgets. This imagines a mobilisation of partners across a place to identify, coordinate and pool existing spending in more holistic, tailored and preventative models that actively work with communities for better outcomes. By doing so, they would drive out the waste in the system associated with fragmentation and duplication which is a feature of disconnected services working to Whitehall departmental priorities rather than shared population priorities.
There are big questions which must be answered for reform to have real impact, and New Local’s programme of work across our network, practice and research will actively interrogate in the months to come. How can national frameworks and funding support community-led service collaboration in places? How will national mission-driven governing create space for local collective action? How can new models of neighbourhood-anchored, community-led practice inform a purpose-led evolution of local government? What is the changing nature of leadership that can effectively facilitate this new local? And how do we overcome persistent barriers to these ways of working: financial, regulatory, cultural, political and practical?
If we want tangible, sustained change – we need a mature centre-local dynamic which creates space for the new local to grow, reframing the role of the centre from micromanager to strategic enabler. This holds the promise for sustainable, enduring reform that recasts the relationship between the local state and communities, building legitimacy and impact along the way.
