The moral courage needed for future leadership: Interview with Professor Donna Hall

As part of our new interview series for Future Local Lab, LGIU’s Chief Executive Jonathan Carr-West sat down with Professor Donna Hall to discuss her impressive career, what it takes to transform local government for the future and the courage needed in local leadership right now to get the ball rolling.

Professor Hall is one of LGIU’s top 25 thinkers in local government make sure you check out the rest of the list.

Watch the full conversation on Youtube here.

2:16 – Donna Hall’s journey into local government
3:54 – The Wigan Deal: The inspiration behind it
6:45 – A new approach: Person-centric public services
10:01 – The challenges of implementing innovative practices
14:13 – Courageous local leadership for the future
18:41 – Building trust and community empowerment
21:54 – The future of local government
30:11 – Final reflections

Watch/listen to the full conversation on Spotify here.

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Looking for just the highlights? A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

Where did your interest in local government begin?

I had no idea what the local government did when I left Leeds University. As many people were in the 80s, I was struggling to find work and eventually found work at Leeds City Council on the Community Program. I started in Human Resources and Organisational Development – although it wasn’t so PC in those days, I was based in the sickness and disciplinary office where people had to ring in before 10 o’clock if they were off and I had to write it down on a big piece of paper. We didn’t have spreadsheets! In my job description, it said ‘must empty and thoroughly clean the ashtrays every morning’ because people smoked in offices. I really got to see the whole council in HR and OD, the entirety of all the different aspects of what a council does. I’ve had brief stints in the community and voluntary sector, the private sector, and the NHS, but my heart lies in local government.

Could you tell us a bit about the Wigan deal? What inspired it, and what impact has it had?

The inspiration was several pieces of work that we had been doing independently in different council departments over a couple of years, starting in 2011. We’d been doing some work with the fantastic Hilary Cottam (who wrote Radical Help) in Worsley Mesnes with 25 families whose children were on the edge of social care.

We found a pattern had emerged with those 25 families: we were spending, on average, between a quarter of a million and half a million per family every single year. At the end of each of those years, the family was either in the same position or in a worse position. 80% of our efforts, staff time, and money were spent on assessment and referral. This had to stop. Rather than starting with a person and building support around them, we were spending all our time individually passing people between the different bits of the state.

Also, at the time, there was a huge period of austerity and cutbacks with the coalition government, which started off by removing elements of deprivation from the funding formula. This meant that poorer councils – particularly councils in the North, but not exclusively – were massively impacted by the funding formula and ended up having a huge amount of their money taken away. So, we had to make this huge saving of £160m. We ended up saving more than that. We were the third worst affected proportionately council in the whole of the UK at that time.

The third element was work that we were doing with Nesta on a creative councils project with adult social care in a place called Scholes, which is another deprived part of Wigan. So, we decided to create a social contract, which looks at a different way of delivering public services by doing it in partnership with citizens. Rather than the state being the authoritarian paternalistic thing that it often is. Instead of seeing citizens as passive recipients of services who just pay the council tax, we saw them as actors in place, real members of the community who could help with getting through this period of austerity that was impacting not just us in Wigan but everywhere.

Not only did we make more savings than we needed to, we ended up adding an additional seven years of healthy life expectancy in the most deprived wards, which was remarkable.

What do you think are the wider lessons for the broader public sector about that person-centric approach?

I think people use the word “person-centered” in a very loose way, but when you actually look at services, by sitting at customer service desks or in a food bank and listening to the stories that people tell you, we are not person-centered at all. We’ve still got a huge way to go.

We don’t start with the person but the service. We start with a deficit model that you have to prove to me that you can access this service that I’ve designed without your input, but you have to meet all of my eligibility criteria. I think this is a model that could be applied to the criminal justice system, it could be applied to DWP. You see some of the amazing work going on in Greater Manchester with Andy Burnham’s Live Well Centres, where he’s taken a person-centred approach to employment and skills, repurposing job centres as Live Well Centres. So not just looking at employability, without thinking about housing, health, mental health and physical wellbeing and the wider support that people have in place.

I think the person-centric approach is hugely unfinished business in the public sector. You see people trying it in little bubbles. Take the incredible work of Mark Smith in Gateshead as an example, he’s a real pioneer of a person-centred approach and has now moved on partly because it’s so difficult to get the traction across the NHS, across DWP, across housing etc.

People find it really difficult to do because we’ve been trained in this school of new public management for so long that people find it hard to break away from that. They commission chunks of services in silos away from the person.

What were some of the key changes you made in how you funded and interacted with the community and voluntary sector?

We put £12m into the community and voluntary sector to provide social connections and infrastructure. Previously, we paternalistically gave them very small amounts of money and micromanaged them cause we did not trust them. They’re not seen and are viewed with suspicion, even by elected members. So we just said, “We trust you to deliver.” In return, we received 500 amazing new projects, which added seven years of healthy life expectancy.

It sounds a lot like pilot purgatory, where people endlessly pilot things. We share them across platforms like LGIU but they are never mainstreamed. What’s the barrier to that?

That’s a fantastic million dollar question. I spent my whole life doing regeneration and policy projects in areas like single regeneration budget, public service agreements, and city challenges. But what you see is when the money runs out, it stops.

I’ve been really committed to having a clear strategy. I think what this UK government needs for public service reform is a clear strategy which overarches every aspect of public service to start with the person. I think what stops it is individual leaders just clinging onto their little silos and the ego of those leaders. The Westminster system doesn’t help, which is very centralised but very separate when it comes to departmental grip on issues.

I think it takes brave leaders and mayors to show some real initiative because they’re away from the Westminster system. As Mark Smith says very often, “a lot of this stuff, we don’t need devolution for, we can do it on Monday.” So I think it’s a kind of moral courage.

Do you think leaders are torn between cutting costs and trying something innovative, struggling to see how to do both? How can people square that circle?

I think we’ve got to get ourselves out of this tepid bath of managed decline. It’s not our job as leaders or as frontline teams in public service to manage decline. It’s our job to reimagine the future. This Future Local Lab is brilliant because that’s what’s needed. It’s that imagination, it’s that courage, it’s that conviction, and it’s understanding that new public management is a busted flush. It was invented in the 80s. It’s not just the way that everything should be. We need to bin it and start again with a community, person-centred approach.

Let’s talk a bit more about leadership, your experience of it and reflections upon it. What does leadership mean for you and what is the core lesson you gained?

Being a leader is about giving people the permission and freedom to innovate and trusting them. Frontline teams can see where organisations are going wrong. They can see the gaps. However, they can’t do anything about it because the system only measures them on their organisational loyalty rather than the loyalty to the community, to the place, to the person. So, that’s the barrier. Empowering frontline teams to work in a creative way costs less because we’re spending all our money on assessments and referrals.

Listen to people with lived experience, listen to your frontline staff. A huge amount of the Wigan deal was listening to staff and listening to residents. It was HR and OD, going back to my Leeds City Council roots. It was structured events to get people to listen more to frontline teams. The leader, the management team, the cabinet and I would listen to frontline staff and that had never happened before. It was almost like you would never see the leader of the council or the chief executive. It wasn’t a one-off either. We did it every two weeks, so it’s building that trust and that relationship. It’s taking on board really amazing ideas and it’s looking at what people could do differently.

I imagine part of that listening process involves sitting with some quite uncomfortable moments and truths and being open and authentic about that. It sounds like leadership is a hard slog, not just great vision, right?

Your vision comes from deep engagement with your staff and citizens. That’s where the vision is created. The whole idea of having a social contract is that you’re moving away from that parent-child transactional relationship and into more of a partnership: “Let’s do this together.” One of the elements of the deal was to tell us when we get it wrong because we’re not perfect. When the King’s Fund came to Wigan and evaluated what we’d done and how we’d done it, they spent a few months living there to understand how it worked. They spoke to residents, staff, and partners. They said why it worked is that firstly, the deal is dead simple. People overcomplicate strategy, so clarity of purpose and then constancy of purpose.

Then one of their researchers said, the way that it’s been done is amazing because you’ve got a bold humility. You know, so you actually act and you act on what you’ve heard and you act on challenging the existing system. One of our values was courage. You’ve got to have the courage to try new things. Because if we carry on doing what we’ve always done, we’ll just get the same results, which are not working for people. But I like that summary, bold humility.

What does the council of the future look like to you and how do we start preparing it?

They would have a different relationship with citizens. Democracy wouldn’t just mean an election every four years. It would mean citizens assemblies and how you listen to the voice of the person with lived experience when you’re designing a service. If you don’t, you’ll end up designing something that just doesn’t work. It is important to be courageous about the end of new public management and think, “What is the future that’s going to replace it? What is a community-powered council? What does it look like? And how can I play a part in it?” Having integrated neighbourhood teams is also essential to ensure there are police, housing, DWP, fire and rescue and social workers all working together around individuals and families with a plan.

How do elected members contribute to this? What is their evolving role in this sort of endeavour?

They are absolutely essential, particularly the work that they do within their wards as well as their strategic work if they’re involved in scrutiny or cabinet roles. Street surgeries, going into communities, and having conversations with citizens is a people-powered approach to local government, which puts the elected member right at the heart of it. I’ve talked at some events where some of the councillors of all parties are really quite suspicious of a really community-focused council. They see it as their job to be the community voice. Councillors who see themselves at the forefront of a community leadership role aim to reflect the views of the community.

Thinking back on the Wigan Deal, is there anything that you would have done differently? Anything you either think you got wrong or you wished you had done more of?

Absolutely. I think I would have moved quicker in certain areas, particularly children’s social care. This was my first MET job. I worked in districts where we’d done the Chorley Smile. The frontline social workers came up with brilliant ideas and innovations. However, the high-risk nature of children’s services and also the regulation with Ofsted and CQC made me cautious. But I wish I had moved quicker because when we tackled it, all this amazing energy in children’s service just came out. It was brilliant.

There’s great concern about an upcoming drop-off in expertise in the local government sector. What’s your advice to encourage young people who’d like to work in local government?

I think there’s a problem where they join local government for a couple of years and then realise it’s really quite bureaucratic and slow-moving. They can’t make change happen, so they leave. Instead, I want young people to come into local government and want to stick with it past a few years, really have ambitions for themselves and for the place where they work.

I think it’s important for their ideas to be listened to. I think very often people get dismissed when they’re at the start of their career, but I think some of the best ideas I ever had were when I was younger. I think really valuing that expertise and that passion that young people have when they come in and giving them space to develop. Get them out into communities to really do a bit of anthropological, ethnographic research themselves and to understand it’s not just about policy in a vacuum, this is about real life, really making change happen. It’s also about backing them and giving them that courage. We all know that if we have somebody who backs us at work, we do a lot better.

Local government is the best career for anybody. There are so many different bits of local government and every little bit impacts on people’s lives. It’s so vital and so diverse and so much about the place and the community. There’s nothing like it. It’s brilliant.

Donna, if you had to sum up your aspirations for the future of local government in three words, what would those words be?

Bold, humble and courageous.

This interview is part of LGIU’s new Future Local Lab – a holistic programme of resources aimed at helping you to prepare for and respond to the emerging challenges facing local government everywhere. It’s open to everyone, make sure you’re signed up today.