A call for creative councils to come forward

It’s no surprise that this year’s “LGC 50 most influential voices” list has a strong bias towards innovation, with so many leaders and chief executives earning their place because – in the face of daunting challenges – they are re-imagining the role of local government. 

You’d expect someone leading a public services lab to welcome that focus on innovation and obviously I do.  But more than that I think it’s a trend that is set to continue as local government increasingly becomes the crucible in which radical new solutions are forged. 

We have known for some time that the challenges facing local communities and services demand radically different solutions.  Cost-cutting, efficiency and the approaches to improvement honed over the past 20 years will take us so far, but a combination of the new financial reality and the rising and more complex demands of tomorrow raise more fundamental questions about the future of public services.  

As Charles Leadbeater’s work on public service innovation across the world shows, the old paradigm of highly specified, professionalized and productized services delivered to a more or less grateful public is already being overturned, not least because in so many areas it just hasn’t been working.  While the future of public services will inevitably involve new configurations of private, civic and public resources working with citizens and communities in different ways, councils are uniquely placed to lead the transformation that is needed.  In a world with the promise of localism and greater freedoms, they are also the local bodies that will shoulder the responsibility for doing so.

Through NESTA’s work with councils across the country, I’m in the privileged position of seeing the huge amount of creativity, energy and talent that local government is already bringing to bear in the search for radical ideas.  As the LGC influential voices list shows, the best councils are already making real progress and there are lots that didn’t make the list who could have. 

What’s also clear from my conversations with leaders and chief executives is that there is a need for a much more concerted, systematic search for scalable innovations that can benefit lots of authorities and communities.  Not all innovations could or should be applied in all areas, but there is certainly a need to get better at replicating, adapting and spreading proven innovations between areas facing similar challenges.

That’s why today NESTA and the LG Group has launched an open call for creative councils to come forward to be part of a two year programme to develop, implement and spread transformational new approaches to meeting some of the biggest medium and long-term challenges facing communities and local services. 

Unlike some of what’s gone before, we haven’t specified the nature of the challenge or solutions that we want to support.  The first stage is a genuine search for the most promising and interesting ideas from across England and Wales.  I hope you’ll get involved. 

Philip Colligan is Executive Director of NESTA’s Public Service Innovation Lab