As we approach the Autumn Budget, the Westminster Circus can feel remote from local public sector delivery. But as we’ll see, macro decisions and mistakes in central government are having a profound effect on delivery, and the urgent need to redesign services.
Here’s a graph of national GDP per capita for the top 20 countries in the world. We’re not Italy (although do pay attention to political challenges in Italy). However, we are towards the bottom of international performance. And ask any teacher, social worker, police officer or nurse — and they will point to the impact of austerity, cost of living, and cuts.
Due to the national economy, our model of public sector delivery is no-longer affordable… meaning we either stop doing things or we must to shift to a new design. However, various national challenges such as escalating SEND needs, botched Adult Social care reforms, and the prison crisis show us that there is little political capital to make these changes. i.e. there is no way of carrying the public to a new and cost-effective delivery model for these problems, without inflicting enough political damage to end the current administration.
We are therefore stuck.
This stuckness means that local services will not be rescued — there is no shiny new policy nor money-tree coming over the hill. It’s up to us in local public services to design our way out of the fundamental economic, demand and political challenges.
It’s informative to look at the impact of austerity on children’s social care. In this graph, you can identify the great austerity experiment starting in 2010 and reducing spend on social care until 2016, where costs start to accelerate upwards. To be clear — this graph shows that austerity has led to more expensive children’s services (there is also excellent evidence from Calum Webb at Sheffield University).
The reason for the increase in children’s services costs are clear from the pink line. The percentage of social care spend on early help was 44% in 2010, by 2024 that had dropped to 21%. I like to call this the early help death spiral, and this doesn’t just affect children’s services.
If we continue reducing spend on early help, services will increasingly cost more, escalating in a spiral. Perhaps every business case should reference the great austerity experiment as proof that investment in early help and prevention works.
So I’m not holding out for the Autumn Budget or Central Government. Many local areas are now embracing an emerging new public sector model — that delicate combination of community, personalisation, integration, neighbourhood delivery, technology, early help and demand management. You could argue this is the inevitable application of systems thinking to service design — building symbiosis between our services and how things worked before the NHS and local authorities existed.
And whilst there is a clear model evolving across the Country, I’m not sure we’ve done enough to join up and share learning. If economic projections are right, it feels pretty urgent to redesign our local services. If you’re part of this movement, get in touch!
Richard Selwyn | Blog 