Mission-led local government

New Local is working in partnership with Inner Circle Consulting on a practical research project on mission-led local government.

Local governments (councils and combined authorities) are pioneering new forms of mission-led statecraft. Missions became a more prominent feature of the UK public policy landscape when Labour in Opposition and now in Government adopted five missions for national renewal. Missions offer a galvanising framework enabling governments to mobilise a wide range of people and organisations to innovate and take collective action to tackle big challenges.

So far, a lot of energy has gone into the “what” of missions, defining and setting out bold ambitions for the future. But big questions remain about the “how” – the processes, tools, organisational cultures, and ability to mobilise people across institutional boundaries to work towards realising these bold ambitions. It is the “how”, or the practice of missions, which provides a genuine opportunity to pioneer a different form of statecraft – one that is better suited to the scale, nature and complexity of today’s challenges.

While national government has received most of the attention, local governments are already experimenting with the ‘how’ in the form of new local statecraft better suited to responding to these complex challenges. This reimagining of local statecraft is underpinned by new forms of leadership, service design and delivery, and partnership working beyond institutional boundaries reflecting the complexities of governing today. Many of these ideas and practices resonate with missions – with some in the sector directly mobilising the language and practice of missions and others drawing on adjacent ideas and approaches.

This project will seek to understand in real-time how local governments are approaching mission led-government, or adjacent whole-place approaches, and the impact of this. The project will explore how this new form of local statecraft is operationalised in councils and combined authorities and how it reshapes partnership working with communities, the VCSE sector, businesses and others. Ultimately, this project will seek to identify actions needed across policy and practice to amplify, deepen and enable mission-led approaches in local government – including identifying how mission-led governing could inform and shape the development of new unitary councils and strategic authorities, being set up through local government reorganisation and English devolution. 

The aims of this project are to:

• Identify how local governments are using mission-aligned approaches to secure impact – drawing out the key principles and practices, as well as barriers to overcome, to help accelerate these ways of working, build scale and ambition, and spread learning across the sector.
• Mobilise the existing body of academic work on missions to support and deepen practice in local government. As well as to identify real-time opportunities, barriers and challenges to inform future academic research.
• Identify how national government can amplify, learn from and enable mission-led approaches in local government – alongside exploring how missions could help reshape roles, relationships and ways of working between different tiers of government.

To find out more about participating in the project please contact Grace Pollard, Head of Policy and Insights at New Local, on gpollard@newlocal.org.uk.

We are particularly keen to hear from councils and combined authorities who are developing whole-place approaches – working with partners and communities – to tackling complex challenges.

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