Introducing LGIU’s founding strategic partner – Browne Jacobson

LGIU’s partnerships are crucial for our work towards our core mission, to strengthen local democracy around the world and make local government collectively stronger. Browne Jacobson have been a long standing partner that we have enjoyed working with over the years on exciting and distinctive projects. We share a passion for local democracy, commitment to local government, innovation in public services and helping councils to be good places to work, fit and ready for the important challenges of the future.

That is why we’re so pleased to announce that we are forming an ongoing strategic partnership to focus in depth and over the longer term on the key challenges that local government is grappling with. These are big, important challenges, developing at a serious pace. Chiefly, the change and disruption within the reorganisation and devolution agendas is happening so fast and at such scale, that we were determined to get our heads together with the team at Browne Jacobson, and devise an exciting research programme that draws on their legal expertise, direct experience working with councils across the country, and LGIU’s knowledge of the sector coupled with our membership networks across England and internationally.

Browne Jacobson has always been keen to push innovative and bold research ideas with us. In previous years we have worked together to develop an understanding of local government’s role within systems for health and wellbeing that puts relationships and organisation cultures ahead of structures. Based on interviews and workshops with teams linked to Integrated Care Systems, our report looked at ways of building different relationships across disconnected public institutions, with case studies showing how health and local government can collaborate.

In 2023, we analysed the ways that councils across the UK approach net zero transformation from a democratic perspective, arguing that only with embedded public support can ambitious goals be achieved. Citizens assemblies and other democratic innovations are important, but we sought to show that a different way of working, more democratic and engaged with local people, must be incorporated across the council to really drive the necessary changes. Not least because the cost of living and other social, economic and political pressures are jostling for position at the front of many minds.

We also published two reports that aim to shed light on some of the vital nuts and bolts of local governance, namely the monitoring officer (2023) and risk management (2025) teams. These roles are so important for good governance, healthy local democracy and public services, but are rarely given the attention they deserve. We demonstrated the pressures, challenges and changing structures that situates these functions, arguing that they encapsulate many of the ways that local government itself is reshaping and remoulding.

Along the way Browne Jacobson has been a supportive partner, willing to try new approaches and to tackle new subjects with us, working with us to explore bold new ideas. Their insight and reach across the sector, coupled with their expertise of legal and governance issues has been essential for carrying these projects forward. But the really exciting thing is working with a partner that has such a commitment to public service, improving outcomes, building democratic, community focussed solutions, and a stronger, healthier local government.

As we look towards an uncertain future there are many challenges as well as opportunities. Reorganisation on the scale we will soon see will of course involve a great deal of structural change. The challenge is to ensure that these structures are shaped around, and enable, the positive change that is needed to improve services and strengthen places. The opportunities, if we can do that, could be huge and transformative for many people.  Over the coming year, LGIU and Browne Jacobson will help local government develop institutions that support and enable:

• Participation
• Accountability
• Leadership
• Collaboration
• Prevention

We look forward to sharing it all with you as we go. For more information about Browne Jacobson’s work please contact Peter Ware and to learn more about LGIU’s Strategic Partners programme, please contact jen.pufky@lgiu.org.