One of the more interesting developments in local reform and devolution over the past 20 years is that some things have become almost ordinary while others remain stubbornly out of reach.
That would have sounded optimistic when we started working in Greater Manchester. Much of the work was about helping organisations to work beyond their boundaries. Health and local government worked from different assumptions; employment support sat in one part of the system, family support in another. Collaboration was possible, but fragile, dependent on particular people, local trust or temporary money.
A great deal has changed. Neighbourhood teams, integrated arrangements, place partnerships and a growing network of local access points, hubs and support offers have become more familiar. Councils, the NHS, police, housing providers, colleges, the voluntary and community sector and combined authorities are more accustomed to working around the same residents and towards overlapping aims. That is hard-earned progress.
But one lesson from staying with this work for a long time is that reform does not stand still. Sometimes success changes the nature of the problem.
When we began, the practical question was how to get organisations to work together. Then it became how to integrate services and pathways, and about relationships, power and democratic renewal. Now the question is becoming different again: how do all these arrangements add up to a coherent local system?
That is the point at which integration and reform can become fragmented.
This is not simply the familiar complaint that joined-up government is hard. Many of the things built to overcome fragmentation can, viewed together, create another layer of it. Each may solve a real problem, with its own governance, funding, data, workforce and professional culture. The difficulty appears when a person or household must move through them.
A family may encounter a GP practice, a school, housing support, an employment adviser, social care, community provision and specialist services. Some may already be integrated and doing the right thing. Yet from the outside the system can still feel like several front doors, repeated conversations and professionals each doing their best within a partial view of the same life.
That family does not experience the local state as a conceptual category. It experiences whether support makes sense, whether it arrives at the right time, whether one part of the system understands what another has already tried, and whether anyone can hold the whole picture for long enough to change what happens next.
Government meets a place in these encounters. It does not meet it as a ministerial diagram, a departmental programme, piece of innovation or a neat set of institutional lines. It meets it through streets, households, services, professions, budgets, relationships and histories that rarely fit the categories through which government is organised.
This is why we have come to see the local state as larger than we often allow. It is not simply the council, though councils remain central, nor the council plus the local NHS. It is the whole set of institutions, funding streams, accountabilities, professional systems, markets, arrangements and relationships through which public purpose is pursued in a place.
A place needs to understand demand across organisational boundaries and see how pressures move: how housing instability affects health, poor health affects employment, family circumstances affect school attendance, transport shapes opportunity and one part of the public sector carries costs created elsewhere. It needs intelligence that does more than report activity within separate services, people who can work across professional cultures, financial and commissioning judgement, programme and change capability, democratic legitimacy and strong relationships with communities. It also needs enough confidence and permission to make uncomfortable trade-offs.
Greater Manchester has been useful for learning this, not because it has solved the problem, but because it has lived with it for longer. Devolution has given the city-region more room to experiment, innovate, create stronger relationships between institutions and given its councils greater scope to act collectively across health, employment, skills, transport, housing, policing, communities, prevention and growth. Much of that would have been harder through isolated organisational action.
This matters for how we understand devolution. A combined authority should not be understood as a layer of government sitting above local government. It is local government organising itself collectively at a scale at which some of the things a place needs can be done more effectively.
The Government is talking explicitly about rewiring the state, deeper devolution, strategic authorities, stronger local government, prevention, public service reform and good growth. If the state is to be rewired around places, what exactly is being rewired? Boundaries, functions, budgets and governance can all change. That may be necessary.
That means moving from integration and innovation to reform and rewiring. Organisational capability is still essential: governing well, managing money, delivering statutory services, commissioning effectively and improving performance. But the next phase of devolution requires capable places, not only capable organisations.
A place needs to understand demand across organisational boundaries and see how pressures move: how housing instability affects health, poor health affects employment, family circumstances affect school attendance, transport shapes opportunity and one part of the public sector carries costs created elsewhere. It needs intelligence that does more than report activity within separate services, people who can work across professional cultures, financial and commissioning judgement, programme and change capability, democratic legitimacy and strong relationships with communities. It also needs enough confidence and permission to make uncomfortable trade-offs.
Much of this is unglamorous. It sits in the quality of local analysis, the maturity of financial conversations, the discipline of meaningful programme management, the relationship between officers and members, the treatment and use of evidence and learning, commissioning and the honesty with which a place learns when something has not worked. It is not the language of big announcements. It is the craft of making institutions work differently over time.
Those capabilities cannot be improvised each time a national programme arrives. Too often, local systems are asked to make coherence after the main design choices have been made. A funding stream arrives with its own timetable, geography, eligibility rules, metrics and reporting requirements. Another arrives alongside it, shaped by a different department and a different account of the problem. Local people then spend months making the pieces fit well enough for residents not to see the joins too sharply.
This is exactly where integration and innovation have to become reform and rewiring. The answer cannot be another partnership or initiative sitting alongside those already there. Reform means changing how decisions are made, information moves, resources are used, professional systems interact and accountability works.
It exposes the limits of both a local-government-only and a local-government-blind conception of devolution. The NHS, police, employment services, housing, education and skills, transport and national agencies all shape the same place, yet their powers, data and money remain organised through different systems. Responsibility can be devolved while control remains elsewhere. That is devolution stopped halfway.
This is not an argument for putting everything under one local roof. National government retains responsibilities for redistribution, standards, equalisation, national regulation, fiscal control, risk and functions where national scale matters. The practical point is that where people experience problems together, places need enough power to act on them together.
If responsibility for outcomes is increasingly exercised at place, should more of the resources behind those outcomes be organised at place too? Some clearly need to remain nationally controlled, and places will reach different conclusions about the balance. But the question becomes harder to avoid the more seriously we take place-based reform and the necessary rewiring of the state. That is not an answer to the debate. It is the debate.
If places are expected to improve services, prevent demand, support good growth and exercise deeper democratic choice, responsibility has to be matched by power, resources, flexibility, information, capability and accountability. More power without capability can disappoint, responsibility without flexibility can overload and accountability without control can become a transfer of blame.
And that brings us to money. The public does not experience public expenditure as separate departmental budgets. It experiences the combined consequences of spending on health, employment, skills, housing, transport, policing, social services and local government. Yet money remains organised largely around the institutions and government departments that control it, while devolution increasingly asks places, strategic authorities and constituent councils to carry responsibility for outcomes in the face of rising demand and constrained resources. We have spent 20 years trying to integrate, innovate and reform services while leaving much of the financial architecture around them intact.
If responsibility for outcomes is increasingly exercised at place, should more of the resources behind those outcomes be organised at place too? Some clearly need to remain nationally controlled, and places will reach different conclusions about the balance. But the question becomes harder to avoid the more seriously we take place-based reform and the necessary rewiring of the state. That is not an answer to the debate. It is the debate.
Live Well in Greater Manchester is relevant here, not as a passing programme to promote, but as an attempt to build a more recognisable operating model around people, households and neighbourhoods across existing provision, rather than adding another service or campaign to the landscape.
The questions are practical. Can existing support behave more like a recognisable whole from the perspective of a resident? Can neighbourhood arrangements connect health, employment, housing, family support and community capacity without every route being separately invented? Can local intelligence be used to understand demand rather than merely process it? Can deeper democratic choices about a place shape how professional systems behave?
None of this is settled. The barriers are financial, institutional, cultural, professional and political. Different parts of government answer to different masters. Funding flexibility is often narrower than language implies. Delivery pressures can crowd out the slower work of building a different model. That is why the experience is useful: it shows what devolution must confront if place is to be more than a scale of administration or minor adjustments.
The same applies to growth. Public service reform and economic development are, even now, often treated as separate conversations. In practice, they are already entangled. Health affects employment. Skills affect productivity and pay. Housing affects labour mobility. Transport affects access to work and learning. Good growth needs an institutional argument beneath it: a place needs enough power, intelligence and resource to understand those connections and act on them.
The national implication is straightforward. If the Government's devolution agenda is serious, it cannot stop at creating stronger institutions or ways of working. It must change the conditions under which places govern: where decisions are made, how accountability works, how information is shared and where and how public money can be spent.
Looking back over two decades in Greater Manchester, one of the surprises is that integration or collaboration was never the destination. Collaboration is more common. Institutions understand each other better. Yet success has produced its own question. The problem is no longer only whether public services can work together or better with communities. It is whether all these ways of working together can become coherent enough to feel, and behave, like a system.
We have spent years learning how to integrate and reform services. Now we need to integrate and devolve the power to change them.
When government meets a place, does it arrive as a collection of programmes and institutions, or increasingly as something capable of understanding the place, acting on what it sees and being accountable for the result?
That is a real test of the next phase of devolution and the challenge of rewiring the state.
Thomas Johnson is head of reform strategy and policy at Greater Manchester Combined Authority
