In autumn 2019, while former mayor Boris Johnson was trying to break Brexit deadlock and revive his party, the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny (CfGS) and Localis had a different focus: how could good local government decision making withstand the twin pressures of rising demand and falling income?
Slightly delayed but not denied by the pandemic, our answer was published in March 2021. The governance risk and resilience framework provided local authorities with a practical way of identifying and discussing the governance conditions that support organisational resilience, helping councils recognise and address governance risks before they became governance failures.
Since then, the framework has informed governance reviews, improvement activity and assurance work across the sector. Referenced in Best Value statutory guidance, it has become a cornerstone document for governance improvement and for understanding governance risk and organisational resilience in local government.
But five years on, when another metro mayor appears intent on rescuing a different government, it feels like the right time to revisit that question. In the intervening period, the pressures we took as our starting point for our research – and outlined in our paper, Decline and Fall – have only exacerbated across the sector.
Currently, the Government's plans to forge a universal model of mayoral devolution in tandem with a huge reorganisation of English local government are posing new questions of governance at all levels – regional, sub-regional, unitary local and neighbourhood hyperlocal.
Governance risk and resilience is not simply a question of whether one organisation is well run. It is, more fundamentally, a question of whether the wider system of local leadership, decision-making and accountability across a place can hold together under pressure, respond to change, and retain legitimacy with the public.
In our work, we will be taking a system lens to examine governance risk and resilience as shared across a place rather than contained within a single organisation. This will involve testing how risks emerging in councils, combined authorities, partnerships, providers, parish settings or neighbourhood arrangements can affect one another, and identifying the common golden thread that links them.
Governance weakness is rarely self-contained. Fragility in one institution, partnership or layer of governance can create knock-on effects elsewhere: blurring accountability, distorting decision-making, eroding trust and increasing pressure on neighbouring organisations or system partners. Resilience, likewise, is interdependent. Stronger governance in one part of a place can support better relationships, clearer assurance and greater adaptability across the wider local system.
The original governance risk and resilience framework provided a valuable common language for identifying and discussing those warning signs which may not amount to outright failure, but which nevertheless signal that governance arrangements are under strain. Since its publication, however, the operating context has shifted markedly. Financial stress, political fragmentation, devolution, local government reorganisation, more complex partnership arrangements, and heightened expectations around transparency and community voice all point to the case for a refresh.
Against this context, Localis and CfGS will undertake a focused collaborative project to thoroughly revisit and update the framework. The intention will be to preserve the core strengths and rationale underpinning the original, while substantially refreshing its language, examples and usability to reflect the significant changes to the sector since publication. The resulting framework will be rooted in a place-based understanding of governance risk and resilience, while remaining practical for day-to-day use by those working in and around local government.
The initial outputs will comprise one shared place-based framework, supported by best practice products, including for councillors, practitioners and one for strategic authorities. The refreshed material will also be designed with scope for later tailored applications in partnership settings. These could include parish and town governance, neighbourhood governance, and other civic and community contexts.
In our work, we will be taking a system lens to examine governance risk and resilience as shared across a place rather than contained within a single organisation. This will involve testing how risks emerging in councils, combined authorities, partnerships, providers, parish settings or neighbourhood arrangements can affect one another, and identifying the common golden thread that links them.
We will also refresh the conceptual frame to revisit the underlying concepts, language and examples used in the original framework to ensure that they speak to today's pressures. This includes governance fragility and resilience, political volatility and no overall control arrangements, devolution and local government reorganisation, partnership governance, culture and behaviours, assurance relationships, organisational improvement and community legitimacy.
And we will seek to make the material usable in live settings. The refresh will focus not only on what the framework says, but on how it can be used. This we hope will also be informed by learning from the experiences of authorities, to understand how the original framework was adopted and used. By doing so, we hope to make sure the framework and guidance products – tailored to the specific needs of councillors and officers – can support real conversations in teams, committees, leadership settings, peer challenge, assurance, scrutiny and improvement activity.
We will be using our joint drinks reception at the Bournemouth Highcliff Marriot Hotel on the evening of 8 July at the Local Government Association Conference to formally launch our programme. In doing so, we will seek advice and counsel from our friends from right across the sector for this vital work, which will be published at the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny Conference in February 2027.
Mel Stevens is chief executive of the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny, and Jonathan Werran is chief executive of Localis
