New Local think-tank chief executive Jessica Studdert is, as you would expect, a committed localist, but that was not always the case. She started her career at the Fabian Society but says: ‘I've come full circle from the centralised, big state mindset to the localiser. It's been a feature of my career trajectory and how I've evolved my thinking about equality and how you achieve social outcomes in an increasingly complex world.'

In the early noughties, public sector priorities were about eradicating child poverty and improving life chances, and the Fabians were at the heart of that agenda. She says: ‘That really captured my imagination, being part of an era of real ambition.'

After working in the charity sector she saw big organisations focused on winning contracts over improving outcomes. It was not creating the societal change that she wanted to see. Instead, Studdert moved to the Local Government Association, working in the Labour Group office, opening up a localism perspective and the ‘rich diversity of approaches in different places'.

‘I went from thinking you achieve change in traditional, big picture, ambitious social reform, to really understanding a more distributed way of tackling stark regional inequality. It is the ability to work locally and flex to the circumstances of place that is so important.

‘Change is grassroots up: councils working with their communities, constantly innovating and adapting and reflecting on what works in a particular place. That fierce ambition of place can't be matched by central government.'

There is a dichotomy: diversity of place is the sector's biggest strength, and its biggest weakness. There is a strong need for a single strategic vision for the future of local government, but who holds the ring on it?

Another collaboration, this time with former communities secretary John Denham, went further in remaking the case for Total Place 2.0, bringing back the ideas of the last Labour government to break down silos and pull together public services at a local level, modernised to take account of the changes in the past decade and a half

‘I think the real ideal is a partnership of equals between central and local government,' Studdert suggests. ‘Where there is a mutual trust and respect for each other's domains.' Holding the big picture in central government and respecting and allowing local players to be trusted experts in their own place, adapting to fit, is what she hopes the current national policy agenda is working towards.

Studdert is not new to New Local. As deputy chief executive under former chief Adam Lent, the pair shifted the focus of the organisation previously named NLGN, jointly authoring The Community Paradigm. She says of her work with Lent: ‘I came from the position of Fabian centrist, and he came as a complete anarchist, and we met in the middle of community power.'

The report became the framework for the organisation, with different aspects of community powered ways of working trickling down from it. Under the Labour Government, with an ambition for public service reform, there is the opportunity to push it forward under her leadership of New Local.

Another collaboration, this time with former communities secretary John Denham, went further in remaking the case for Total Place 2.0, bringing back the ideas of the last Labour government to break down silos and pull together public services at a local level, modernised to take account of the changes in the past decade and a half.

‘The logical national policy,' she says, ‘is to create a more enabling framework that understands a siloed approach has diminishing returns and the wiring needed to make this community-led working is not something that has to sit outside the logic of the system, but something that is actively built around that relationship between local, state and communities and seeing that as the precious relationship everything needs to be built on.'

With a long list of burning platforms, and local government reorganisation in many areas, Studdert says there is a real opportunity to think through what a new operating model for local government might look like.

‘While we are going through the process of LGR, designing new councils from scratch, there is an important opportunity to think through how that can be done in a way that's building something genuinely new and embedding a much more preventative model and a much deeper model of community-led working,' Studdert states.

It comes as the health sector looks at ‘neighbourhoods' – albeit on a far larger scale than councils would consider to be a neighbourhood – which gives the chance to pull wider public service reform together. But the reorganisation timescales are tight and there is a risk of slipping into reductive discussion on the shape and size of unitaries without focusing on communities and wider reform.

‘We have got to create space for putting down deep roots and building something new,' Studdert advises, as the status quo is not working. ‘It's not possible to squeeze out ever more efficiencies within the traditional way of working.'

But she remains optimistic. ‘Times are enormously challenging, but it's when you look locally that you find enormous energy and dynamism and hope for how things could work differently.

‘If national government can recognise and enable that, and shift how it funds, regulates and incentivises local public services to work differently in place, we could be in such different territory as a country.'